Lauret Savoy

press release: Join us as acclaimed author Lauret Savoy offers a reading from her new book Trace. The book is a powerful and provocative meditation on place, race, and the unvoiced presence of the past. A woman of African American, Euro-American, and Native American heritage, Savoy explores how the country’s still unfolding history marks a person, a people, and the land itself, weaving together human stories of migration, displacement, and erasure with personal journeys across a continent and time. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from “Indian Territory” to the origin of names on the land, and from the U.S.–Mexico border to the U.S. capital, Trace counters some of our oldest and most damaging public silences by revealing often-unrecognized ties, such as the siting of Washington, DC, and the economic motives of slavery. None of these links is coincidental. Few appear in public history. All touch us. Lauret Savoy is a professor of environmental studies and geology at Mount Holyoke College. Her books include The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity and the Natural World; Bedrock: Writers on the Wonders of Geology; and Living with the Changing California Coast. She lives in Leverett, MA.