Susan Marsh
Susan’s novel War Creek won the 2014-15 May Sarton Award for contemporary fiction. Saving Wyoming’s Hoback, co-authored with Florence Shepard, won the 2016-2017 Wallace Stegner Prize in Environmental Humanities. Born in Seattle in 1953, Susan Marsh is a naturalist and award-winning writer now living in Jackson, Wyoming. She has over thirty years’ experience as a wild land steward for the U. S. Forest Service. She was drawn to the wild from an early age, and animals were her primary conduit to this place of beauty and mystery. This loss of the wild and affinity for animals has driven Susan’s lifelong path.
“When I was in high school I planned a career in marine biology,” she says. “But I balked when my instructor wanted me to collect a moon snail off the beach and put it in a jar of formaldehyde. ‘You have to be hard-nosed if you’re going to be a scientist,’ he told me. That was the end of my career as a biologist.” She has degrees in geology and landscape architecture. Susan’s books include War Creek, A Hunger for High Country, Saving Wyoming’s Hoback, Cache Creek: A Trailside Guide to Jackson Hole’s Backyard Wilderness, The Wild Wyoming Range, Targhee Trails, Beyond the Tetons and Stories of the Wild.
Her writing has appeared in Orion, North American Review, Fourth Genre, Talking River Review, Weber Studies, North Dakota Quarterly, and numerous other journals. Her work has been anthologized in books including The Leap Years (Beacon Press, 2001), Going Alone (Seal Press, 2004), Open Windows (Ghost Road Press, 2005), Solo (Seal Press, 2005), A Mile in Her Boots (Solas House, 2006), and Blood, Water, Wind,
and Stone: An Anthology of Wyoming Writers (Sastrugi, 2016). Susan received the 2003 Neltje Blanchan Memorial Award, awarded by the Wyoming Arts Council.
Her novel War Creek was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association’s 2015 Pearl Award and won the 2015 Sarton Women’s Literary Award for contemporary fiction. Saving Wyoming’s Hoback, co-authored with Florence Rose Shepard, won the 2016-17 Wallace Stegner Prize in Environmental Humanities. In 2017 she joined Mountain Journal as a columnist writing on national forests and public land in general. The purpose of this publication is to publish “Meaningful public-interest journalism at the intersection of people and nature in America’s wildest, most iconic ecosystem.”
