1990 - Peter Matthiessen
1991 - Peter Matthiessen
1992 - Wendell Berry
1993 - Gretel Ehrlich
1994 - Annick Smith /
Terry Tempest Williams
1995 - Wendell Berry
1996 - Richard Nelson
1997 - Richard Nelson
1998 - Rick Bass
1999 - William Kittredge
2000 - Rick Bass
2001 - Scott Russell Sanders
2002 - Robert Michael Pyle
2003 - John Elder
2004 - David James Duncan
2005 - Janisse Ray &
   Kim Todd & Phil Condon
2006 - Sharman Apt Russell
2007 - Alison Hawthorne Deming

2009 EWI Workshop Leader

self-portrait--in the Arctic aboard the Amundsen

Elizabeth Grossman

Elizabeth Grossman is a freelance writer and journalist based in Portland, Oregon. A third generation New Yorker, she was born and raised in Manhattan, and has a B.A. in literature from Yale University. She moved to Portland in 1996 and lives two minutes’ walk from the Willamette River.

She writes about environmental and science issues and is the author of 3 books of non-fiction, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health (Island Press, 2006, and in paperback 2007), Adventuring Along the Lewis and Clark Trail (Sierra Club Books, 2003), and Watershed: The Undamming of America (Counterpoint, 2002). She is also co-editor with Susan Ewing of Shadow Cat: Encountering the American Mountain Lion (Sasquatch Books, 1999). High Tech Trash was chosen by Booklist as one of their editors “best” books of 2006.

Her new book, Redesigning the Future (on the impacts of persistent and pervasive pollutants and work in “green chemistry” to design alternative materials) will be published by Island Press in 2009.

Her work has appeared in a variety of publications including Salon, The Washington Post, Mother Jones, Grist, The Nation, Orion, Earth Island Journal, The Oregonian, and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She also serves as an advisor to two literary magazines High Desert Journal and Isotope, and as a correspondent for Orion magazine.

Elizabeth has received support for her work from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (2004-2005), The Overbrook Foundation (2008), The Fund for Investigative Journalism (2006) and the Nation Institute (2005 and 2006). She received an Oregon Literary Fellowship in non-fiction in 2008, and has received travel grants from the Chemical Heritage Foundation (2007) and the Society for Conservation Biology (2006). She has also been a science journalism fellow at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (2007) and the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory (2004), and was an Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources fellow in 2000.

She has been a guest speaker and instructor at numerous colleges and universities, including Grinnell College, Whitman College, College of the Atlantic, Portland State University, University of Ottawa Faculty of Law, Chico State, and Washington State University. She has also spoken and taught at many writers conferences and workshops, environmental, literary and business conferences. Before beginning to write fulltime in 1999, she worked for over ten years as a literary agent in New York City specializing in literary non-fiction and working with many historians, international journalists, poets, and natural history writers.

Elizabeth travels extensively for her work and in the past year has made several trips to the Arctic, where she spent nearly a month on an icebreaker in the winter of 2007. When not at her desk writing, she is out exploring – hiking, camping, paddling, sketching, and watching birds.

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