Wilderness and Razor Wire investigates the persistence of nature in an unnatural setting--a desert prison--and the ways in which wilderness can provide hope in a hostile environment.
I was born in Duluth, Minnesota, on November 8, 1958, and moved to Tucson, Arizona, at the age of nine. In Tucson, I slowly and painfully learned to become a child of the desert, taking my first lessons in the front range of the Santa Catalina Mountains. In 1980, I graduated from the University of Arizona with a bachelor's degree in biology and for the next five years taught science. In 1987, I went to prison, where I joined the creative writing workshop of poet and author Richard Shelton and soon began publishing articles and essays about two subjects I knew well: prison and the natural history of the Southwest. It was only a matter of time before I would connect the two subjects on the page.
During my incarceration while mentoring with Richard Shelton, my articles and essays began appearing in national magazines and literary journals like Arizona Highways, Bird Watcher's Digest, Manoa, Northern Lights, Alligator Juniper, Puerto Del Sol, and the Gettysburg Review. Several of these essays, in turn, were selected for anthologies such as American Nature Writing, Getting Over the Color Green, and David Quammen's anthology The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2000. Editors have nominated two of my essays for Pushcart Prizes, and Robert Atwan of The Best American Essays series listed my work in "Notable Essays of 1998" and again in "Notable Essays of 1999."
In January 2000, Mercury House published my first book, Wilderness and Razor Wire: A Naturalist's Observations from Prison, to critical acclaim. The San Francisco Chronicle called it, "...entirely original: an edgy, ferocious, subtly complex collection of essays...". The book won the 2002 John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing.
After my release from prison that same year, I completed my MFA in creative writing at the University of Arizona, and continued writing and publishing essays and books about the Southwest. In 2010, The University of Arizona Press will publish my fifth book, Dry River, which deals with southern Arizona's Santa Cruz River, its nature, my family, and the people past and present who live alongside it. Today, I live with my wife in an 1890s stone cottage near Bisbee, Arizona.
