Alum Rebecca Solnit: 'One of San Francisco's Singular Literary Voices'

SF WEEKLY -- By using place as a prism for the world, Solnit’s work has strived to connect isolated ideas into a nexus of context that ultimately resembles a planet covered in thumbtacks and red strings. At the center of it all is San Francisco, the edge of the world that has long served as her home and muse. Solnit first came to the Bay Area in 1966 at the age of five, when her parents moved from Bridgeport, Connecticut, to Novato in Marin County. She passed the GED after completing 10th grade, and at 17, left to study abroad in Paris. Eventually, she returned to complete her studies at San Francisco State. She went on to receive a Master’s in Journalism from University of California, Berkeley, in 1984, and has lived in San Francisco ever since. In her time here, Solnit has seen the city and the world change in countless and surprising ways (“The Bay Area is good at containing contradictions,” she notes in “Infinite City.”) Arguably, one of the most immediate examples is the advent of social media.