In 2000 with the support of Regent James E. Sowell, Texas Tech University established the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community and the Natural World with the acquisition of the papers of 5 contemporary American writers: William Kittredge, Barry Lopez, David Quammen, Pattiann Rogers, and Annick Smith. The Collection opened to researchers in 2001 and has since grown to include more than 30 writers. Sowell Collection writers have received numerous honors for literary and scientific writing, including National Book Awards, MacArthur Genius Awards, Stegner Fellowships, and John Burroughs Awards.
The Collection documents a literary community whose work explores questions of land use and environment, the nature of human and non-human communities, the intersection of spiritual and scientific values, and the fragility and resilience of the Earth. These authors write across forms – novel, essay, short story, memoir, poetry – and across genres – science journalism, food and travel writing, horror fiction, eco-poetry.
While many authors are based in the American West, they are not limited by geography. They have travelled through the Arctic and Antarctic, across the great deserts of Sudan and Egypt, deep into Lebanon, Rwanda, Namibia, and Japan. They’ve paddled Minnesota’s Boundary Waters and the Carolinas’ Chattooga River, swum in New York’s Finger Lakes, hiked into the heart of the American Southwest, homesteaded in the Missoula Valley, searched for Bigfoot and butterflies in the Dark Divide. They go see. They take notes. They bring back new ways of exploring, of knowing, and of belonging to our places and our communities.
Within and across each author’s archive you’ll find evidence of a worldwide literary community, the individual and collaborative creative processes, and the changing technology of the written word. You’ll find letters, journals, hand-written manuscripts, photographs, audio and visual recordings, and the digital documents of the twenty-first century.
A complete list of authors in the collection may be found on the Sowell website.
