Diane Wilson

Diane Wilson comes from the fishing village of Seadrift, Texas, where she was one of the rare girls who went out on the family boat to shrimp with her father. After she married and had five children, her oldest daughter said it wasn’t that uncommon to see her mother stirring something on the stove with one hand while reading Gandhi with the other.

Wilson started out as an activist on the behalf of the San Antonio Bay, but she has since found her voice as an international activist, as the instigator of new organizations like CodePink Women for Peace and as an author of An Unreasonable Woman: A True Story of Shrimpers, Politicos, Polluters and the Fight for Seadrift, Texas (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2005).

When arrested and incarcerated in the Victoria County Jail, Diane was wanted in Texas on criminal trespassing charges for climbing a tower at Dow Chemical to unfurl a banner protesting how the company failed to take responsibility for the 1984 chemical disaster in Bhopal, India, where 150,000 people were poisoned. The following is a January 2006 letter Diane wrote to Sheriff T. Michael O’Connor about the jail.

Her most recent book, Diary of an Eco-Outlaw, was published in 2011. Her second book, Holy Roller: Growing Up in the Church of Knock Down, Drag Out; or, How I Quit Loving a Blue-Eyed Jesus, follows her life as a child growing up in a Pentecostal family and came out in 2008. All her books are published by Chelsea Green Publishing

Checkout Diane Wilson’s Website