2022 PEN/Hemingway Keynote Address

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Each year the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and PEN America award the PEN/Hemingway prize for the year's best debut novel by an American author. The award is usually presented at a gala reception at the John F. Kennedy Library in Boston, Massachusetts; however, in 2022, the award celebration was held online via Zoom due to ongoing concern about COVID-19. The 2022 PEN/Hemingway prize was awarded to Torrey Peters for her book, Detransition, Baby (Penguin Random House). This year we are pleased to present the keynote address of American writer, educator, conservationist, and activist Terry Tempest Williams. Tempest Williams is the author of over twenty books including the environmental literature classic, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place. Her other books include Finding Beauty in a Broken World; When Women Were Birds; The Hour of Land - A Personal Topography of America's National Parks; and most recently, Erosion - Essays of Undoing. A recipient of a John S. Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, and the Robert Kirsch Award, Tempest Williams is writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters and divides her time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Castle Valley, Utah.