Rebecca Solnit

The second writer in residence was American author, activist and journalist Rebecca Solnit

Shortly after her birth in New England to a Russian-Jewish father and Irish mother, Rebecca Solnit's family moved to New Mexico, and then to Lima, Peru, and then to Ohio. By the time she was five, they had settled about thirty miles north of San Francisco, where she grew up until age 17. She has lived in San Francisco almost continuously since age 18, with long sojourns in the deserts of Nevada and New Mexico, and other travels around the southwestern United States. She just finished her thirteenth book, due out next year; the twelve in print include this year's Storming the Gates of Paradise, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art, River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award, along with the Western Writers of America's Spur Award).

An activist since her mid-twenties, she has worked on antiwar, antinuclear, environmental, human rights, and Native American land rights issues, as well as organizing demonstrations in support of the monks in Burma last fall. She is a contributing editor to the national magazine Harper's, a columnist for the environmental magazine Orion, and a regular contributor to the online political site Tomdispatch.com. Before this journey to Iceland, her last trip out of the country was to the Zapatista rebels in southern Mexico.