Geography Colloquia Series - Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History

Salt lakes are some of the world's most extraordinary ecosystems, but nearly all of them―from the Great Salt Lake to the Aral Sea��are drying up, a harbinger of dust storms, rising sea levels, and worsening human health. Caroline Tracey's book Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History, a hybrid work of memoir and geographic research, spans the American West, Mexico, Argentina, Kazakhstan and beyond, documenting salt lakes, their loss, and the efforts underway to save them, as well as Tracey's relationships to the lakes.

In this talk she will describe the making of the book, including how it draws on her training in geographic methods and on additional creative sources such as Mormon diaries, Soviet realist novels, Australian Aboriginal paintings, and techniques of memoir and the personal essay. Caroline Tracey is the author of Salt Lakes: An Unnatural History (W.W.

Norton, 2026). After receiving her PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley, she became an independent writer and journalist specializing in the Southwestern US, Mexico, and their borderlands.

Her work has appeared in numerous publications and has received a Fulbright fellowship, the Waterston Prize for Desert Writing, an Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writer's Grant, and a Creative Capital State of the Arts Award.