Joe Wilkins
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Joe Wilkins was born and raised north of the Bull Mountains, out on the Big Dry of eastern Montana. His debut novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, speaks to the struggle, violence, and care Joe knew growing up in the rural West, and his memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, captures the lives of boys and men in that desolate country, a place that shapes the people who live there and rarely lets them go.
Wilkins is also the author of the poetry collections Killing the Murnion Dogs, Notes from the Journey Westward, and When We Were Birds. His most recent book of poetry, Thieve, is now available from Lynx House Press. His work has appeared in a host of the nation’s leading magazines and literary journals, including The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Harvard Review, TriQuarterly, Orion, The Sun, High Country News, and Slate. As the winner of the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency from PEN Northwest, he and his family spent the summer and fall of 2015 living in a remote cabin in the Klamath Mountains along the Rogue River in southwest Oregon.
Fall Back Down When I Die was short-listed for the Center For Fiction's First Novel Award and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and The Mountain and the Fathers won a 2014 GLCA New Writers Award–an honor that has previously recognized early work by luminaries such as Alice Munro, Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, and Mary Szybist. Wilkins’s poetry collections have won the Oregon Book Award, the High Plains Book Award, and the Blue Lynx Prize. Of Wilkins’s work, the Indiana Review writes, “The most striking component of it 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.”
After graduating from Gonzaga University with a degree in computer engineering, Wilkins spent two years teaching ninth grade pre-algebra in the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America. He then went on to earn his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho, where he worked with the poet Robert Wrigley and the memoirist Kim Barnes. Wilkins now lives with his family in western Oregon, where he directs the creative program at Linfield College.
Wilkins is also the author of the poetry collections Killing the Murnion Dogs, Notes from the Journey Westward, and When We Were Birds. His most recent book of poetry, Thieve, is now available from Lynx House Press. His work has appeared in a host of the nation’s leading magazines and literary journals, including The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Harvard Review, TriQuarterly, Orion, The Sun, High Country News, and Slate. As the winner of the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency from PEN Northwest, he and his family spent the summer and fall of 2015 living in a remote cabin in the Klamath Mountains along the Rogue River in southwest Oregon.
Fall Back Down When I Die was short-listed for the Center For Fiction's First Novel Award and the Pacific Northwest Book Award, and The Mountain and the Fathers won a 2014 GLCA New Writers Award–an honor that has previously recognized early work by luminaries such as Alice Munro, Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, and Mary Szybist. Wilkins’s poetry collections have won the Oregon Book Award, the High Plains Book Award, and the Blue Lynx Prize. Of Wilkins’s work, the Indiana Review writes, “The most striking component of it 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.”
After graduating from Gonzaga University with a degree in computer engineering, Wilkins spent two years teaching ninth grade pre-algebra in the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America. He then went on to earn his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho, where he worked with the poet Robert Wrigley and the memoirist Kim Barnes. Wilkins now lives with his family in western Oregon, where he directs the creative program at Linfield College.
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