Resident Faculty

Kyle Mills is the New York Times bestselling author of ten political thrillers. He initially found inspiration from his father, a former FBI agent and director of Interpol, who is still able to put Kyle in touch with the people who give his books such realism. He also co-authors thrillers with the late Robert Ludlum. Avid rock climbers and mountain bikers, he and his wife have lived in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, for fifteen years but these days are running for warmer climates in the winter.

Laurie Gunst is the author of Born Fi’ Dead: A Journey through the Jamaican Posse Underworld and Off-White. Born Fi’ Dead is the account of her ten years with Jamaican drug gangs in Kingston and New York. Off-White is her memoir of growing up between three cultures: Southern, Jewish, and African American. She is a recent graduate of the Master of Science program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University.

John Byrne Cooke won a Spur Award for his first novel, The Snowblind Moon. He is the author of two more historical novels, South of the Border and The Committee of Vigilance. He created and wrote the documentary series Outlaws and Lawmen for the Discovery Channel. His first book of nonfiction, Reporting the War: Freedom of the Press from the American Revolution to the War on Terrorism, was published in 2007. He is currently working on a memoir about his years as Janis Joplin's road manager, and promises "Three more books by 2020."

Jeremy Schmidt is a writer and photographer of natural history and adventure travel, especially along the winding frontiers between the modern world and what’s left of the natural and indigenous. He is the author or co-author of more than fifteen books and hundreds of articles for magazines including Audubon, International Wildlife, National Geographic, National Geographic Traveler, Natura (Italy), Panorama (Netherlands), Outside, GEO, and others. For twelve years he was the adventure columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.

Assignments have taken him to all continents except Antarctica, to report on panda research in China, apartheid’s impact on the national parks of South Africa, volcano surfing in Russia, Buddhist pilgrims in Tibet, the nature reserves of Costa Rica, India’s last working elephants, throat-singing reindeer nomads in Mongolia, the survival of mountain gorillas of Congo during the Rwandan genocide, and more.

His book Himalayan Passage won the first Barbara Savage Award for adventure writing; it’s recently been called a “classic of Himalayan travel as it used to be.” He figures that just means it’s an old book. Other awards include the 1992 Lowell Thomas Award for travel writing (in National Geographic Traveler), and the Ranger Rick John Strohm Award for children’s writing.

Patti Sherlock's latest book, A Dog for All Seasons, St. Martin's, 2010, describes her years with Duncan, a border collie who helped her on an Idaho sheep farm and saw her through many cycles of change. Sherlock has written two other nonfiction books and three novels for young adults. Letters from Wolfie, Penguin-Putnam, which won numerous awards, told the story of a 13-year-old boy who volunteered his dog to be a scout dog during the Vietnam war. Her other books are Taking Back Our Lives, a meditation book, Some Fine Dog and Four of a Kind, Holiday House, and Alone on the Mountain, Doubleday, which chronicled the life of western shepherds.

Laurie Kutchins has published two previous books of poetry. The Night Path (BOA Editions, 1997) received the inaugural Isabella Gardner Award and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, and Between Towns was winner of the Texas Tech University Press First Book Award in 1993. Her poems have been published widely in anthologies and periodicals, including The New Yorker, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Poetry, West Branch, and Denver Quarterly. Kutchins has also published prose essays in The Georgia Review, LIT, and in the anthologies A Tough and Tender Kinship, and A Place on Earth: Nature Writers from North America and Australia.

She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at James Madison University. She has also been a visiting writer at the University of New Mexico, and a faculty member of the Taos Summer Writers Conference where she offers workshops exploring the intersection of the creative and therapeutic processes.

Inspired by Tony Hillerman’s tales of the Navajo, Deborah Turrell Atkinson writes novels that weave the legends and folklore of the Hawaiian Islands into suspenseful mysteries, a perspective of Hawaii the tour books never show. The series consists of four novels, Primitive Secrets (2002), The Green Room (2005), Fire Prayer, (2007), and Pleasing the Dead (2009).

Atkinson lives in Honolulu and is president of the Hawaii chapter of Sisters in Crime. She also serves on the board of the SoCal chapter of Mystery Writers of America. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a recipient of the University of Hawaii’s Meryl Clark Award for Fiction.

Tiffanie DeBartolo started her career as a screenwriter and filmmaker, writing and directing Dream for an Insomniac, which starred Ione Skye and Jennifer Aniston. Her first novel, God-Shaped Hole, was released in 2001; her second novel, How To Kill a Rock Star. She most recently finished writing the text to a graphic novel about Jeff Buckley, tentatively titled So Real: The Adventures of Jeff Buckley.