Lauret Savoy, "Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape"

A writer, teacher, photographer, and pilot, Lauret Savoy is also a woman of multiracial heritage. Her courses and writings explore the narratives we tell of the American land’s origins — and the narratives we tell of ourselves in this land, including the place of race. Winner of Mount Holyoke College’s Distinguished Teaching Award and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, Lauret has also held fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution and Yale University. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America. Senior classes have chosen her to be a Baccalaureate speaker and Last Lecturer.

Savoy’s most recent book is “Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape”, a mosaic of historical inquiry and personal journeys that cross a continent and time to explore how the country’s still-unfolding history has marked us and the land. “Trace” won the 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation and the 2017 ASLE Creative Writing Award. It was also a finalist for a PEN American Book Award and Phillis Wheatley Book Award, as well as shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing and the Orion Book Award.

This event is sponsored by the Center for Environmental Studies and the Class of 1960 Scholars Program in Environmental Studies.