Rebecca Solnit (born 1961) is a writer who lives in San Francisco. She has written on a variety of subjects including the environment, politics, place, and art.

She skipped high school altogether, enrolling in an alternative junior high in the public school system that took her through tenth grade, when she passed the GED exam. Thereafter she enrolled in junior college. When she was 17 she went to study in Paris. She ultimately returned to California and finished her college education at San Francisco State University when she was 20. She then received a Masters in Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley in 1984 and has been an independent writer since 1988. Prior to this she was a museum researcher and art critic. She has worked on environmental and human rights campaigns since the 1980s, notably with the Western Shoshone Defense Project in the early 1990s, as described in her book Savage Dreams, and with antiwar activists throughout the Bush era.

Solnit has received many awards for her writing: a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan literary fellowship, two NEA Fellowships for Literature, and a 2004 Wired Rave Award for writing on the effects of technology on the arts and humanities.

Her writing has appeared in numerous publications in print and online, notably at the website Tomdispatch.com. She is the author of twelve books as well as essays in numerous museum catalogues and anthologies.