Fall 2007
Ross Gelbspan, a reporter and editor for 31 years and a Pulitzer Prize winner, joined fellows and staff of the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism for the program’s first residency week. Author of the books The Heat Is On and Boiling Point and articles in Harper’s and the Washington Post, Gelbspan has been in the forefront of reporting on the escalating effects of global warming. During his career, he has worked at the Philadelphia Bulletin, the Washington Post, the Village Voice and, for 13 years, at the Boston Globe.
Spring 2008
William Finnegan is a widely traveled journalist and a widely published writer. He first came to notice in the 1980s when—on a surfing trip around the world—he fetched up in South Africa and spent a year as a teacher at a colored school. His account of that work, Crossing the Line, was an instant classic. He has gone on to write other books about Africa, many reports from trouble spots around the world for The New Yorker, and his widely acclaimed and harrowing book about the lives of contemporary American youth from the wrong side of the tracks, Cold New World. He also surfs, and has become an acclaimed literary chronicler of the sport.
Spring 2009
Rebecca Solnit is an activist, historian, and writer who lives in San Francisco. Her work deals in particular with landscape, cityscapes, cultural geographies, the environment, place, time, speed, memory, photography, metaphor, counternarratives, and the uses of story. She is currently working on her 13th book. The 12 in print include 2007's Storming the Gates of Paradise; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Hope in the Dark; Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender and Art; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A contributing editor to Harper's and columnist for Orion, she frequently writes for the political site Tomdispatch.com. She has worked on antinuclear, antiwar, environmental, indigenous land rights and human rights campaigns and movements over the years.
Fall 2009
Alan Weisman is a former Bread Loaf fellow and author of the currently best-selling The World Without Us. He is an award-winning journalist whose reports have appeared in Harper’s, the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly, Discover, and on NPR, among others. A former contributing editor to the Los Angeles Times Magazine, he is a senior radio producer for Homelands Productions and teaches international journalism at the University of Arizona. His essay “Earth Without People” (Discover, February 2005), on which The World Without Us expands, was selected for Best American Science Writing 2000–2007.