About
Terry Tempest Williams is a writer and environmental advocate affiliated with Upaya Zen Center. She has authored over 20 books, including Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, When Women Were Birds, The Hour of Land, and Erosion: Essays of Undoing. Her work focuses on the relationship between landscape, ecology, and personal experience. Williams has received the Lannan Literary Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Thoreau Prize for Excellence in Nature Writing. She is Writer-in-Residence at Harvard Divinity School and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She splits residence between Castle Valley, Utah and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Teaching focus
Williams's teaching at Upaya sits inside the center's Soto Zen container. The basic form is zazen, just sitting, with the posture and breath held lightly and the mind allowed to settle without force. Around that core, Upaya's programs build out a wider arc that includes the Bodhisattva precepts, oryoki meal practice, walking meditation (kinhin), dharma talks, and the GRACE framework Roshi Joan developed for clinicians working at the bedside. Williams teaches inside that framework, which means the work isn't just on the cushion. Students are asked to bring practice into the spaces where it actually gets tested: at the bedside, in conversation, in moments of grief or political reactivity, in the long, slow work of climate and justice. Upaya's approach is recognizable for its refusal to keep zazen and the world in separate boxes. The cushion and the clinic, the cushion and the kitchen, the cushion and the protest line are all treated as the same field of practice, not different ones. Williams's contribution stays in that key. Teaching sessions emphasize uprightness, attention, and the Bodhisattva vow as something lived in specific situations rather than recited as an idea. There's room for silence. There's also room for hard conversations about what practice asks of a person in a world under pressure.
Background
Terry Tempest Williams appears in Upaya Zen Center's teacher and faculty roster as part of the wider contemplative community Roshi Joan Halifax has gathered in Santa Fe, New Mexico, over the past four decades. The biographical material on file is drawn directly from Upaya's own teacher page and reflects what Williams has chosen to share there. Terry Tempest Williams is known for her eloquent prose on behalf of our beautiful, broken world. She is the author of more than 20 books, including the environmental literature classic, Refuge - An Unnatural History of Family and Place, When Women Were Birds, The Hour of Land, and most recently, Erosion, Essays of Undoing. Her new book, The Glorians - Visitations from the Holy Ordinary will be published in 2025. Her awards include Lannan Literary Fellowship in Creative Nonfiction; Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Thoreau Prize for Excellence in Nature writing. She is currently Writer-in-Residence at Harvard Divinity School and member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She divides her time between Castle Valley, Utah, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. That body of work places Williams inside a center known for blending Soto Zen practice with contemplative care for the dying, climate work, neuroscience dialogues, and a long-running program for clinicians and chaplains called GRACE. Upaya's roster mixes resident priests with visiting scholars, doctors, scientists, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders, and the programs reflect that blend. Williams's appearances at Upaya situate this work inside that wider conversation between zazen and the world it sits inside. For practitioners who arrive at Upaya through a sesshin or a Being with Dying training, the common thread is a posture of upright, alert presence under whatever conditions show up. The forms are recognizably Soto Zen: zazen, kinhin, oryoki, the Bodhisattva precepts, dharma talks, and dokusan with senior teachers. The framing is wider than any single discipline, which is part of what has made Upaya a meeting ground for working clinicians, scientists, artists, and long-time Buddhist practitioners. Williams contributes to that container in the role Upaya's website assigns. People interested in the specific arc of Williams's career outside Upaya can follow the linked website and external publications listed on the Upaya page itself, which is where any deeper biographical detail belongs.
Lineage
Williams's teaching home for the work documented here is Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, founded by Roshi Joan Halifax in the 1980s and rooted in the Soto Zen lineage. Upaya's broader faculty includes resident priests, visiting senior teachers, scientists, clinicians, poets, and indigenous knowledge holders. Williams contributes as part of Upaya's wider faculty rather than as a Zen priest. Information about specific dharma transmission lines, ordination, or external lineage roots belongs on Williams's own site rather than fabricated here.
What to expect
In a program with Williams at Upaya, expect zazen and Soto Zen forms paired with teaching in Williams's own area of focus. Days follow Upaya's rhythm of sittings, walking meditation, meals, talks, and time for questions. Silence is taken seriously, but so are the conversations that come out of it. The framing is wide enough for people from outside Buddhist practice to take part fully. Long-time Zen students will recognize the forms; newcomers will be supported through them. Expect to leave with a clearer sense of how practice meets the specific subject Williams is teaching.
