Our 2026 Keynote Speaker Is Terry Tempest Williams!

Terry Tempest Williams

The 2026 keynote speaker at Unbound will be award-winning author, environmentalist, and activist Terry Tempest Williams. She will speak Friday, April 17, in Columbia.

Williams is the author of the environmental literature classics Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; The Open Space of Democracy; Finding Beauty in a Broken World; When Women Were Birds; Erosion: Essays of Undoing; and The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America’s National Parks.

Her next book will be The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary, which will arrive in bookstores on March 3, 2026. Kirkus described it as “an impassioned defense of interconnectedness.” The Glorians was named on the New York Times Book Review’s list of The Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026, and Book Riot included the book on its list of 5 of the Most Anticipated New Nonfiction Book Releases of 2026.

Williams is currently writer-in-residence at the Harvard Divinity School. She is also co-founder of the Constellation Project, which seeks to create a community of practice to promote the importance of imagination, creativity, and spirituality in Planetary Health. She was also featured in Ken Burns’ PBS series on the national parks. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Orion Magazine, The Progressive, and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change. She is an Emerson Collective Fellow for 2025-26, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

For more information on the author, see her website at http://www.terrytempestwilliams.com/.

We can’t wait to welcome Terry to Columbia, Missouri. Watch this space and our social media channels for more details on reserving (free!) keynote tickets.