Lauret Savoy

A teacher, earth scientist, writer, photographer, and pilot, Lauret Savoy is a woman of African American, Euro-American, and Native American heritage. The author of Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (Counterpoint Press), she writes about the stories we tell of the American land’s origins and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. Trace won the 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. It was also a finalist for the 2016 PEN American Open Book Award and Phillis Wheatley Book Award, as well as shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and Orion Book Award. She is the co-editor of The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World (Milkweed Editions); Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology (Trinity University Press), and Living with the Changing California Coast (University of California Press). Winner of Mount Holyoke’s Distinguished Teaching Award and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, she has also held fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University. Lauret is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College.