Alexa Hagerty Selected As Winner Of The 2026 Waterston Desert Writing Prize (Photo) - 08/18/26
BEND, OR — The High Desert Museum has selected writer and anthropologist Alexa Hagerty as the winner of the 12th annual Waterston Desert Writing Prize. Hagerty is the author of “Still Life with Bones: Genocide, Forensics, and What Remains,” a New York Times Editors' Choice, and was named one of The New Yorker's Best Books of the Year in addition to winning the 2024 Juan E. Méndez Book Award for Human Rights in Latin America.
“We are honored to welcome this year’s Waterston Desert Writing Prize winner, Alexa Hagerty, alongside acclaimed writer and performer Joy Harjo,” said High Desert Museum Executive Director Dana Whitelaw, Ph.D. “Together, they embody the spirit of the Prize through their profound engagement with landscape, place, and the human experience, reminding us of the enduring power of literary nonfiction to deepen our understanding of desert environments.”
Hagerty’s winning submission is titled Salt, Cloud, Ghost: A Journey through Desert, Deep Time, and Digital Age, which is a project focused on Chile’s Atacama Desert. She explores technology, memory, and loss in her writing. Her proposal journeys through the Atacama Desert, where the extraction of minerals and data for AI meets the region’s long history of colonialism, dictatorship, and disappearance.
An affiliate of the University of Cambridge's Minderoo Centre for Technology and Democracy, she holds a PhD in anthropology from Stanford University. Hagerty’s writing has appeared in Wired and the Los Angeles Review of Books, and The New York Times, the BBC, and The Guardian have covered her research.
The 2026 Waterston Desert Writing Prize finalists are C. J. Alvarez and Caprice Gray.
Alvarez, who holds a Ph.D. in history and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin, uncovers the 12,000-year history of the Chihuahuan Desert in his book project Another Kind of Clay. The project focuses on one of the largest and least-known expanses of dryland in North America to remember, to look beyond the false claims and real damage of conquest, and to readapt to the drylands.
Originally from the traditional Wecksquaesgeek territory in Harlem, New York, Gray holds a Bachelor of Arts from Yale, a Master of Science from Harvard University, and a Master of Fine Arts in Writing from New York University. Her proposal, The Once and Future Desert, is a proposed love letter to the desert written on a planet facing ecological crisis. It explores the complicated, yet paradoxically symbiotic, relationship between the desert and humankind throughout history.
The Waterston Advisory Committee and a guest judge review proposals. This year’s guest judge is Charles Hood, a five-time Waterson Award finalist and 2025 Obsidian Award Winner who has spent a career living and working in the Mojave Desert of Southern California. Hood’s nature study has taken him around the world and to the South Pole. He has published 22 books, including “Wild L.A.”, which is now in its fourth printing. His most recent books are “Nature at Night, “Double Hyenas and Lazarus Birds,” and “Acorns: In a Nutshell.”
The Waterston Desert Writing Prize, established in 2014 by author and Oregon Poet Laureate Ellen Waterston, honors and fosters literary nonfiction that celebrates desert landscapes. In 2020, the High Desert Museum, which has long hosted events for the Prize, adopted the program. The mission and goals of the Prize complement those of the High Desert Museum, emphasizing the importance of protecting deserts and creating important conversations about the issues affecting them.
To learn more about the Waterston Desert Writing Prize, and to purchase your tickets to the Waterston Desert Writing Prize Ceremony, visit: highdesertmuseum.org/waterston-prize.
ABOUT THE MUSEUM
The HIGH DESERT MUSEUM opened in Bend, Oregon in 1982. It brings together wildlife, cultures, art, history and the natural world to convey the wonder of North America’s High Desert. The Museum is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization accredited by the American Alliance of Museums, is a Smithsonian Affiliate, was the 2019 recipient of the Western Museums Association’s Charles Redd Award for Exhibition Excellence and was a 2021 recipient of the National Medal for Museum and Library Service. To learn more, visit highdesertmuseum.org and follow us on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok.
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