David Abrams’ short stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, The Literarian, Connecticut Review, The Greensboro Review, The Missouri Review, The North Dakota Review and other literary quarterlies. His novel about the Iraq War, Fobbit, was published this summer. He regularly blogs about the literary life at The Quivering Pen. Abrams retired in 2008 after a 20-year career in the active-duty Army as a journalist. He was named the Department of Defense's Military Journalist of the Year in 1994 and received several other military commendations throughout his career. His tours of duty took him to Thailand, Japan, Africa, Alaska, Texas, Georgia and The Pentagon. In 2005, he joined the 3rd Infantry Division and deployed to Baghdad in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. The journal he kept during that year formed the blueprint for the novel which would later become known as Fobbit. He was born in Pennsylvania and grew up in Jackson, Wyoming. He earned a BA in English from the University of Oregon and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Alaska-Fairbanks. He now lives in Butte, Montana with his wife. [website]

Claude Alick took to the sea at the age of eighteen after completing his secondary education, working on charter yachts, plying the Caribbean Sea between Grenada and Antigua. Somewhere along the way, while reading writers like Conrad, Poe, Melville and others, he caught the writing bug and began writing about the islands and its people. Alick came to the United States in 1970, has attended schools in Portland, Maine, Memphis, Tennesee, and the University of Montana. Alick has published two books, Wet Storage and other stories (a collection) and Dancing with the Yumawalli, (a novel). [website]

Minerva Allen is the author of Nakoda Sky People and a contributor to New Poets of the American West. She lives in northern Montana on the Fort Belknap Reservation in Lodge Pole with her family in the foothills of the Little Rockies, known as the Island Mountains to the Nakoda. She owns a ranch with cattle and many horses that roam the ridges in Big Warm. She coordinates the Lodge Pole Senior Programs and teaches night-school courses in Nakoda Language. She enjoys rodeos and life in general. She is the mother of eight children (and raised six more) and numerous grandchildren.

Kim Anderson is the associate director, programs for Humanities Montana.

Co-Director of the EOU Low Residency MFA, David Axelrod is the author of six collections of poems. The most recent, What Next, Old Knife? was published in 2012 by Lost Horse Press, which will also publish Folly, in 2013. His previous collection, The Cartographer’s Melancholy, won the Spokane Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2006 Oregon Book Award. His collection of cultural and environmental essays about the interior Northwest, Troubled Intimacies, appeared in 2004. His poems and essays have been published in New Letters, Boulevard, Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Quarterly West, River Styx, Verse Daily, among others. He also edits basalt: a journal of fine & literary arts, and is Professor of English and Writing at Eastern Oregon University, where we has taught since 1988.

Kim Barnes holds a BA in English from Lewis-Clark State College, an MA in English from Washington State University, and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Montana. In the Wilderness: Coming of Age in Unknown Country, her first memoir, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, received a PEN/Jerard Fund Award, and was awarded a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award. Her second memoir, Hungry for the World, was a Borders Books New Voices Selection. She is the author of three novels: Finding Caruso; A Country Called Home, winner of the 2009 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Fiction and named a Best Book of 2008 by The Washington Post, Kansas City Star, and The Oregonian; and her newest, In the Kingdom of Men, a story set in 1960s Saudi Arabia. She is the co-editor of two anthologies: Circle of Women: An Anthology of Contemporary Western Women Writers (with Mary Clearman Blew), and Kiss Tomorrow Hello: Notes from the Midlife Underground by Twenty-Five Women Over Forty (with Claire Davis). Her essays, poems, and stories have appeared in a number of magazines and anthologies, including The New York Times, WSJ online, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, Good Housekeeping, Oprah Magazine, MORE Magazine, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She is a former Idaho-Writer-in-Residence and teaches in the Master of Fine Arts program at the University of Idaho. Barnes has three grown children, one dog, one cat, and is married to the poet Robert Wrigley. [website]

Rick Bass is the author of more than 25 books of fiction and nonfiction, including, most recently, The Heart Of The Monster with David James Duncan, the novel Nashville Chrome, and the nonfiction The Black Rhinos of Namibia. His fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Bass’s memoir Why I Came West was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. He lives in Missoula and has been touring and recording with Stellarondo for the past year.

Sheila Bonnand is an assistant professor/reference librarian at Montana State University. She is involved with intellectual freedom issues both professionally (as a member of the Montana Library Association’s Intellectual Freedom Committee and the Association of College and Research Libraries’ Intellectual Freedom Committee) and personally (as a board member of the Montana ACLU). She is especially concerned about threats to the First Amendment that might restrict our right to free speech – and, by extension, our freedom to read.

Carol Buchanan’s first novel, God's Thunderbolt: the Vigilantes of Montana, won the 2009 Spur award for Best First Novel. In 2010, Gold Under Ice was a Finalist for the 2011 Spur for Best Long Novel. The Devil in the Bottle was published in December 2011. Although she didn't set out to write a series, all three historical novels are set in the Montana wilderness in 1863-1865. They portray men struggling to establish justice where no laws exist to curb men's greed for millions in gold lying in the streams. Carol is currently at work on the fourth novel in the Vigilante series. [website]

James Lee Burke’s most recent novel is Creole Belle. Over the years he has published more than twenty-five novels and two short story collections. His stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Best American Short Stories, New Stories From The South, The Southern Review, Antioch Review and Kenyon Review. His novels, Heaven’s Prisoners, Two for Texas, and In The Electric Mist with Confederate Dead were adapted as motion pictures. His novel The Lost Get-Back Boogie was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. [website]

Charlotte Caldwell was raised on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee. She graduated with a BA from Middlebury College, Vermont in 1974. She went on to receive Masters Degrees in Environmental Studies and in Special Education from other New England universities. As a photographer, naturalist and preservationist, Charlotte captures the beauty of light as it touches landscapes, wildlife, buildings, and people. Her first book of photographs, The Cottages and Architects of Yeamans Hall, by Charlton deSaussure with Photographs by Charlotte Caldwell was published in 2010. Her photographs have also been published in Antiques Magazine, Antiques and Fine Arts Magazine, and the Livingston Enterprise. Through a juried photography show in 2010, she was chosen to present her insect photography to the North American Nature Photographers’ Association’s Annual Conference. She serves on the non-profit boards of Montana Preservation Alliance and The Nature Conservancy of Montana. Her newest work is Visions and Voices: Montana’s One-Room Schoolhouses.

Amy Cannata is communications director for the ACLU of Montana. She produces in-house publications, works with the media and manages the organization’s website and online social networking. She spent 14 years as a newspaper reporter in Spokane, Wash., where she nurtured her appreciation of the First Amendment.

Sarah Carter F.R.S.C. is Professor and Henry Marshall Tory Chair in the Department of History and Classics, and the Faculty of Native Studies of the University of Alberta since 2006. From 1992-2006 she taught at the University of Calgary. She is Adjunct Professor with Athabasca University. Her research focuses on the history of Western Canada and on the critical era of the late nineteenth century when Aboriginal people and newcomers began sustained contact. Her work has touched on many aspects of this history, including the place of Aboriginal people in the new agricultural economy (Lost Harvests: Prairie Indian Reserve Farmers and Government Policy) and the creation of race and gender categories and hierarchies in the key decade of the 1880s (Capturing Women: The Manipulation of Cultural Imagery in Canada’s Prairie West). Her work stresses the interconnected lives of Aboriginal people and the early non-Aboriginal settlers.

David Allan Cates is the author of four novels, Hunger in America, a New York Times Notable Book, X Out of Wonderland, Freeman Walker, both Montana Book Award Honor Books, and, most recently, Ben Armstrong’s Strange Trip Home. Cates is the winner of the 2010 Montana Arts Council's Artist Innovation Award in prose and his short story, "Rubber Boy," (Glimmer Train 70) is a a distinguished story in the 2010 Best American Short Stories. His stories have appeared in numerous literary magazines, and his travel articles in Outside Magazine and the New York Times Sophisticated Traveler. Cates is the executive director of Missoula Medical Aid, which leads groups of medical professionals to provide public health and surgery services in Honduras. In Missoula he works with the Missoula Writing Collaborative, teaching classes on the short shory in public high schools, and is a part-time faculty in Pacific Lutheran University's low-residency MFA program. For many years he worked as a fishing guide on the Smith River and raised cattle on his family's farm in Wisconsin. [website]

Victor Charlo is the author of Put Sey, a contributor to New Poets of the American West, and a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. He is a direct descendent of the chiefs who signed the Hellgate Treaty. Born and raised on the Flathead Reservation in western Montana, Vic writes poems about reservation life and people, his family, and his journeys to visit the polar bears. Vic earned degrees from the University of Montana and Gonzaga University. The proud father of four children, Vic resides in Old Agency, near Dixon, Montana. His daughter, April, translates her father’s poems into Salish.

John Clayton is the author of The Cowboy Girl, a narrative biography of the Montana/Wyoming novelist, publisher, rodeo founder, and homesteader Caroline Lockhart, which was a finalist for the 2007 High Plains Book Award. An independent journalist, essayist and blogger based in Red Lodge, he has worked for clients ranging from National Geographic to Harvard Business School publishing. His work covers Western history, environment, and literature, as well as advanced management communications techniques.

Ray Cross teaches Federal Indian Law and Public Lands and Natural Resources Law at the University of Montana School of Law. He also teaches American Indian Cultural and Religious Freedoms, Tribal-State Relations and American Indian Natural Resources Law. He co-advises the Public Lands & Resources Law Review and he also co-coaches the Native American Law Students’ Moot Court Team that placed second nationally in 2004. He works extensively with Indian tribes, Indian organizations, and federal agencies on issues of Indian energy development, education, self-determination and cultural and natural resources preservation.

emily m. danforth's debut novel, The Miseducation Of Cameron Post (HarperCollins 2012), has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Booklist, Kirkus, and School Library Journal, and was featured in the LA Times, The Seattle Stranger, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, and NPR—whose reviewer called it "...a skillfully and beautifully written story that does what the best books do: It shows us ourselves in the lives of others." emily has an MFA in Fiction from the University of Montana and a Ph.D in English-Creative Writing from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is an assistant professor of English-Creative Writing at Rhode Island College in Providence, and is also 1/3 of the editorial/publishing staff of The Cupboard, a quarterly prose chapbook eagerly awaiting your submissions. [website]

Theresa Danley is the author of Epic’s E-Book Award Finalist, Effigy. Her newest novel is Deity. She lives along the hi-line of Montana. Somewhere between raising her family and writing her novels, Theresa can usually be found riding a horse. [website]

Kate Davis, Executive Director of Raptors of the Rockies, has been caring for wild animals since her start at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1973. She relocated to Montana in 1978 and received a degree in zoology at the University of Montana. She currently keeps 18 permanently injured and falconry raptors at the Raptor Ranch on the banks of the Bitterroot River, and presents about 70 programs to school and community groups each year. Her first book for Mountain Press Publishing, Raptors of the Rockies, came out in 2002, and her second, Falcons of North America, hit the stands in late 2008. Raptors of the West Captured in Photographs is a collaboration with falcon book photographers Rob Palmer and Nick Dunlop. It won the National Outdoor Book Award for Design and Artistic Merit, and the Montana Book of the Year Award 2011. Her new book on a Bald Eagle nest that fledged four young will be out in early 2013, filled with 140 of her photos and a narrative of nest success. [website]

Tom Decker is the co-author (with his mother-in-law, Flora Wong) of Long Way Home: Journeys of a Chinese Montanan.

Patrick deWitt was born on Vancouver Island in 1975. He has also lived in California, Washington, and Oregon, where he currently lives with his wife and son. He is the author of two novels, Ablutions and The Sisters Brothers. His first book, Ablutions, was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice book. His second book, The Sisters Brothers, was shortlisted for the 2011 Man Booker Prize, the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, and the 2011 Governor General's Award for English language fiction. The Sisters Brothers was also a shortlisted nominee for the 2012 Walter Scott Prize for historical fiction. [website]

Ivan Doig was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana, in 1939 and grew up along the Rocky Mountain Front where much of his writing is set. His first book, the highly acclaimed memoir This House of Sky, was a finalist for the National Book Award. A former ranch hand, newspaperman, and magazine editor, Doig is a graduate of Northwestern University where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism. He also holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Washington. In the century’s-end San Francisco Chronicle polls to name the best Western novels and works of non-fiction, Doig is the only living writer with books in the top dozen on both lists: English Creek in fiction and This House of Sky in non-fiction. He is the author of three other books of nonfiction and 11 novels including Bucking the Sun, Prairie Nocturne, Worksong published in 2010 and his newest work, published this fall, The Bartender’s Tale. He lives in Seattle with his wife Carol, who has taught the literature of the American West. [website]

Samantha Dwyer is the office mananger and program assistant of Humanities Montana.

Ken Egan is the executive director of Humanities Montana.

John D. Ellingsen is a native of Great Falls, Montana. He has a Master of Arts and Applied Arts degree from Montana State University. Ellingsen has won numerous awards for his work in historic preservation, including a lifetime achievement award from the Montana Preservation Alliance, the Governor's Award for historic preservation, and a special award for preservation from the Department of the Interior for his work at Garnett Ghost Town. Since 1972 he has worked as curator in Virginia City. At present, he is curator emeritus. Ellingsen lives in Nevada City, Montana and is the author of Witness to History: The Remarkable Untold Story of Virginia City & Nevada City Montana.

Carson Ellis loved exploring the woods, drawing, and nursing wounded animals back to health as a kid. As an adult, little has changed—except she is now the acclaimed illustrator of several books for children, including Lemony Snicket’s The Composer Is Dead, Dillweed’s Revenge by Florence Parry Heide, and The Mysterious Benedict Society by Trenton Lee Stewart. She and her husband, Colin Meloy, are the creators of Wildwood and Under Wildwood. Elis and Meloy live with their son, Hank, in Portland, Oregon, quite near the Impassable Wilderness. [website]

Jonathan Evison’s newest novel (due out in late August) is The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving. Other novels include the highly celebrated West of Here and his debut novel, All About Lulu, won critical acclaim, including the Washington State Book Award. Evison was awarded a Richard Buckley Fellowship from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. In his teens, Evison was the founding member and frontman of the Seattle punk band March of Crimes, which included future members of Pearl Jam and Soundgarden. Born in San Jose, California, he now lives on an island in Western Washington. [website]

2012 Festival

• Schedule of Events (PDF)
• Authors & Presenters
  - At a Glance
  - Bios: A-E | F-M | N-Z
• Panel Descriptions (PDF)
• Festival Sponsors & Partners
• Festival Photos  
• Festival on Facebook  

Other Resources

• Video from Past Festivals  
• Photos from Past Festivals
• About Missoula

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