Writing Fellowships – Barry Lopez Foundation for Art & Environment

The Barry Lopez Foundation Writing Fellowship at Ucross offers a non-fiction author or essayist a two-week residency at the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming. The fellowship, accompanied by a $5,000 honorarium, provides a published, mid-career writer uninterrupted time to focus on a work in progress or the freedom to explore new ideas.

Reflecting the interests and concerns personified in Lopez’s own work, fellows may address themes related to landscape, geography, and the natural sciences as understood through the lens of history, memoir, or our relationship to place. Their work should reinforce Lopez’s desire to inspire an ethical relationship with the land and contribute to our understanding of the responsibilities we have to the natural world and to each other.

There is no application process for the award. Fellowships are presented annually by invitation, selected by the Board of the Barry Lopez Foundation and members of its Advisory Committee, in consultation with the Ucross Foundation. The inaugural recipient of the fellowship is the author, essayist, and critic Rebecca Solnit.

Rebecca Solnit

In 2026, Rebecca Solnit was awarded the inaugural Barry Lopez Foundation Writing Fellowship at Ucross. Named “The finest essayist at work in the English language,” by Bill McKibben, Solnit is known for a style that is at once fierce and lyrical and for her sweeping range of subjects from the American West to photography, politics, feminism, the pleasures of walking, climate activism, and her relentless challenge to the current political regime. Like Barry Lopez’s own writing, Solnit maintains a firm grip on hope, even in the most challenging times – although as she has recently suggested, “If hope doesn’t work for you, try Never Fucking Surrender.” We are honored to be working with Solnit, whose boundless curiosity, immediacy, and concern reflect the best of Lopez’s expansive and affectionate appreciation of the world. About the Fellowship, she writes:

Barry Lopez taught me to write in how his books modeled wonder, exploration, the way that a book could like a traveler roam across vast spaces, candor, the relationship between the deepest inner life and the broadest expanses, between the spiritual and the natural. I’m honored to have this fellowship in his name, and I’m excited to go be in the prairie (and coal country) of Northeast Wyoming.

A fearless writer and activist, Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than 25 books, including Orwell’s Roses, Hope in the Dark, Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility, A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster, and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. She also contributed the introduction to Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, a posthumous collection of essays by Barry Lopez. Her expansive command is exemplified by Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West, which reframes heroic nineteenth century narratives against the attempt to eradicate the indigenous inhabitants of Yosemite Valley and the violence against people and the land enacted at the Nevada Test Site. Most recently, she published, The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, which has been enthusiastically greeted as a guide to navigating the most challenging of times. A regular contributor to the Guardian, she writes the newsletter Meditations in An Emergency and serves on the boards of Oil Change International and Third Act. Solnit has received two NEA fellowships for Literature, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Award, a Lannan Literary Award, and the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism for River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West. She is a product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school.