Newsweek magazine's current issue spotlights writer Terry Tempest Williams as one of 20 "colorful, impassioned" Westerners who are scoring points for their sides on major environmental issues of the day.
Williams, 35, is a naturalist-in-residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History and was the only Utahn to make Newsweek's listof 20 leading movers and shakers in the West. The national news magazine calls her "one of the West's most striking new writers."
In her most recent book, "Refuge," Williams writes about the cancer that has plagued the women in her family who lived downwind from nuclear arms tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site during the 1950s.
In 1986, Williams' book, "Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland" received the Southwest Book Award for creative non-fiction. The previous year, "The Secret Language of Snow," a children's book she co-authored, was named best science book for children by the New York Academy of Sciences.
Williams is also the author of the books "Coyote's Canyon" and "Between Cattails," and was an award-winning columnist for the Deseret News.