Terry Tempest Williams grew up within sight of the Great Salt Lake in Salt Lake City, Utah. A fifth-generation Mormon, her ancestors followed Brigham Young, "the American Moses," to the Promised Land for spiritual sovereignty in 1847, fleeing the prosecutions they met in Navhoo, Illinois, after the murder of their prophet, Joseph Smith.

"I write through my biases of gender, geography, and culture. I am a woman whose ideas have been shaped by the Great Basin and Colorado Plateau, these ideas are then filtered through the prism of my culture and my culture is Mormon. These tenets of family and community which I see at the heart of that culture are then articulated through story."

Perhaps best known for her book Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (Pantheon, 1991), where she chronicles the epic rise of Great Salt Lake and the flooding of the Bear River Migratory Bird Refuge in 1983, alongside her mother's diagnosis with ovarian cancer, believed to have been caused by radioactive fallout from the nuclear tests in the Nevada desert in the 1950's and 60's, is now regarded as a classic in American Nature Writing, a testament to loss and the earth'' healing grace. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote, "There has never been a book like Refuge. . . . utterly original."

Her other books include a collection of essays, An Unspoken Hunger (Pantheon, 1994); Desert Quartet: An Erotic Landscape (Pantheon, 1995); Coyote's Canyon (Gibbs M. Smith, 1989); and Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1984). She is also the author of two children's books: The Secret Language of Snow (Sierra Club/Pantheon, 1984); and Between Cattails (Little Brown, 1985). Her work has been widely anthologized, having also appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Outside, Audubon, Orion, The Iowa Review, and The New England Review, among other national and international publications. Williams was identified by Newsweek in 1991 as someone likely to make "a considerable impact on the political, economic, and environmental issues facing the western states this decade."

She has served on the Governing Council of the Wilderness Society and was a member of the western team for the President's Council for Sustainable Development. She is currently on the advisory board of the National Parks and Conservation Association, The Nature Conservancy, and the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. She has testified before the United States Congress twice regarding issues of women's health and the environmental links associated with cancer and has been a strong advocate for America's Redrock Wilderness Act, protecting the redrock canyons of southern Utah. As one of the editors of Testimony: Writers Speak On Behalf of Utah Wilderness, she organized twenty American writers to pen their thoughts on why the protection of these wildlands matter. When President William Jefferson Clinton dedicated the new "Grand Staircase-Escalate National Monument" on September 18, 1996, he held up this book on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and said, "This made a difference." She was recently inducted to the Rachel Carson Honor Roll and has received the National Wildlife Federation's Conservation Award for Special Achievement. The Utne Reader named Terry Tempest Williams as one of their "Utne 100 Visionaries," in their words, "a person who could change your life."
She has been a fellow for the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and received a Lannan Literary Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction. In 1999, Ms. Williams received "The Spirit of the West" award from the Mountain-Plains Booksellers Association for Special Literary Achievement. She has also been recognized by the Mormon Arts & Letters Association and honored by Physicians for Social Responsibility for "distinguished contributions in literature, ecology, and advocacy for an environmentally sustainable world."
Formerly, naturalist-in-residence at the Utah Museum of Natural History, Ms. Williams now lives in Castle Valley, Utah, with her husband Brooke Williams.