Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, and activist and author of more than twenty-five books on feminism, western and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe, including “Orwell’s Roses,” “Recollections of My Nonexistence,” “Hope in the Dark,” “Men Explain Things to Me” (credited with inspiring the term “mansplaining”), “A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster,” “A Field Guide to Getting Lost,” and “River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West,” which won the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, Harvard’s Mark Lynton History Prize, and the Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, Solnit writes regularly for The Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and co-edited the 2023 anthology “Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility,” launching the climate project Not Too Late in 2022 to transform narratives around climate crisis from despair to possibility. Solnit has received two NEA fellowships for Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction for “Call Them By Their True Names,” and the 2019 Windham-Campbell Literature Prize in Non-Fiction, while Utne Reader named her one of the “25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World” in 2010.
Why their voice matters: Solnit documents how ordinary people respond to crisis with extraordinary altruism and solidarity, demonstrating that disasters reveal human capacity for mutual aid rather than chaos, while her explorations of walking, wandering, and getting lost provide frameworks for embracing uncertainty as essential to discovery, and her decades of writing on hope as a discipline rather than an emotion offers vital counterweight to despair in an age of climate crisis and social upheaval.