Pamela Petro

[1] Her books, including Travels in an Old Tongue (1996), Sitting up with the Dead (2001, UK, 2002, 2017 US), The Slow Breath of Stone (2005), and The Long Field (2021, UK 2023, US) investigate ideas of place, home, longing, and belonging, using people and places to illuminate and reveal one another.

She is interested in the Welsh concept of hiraeth, an intractable longing for someone or something — a home, a culture, a language, or younger self — that’s been left behind or taken away, or has only ever existed in the imagination.

Petro’s photography-based visual art explores similar themes in both environmental and word-image installations.

[2] In 2019 Petro exhibited The Blink of Our Lifetimes: The Ecology of Dusk at the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University.

In 2011 she was named by the National Park Service as an Artist in Residence at the Grand Canyon, for both writing and photography.