Director
Lynn Stegner is a writer, mostly of fiction, with a list of books that includes novels, novellas, short stories and numerous nonfiction pieces focused primarily on conservation. Her latest novel published in 2024, The Half-Life of Guilt, considers among other themes the effects of human beings, a brutally copious species, on the rest of the planetary community and the intrinsic conflict between international commerce and environmental health. Over the last dozen years her involvement in conservation has grown exponentially and landed her in some fascinating endeavors, for instance, a week-long colloquium in Italy with scientists, philosophers, linguists and writers from twenty different countries who are working to come up with a new language for conservation on a declining planet.
In addition to the courses and writing workshops she has taught for Stanford University Continuing Studies these past fifteen years, she is also a longtime developmental editor, with clients around the world.
Her introduction to Southern Utah began in the early 1980s when her husband, the writer and environmental warrior, Page Stegner, began taking his University of California nature writing classes on week-long trips down the rivers of the Southwest. Since then, not a single year has passed when she hasn’t found her way back to Southern Utah, typically in the spring and fall, to wander the canyons and washes, and to recover the solace of landscape. She has served on a number of boards, including the University of California Santa Cruz Foundation, Green Foothills (founded by her father-in-law, Wallace Stegner) and Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve Advisory Council.