Terry Tempest Williams is an American author, conservationist, and activist. Her writing is rooted in the American West and has been significantly influenced by the arid landscape of her native Utah and its Mormon culture. Williams is the author many books, including the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; Red; The Open Space of Democracy; Finding Beauty in a Broken World, and most recently, The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks. She is Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School.