Writing Westward Podcast

A conversation with Eric Perramond about water in the American West and his book, Unsettled Waters: Rights, Law, and Identity in the American West, published by the California University Press in 2019.

Eric P. Perramond is Professor of Environmental Science and Southwest Studies and W.M. Keck Director of the Hulbert Center for Southwest Studies at Colorado College. Unsettled Waters: Rights, Law, and Identity in the American West was published by University of California Press in 2018. His previous books include An Introduction to Human-Environment Geography: Local Dynamics and Global Processes, published by WILEY-Blackwell in 2013, and Political Ecologies of Cattle Ranching in Northern Mexico: Private Resolutions, published by University of Arizona Press in 2010.

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A conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist, John Branch, about his book The Last Cowboys: A Pioneer Family in the New West.

John Branch is a New York Times sports reporter. Branch's previous work has received considerable acclaim. In 2011 and 2012 he ws a finalist for Pulitzer Prizes in feature writing, and in 2013 his multimedia project "Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek" on a deadly avalanche in Washington State won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize in Feature Writing. In 2015, his biography, Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard, won the 2015 Pen/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing.

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Conversation with historian David A. Chang about his award-winning book The World and All Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2016.

A conversation with David A. Chang about his award-winning book The World and All Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2016. This book won  the Albert J. Beveridge Award for the best book in English on the history of the United States, Latin America, or Canada from 1492 to the present from from the American Historical Association, the John C. Ewers Award for best book in North American Indian Ethnohistory from the Western History Association, the Best Subsequent Book in Native American and Indigenous Studies from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and was a Finalist for the John Hope Franklin Award for Most Outstanding Book in American Studies from the American Studies Association.

David A. Chang is a Distinguished McKnight Professor of History and American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota. He is also author of the award-winning The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership in Oklahoma, 1832-1929, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2010.

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A conversation with Professor Beth Lew Williams and her award-winning 2018 book, The Chinese Must Go: Violence, Exclusion, and the Making of the Alien in America (Harvard University Press, 2018)

Beth Lew-Williams is an Assistant Professor and Philip and Beulah Rollins Bicentennial Preceptor in the Department of History at Princeton University. The Chinese Must Go recently won the 2019 Ray Allen Billington Prize and 2019 Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, as well as the 2019 Vincent P. DeSantis Book Prize from the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age & Progressive Era.

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A conversation with geographer Terence Young about his book, Heading Out: A History of American Camping (Cornell University Press, 2017)

Terence Young is a professor emeritus of geography at California State Polytechnic University. He has published widely on camping, parks, sustainability, and other topics of the environment, geography, and history. Heading Out won the 2018 Hal K. Rothman Award from the Western History Association for the Best Book of Western Environmental History, and the 2018 J.B. Jackson Prize from the American Association of Geographers. He also published Building San Francisco's Parks: 1850-1930 in Johns Hopkins University Press' "Creating the North American Landscape Series" in 2008.

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A conversation with historian Flannery Burke about her award winning book A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century (University of Arizona Press, 2017)

Flannery Burke is Professor of History at Saint Louis University. She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in history from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and B.A. in history from Bryn Mawr College. Burke is an historian of the environment, the American West, gender and sexuality, and history education. Her recent book, A Land Apart: The Southwest and the Nation in the Twentieth Century, was published in 2017 by the University of Arizona Press in their Modern American West Series. It won the Spur Award for Best Contemporary Nonfiction from the Western Writers of America and the 2017 Southwest Book of the Year Award. Her previous book, From Greenwich Village to Taos: Primitivism and Place at Mabel Dodge Luhan's was published in 2008 in the University of Kansas Press' Culureamerica Series. It won the Ralph Emerson Twitchell Award from the Historical Society of New Mexico, was a finalist for the New Mexico Book Co-op and New Mexico Humanities Council New Mexico Book Prize.

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A conversation with poet Tacey M. Atsitty about her new collection, Rain Scald: Poems, published by the University of New Mexico Press in 2018.

Atsitty holds undergraduate degrees from Brigham Young University and the Institute for American Indian Arts, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Her work has appeared in multiple collections and journals and earned her such accolades as the Truman Capote Creative Writing Fellowship, the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize, Morning Star Creative Writing Award, and the Philip Freund Prize. She currently serves as the director of Native American programming and events at the This is the Place Heritage Park in Salt Lake City.

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A conversation with historian Stephen Pyne about his ongoing work on the history of Fire in America.

In 2015, the University of Arizona Press published his Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America. As companion pieces to that book, his is currently published a 9-volume series entitled "To the Last Smoke." Volumes 1-6 on Florida, California, The Northern Rockies, The Southwest, The Great Plains, and The Interior West are already available. The forthcoming Volumes 7-9 will include The Northeast, Slopovers: Fire Surveys of the Mid-American Oak Woodlands, Pacific Northwest, and Alaska, and a comparative overseas volume entitled Here and There.

Stephen Pyne is a Regents Professor in the School of Life Sciences at Arizona State University. He has published over 30 books. In addition to those discussed above, other noteworthy titles include Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildland and Rural Fires (University of Washington Press, 1982), The Ice: A Journey to Antarctica (University of Washington Press, 1986), World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth (University of Washington Press, 1997), How the Canyon Became Grand: A Short History (Pengiun Books, 1999), and Voyager: Exploration, Space, and the Third Great Age of Discovery (Penguin Random House, 2011). 

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A conversation with Benjamin Johnson about his book Escaping the Dark Gray City: Fear and Hope in Progressive-Era Conservation, published by Yale University Press in 2017.

Benjamin Johnson is an Associate Professor of History at Loyola University in Chicago. He is also the author of Revolution in Texas: How a Forgotten Rebellion and Its Bloody Suppression Turned Mexicans into Americans (Yale University Press, 2003), and Bordertown: The Odyssey of an American Place (Yale University Press, 2008), and editor or co-editor of Steal this University: The Labor Movement and the Corporatization of Higher Education (Routledge, 2003), The Making of the American West (ABC-CLIO, 2007), Bridging National Borders in North America (Duke University Press, 2010), and Major Problems in the History of North American Borderlands (Cengage Learning, 2011).

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A conversation with Victoria Lamont about her book Westerns: A Women's History, published in 2016 by the University of Nebraska Press as part of the "Postwestern Horizons" Series.

Victoria Lamont is an Associate Professor of English and the Associate Chair of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Waterloo.

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