Meet The Authors

Kim Barnes

Kim Barnes is the author of two memoirs and two novels, most recently A Country Called Home, which received the 2009 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Fiction and was named a best book of 2008 by The Washington Post, Kansas City Star, and The Oregonian (Northwest). She is the recipient of the PEN/Jerard Fund Award for an emerging woman writer of nonfiction, and her first memoir, In the Wilderness, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Her work has appeared in a number of journals… [more info]

John Clayton

John Clayton's book, The Cowboy Girl, is a biography of the Montana/Wyoming novelist, journalist, and homesteader Caroline Lockhart. "Expertly researched and wonderfully written," writes Mark Spragg, author of Where Rivers Change Direction, "this biography of Lockhart expands the genre to a meditation on frontier, feminism, and the vagaries of literary hubris. Clayton has rendered a riveting portrait of a woman both troubled and brave, a character caught up in the fiction of her own life." The… [more info]

Jaimee Wriston Colbert

Jaimee Wriston Colbert is the author of a new novel, Shark Girls, nominated for the ALA Notable Books of 2010 List and a finalist for the Foreword Magazine Book of the Year Awards; a linked stories collection, Dream Lives of Butterflies, which won the gold medal in the 2008 Independent Publisher Awards; a novel in stories, Climbing the God Tree, winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Prize; and the story collection Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile, winner of the Zephyr Publishing… [more info]

Gene Gagliano

Known by many children as the teacher who dances on his desk, Gene Gagliano is a retired elementary teacher whose author presentations are entertaining, informative and inspirational. He has presented at schools (78 in Wyoming), and at IRA, teacher, SCBWI, and library conferences, and for other community groups in Wyoming, Colorado, Missouri, South Dakota, Minnesota, and Montana. Gene was the recipient of the International Reading Association’s 2004 Wyoming State Celebrate Literacy Award. In 2001 he received… [more info]

Jack Gantos

Jack Gantos is the author of dozens of books for children, including the "Rotten Ralph" readers, the "Joey Pizga" books and the "Jack Henry" books, and books for young adults, including Hole in My Life, (Farrar Straus, 2002), a memoir of crime, prison, and his emergence as a writer. For more on his books, see www.jackgantos.com.

Gantos was born in Mount Pleasant, Pennsylvania. He remembers playing a lot of "pass the chalk" in Mrs. Neiderheizer's class in first grade. He was in the Bluebird… [more info]

Lee Gutkind

Lee Gutkind is founder and editor of the popular journal, Creative Nonfiction, the first and largest literary journal to publish nonfiction exclusively. He is editor of Best Creative Nonfiction, an annual anthology, and author of Keep It Real: Everything You Need to Know about Researching and Writing Creative Nonfiction, both published by W.W. Norton. In all, Gutkind has written 15 books, and edited 18 collections and volumes in the past 25 years.

His newest book is… [more info]

Russell Hawley

Russell J. Hawley attended the University of Colorado in 1985 with the intention of becoming a professional palæontologist. Accordingly, he took classes in geology, biology, zoology, comparative anatomy and human anatomy and physiology. But then he took calculus - and failed it. He took calculus again, and failed it again. After failing calculus for the third time, he decided that he would probably make a pretty mediocre scientist even if, by some miracle, he did ever manage to pass calculus so he switched… [more info]

Jeff Lockwood

Jeff Lockwood earned a B.S. in biology from New Mexico Tech and a Ph.D. in entomology from Louisiana State University. Originally hired as an Assistant Professor of Entomology at the University of Wyoming, he metamorphosed into a Professor of Natural Sciences & Humanities and transferred to the department of philosophy and in the MFA program in creative writing. He teaches nature and spiritual/religious writing, environmental ethics, and philosophy of ecology. His writings have been honored with a Pushcart… [more info]

Nina McConigley

Nina Swamidoss McConigley was born in Singapore and grew up in Wyoming. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where she was an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow. She also holds an MA in English from the University of Wyoming and a BA in Literature from Saint Olaf College. She is the winner of a Barthelme Memorial Fellowship in Non-Fiction and served as the Non-Fiction Editor of Gulf Coast: a Journal of Literature and Fine Arts. Her play, "Owen Wister Considered" was one of five… [more info]

Zak Pullen

Zachary Pullen’s character oriented illustrations have been seen in numerous publications including The New York Times Book Review, Sports Illustrated, Esquire, and The Wall Street Journal to name a few. Zak has been honored several times with acceptance into the prestigious Society of Illustrators juried shows and Communication Arts Illustration Annual of the best in current illustration. Clients include: The New York Times Book Review, Esquire Magazine, Penthouse,… [more info]

Tom Rea

Tom Rea grew up in Pittsburgh, Pa., and has lived in Wyoming for 35 years. His books include Devil's Gate: Owning the Land Owning the Story (Oklahoma, 2006), winner of the 2006-07 nonfiction book award from the Wyoming State Historical Society, and Bone Wars: The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie's Dinosaur, (Pittsburgh, 2001, paperback 2004) winner of a Western Writers of America Spur Award for contemporary nonfiction. He is currently president of the Wyoming Humanities Council, and… [more info]

David Romtvedt

Romtvedt’s books of poetry include Certainty, How Many Horses, Some Church and A Flower Whose Name I do Not Know which won the National Poetry Series award. His work has been selected for the Pushcart Prize and for two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, one in poetry and the other an international fellowship in poetry and music. He is a recipient of a Wyoming Arts Council literature fellowship and the Wyoming Governor's Arts Award. Romtvedt serves as faculty member in… [more info]

Virginia Shank

Virginia Shank lives in Binghamton, NY, works toward a PhD, edits Harpur Palate and Binghamton Writes, dabbles in claymation, and works as a seasonal zookeeper. She earned her MFA and worked on Fugue at the University of Idaho. Her poetry recently appeared in Rhino and The Meadowland Review. [more info]

Ravi Shankar

Ravi Shankar is Associate Professor and Poet-in-Residence at Central Connecticut State University and the founding editor of Drunken Boat, the international online journal of the arts, which recently celebrated its tenth anniversary in existence. He has published a book of poems, Instrumentality (Cherry Grove). Ravi was named a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards, and with Reb Livingston, collaborated on a chapbook, Wanton Textiles (No Tell Books, 2006). He currently serves on… [more info]

Paul Taylor

Paul Taylor celebrates his Australian homeland, sharing stories and music of Aboriginal and European Australia in one-man theater productions. Take a trip down under with Paul in “Matilda and the Dreamtime,” a family and educational performance, or “Land of the Lightning Brothers”, a multi-media performance of Aboriginal stories and music, including the exotic sounds of the didjeridoo. Yidunduma Bill Harney, the last male custodian of the Wardaman culture in Australia’s Northern Territory, mentors… [more info]

Ray Troll

From his tree lined studio, high on a hill above the Tongass Narrows in rain-swept Ketchikan Alaska, Ray Troll draws & paints fishy images that migrate into museums, books and magazines and onto t-shirts sold around the planet. Basing his quirky, aquatic images on the latest scientific discoveries, Ray brings a street-smart sensibility to the worlds of ichthyology & paleontology.

Ray moved to Alaska in 1983 to spend a summer helping his big sister Kate start a seafood retail store. The fish store… [more info]

John Vernon

John Vernon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts and now lives in Colorado. He was educated at Boston College and the University of California at Davis, and has taught at the University of Utah and Binghamton University (S.U.N.Y.) He is the author of eleven books, including the book of poems Ann, the memoir A Book of Reasons, and the novels La Salle, Lindbergh's Son, Peter Doyle, All for Love: Baby Doe and Silver Dollar, The Last Canyon, and Lucky Billy.… [more info]

George Vlastos

George has been a poetry-pusher for nearly two decades, finding the 'spoken word' to be as vital to his daily living as meals, mountainsides, making-up to his wife, and moderating the emotional moguls of their boys. His emcee credentials stretch as far as the island of Crete where he helped highland shepherds learn then perform in an impromptu gangsta-rap competition (the winner was chosen according to who aroused the most sheep bleatings) to inciting a packed room of Cheyenne's so-called troubled youth to… [more info]

Larry Watson

Larry Watson received his BA and MA from the University of North Dakota, and his Ph.D. from the University of Utah.

He is the author of In A Dark Time, Montana 1948, Justice, White Crosses, Laura, Orchard, Sundown, Yellow Moon, and American Boy (forthcoming 2011), and the chapbook of poetry Leaving Dakota. Watson’s fiction has been published in more than a dozen foreign editions, and has received prizes and awards from Milkweed Press,… [more info]

Robert Wrigley

Robert Wrigley was born in 1951, in East St. Louis, Illinois, and grew up not far away in Collinsville, a coal mining town. Wrigley attended Southern Illinois University and the University of Montana, where he developed an abiding love for the western wilderness. Since 1977 he has lived in Idaho, teaching first at Lewis-Clark State College, in Lewiston, and since 1999, at the University of Idaho, where he teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.

His books of poetry include The Sinking… [more info]