© Jude Mooney Photography
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen books about environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory, including The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; Men Explain Things to Me; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award); and atlases of San Francisco and New Orleans. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a contributing editor to Harper’s and frequent contributor to the Guardian newspaper.