Jackson Hole Writers Conference

Faculty

Keep checking back, as we are constantly adding new conference writers, editors, and agents!

Tracks

Travel/Outdoors || Young Adult || Teachers || Creative Nonfiction || Fiction || Poetry

Author of The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers, is a former lawyer and Fulbright Scholar and is a freelance writer for National Geographic and Playboy. In the course of his years of research on reptiles, he has been bitten between the eyes by a blood python, chased by a mother alligator, sprayed by a bird-eating tarantula, and ejaculated on by a Bengal tiger. Alexandra Fuller: “Bryan is the smartest man I ever met.”

Broughton Coburn

Broughton Coburn, of Wilson, Wyoming, has worked in environmental conservation and development in the Himalaya for two of the past three decades, and has written, edited or collaborated on seven books, including Aama in America: A Pilgrimage of the Heart (Anchor/Doubleday) and the two national bestsellers, Everest: Mountain Without Mercy (National Geographic Books) and Touching My Father’s Soul: A Sherpa’s Journey to the Top of Everest (HarperSanFrancisco).
www.unusualspeaker.com

Katherine Ives

A graduate from the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, with an MFA in Fiction, Katie Ives is the Senior Editor for Alpinist Magazine. Her fiction, nonfiction and translations (from French and Mongolian) have appeared in various publications, including Rock & Ice, Alpinist, She Sends, The Mountain Gazette, Circumference, 91st Meridian, The Mongolian Studies Journal and Ideya Magazine, and she has also written a book review for the 2006 American Alpine Journal. In 2004 she won the Mammut/Rock & Ice Writing Contest, and in 2005 she received a scholarship to attend the Banff Mountain Writing Program.

Young Adult

Melissa Manlove

Melissa Manlove is Assistant Editor at Chronicle Books in San Francisco. She has been with Chronicle for four years. Some of the books she has served as editor for are Emily’s Balloon by Komako Sakai, Tools by Taro Miura, Tales from the Brothers Grimm by Cooper Edens, and Make a Wish by Roseanne Thong, illustrated by Elisa Kleven. She is a member of the SCBWI and has 10 years of children’s bookselling experience.

Christian Burch

Christian Burch has lived in Jackson for twelve years and has worked as a painter and male nanny. HIs first book, The Manny Files, was published in 2006 and won the Josette Frank Award, The Stonewall Honor, and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. His second book will be released in September 2008. Along with writing, Christian currently teaches Visual Arts at the Jackson Hole Community School and continues mannying.

Patti Sherlock

Patti Sherlock has published two nonfiction books for the adult market and three young adult novels, and publishes in magazines, too. Her latest YA novel, Letters from Wolfie, about a boy who donates his dog to the army during the Vietnam war, was selected for Westminster, Colorado's "One City One Book" event and for the Solano Kids Read event, a California one-county one-book event. The book won the Merial Human-Animal Bond Award, is a nominee for the Rebecca Caudill Award, was nominee for the Young Reader's Medal in California and nominated for Young Reader's Choice in six other states, plus it has been nominated for two literary awards in Japan. Letters from Wolfie and Some Fine Dog were Junior Library Guild selections. Four of a Kind was runner-up for the Spur Award from Western Writers of America.

Creative Nonfiction

Tim Cahill

Tim Cahill is a travel writer who lives in Livingston, Montana. He is a founding editor of Outside magazine and currently serves as an "Editor at Large" for the magazine. He also is a frequent contributor to National Geographic Adventure magazine. He has written ten books recounting his adventure travel experiences and blends his own brand of humor into his stories.

Along with professional long-distance driver Garry Sowerby, Cahill set a world record for speed in driving the entire length of the American continents, from Ushuaia in Tierra del Fuego in southern Argentina up along the Pan-American Highway to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska in twenty-three days, twenty-two hours, and forty-three minutes. This trip was the source material for his book Road Fever.

Michael Perry

Michael Perry is a humorist and author of the bestselling memoir Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, and the essay collection Off Main Street. Perry has written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Backpacker, Orion and Salon.com, and is a contributing editor to Men’s Health. His essays have been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered and he has performed and produced two live audience recordings (I Got It From the Cows and Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow). Perry lives in rural Wisconsin , where he remains active as a volunteer firefighter and emergency medical responder. He can be found online at www.sneezingcow.com

Alexandra Fuller

Alexandra Fuller was born in England in 1969. She moved to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) with her family when she was two. After that country’s war of independence (1980) her family moved first to Malawi and then Zambia where she met her husband. In 1994, she came to the States. She lives now in Wyoming with her husband, two daughters and a son. She is the author of the memoirs Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood and Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier and of the non-fiction narrative The Legend of Colton H. Bryant. Her articles and book reviews have appeared in many publications including National Geographic, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The London Guardian.

Broughton Coburn

Karol Griffin

Karol Griffin is the author of Skin Deep: Tattoos, the Disappearing West, Very Bad Men, and My Deep Love for Them All (Harcourt, 2003). She earned the Wyoming Arts Council 2000 Doubleday award, an annual grant to "honor a woman writer of exceptional talent." Her work has appeared in Northern Lights; Dorothy Parker's Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos; Fourth Genre; Red Rock Review; and other publications. She teaches in the English Department at Central Wyoming College. She has also worked as a tattoo artist, photographer, horse wrangler, salvage-yard car crusher, and phone-sex operator. She is currently embroiled in the literary possibilities of the Wyoming oilfield.

Laurie Gunst

Laurie Gunst was born and raised in Richmond Virginia, the youngest daughter in a Jewish family with a paternal ancestor who fought for the Confederacy and a mother who campaigned for civil rights. She was partly raised by the African American women who worked for her family, and the experience of growing up between these two worlds has shaped her life and writing.

After earning a doctorate in history from Harvard and a master’s in journalism from Columba, she published her first book in 1995. Born Fi’ Dead: A Journey Through the Jamaican Posse Underworld is her account of ten years she spent exploring that island’s gang life and the political corruption that spawned it. Her second book, Off-White (2005), is a memoir of her family—both sides—and the fierce contradictions of being what the title says.

She’s presently at work on a new book, LoveSick, a mind/body exploration of love’s downside: when the stress of being with the wrong person sends your health south. Laurie Gunst lives in Dubois, Wyoming.

Fiction

Elizabeth George

Elizabeth Geroge is the author of eighteen best selling novels. She has won the Anthony Award, the Agatha Award, and France's Le Grand Prix de Literature Policiere for her novel A Great Deliverance, for which she was also nominated for the Edgar and the Macavity Awards. She has also been awarded Germany's MIMI for her novel Well-Schooled in Murder.

Most of her novels have been filmed by for television by the BBC and have been broadcast in the U.S. on PBS's Mystery series.

Elizabeth George currently lives in Seattle, Washington, making frequent trips to London where she has a flat in South Kensington.

Gail Tsukiyama

Gail Tsukiyama is the bestselling author of six novels, including Women of the Silk, The Samurai’s Garden, and her newest book, The Street of a Thousand Blossoms. She has been a recipient of the Academy of American Poets Award and the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award. She divides her time between El Cerrito and Napa Valley, California.

Jane Hamilton

Jane Hamilton’s first novel, The Book of Ruth, was published in 1988 and won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award, Great Lakes College Association New Writers Award, and the Wisconsin Library Association Banta Book Award in 1989. The Book of Ruth was an Oprah's Book Club selection in 1996, and it was the basis for a 2004 television film of the same title. In 1994, she published A Map of the World, which was adapted for a film in 1999 and, the same year, was also an Oprah's Book Club selection. Her third novel, The Short History of a Prince, published in 1998, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998. This book was also shortlisted for the 1999 Orange Prize. She has since published two more novels, both set in Wisconsin.

Bob Mayer

New York Times bestselling author Bob Mayer has published over 35 books ranging from military techno-thriller to political thriller to non-fiction to science fiction to romantic adventure. He has over three million books in print with four books to be published in 2007, including WHO DARES WINS: Special Operations Tactics for Building Your Winning A-Team; The Novel Writer’s Toolkit: A Guide To Writing Great Fiction And Getting It Published; and as the primary contributor to The Writer’s Digest Writing Kit coming out in August 2007 and the editor of Hunting Al Qaeda.

Tiffanie DeBartolo

Tiffanie DeBartolo received a degree in philosophy from the University of California at Berkeley. Before she started writing novels she penned three screenplays, one of which she directed and saw released in theaters nationwide, called Dream for an Insomniac, which starred Ione Skye and Jennifer Aniston. After barely surviving life in Hollywood, a place she says she never fit in, it was time to move on to new challenges -- like writing novels. Her first book, God-Shaped Hole, was released in 2002, her second, How to Kill a Rock Star, in 2005, and she is currently hard at work on her third. Tiffanie lives in New York City, and if she can’t be found typing for twelve hours a day, she’s probably chasing her favorite rock bands around the country.
www.tiffaniedebartolo.com

Deborah Turrell Atkinson

Deborah Atkinson’s mystery series portray an insider’s view of Hawai‘i, a perspective the tour books never show. Featuring half-Hawaiian, half-Japanese protagonist Storm Kayama, the novels lead the reader off the beaten trail and expose not only the dark side of human nature, but the legends and folklore of the islands and the unique vulnerability of living in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Atkinson lives in Honolulu, Hawaii with her husband and their two teenage sons. A graduate of the University of Michigan and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the author of Primitive Secrets (2002), The Green Room (2005), and Fire Prayer (2007). In her free time, Debby enjoys surfing, skiing, outrigger canoe paddling, and scuba diving with her husband and sons.
www.debbyatkinson.com

William Haywood Henderson

William Haywood Henderson grew up mostly in Colorado and Wyoming. He is the author of three novels set primarily in Wyoming: Native (1993), The Rest of the Earth (1997), and Augusta Locke (2006), a Mountain & Plains Book Awards finalist. He earned a BA in English from the University of California at Berkeley and an MA in Creative Writing from Brown University. From 1989 to 1991, he attended Stanford University as a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing. He has held a variety of jobs, including chef, copyeditor, technical writer, landscape gardener, and caretaker on a ranch. He has taught creative writing at Brown, Harvard, and the University of Colorado at Denver. Currently, he teaches at Lighthouse Writers Workshop and the University of Denver.
www.williamhaywoodhenderson.com

John Byrne Cooke

John Byrne Cooke has lived in Jackson Hole since 1982. He has published three historical novels, The Snowblind Moon, South of the Border, and The Committee of Vigilance. He created and wrote the documentary series Outlaws and Lawman for the Discovery Channel. His first nonfiction book, Reporting the War: Freedom of the Press in Wartime from the Revolution the War on Terrorism, will be published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2007.
www.johnbyrnecooke.com

Lise McClendon

Novelist Lise McClendon has been writing about Jackson Hole for fifteen years, starting with The Bluejay Shaman, but only recently moved here. She is the author of six mystery novels, including Blue Wolf, One O'clock Jump, and Sweet and Lowdown. She has taught writing through the Writer's Voice Project and the Jackson Hole Writers Conference, for many years. She has served on national boards of Mystery Writers of America and International Association of Crime Writers/North America. She has lived in Montana and Wyoming for twenty-five years.
www.lisemcclendon.com

Kyle Mills

Kyle Mills grew up in Oregon, the son of an FBI agent. He writes to support his rock climbing obsession. His novels include Smoke Screen, Fade, Sphere of Influence, Rising Phoenix, Free Fall, Storming Heaven, Burn Factor, The Second Horseman and his newewt book, Darkness Falls. Several of his books have been New York Times best sellers. Kyle lives in Jackson, Wyoming, and Capetown, South Africa. www.kylemills.com

Tim Sandlin

Tim Sandlin is a novelist and screenwriter. His novels include Sex and Sunsets, Western Swing, Honey Don't, the GroVont Trilogy, Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty and the forthcoming Rowdy in Paris. His movie credits include the Showtime original Floating Away, based on Sorrow Floats, and Skipped Parts, a TriMark film. He is also a contributor to the New York Times Book Review and has judged several writing competitions, including the Western States Book Awards.
www.timsandlin.com

Tina Welling

Tina Welling is the author of the novel, Crybaby Ranch; her next novel Fairy Tale Blues I will be released by NAL/Penguin April 2009. She has written non-fiction for anthologies and national magazines and received awards for her short fiction.

Poetry

Christopher Merrill

Christopher Merrill has published four collections of poetry, including Brilliant Water and Watch Fire, for which he received the Peter I. B. Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets; translations of Aleš Debeljak’s Anxious Moments and The City and the Child; several edited volumes, among them, The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature and From the Faraway Nearby: Georgia O’Keeffe as Icon; and four books of nonfiction, The Grass of Another Country: A Journey Through the World of Soccer, The Old Bridge: The Third Balkan War and the Age of the Refugee, Only the Nails Remain: Scenes from the Balkan Wars, and Things of the Hidden God: Journey to the Holy Mountain. His work has been translated into twenty-five languages, his journalism appears in many publications, and he is the book critic for the daily radio news program, The World. He has held the William H. Jenks Chair in Contemporary Letters at the College of the Holy Cross, and now directs the International Writing Program at The University of Iowa.

Leah Shlachter

Leah Shlachter has had her poetry published in The Owen Wister Review, Bamboo Ridge A Hawaii Literary Journal, and the Jackson Hole News and Guide. She earned a BA in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing from the Universiy of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington. Leah currently works as a restaurant server, substitute library assistant, and freelance writer out of Jackson, Wyoming. This is her first year working with the Jackson Hole Writers Conference.

Cecily Parks

Cecily Parks is the author of Field Folly Snow, which will be published by the University of Georgia Press/VQR Poetry Series in 2008. Her chapbook, Cold Work, won the 2005 Poetry Society of America New York Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in a variety of publications, including Best New Poets 2007 and Tin House, and she has an essay in A Leaky Tent Is a Piece of Paradise: Twenty Young Writers on Finding a Place in the Natural World. She is a PhD candidate in English at CUNY Graduate Center.

Mike Burwell

Burwell writes environmental impacts statements, maintains a shipwreck database for Alaska, is working toward an anthropology degree, and teaches poetry part-time at the University of Alaska Anchorage. His poems and stories have appeared in Abiko Quarterly, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ice-Floe, Inside Passages, Pacific Review, Points North, Poems & Plays, Northland Quarterly, Louisville Review, Tongue, Thunderbird, Utah Wilderness Review, and a number of regional anthologies, including North of Eden: An Anthology of Alaskan Writings, 1995. In 1989, his collection North and West was published by Heaven Bone Press in New York, winner of their annual International Chapbook Competition. His poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. His first full-length poetry collection, Cartography of Water, was published in December 2007 by NorthShore Press.