For a list of this year’s authors, visit the 2012 Authors page.
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2011 Authors
Stewart Aitchison has been exploring, photographing, teaching, and writing about the Colorado Plateau for more than forty years, ten of those as a field biologist for the Museum of Northern Arizona. Besides leading trips for Grand Canyon Field Institute, he also escorts educational excursions for National Audubon Society, Smithsonian, and National Geographic Expeditions. His publications include: Grand Canyon’s North Rim and Beyond, Grand Canyon: Window of Time, A Traveler’s Guide to Monument Valley, A Guide to Southern Utah’s Hole-in-the-Rock Trail, and The Desert Islands of the Sea of Cortés. Stewart lives in Flagstaff with his wife and can be found working on a straw bale building project in Bluff, Utah.
Donna Ashworth, an Arizona native and great-granddaughter of wagon-train pioneers, received her degrees in history and literature from Arizona State University. After fifteen years of teaching high school English and Humanities, during which time she built, with her own hands, a house of stone in the desert north of Phoenix, she resigned from public schools to become a seasonal fire lookout on the Coconino National Forest. In the 25 years she spent on mountain tops, she wrote The Small Mountain Quartet. In 2005 she represented fire lookouts in Washington, DC when the Smithsonian Institution offered 100 years of Forest Service culture as part of its 39th annual Folklife Festival on the National Mall.
Carol Berg is the author of twelve epic fantasy novels. Her novels have earned national and international acclaim, including the Geffen Award, the Prism Award, and multiple Colorado Book Awards. Her book Lighthouse Duet, Breath and Bone and Flesh and Spirit, won the 2009 Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature. Her latest novel, The Soul Mirror, received starred reviews from both Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. Prior to her writing career, she taught mathematics and was a software engineer. She has degrees in mathematics from Rice University and computer science from the University of Colorado. She lives in Colorado at the foot of the Rocky Mountains.
Erik Bitsui, from the ultra-rural reservation community of Blue Gap, Arizona, Bitsui is a freelance writer, living and working on the Navajo Nation. He is a graduate of NAU. The majority of his work is based on his experiences as a Native American in the 21st century. One of the founders of the Northern Arizona Book Festival, Bitsui served as the assistant director in 1998-99. He has continued to coordinate community outreach projects in and around the Navajo Nation. Bitsui has taught K-12, adult learners of English, and college students.
Michael Collier is the author of five books of poems: The Clasp and Other Poems; The Folded Heart; The Neighbor; The Ledge, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and Dark Wild Realm. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Pushcart Prize, and an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Born in Phoenix, Collier holds an MFA from the University of Arizona. Poet Laureate of Maryland from 2001–2004, he currently teaches in creative writing at the University of Maryland and is the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
Carolyn O’Bagy Davis, a descendant of Utah pioneers, has written nine books and lectures extensively on archaeology, quilting, and western history. She studied anthropology from the University of Arizona. In 2010, she was inducted into the Arizona Quilter’s Hall of Fame. Davis just finished a book with the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office on the Hopi people. She is working on biographies of Hopi quilter and basketmaker Editha Watson, an early anthropologist for the Navajo, and Willard J. Page, a landscape artist who lived in the 1930s and 1940s. Davis is also writing a book about John and Louisa Wetherill and their lives among the Navajos. Her book Hopi Summer: Letters from Ethel to Maud was chosen for this year’s ONEBOOKAZ.
Jamie Ford’s debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, was named an IndieBound NEXT List Selection, a Borders Original Voices Selection, and a Barnes & Noble Book Club Selection. It has been translated into 25 languages. Ford is the great-grandson of Nevada mining pioneer Min Chung, who emigrated from China to San Francisco in 1865, where he adopted the Western name “Ford,” thus confusing countless generations. Ford is an award-winning short-story writer, an alumnus of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers and Orson Scott Card’s Literary Boot Camp. Having grown up near Seattle’s Chinatown, he now lives in Montana with his wife and children. His next book, Songs from The Book of Souls, should be hitting shelves sometime in early 2012.
Jerry Gabriel is a visiting assistant professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland. He holds degrees from The Ohio State University, NAU, and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His first book of fiction, Drowned Boy, was the winner of the 2008 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction and was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection. His work has appeared in One Story, Epoch, The Tampa Review, and Fiction. He has been short-listed for a Pushcart Prize and received an artist grant by the New York Foundation for the Arts. Gabriel recently completed his first novel, Resurrecting the Single Wing, about an Ohio high school football coach.
T. Greenwood hails from rural Vermont. She left Vermont for graduate school and received her master’s degree in English from NAU. She also holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Washington. Her novels include Breathing Water, Nearer than the Sky, Undressing the Moon, The Hungry Season, and Two Rivers, which was named an IndieBound Indie Next selection. Her new book, This Glittering World, is set in Flagstaff and was published this January. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Maryland State Arts Council Fiction Grant. She currently lives with her husband and daughters in San Diego.
Nancy Pickard is the bestselling author of The Scent of Rain and Lightning and 17 other novels, as well as many short stories. She has won multiple Agatha, Anthony, and Macavity awards, and is a four-time Edgar Award finalist. Her book The Virgin of Small Plains was the Kansas Reads book of the year in 2009. The New York Times says, “Pickard has the storytelling gift.” She is a founding member of Sisters In Crime, the international organization devoted to supporting the work of women mystery writers. A lifelong resident of the Kansas City area, she now resides in Merriam, Kansas.
Ana Maria Spagna is the author of Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey (winner of the 2009 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize) and Now Go Home: Wilderness, Belonging, and the Crosscut Saw (a Seattle Times Best Book of 2004). Her newest book Potluck: Community on the Edge of Wilderness explores the ways that relationships with people and places grow intertwined over time, tangled even. Her writing on nature, work, and life in a small community appears regularly in High Country News, Mountain Gazette, Oregon Quarterly, and elsewhere. She holds a master’s degree in creative writing from NAU and currently lives in Stehekin, Washington.
Inés Villafañe-León Born in Santiago, Chile, Villafañe-León is fluent in five languages. A recipient of a Fulbright scholarship to visit the U.S., she moved her family to California, where she created the first “Newcomer Center”, developing an award-winning accelerated language-learning program for immigrant children, which was later adopted in Spain and Germany. Villafañe-León holds master’s degrees from the University of Chile and the University of California in Berkeley. Her latest book, ¡Ahí viene el Felnando! Conversaciones testimoniales del alma apasionada de Fernando Alegría!, is an account of a Chilean master of letters and his relationship with such great contemporaries as Gabriela Mistral, Salvador Allende, and Pablo Neruda.
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Previous Years
Dorothy Allison is a National Book Award finalist, as well as the winner of the ALA prize and the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction.
Rudolfo Anaya is a winner of the National Book Award, Pen West Fiction Award, and the NEA National Medal of Arts. Anaya is the author of fourteen works of fiction, ten book for children, one poetry collection, six plays, numerous non-fiction works and anthologies, fourteen works of fiction, including Bless Me, Ultima, widely considered one of the most important works of modern Chicano literature.
Jimmy Santiago Baca taught himself to read and write while serving time in prison and soon began writing poetry, which he traded with other prisoners for cigarettes. He received the American Book Award for poetry. Baca is the author of seven poetry collections, a memoir, a collection of stories and essays, and a screenplay.
Rick Bass is a PEN/Nelson Algren Award winner, as well as a Story Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
Marvin Bell won the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets and was the first Poet Laureate for the state of Iowa. He was a National Book Award finalist and taught at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Robert Bly co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War. Bly won the National Book Award in 1968 for The Light Around the Body. He is the author of twenty-three poetry collections and nine nonfiction works, including Iron John: A Book About Men, which is credited for starting the Mythopoetic men’s movement.
T. Coraghessan Boyle won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Prix Médicis étranger. He is the author of twelve novels and over a hundred short stories.
Andrei Codrescu won the Ovidus Award and is a two-time winner of the Pushcart Prize. He was born in Sibiu, Romania.
Junot Díaz is the author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2008. He also won the PEN/Malamud Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Best Novel. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao was selected by Time and New York Magazine as the best novel of 2007. Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic and currently teaches creative writing at MIT.
Dave Eggers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. He is the founder and editor of McSweeney’s and also edits the annual Best American Nonrequired Reading series. Eggers cofounded 826 Valencia, an after school writing program for kids ages 6 to 18.
Dagoberto Gilb is a winner of PEN/Hemingway Foundation Award and the PEN Southwest Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the National Book Critic’s Circle Award.
Daniel Handler (a.k.a. Lemony Snicket) is the author of Adverbs and, writing as Lemony Snicket, the thirteen book children’s series A Series of Unfortunate Events.
Denis Johnson won the National Poetry series Award, the National Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Ted Kooser served as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress. Kooser is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the Pushcart Prize. He has published nineteen poetry collections.
Li-Young Lee won the William Carlos Williams Award, Lamont Poetry Selection, American Book Award, Whiting Writers Award, and Lannon Literary Award. He was born in Indonesia and is the grandson of Yuan Shikai, China’s first Republican President.
Lydia Millet is a PEN USA winner, was short-listed for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. She is the author of six novels and one short story collection.
Rick Moody is a winner of the Pushcart Editor’s Choice Award and the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir. Moody is the author of a memoir and five novels, including Garden State and The Ice Storm.
Toni Morrison won both the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize. She also won the National Book Critics Circle Award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award, Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, and American Book Award. In 1996, Morrison was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal of Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. She is the author of nine novels and two children’s books.
Naomi Shihab Nye is the winner of four Pushcart Prizes, the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award, the Paterson Poetry Prize, and the American Academy of Poets’ Lavan Award. Nye is the author of seven poetry collections and one novel. She was named one of PeacebyPeace.com’s first peace heroes.
Annie Proulx won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. She is the author of four novels, four short story collections, and three works of nonfiction.
Ishmael Reed has been nominated for two National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and has won the Langston Hughes Medal. Reed is the author of nine novels, six poetry collections, eight essay collections, two travelogues, six plays, and has edited thirteen anthologies.
Alberto Ríos was a finalist for the National Book Award and has won the Walt Whitman Award and six Pushcart Prizes for poetry and fiction. Ríos is the author of eleven poetry collections, three short story collections, and a memoir.