Montana Noir

About the Contributors

David Abrams is the author of the novels Brave Deeds and Fobbit. Fobbit was named a New York Times Notable Book of 2012, an Indie Next pick, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, a Montana Honor Book, and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. His stories have appeared in Esquire, Narrative, Glimmer Train, and many other publications. He lives in Butte with his wife.

Janet Skeslien Charles grew up in Shelby and attended the University of Montana. Her novel Moonlight in Odessa, which explores the business of e-mail-order brides, was translated into ten languages. She currently lives in Paris, France.

Debra Magpie Earling is Bitterroot Salish and a member of the Flathead Nation. She is the author of the novels Perma Red and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. She has been a recipient of an NEA grant, an American Book Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She is currently the director of the creative writing program at the University of Montana.

Gwen Florio is an award-winning journalist who turned to fiction in 2013 with the publication of Montana, which won the Pinckley Prize for Debut Crime Fiction and a High Plains Book Award. Disgraced is the third novel in the Lola Wicks series, and two more are scheduled. Florio lives in Missoula.

Jamie Ford loves living in Great Falls, his home for seventeen years, though he occasionally calls it Adequate Falls. His debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, spent two years on the New York Times best-seller list and went on to win the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. His most recent novel, Songs of Willow Frost, was published in 2013. His work has been translated into thirty-four languages.

James Grady was born and raised in Shelby and graduated from the University of Montana. He was a research analyst for the state’s 1972 Constitutional Convention and a legislative aide to Montana’s US Senator Lee Metcalf during Watergate. Grady’s first novel, Six Days of the Condor, became the iconic Robert Redford movie. He has published more than a dozen other novels, twice that many short stories, and worked as a national investigative reporter.

Keir Graff was born and raised in Missoula, where he attended Hellgate High School and, briefly, the University of Montana. He is the author of four novels for adults (most recently The Price of Liberty), two novels for middle-graders, and many short stories. Graff now lives in Chicago, where he is the executive editor of Booklist and cohost of the popular Publishing Cocktails events. He returns to Montana every year.

Eric Heidle is a full-blooded Montanan-American working east of the divide as a creative director, writer, and photographer. In 2015 his story “At Jackson Creek” took first place in Montana Public Radio’s fiftieth-anniversary short-fiction contest. Heidle’s photography has appeared in Montana Outdoors, Backpacker, and other publications. When he’s not at his desk, he is usually roaming the Rocky Mountain Front, paddling the Missouri, or failing to catch fish.

Walter Kirn is the author of eight books and an e-book. His most recent is Blood Will Out, a memoir of his friendship with murderer Clark Rockefeller. His other books include Up in the Air, Thumbsucker (both of which have been made in to feature films), and Mission to America. A columnist for Harper’s, he has also written for the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New Republic, GQ, New York, and Esquire. He lives much of the year in Livingston.

Sidner Larson is the former director of American Indian Studies at Iowa State University (2000–2015); an enrolled member of the Gros Ventre tribal community of Fort Belknap; and the author of Catch Colt, Captured in the Middle, and numerous academic articles and poems. He is currently teaching at the University of Arizona Law School and working on an indigenous peoples law book.

Carrie La Seur is a Billings-based environmental lawyer whose debut novel, The Home Place, was on the Indie Next list, won a High Plains Book Award, and was a finalist for a Strand Critics’ Circle Award. Her work has been published in the Daily Beast, Grist, the Guardian, the Harvard Law and Policy Review, Huffington Post, Kenyon Review, Mother Jones, Oil, Gas and Energy Law, Salon, and the Yale Journal of International Law.

Thomas McGuane has written ten novels, beginning with The Sporting Club (1969), as well as three nonfiction essay collections and three short-story collections. His short fiction began regularly appearing in the New Yorker in 1994. McGuane’s novel Ninety-two in the Shade was a finalist for the National Book Award, and other works have been included in Best American Stories, Best American Essays, Best American Mystery Stories, and Best American Sporting Essays. He lives near McLeod.

Caroline Patterson is the author of the story collection Ballet at the Moose Lodge. A former Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University, she edited Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart and published fiction in journals and magazines including Alaska Quarterly Review, Big Sky Journal, Epoch, Southwest Review, and Seventeen. She lives in Missoula, where she is the executive director for the Missoula Writing Collaborative.

Yvonne Seng has lived in Montana for most of the twenty- first century — in Missoula, Ovando, and Helena, where she was curator for the Holter Museum of Art — all after having worked extensively in the Middle East. Born in Australia, her first book was the nonfiction Men in Black Dresses: A Quest for the Future Among Wisdom-Makers of the Middle East. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology Explosions: Stories of Our Landmined World and the literary journal Gargoyle.