Rebecca Solnit | |
|---|---|
 Solnit in 2018 | |
| Born | 1961 (age 64–65) Bridgeport,Connecticut, U.S. |
| Occupation | |
| Education | American University of Paris San Francisco State (BA) UC Berkeley (MA) |
| Subject | |
| Years active | 1988–present |
| Notable works | |
| Website | |
| rebeccasolnit | |
Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) is an American writer and activist. She has written on a variety of subjects, includingfeminism, the environment, politics, place, and art.[1]
Solnit is the author of seventeen books, includingRiver of Shadows, which won the 2004National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism;A Paradise Built in Hell, originally published in 2009 and later revised in 2020, which charts altruistic community responses to disaster;The Faraway Nearby, a wide-ranging memoir published in 2013; andMen Explain Things to Me, a collection of essays on feminism and women's writing first published in 2014.
Solnit was born in 1961[2] inBridgeport, Connecticut, to aJewish father andIrish Catholic mother.[3] In 1966, her family moved toNovato, California, where she grew up. "I was a battered little kid. I grew up in a really violent house where everything feminine and female and my gender was hated", she has said of her childhood.[4] She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed theGeneral Educational Development tests.
When she was 17, she went to study in Paris at the American College in Paris (now theAmerican University of Paris). She returned to California to finish her college education atSan Francisco State University.[5][6] She then received a master's degree injournalism from theUniversity of California, Berkeley in 1984[7] and has been an independent writer since 1988.[8]
Solnit has worked on environmental andhuman rights campaigns since the 1980s, notably with theWestern Shoshone Defense Project in the early 1990s, as described in her bookSavage Dreams, and with antiwar activists throughout the Bush era.[9] She has discussed her interest inclimate change and the work of350.org and theSierra Club, and inwomen's rights, especiallyviolence against women.[10]
Her writing has appeared in numerous publications in print and online, includingThe Guardian newspaper andHarper's Magazine, where she is the first woman to regularly write the Easy Chair column founded in 1851. She was also a regular contributor to the political blogTomDispatch[11] and is (as of 2018) a regular contributor toLitHub.[12]
Solnit is the author of seventeen books as well as essays in numerous museum catalogs and anthologies. Her 2009 bookA Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster began as an essay called "The Uses of Disaster: Notes on Bad Weather and Good Government" published byHarper’s magazine the day thatHurricane Katrina hit theGulf coast. It was partially inspired by the1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, which Solnit described as "a remarkable occasion...a moment when everyday life ground to a halt and people looked around and hunkered down". In a conversation with filmmakerAstra Taylor forBOMB magazine, Solnit summarized the radical theme ofA Paradise Built in Hell: "What happens in disasters demonstrates everything an anarchist ever wanted to believe about the triumph of civil society and the failure of institutional authority."[9]
In 2014,Haymarket Books publishedMen Explain Things to Me, a collection of feminist essays by Solnit on topics such as violence against women and the silencing of women. The book has been translated into many languages, including Spanish, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, Finnish, Swedish, Italian, Slovak, Dutch, and Turkish. Although Solnit's title essay is often credited with introducing the word "mansplaining"[13][14]—which refers to an alleged tendency in men to assume authoritative knowledge and "explain" things, generally to women, in a condescending or patronizing way—Solnit did not use the word in the essay nor did she later express her approval of the word.[15]Men Explain Things to Me contains illustrations by visual and performance artistAna Teresa Fernández.[16]
In 2019, Solnit wrote a new version ofCinderella, also for Haymarket Books, calledCinderella Liberator.[17] In this feminist revision, Solnit reclaims Ella from the cinders and gives both the prince ("Prince Nevermind" in her version) and Ella new futures that involve thinking for themselves, acting out free will, starting businesses, and becoming friends, rather than dependent lovers. As Syreeta McFadden argued for NBC News, Cinderella has long been retold, changing with the times.[18] Solnit's book usesArthur Rackham's original silhouetted drawings of Cinderella.[19]
In 2020, Solnit publishedRecollections of My Nonexistence, a memoir and coming-of-age narrative about her formative years in 1980s San Francisco when she found her identity as a writer, feminist, and political activist. InThe New York Times review,Jenny Odell called it "an un-self-centered book that often reverses the figure-ground relationship, portraying the emergence of a writer and her voice from a particular cultural moment and set of fortuitous influences."[20] Odell added that the "Nonexistence" of the title referred to Solnit's "instinct as a young woman to disappear, her sense that her appearance was dangerous" in an atmosphere wheregender-based violence was lurking.[20]
Solnit has received twoNEA fellowships for Literature, aGuggenheim Fellowship, aCreative Capital Award, aLannan literary fellowship, and a 2004Wired Rave Award for writing on the effects of technology on the arts and humanities.[21] In 2010,Utne Reader magazine named Solnit as one of the "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World".[22] Her 2013 novelThe Faraway Nearby was shortlisted for the 2013National Book Critics Circle Award.[23]
New York Times book criticDwight Garner called Solnit "the kind of rugged, off-road public intellectual America doesn't produce often enough....Solnit's writing, at its worst, can be dithering and self-serious,Joan Didion without the concision and laser-guided wit. At her best, however [...] she has a rare gift: the ability to turn the act of cognition, of arriving at a coherent point of view, into compelling moral drama."[24]
ForRiver of Shadows, Solnit was honored with the 2004National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism[25] and the 2004Sally Hacker Prize from theSociety for the History of Technology, which honors exceptional scholarship that reaches beyond the academy toward a broad audience.[26] Solnit was also awarded Harvard'sMark Lynton History Prize in 2004 forRiver of Shadows.[27] Solnit was awarded the 2015–16 Corlis Benefideo Award for Imaginative Cartography by the North American Cartographic Information Society.[28] Solnit's book,Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises, won the2018 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction.[29] She won the 2019Windham–Campbell Literature Prize in Non-Fiction.[30] Solnit is the eleventh recipient of the Paul Engle Prize, presented by the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature.[31]
Solnit creditsEduardo Galeano,Pablo Neruda,Ariel Dorfman,Elena Poniatowska,Gabriel García Márquez,Virginia Woolf,[32] andHenry David Thoreau[33] as writers who have influenced her work.[9]
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Quotations from Wikiquote
Data from Wikidata