
ELIZABETH HIGHTOWER ALLEN
ELIZABETH HIGHTOWER ALLEN is a contributing editor at Outside magazine, where she spent twenty-plus years editing award-winning features and writing columns and book reviews. A transplanted southerner turned westerner, she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she edits books and articles about public lands, memoir, and adventure, and serves on the advisory board to Writers on the Range. She and her husband and daughter spend as much time as they can exploring the rivers and mountains of the West, while also making it back to Tennessee fairly frequently for ham biscuits. Her mind is blown by the rugged vastness of the Gila.

BEHIND THE BOOK
An interview with Elizabeth Hightower Allen about the making of the essay collection she edited, First & Wildest
(coming soon!).
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BOOKS BY THE AUTHOR
The Gila Wilderness at 100
In the summer of 1922, Aldo Leopold traveled on horseback up into the headwaters of New Mexico's Gila River and proposed to his bosses at the Forest Service that 500,000 acres of that rough country be set aside as roadless wilderness. Thus was born America's first—the world's first—designated wilderness. A century later, writer-activists come together to celebrate this vast, rugged landscape, the Yellowstone of the Southwest.
"Engaging and purposeful… a multi-voiced call for a reinvigorated and reimagined wilderness ethic in an era of social and biological crises."
—WASHINGTON INDEPENDENT REVIEW OF BOOKS
