amy irvine
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Amy Irvine comes from six generations of Utah Mormons--setting herself apart from her conservative roots as both a feminist and environmental activist. Also a nationally recognized rock climber, Amy was part of an early generation of women climbers who helped changed the face of the sport. She became known within the male-dominated climbing world for her writings about climbing from the female perspective, as well as for her women-specific climbing courses.
Concurrently, Amy completed a B.A. in women's studies, graduating magna cum laude from the University of Utah. She then spent a decade in service to the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, one of the nation's leading wilderness advocacy organizations, serving for five years as its director of development before turning to full-time writing and motherhood. Her latest book, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land (Farrar, Straus & Giroux's North Point Press, 2008), chronicles her time working as a wilderness advocate in rural Utah--a place that is staunchly patriarchal in its theocratic culture as well as fiercely adverse to environmental preservation efforts. Trespass just received the Orion Book Award--chosen from a field of great authors that included Terry Tempest Williams, Wendell Berry, Chuck Bowden, Rick Bass, and others. It also has received the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and the Colorado Book Award, and is currently a finalist for the Mountains and Plains Bookseller's Book of the Year. Trespass was listed on Booklist as one of the Top 10 Environmental Books of 2008, and was also listed as one of More Magazine's Must-Read Memoirs.
Here's the praise for Trespass:
"Bold and original in her thinking, candid and lyrical in expression, Irvine launches a penetrating critique of Mormon sovereignty, the persistent oppression of women... and the federally sanctioned, post-9/11 rush to extract fossil fuels from protected public lands . . . Forthright and imaginative, sensitive and tough, Irvine joins red-rock heroes Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams in breaking ranks and speaking up for the living world." (Booklist, starred review);
"Fierce...the most vivid ground-level report from this war zone that I have ever read." (Washington Post); "[Irvine] braids together threads of Mormon history, her own family's stories and her quest of illumination, creating a singularly elegiac and astringent memoir of dissent..." (Chicago Tribune); "Tresspass is a book full of transgressions because Amy Irvine has dared to examine the nature of orthodoxy, be it religion, environmentalism, or marriage... If erosion is the face of a changing landscape, Amy has written erosional prose. This is a transformative memoir that dances between shadow and light." (Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place)
Here's the praise for Trespass:
"Bold and original in her thinking, candid and lyrical in expression, Irvine launches a penetrating critique of Mormon sovereignty, the persistent oppression of women... and the federally sanctioned, post-9/11 rush to extract fossil fuels from protected public lands . . . Forthright and imaginative, sensitive and tough, Irvine joins red-rock heroes Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams in breaking ranks and speaking up for the living world." (Booklist, starred review);
"Fierce...the most vivid ground-level report from this war zone that I have ever read." (Washington Post); "[Irvine] braids together threads of Mormon history, her own family's stories and her quest of illumination, creating a singularly elegiac and astringent memoir of dissent..." (Chicago Tribune); "Tresspass is a book full of transgressions because Amy Irvine has dared to examine the nature of orthodoxy, be it religion, environmentalism, or marriage... If erosion is the face of a changing landscape, Amy has written erosional prose. This is a transformative memoir that dances between shadow and light." (Terry Tempest Williams, author of Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place)
