Lauret Savoy, the David B. Truman Professor of Environmental Studies at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, received the 2017 Creative Writing Award from the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. The award recognizes excellence in the fields of ecocriticism and environmental creative writing.
Professor Savoy was honored for her book Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape (Counterpoint, 2015). The prize committee said the book was “impeccably researched and gracefully written meditation on landscape, memory, and race.” Earlier, the book won the 2016 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation.
Dr. Savoy has served as the director of Mount Holyoke’s Miller Worley Center for the Environment, and she is on the board of directors of the National Parks Conservation Association.
Professor Savoy is a graduate of Princeton University. She holds a master’s degree from the University of California, Santa Cruz and a Ph.D. from Syracuse University in New York.