Watch the video recording of this lecture.  Our thanks to Helena Civic TV for capturing this wonderful presentation for all to enjoy.

Corrie Williamson, author, teacher, naturalist, and Community Outreach Director at American Prairie, blended poetry, history, and restoration ecology in a presentation that traveled across time, geography, and literature. She was introduced by Stephenie Ambrose-Tubbs, daughter of the late Stephen E. Ambrose, for whom the lecture is named.

Williamson, who grew up in the same small Virginia town as William Clark’s first wife, Julia Hancock, shared her connections to the history and landscape of the Corps of Discovery and how it led her to Montana and to her work connecting storytelling, conservation, and communities. Her lecture included work from her award-winning collections of poems, as well as other important literary touchpoints and perspectives related to the Great Northern Plains’ history and habitat. 

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Williamson discussed her work at the conservation NGO American Prairie, and their mission to connect, protect, and share 3.2 million acres of Montana’s grasslands. She explained how this work extends beyond habitat and wildlife conservation to intertwine with the stories about the past, and what can be imagined and hoped for the future.

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About Corrie Williamson

Corrie Williamson was born on a small farm in southwestern Virginia. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Your Mother’s Bear Gun, newly out in 2025 from River River Books. Her other books are The River Where You Forgot My Name, in the Crab Orchard Series, which was named a 2019 Montana Book Award Honor Book by the Montana Library Association; and Sweet Husk, which won the 2014 Perugia Press Prize, and was a finalist for the 2015 Library of Virginia Poetry Award. She is also co-editor of the eco-poetry anthology Rocky Mountains Literary Field Guide, forthcoming from Mountaineers Books in 2027. 

Williamson completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia, with a BA in Poetry and Anthropology, and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Arkansas, where she was a recipient of the Walton Fellowship, and a Director of the Writers in the Schools Program. She has taught writing at the University of Arkansas, Helena College, and Carroll College, and worked as an educator in Yellowstone National Park.

She was the recipient of the 2020 Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, spending seven and a half months writing and living off-grid in a remote section of the Rogue River in southwest Oregon. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, AGNI, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and many others. You can also find her work in anthologies such as Cascadia Field Guide; Environmental and Nature Writing Volume II: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology; Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology; and Bright Bones: An Anthology of Contemporary Montana Writing.

Williamson lives in Lewistown, Montana, where she works as Director of Community Outreach for the conservation NGO American Prairie. 

Visit https://www.corriewilliamson.com.

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About Stephenie Ambrose-Tubbs