Amy Irvine
A sixth-generation Utahn and longtime public-lands advocate.
Her memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, received the Orion Magazine Book Award and the Colorado Book Award—while the Los Angeles Times wrote that it “might very well be Desert Solitaire’s literary heir.” In a starred review, Booklist characterized Trespass as “a penetrating critique of Mormon sovereignty” and called Irvine “bold and original in her thinking, candid and lyrical in expression.”
During the pandemic, Irvine wrote, with Pam Houston, Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics & Place. Part tribute to wilderness, part indictment against tyranny and greed, Air Mail reveals the evolution of a friendship that galvanizes as it chronicles a strange new world. (See the events page for author readings.)
Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness is a feminist response to Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, published on the 50th anniversary of Solitaire’s release. The book was listed among Orion Magazine’s “25 Most-Read Stories of the Decade,” included on Stanford University’s climate scientists’ 2019 Summer Reading List, added to Outside Magazine’s Adventure Canon, and named by Backpacker as one of its New Wilderness Classics.
She joins red-rock heroes Edward Abbey and Terry Tempest Williams in breaking ranks and speaking up for the living world.Booklist — Starred Review
Essays In
Anthologies
Red Rock Testimony was instrumental in compelling President Barack Obama to establish the Bears Ears National Monument in southern Utah.
Honors & Teaching
Irvine is the recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and a teaching fellowship for the Mountainview Low-Residency MFA program at Southern New Hampshire University, where she now teaches fiction and nonfiction.
Irvine lives and writes off-grid, on a remote mesa in southwest Colorado—a stone’s throw from her Utah homeland.
