Joe Wilkins' memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers (2012), captures life in the Big Dry, a desolate region in eastern Montana that shapes the men who live there and rarely lets them go. He is also the author of the poetry collections Killing the Murnion Dogs (2011), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and the High Plains Book Award, and Notes from the Journey Westward (2012), winner of the White Pine Press Poetry Prize and the High Plains Book Award. His essays, poems, and stories have appeared in many magazines and journals, including The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Harvard Review, Orion, The Sun, The Utne Reader, and Slate.A National Magazine Award finalist and PEN Center USA Award finalist, he is the recipient of the Richard J. Margolis Award of Blue Mountain Center, which goes to "a promising new journalist or essayist whose work combines warmth, humor, wisdom and concern with social justice." Deborah Kim, editor at the Indiana Review, writes, "The most striking component of [Wilkins' work] is its awareness of 'the whole world.' What is ordinary becomes transcendent. In places derelict and seemingly unexceptional, Wilkins compels us to recognize what is worth salvage, worth praise."The Mountain and the Fathers was recently awarded the 2014 GLCA New Writers Award in Nonfiction and was previously named an Orion Book Award finalist and a Montana Book Award Honor Book. Wilkins' work has been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing, Writing Today, New Poets of the American West, The Southern Poetry Anthology, and Best New Poets 2006, and has earned notable mention in Best American Nonrequired Reading, Best American Essays, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. As the winner of the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency from PEN Northwest, he and his family will spend the summer and fall of 2015 living in a remote cabin along the Rogue River in southwest Oregon.Wilkins lives with his wife, son, and daughter in McMinnville, where he teaches writing at Linfield College.