Lannan Foundation

Rebecca Solnit is an activist, historian, and writer who lives in San Francisco. In her most recent book, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, Solnit surveys disasters from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake to 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and shows that the typical response to calamity is spontaneous altruism, self-organization, and mutual aid, with neighbors and strangers calmly rescuing, feeding, and housing each other. In her book Wanderlust: A History of Walking, she takes her readers on a leisurely journey through the prehistory, history, and natural history of bipedal motion. Previous publications include Storming the Gates of Paradise: Landscapes for Politics; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim and the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism). A contributing editor to Harper’s, she frequently writes for the political site Tomdispatch.com and occasionally for the London Review of Books and the (U.K.) Guardian. Solnit received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction in 2003.