“Revery Will Do: Imagination and Conservation on Montana’s Great Plains” is the title of a lecture that Corrie Williamson will give at Lewis & Clark Library on December 3, 2025. She is an author, teacher, naturalist, and Community Outreach Director at American Prairie, and will blend poetry, history, and restoration ecology in a presentation that travels across time, geography, and literature. She will be introduced by Stephenie Ambrose-Tubbs, daughter of the late Stephen E. Ambrose, for whom the lecture is named.
Williamson, who grew up in the same small Virginia town as William Clark’s first wife, Julia Hancock, will share her connections to the history and landscape of the Corps of Discovery and how it led her to Montana and to her work connecting storytelling, conservation, and communities. Her lecture will include work from her award-winning collections of poems, as well as other important literary touchpoints and perspectives related to the Great Northern Plains’ history and habitat.
Williamson will discuss her work at the conservation NGO American Prairie, and their mission to connect, protect, and share 3.2 million acres of Montana’s grasslands, and how this work extends beyond habitat and wildlife conservation to intertwine with the stories we tell about the past, what we can imagine and hope for the future, and how these together shape our paths forward.
