Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit
File:Rebecca Solnit and Christian Bruno.jpg Rebecca Solnit with cinematographer Christian Bruno in 2010
Born	(1961-06-24) June 24, 1961
Occupation	Author, memoirist, essayist
Nationality	American
Subject	Cultural history, environmentalism, memoir
Notable works	Wanderlust (2001), River of Shadows (2003), A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005), The Faraway Nearby (2013), A Paradise Built in Hell (2010), Men Explain Things to Me (2014)
Website
rebeccasolnit.net

Rebecca Solnit (born June 24, 1961) is an American writer. She has written on a variety of subjects, including the environment, politics, place, and art. Solnit is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine, where bi-monthly she writes the magazine's "Easy Chair" essay.

Early life and education

Solnit was born in Bridgeport, CT. to a Jewish mother and Irish Catholic father, and in 1966 her family moved to Novato, California, where she grew up. "I was a battered little kid," she said of her childhood. She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the GED. Thereafter she enrolled in junior college. When she was 17 she went to study in Paris, France. She ultimately returned to California and finished her college education at San Francisco State University. She then received a master's degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and has been an independent writer since 1988.

Career

Activism

Solnit has worked on environmental and human rights campaigns since the 1980s, notably with the Western Shoshone Defense Project in the early 1990s, as described in her book Savage Dreams, and with antiwar activists throughout the Bush era. She has discussed her interest in climate change and the work of 350.org and the Sierra Club, and in women's rights, especially violence against women.

Writing

Her writing has appeared in numerous publications in print and online, including the Guardian newspaper and Harper's Magazine, where she is the first woman to regularly write the Easy Chair column founded in 1851. She is also a regular contributor to the political blog TomDispatch and to LitHub.

Solnit is the author of seventeen books as well as essays in numerous museum catalogs and anthologies. Her 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster began as an essay called "The Uses of Disaster: Notes on Bad Weather and Good Government" published by Harper’s magazine the day that Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf coast. It was partially inspired by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which Solnit described as "a remarkable occasion...a moment when everyday life ground to a halt and people looked around and hunkered down". In a conversation with filmmaker Astra Taylor for BOMB magazine, Solnit summarized the radical theme of A Paradise Built in Hell: "What happens in disasters demonstrates everything an anarchist ever wanted to believe about the triumph of civil society and the failure of institutional authority."

Awards and recognition

Solnit has received two NEA fellowships for Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan literary fellowship, and a 2004 Wired Rave Award for writing on the effects of technology on the arts and humanities. In 2010 Utne Reader magazine named Solnit as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World". Her The Faraway Nearby (2013) was nominated for a National Book Award, and shortlisted for the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award.

For River of Shadows, Solnit was honored with the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism and the 2004 Sally Hacker Prize from the Society for the History of Technology, which honors exceptional scholarship that reaches beyond the academy toward a broad audience. Solnit was also awarded Harvard's Mark Lynton History Prize in 2004 for River of Shadows.

Solnit credits Eduardo Galeano, Pablo Neruda, Ariel Dorfman, Elena Poniatowska, Gabriel García Márquez, and Virginia Woolf as writers who have influenced her work.

Informal recognition

Solnit is credited with the concept behind the term mansplaining, a habitual gender-based condescending language style that emerged as a term shortly after her April 2008 blog post "Men Explain Things to Me," although she did not invent the portmanteau word itself.

Bibliography

This list is incomplete; you can help by expanding it.

See also

• Women's rights in 2014

External links

• Rebecca Solnit official website
• Works by or about Rebecca Solnit in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Rebecca Solnit author page at Penguin Books
• Rebecca Solnit at The Nation magazine
• Rebecca Solnit author page at TomDispatch.com
• Rebecca Solnit in the London Review of Books
• Rebecca Solnit in Harper's Magazine
• New York Public Library conversation with Peter Coyote
• Interview With Rebecca Solnit by Padma Viswanathan in The Rumpus, August 7, 2009