Raised and publicly educated in California, Rebecca Solnit is a writer and activist who has published more than 20 books and contributes to The Guardian and LitHub. She received a Lannan Literary Award and National Book Critics Circle Award for River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (2003). She became a figure in the popular imagination for coining the term “mansplaining” in her 2008 feminist polemic Men Explain Things To Me. Some have noted that Solnit’s writing was prophetic in expressing sentiments that rang true for many US citizens a decade or two later. Hope in the Dark is a case in point, as it achieved newfound acclaim after the 2016 election of Donald Trump.

Solnit’s activism and writing expose her feminism, anti-capitalism, and environmentalism. She considers activism and writing to be natural companions in that the purpose “of resisting corporate globalization” is to “protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the local, the poetic, and the eccentric” (67). Additionally, her writing is a channel she uses to voice activist concerns that might be relevant in a future moment in history.

Instead of an abstract essayist, Solnit is a concrete figure in the text of Hope in the Dark.