Lauret Savoy’s research and writing consider how the nation’s ever-unfolding history has marked the land as well as its peoples. Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape won the American Book Award; it was also a finalist for PEN American and additional honors. Her other books include The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (with Alison Hawthorne Deming); Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology (named one of the “Five Best” science books in the Wall Street Journal); and Living with the Changing California Coast. Tracing memory threads Lauret’s life and work: unearthing what is buried, re-membering what is fragmented, shattered, eroded. A Black woman of complex multicontinental ancestry, she writes of the intertwinings of natural and cultural histories to understand the American land’s origins—and the stories we tell of ourselves in this land. Lauret is the David B. Truman Professor of Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Winner of Mount Holyoke’s Distinguished Teaching Award and an Andrew Carnegie Fellowship, Lauret has held fellowships at the Smithsonian Institution, Yale University, and Harvard University’s Warren Center for Studies in American History. Her research has also been supported by the National Science Foundation. She is a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and a pilot.
