EUGENE–Award-winning author and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams will deliver a free public lecture on Tuesday, May 23, as the Oregon Humanities Center’s 1999-2000 Robert D. Clark Professor in the Humanities at the University of Oregon.

Williams’ talk, "Hieronymus Bosch in North America," is set for 7:30 p.m. in the Ballroom of the Erb Memorial Union, 1222 E. 13th Ave. Seating is limited, so early arrival is recommended.

Copies of her latest book, "LEAP" (Pantheon, 2000)–as well as autographed broadsides produced by the UO Knight Library Press–will be available for sale at a book signing and reception immediately following the lecture.

In her Clark Lecture, Williams will draw from "LEAP," an exploration of Hieronymus Bosch’s famous 15th-century painting, "The Garden of Earthly Delights." Seized by the beauty and mystery of Bosch’s vision, Williams focuses her gaze on his medieval triptych as she would on a natural landscape.

Williams grew up within sight of the Great Salt Lake in Salt Lake City, Utah. A fifth-generation Mormon, her ancestors followed "the American Moses," Brigham Young, to the "Promised Land for spiritual sovereignty" in 1847, fleeing the religious persecution they had encountered in Illinois.

Her gender, her Mormon faith and her close connection to the natural world–and particularly to the geography of the Great Basin and the Colorado Plateau–have strongly informed her writing and her life as an environmental and political activist.

Williams was inducted recently into the Rachel Carson Honor Roll, and she has received the National Wildlife Federation’s Conservation Award for Special Achievement. She helped to organize and edit the book "Testimony–Writers Speak Out on Behalf of Utah Wilderness," which President Clinton cited as having "made a difference" when he dedicated the new "Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument" in September of 1996.

Williams is perhaps best known for her book, "Refuge–An Unnatural History of Family and Place" (Pantheon, 1991). Now regarded as a classic in American nature writing, it is a powerful testament to loss and to the Earth’s healing grace.

In "Refuge," which critics have called a "beautiful and moving work," Williams chronicles the epic rise of the Great Salt Lake, and the subsequent flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in 1983. Accompanying the story of the destruction of the bird refuge is a narrative of her mother’s diagnosis with and eventual death from cancer, which she believes may have been caused by radioactive fallout from nuclear testing in the Nevada desert in the 1950s and ‘60s.

The Bowerman Family established the Robert D. Clark Lecture in the Humanities in 1994 to honor historian and Eugene author Robert D. Clark, UO president emeritus. The Clark Lecture seeks to promote public discussion on the natural sciences, the history of Oregon and the interface between science and social and cultural affairs, as exemplified by Thomas Condon, legendary frontier missionary, geologist, paleontologist and founding member of the University of Oregon.

Clark inaugurated the lecture series named in his honor in 1995. Other Clark Lecturers were Chris Maser in 1996 and David Rains Wallace in 1998.

For information or for disability accommodations, browse http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~humanctr or call the Oregon Humanities Center, (541) 346-3934.

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