Featured Speakers
Janet Fitch
Janet Fitch was born in Los Angeles, a third-generation native, and grew up in a family of voracious readers. She is the author of the Oprah's Book Club novel White Oleander, which became a film in 2002. Her other novels include Kicks and Paint it Black.
A graduate of Reed College, Janet is a faculty member in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, where she teaches fiction. She also edits fiction manuscripts privately, and lectures on special topics in fiction writing.
Some of her favorite authors include Fyodor Dostoevsky and Edgar Allan Poe.
Louis Bayard
With his three most recent novels, The Black Tower, The Pale Blue Eye and Mr. Timothy, Louis Bayard, in the words of the Washington Post, has ascended to "the upper reaches of the historical-thriller league." A New York Times Notable author, he has been nominated for both the Edgar and Dagger awards and has been named one of People magazine's top authors of the year.
Louis is also a nationally recognized essayist and critic whose articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Salon, Ms., Nerve.com and Preservation. His other novels include Fool's Errand and Endangered Species (Alyson). He is a contributor to the anthologies The Worst Noël and Maybe Baby (HarperCollins) and 101 Damnations (St. Martin's).
Craig Johnson
Craig Johnson has received both critical and popular praise for his Sheriff Walt Longmire novels The Cold Dish, Death Without Company, and Kindness Goes Unpunished (Viking/Penguin) with starred reviews in Kirkus, Booklist and Publisher’s Weekly. All three have been made Booksense selections and Killer Picks. The Cold Dish was a DILYS Award Finalist. Death Without Company was selected by Booklist as one of the top-ten mysteries of 2006, won the Wyoming Historical Society’s fiction book of the year, and was a finalist for the Mountains & Plains Bookseller’s Association’s Book of the Year. Another Man’s Moccasins, the fourth in the series, was number nineteen in Bookscan’s nationwide bestseller’s list.
Patricia Smiley
Patricia Smiley is the best-selling author of the Tucker Sinclair mystery series. Her short fiction has been published in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and Two of the Deadliest, an anthology edited by Elizabeth George. Patty has served on the faculty of various writer’s conferences, including the Surrey International Writer’s Conference in British Columbia, Canada, and the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference in Corte Madera, California.
She has worked with the Los Angeles Police Department for fourteen years, nine years as a volunteer and four years as a Specialist Reserve Officer assigned to the Los Angeles International Airport in the Airport Crimes Investigative Unit. Currently, she is assigned to Pacific Area Detectives as a Burglary and Theft investigator.
Benjamin Percy
Benjamin Percy is the author of a novel, The Wilding (forthcoming from Graywolf Press in fall of 2010), and two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh (Graywolf, 2007), and The Language of Elk (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). His fiction and nonfiction have been read on National Public Radio, performed at Symphony Space, and published by Esquire, Men's Journal, the Paris Review, Orion, Glimmer Train, Chicago Tribune, and many others.
His honors include a Whiting Writer's Award, the Plimpton Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories. His story "Refresh, Refresh" has been adapted into a graphic novel — co-authored by filmmaker James Ponsoldt and illustrated by Eisner-nominated artist Danica Novgorodoff — published by First Second Books (a division of Macmillan) in 2009. He teaches in the MFA program in creative writing and environment at Iowa State University.
Winifred Gallagher
Winifred Gallagher's previous books are Just the Way You Are: How Heredity and Experience Create the Individual, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and The Power of Place: How Our Surroundings Shape Our Thoughts, Emotions, and Actions. She has written for many magazines, from The Atlantic Monthly to Rolling Stone. She lives in Manhattan and Long Eddy, New York.
Tim Cahill
Tim Cahill is a founding editor of Outside and for years wrote the "Out There" column. The travel adventure writer knows no limits when it comes to picking his assignments: he's gotten up-close with great white sharks, sailed in 30-below-zero Antarctic weather, and trekked through Death Valley on a grueling summer day. Cahill's books include Road Fever, Jaguars Ripped My Flesh, and A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg. His work has appeared in Esquire, National Geographic Adventure, the New York Times Book Review, and other national publications. He won a National Magazine Award in 2003, the same year he received a Lowell Thomas Gold Award from the Society of American Travel Writers. He also co-authored the Academy Award nominated documentary, The Living Sea. Cahill lives in Montana, in the shadow of the Crazy Mountains.
Jeff Chu
Jeff Chu is an articles editor at Fast Company, the New York-based business magazine. He leads the magazine’s coverage of philanthropy and social entrepreneurship (a.k.a. do-gooder stuff) as well as urban affairs. He also writes; his recent stories include an investigation into legal and ethical problems at the furniture retailer Design Within Reach and a profile of Rwanda’s audacious and risky development strategy. Before coming to Fast Company, he spent a very long nine months at the now-defunct Conde Nast Portfolio and seven years at Time magazine, where he was a London-based staff writer (his first cover story was on Britney Spears and her Swedish songwriter, Max Martin) and then a New York-based writer and editor.
A graduate of Princeton and the London School of Economics, Jeff was a 2004 Phillips Foundation fellow (his project examined complaint in American history) and will be a media fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution in 2012. He is now at work on his first book, an exploration of the intersection between homosexuality and Christianity in America.
Susan Juby
Susan Juby is the author of several books, including the Alice MacLeod series, Another Kind of Cowboy and Getting the Girl: A Guide to Private Investigation, Surveillance and Cookery (HarperCollins). Her work has been nominated for many awards including the Amazon/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and several of her books have been chosen as Best Books for Young Adults by the American Library Association. Another Kind of Cowboy was an ALA Rainbow book. Getting the Girl was nominated for an Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America and for the Arthur Ellis Award by the Crime Writers of Canada. Her memoir, Nice Recovery (Viking), will be out in April.
Her books have been published all over the world and her first book, Alice, I Think, was adapted into a thirteen part television series that aired on CTV and the Comedy Network. Susan lives in Nanaimo, on Vancouver Island, Canada, with her husband and her dog. She teaches creative writing in the MFA program at the University of British Columbia.
Kate Northrop
Kate Northrop’s first collection of poems, Back Through Interruption (Kent State University Press 2002) won the Stan and Tom Wick First Book Award. Her second collection, Things Are Disappearing Here (Persea Books 2007) was the finalist for the James Laughlin Award and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. Her new collection, Clean, is forthcoming from Persea. Northrop teaches in the MFA program at the University of Wyoming.
H.L. Hix
H. L. Hix teaches at the University of Wyoming. His recent poetry books include Chromatic, a finalist for the 2006 National Book Award; God Bless (2007), a “political/poetic discourse” built around sonnets and sestinas and villanelles composed of quotations from George W. Bush; a set of four sequences collectively called Legible Heavens(2008); and a verse biography, Incident Light (2009).
wiki.wyomingauthors.org/HL+Hix
Kimberly Johnson
Kimberly Johnson is the author of two collections of poetry, Leviathan with a Hook and A Metaphorical God (Persea Books 2002 and 2008), and of a translation of Virgil's Georgics (Penguin Classics 2009). Her poetry, translations, and scholarly essays have appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, Slate, The Iowa Review, and Modern Philology. Recipient of grants and fellowships from the Utah Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, Johnson holds an MA from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop, and a PhD in Renaissance Literature from the University of California at Berkeley. She lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, and is married to the poet Jay Hopler.
Jay Hopler
Jay Hopler was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, in 1970 and has earned degrees from New York University, The Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars and The Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies including The American Poetry Review, Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art, Eclipse, Gulf Coast, The Iowa Review, The Literary Review, Mid-American Review, The New Delta Review, New Voices: 1989—1998 (Academy of American Poets), The New Yorker, Poetry International, Sonora Review, Under the Rock Umbrella: Modern American Poets from 1951—1976 (Mercer University Press), The Wallace Stevens Journal, and many others.
His book of poems, Green Squall (Yale University Press, 2006) was winner of the 2005 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, received the 2007 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award, a 2006 Florida Book Award (Silver Medal in the Poetry Category), a 2006 ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award (Bronze Medal in the Poetry Category) and a 2007 National “Best Books” Award from USA Book News. The Killing Spirit: An Anthology of Murder-for-Hire, his first book, was published in the United States and Europe by The Overlook Press and Canongate Books in 1996. Hopler’s next book, The Yale Anthology of Younger American Poets, will be published by Yale University Press in 2010.
Hopler is Assistant Professor of English (Creative Writing/Poetry) at the University of South Florida and divides his time between Tampa and Salt Lake City where he lives with his wife, the poet, Kimberly Johnson.