Revery Will Do: Imagination and Conservation on Montana’s Great Plains

Corrie Williamson, author, teacher, naturalist, and Community Outreach Director at American Prairie, 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, part poetry-reading, 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.
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About Corrie Williamson


Corrie Williamson was born on a small farm in southwestern Virginia. She is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Your Mother’s Bear Gun, newly out in 2025 from River River Books. Her other books are The River Where You Forgot My Name, in the Crab Orchard Series, which was named a 2019 Montana Book Award Honor Book by the Montana Library Association; and Sweet Husk, which won the 2014 Perugia Press Prize, and was a finalist for the 2015 Library of Virginia Poetry Award. She is also co-editor of the eco-poetry anthology Rocky Mountains Literary Field Guide, forthcoming from Mountaineers Books in 2027.

Williamson completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Virginia, with a BA in Poetry and Anthropology, and her MFA in Poetry from the University of Arkansas, where she was a recipient of the Walton Fellowship, and a Director of the Writers in the Schools Program. She has taught writing at the University of Arkansas, Helena College, and Carroll College, and worked as an educator in Yellowstone National Park.

She was the recipient of the 2020 Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, spending seven and a half months writing and living off-grid in a remote section of the Rogue River in southwest Oregon. Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Southern Review, Ecotone, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, AGNI, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and many others. You can also find her work in anthologies such as Cascadia Field Guide; Environmental and Nature Writing Volume II: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology; Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology; and Bright Bones: An Anthology of Contemporary Montana Writing.

She lives in Lewistown, Montana, where she works as Director of Community Outreach for the conservation NGO American Prairie. Visit https://www.corriewilliamson.com.

About Stephenie Ambrose-Tubbs

Stephenie Ambrose-Tubbs is author of The Lewis and Clark Companion; An Encyclopedic Guide to the Voyage of Discovery, and Why Sacagawea Deserves the Day Off; Lessons from the Lewis and Clark Trail. She lectures nationally about her experiences and observations on the Lewis and Clark Trail, which she first followed in 1976 with her father, bestselling author Stephen Ambrose.

In addition to working with the Lewis and Clark Trail Adventures, Ambrose-Tubbs serves as chair on the Lewis and Clark Trust Inc. a non-profit aimed at preserving the Trail and all of its aspects through conservation and education. She recently had the pleasure of working with National Geographic/ Linblad‘s ship, the Sea Lion, on the Columbia River. She is an emeritus board member for American Prairie and holds two degrees in History from the University of Montana.