30 Jun Telluride Library: Celebrated Author Terry Tempest Williams & “The Glorians,” 7/15!
Join Telluride’s Wilkinson Public Library on Wednesday, July 15th, 5:30 pm for a special evening with Terry Tempest Williams. The renowned author will be discussing her best-selling new book, “The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary.”
“I go to Terry Tempest Williams for the reasons I go to Whitman and Thoreau: to recover a capacious spirit and to rejoin the urgent living world. She gives me something bigger than hope.”―Richard Powers, author, “The Overstory.”
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Terry Tempest Williams’ “The Glorians” is a national bestseller, named a “Most Anticipated Book of 2026” by The New York Times Book Review, Literary Hub, and Book Riot. The NYT Book Review framed the work as reflections on aging and relationships built on the idea that each ordinary little beauty is connected to every other and to us.
What sets the book apart from a simple celebration of the beauty of the natural world is its refusal of easy relief. Williams recently said in a radio interview (KSUT in Ignacio, Colorado) that “hope” isn’t a word she loves. She finds it attached to our desires. in “The Glorians” she writes she wants honest conversations that do not have a Hollywood endings, insisting there is a real world and that real world is dying.
Williams connects the violence she sees in the country to as yet ungrieved losses:slavery; genocide of Native peoples; and the more than one million Americans lost to COVID-19.
The throughline of “The Glorians” is grief, but it is grief metabolized into wake up this is real so pay attention, rather than despair.
There’s also a strong autobiographical and political spine to “The Glorians.”
In 2016 Williams and her husband bought 1,120 oil and gas leases from the Bureau of Land Management for $1.50 an acre as a protest against federal energy policy, vowing not to develop them. She left her teaching post at the University of Utah amid a dispute, and writes in the book that she later obtained evidence state lawmakers pressured the university to remove her over those leases. That rupture — being “evicted from my tribe,” as she has put it — is part of what the book reckons with, alongside her return home to Utah.
Terry Tempest Williams. courtesy Grove Atlantic.
As for the author herself, Terry Tempest Williams is one of the defining voices in American nature writing, an Utah conservationist and activist whose work braids together landscape, spirituality, a nd politics. Her writing is rooted in the American West and has been shaped by the arid landscape of her native Utah, and spans ecology, wilderness preservation, women’s health, and our relationship to nature and culture.
Williamns is best known for “Refuge:An Unnatural History of Family and Place.” Other books include “When Women Were Birds”; “The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks”; “Leap, Finding Beauty in a Broken World”; and “Erosion: Essays of Undoing.”
Terry Tempest Williams is a member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters and is writer-in-residence at Harvard Divinity School, dividing her time between Cambridge and Castle Valley, Utah, although as of this year she moved back to Salt Lake full time.
From Telluride Library:
Find physical copies of “The Glorians” through the library catalog, as well as ebooks and audiobooks through Libby and Hoopla.
Between the Covers Bookstore also has copies of “The Glorians” for sale at 10% off off the cover price. That is the best options for purchasing if you would like to have a book signed. See informaton below about book signings at this year’s OBOC.
A special thanks to the Friends of the Library for helping to support One Book, One Canyon year after year! This event is free and open to the public and sure to be popular. Come early to ensure your seat! Seats are general admission and cannot be reserved.
If you have pre-purchased a book or books and would like to have it /them signed with a personalization, please bring your book or books to BTC no later than 6 pm on Tuesday, July 14th. Please write LEGIBLY on a yellow sticky note the name for personalization and any very short message (e.g., “Happy Birthday”) you would like. Please write your name on a sticky note on the front of the book so wthe Library knows where to return your copy.
The Library will return your book at the Terry Tempest Williams event or you can take it back to the BTC to pick up at your convenience. Signed, but not personalized, books will be available for purchase at the bookstore the day after the event.
You can also purchase a limited supply of signed, but not pesrsonalized, or unsigned books at the event.
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