Mary Webb: The Driest State: Nevada Watersheds Essay
In conjunction with Nolan Preece’s The Driest State: Nevada Watersheds exhibition, CCAI commissioned Mary Webb to write the essay. Click HERE to read Webb’s essay, From a Desert Sky: Capturing Nevada Watersheds.
Mary Webb grew up in the Midwest and migrated as a college student to the southwest. She earned an M.A. in English at Northern Arizona University in 1984. She has taught English at UNR since 1984, specializing in writing course and literary nonfiction. She writes about arid landscapes, climate, and drought in the west. Her collaborative book, A Doubtful River, with photographers by Robert Dawson and Peter Goin, was awarded the Wilbur Shepperson Prize for Western Literature. The book examines and critiques cultural perceptions of water use in the Nevada desert in the context of a prolonged drought during the 1980s. She has published essays about recreation and whitewater parks along the Truckee River, and is researching her military family’s relationship to place after experiencing the bombing at Pearl Harbor.
