Literature of the American West

Stephen Pett is the author of Sirens (Vintage), a novel, and a collection of poetry, Pulpit of Bones (Morrow). His short stories have appeared in many journals, including Witness, Cimarron Review, High Desert Journal, Missouri Review, North American Review, The Southern Humanities Review,and, most recently, The Sun. He is the winner of the 2023 W.S. Porter Prize for his story collection This Impossible Vertical World, which will be published by Regal House.

For eight years Stephen Pett coordinated Iowa State University’s MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment. He is Founding Editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment.

Inspired by his years living in Ireland, some of that time as a Thomas J. Watson Fellow, Stephen Pett took ten summer classes to Ireland, writing and reading their way around the island. He also took many groups on the road for “study abroad classes at home,” visiting Native communities in the southwest, and numerous “wild” locations, from the Badlands of South Dakota and Yellowstone Park to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in northern Minnesota.

Stephen Pett is the recipient of several teaching awards, at both Iowa State University and the Native American Preparatory School in Rowe, New Mexico, where he taught for two years while on leave from ISU and was selected twice by students as Teacher of the Year.

For six years he taught a writing workshop at the prison in Fort Dodge, Iowa. For three years he taught a workshop at the New Mexico State Prison, and now runs one at the county jail in Santa Fe.

He divides his year between Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Gunflint Trail in northern Minnesota, where for over a decade he has been building and summering in a cabin on Loon Lake.