AMY IRVINE
AMY IRVINE is a sixth-generation Utahn and long-time public lands activist. Her second book, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, received the Orion Book Award, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, and the Colorado Book Award—while the Los Angeles Times wrote that it “might very well be Desert Solitaire’s literary heir.” Her essays have appeared in Orion, Pacific Standard, High Desert Journal, TriQuarterly, Climbing, and elsewhere. Irvine contributed an essay to Red Rock Testimony: Three Generations of Writers Speak on Behalf of Utah’s Public Lands, a book that was instrumental in President Obama’s proclamation of the Bears Ears as Utah’s newest national monument. She lives and writes off the grid in southwest Colorado, just spitting distance from her Utah homeland.
BEHIND THE BOOK
An interview with Amy Irvine about the making of her most recent book, Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place (COMING SOON!).
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BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place
When the state of Colorado ordered its residents to shelter in place in response to the spread of coronavirus, writers Pam Houston and Amy Irvine—who had never met—began a correspondence based on their shared devotion to the rugged, windswept mountains that surround their homes, one on either side of the Continental Divide. As the numbers of infected and dead rose and the nation split dangerously over the crisis, Houston and Irvine found their letters to one another as necessary as breath. Part tribute to wilderness, part indictment against tyranny and greed, Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place reveals the evolution of a friendship that galvanizes as it chronicles a strange new world.
“An affecting collection of candid, heartfelt letters that stands as a testimony to the sustenance of friendship in frightening times.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS
A New Season in the Wilderness
As Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness turns fifty, its iconic author, who has inspired generations of rebel-rousing advocacy on behalf of the American West, is due for a tribute as well as a talking to. In Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, Amy Irvine admires the man who influenced her life and work while challenging all that is dated—offensive, even—between the covers of Abbey’s environmental classic. From Abbey’s quiet notion of solitude to Irvine’s roaring cabal, the desert just got hotter, and its defenders more nuanced and numerous.
"Spirited, fast-paced, passionate, at once humorous and provocative, and all rendered in gorgeous prose. ...a celebration of public lands and a heartfelt work of resistance..."
—HIGH DESERT JOURNAL