Win Blevins rushed out of Arkansas and Missouri, passionate to get to college. Then he rushed through an early marriage, teaching positions in colleges, and good jobs as a reviewer of music, theater, and music in Los Angeles, passionate to write books.

The outward result of all this energy has been fourteen novels (including STONE SONG, which won the Spur award and the Mountains and Plains Booksellers award for fiction), three volumes of informal history, a volume of natural history, and a dictionary. He has also sold five screenplays, and countless short stories and magazine and newspaper articles.

He says he considers writing for a living an indescribable blessing. He lives with his wife Meredith, the center of his life, in the canyon country of the Four Corners. Aside from writing and his family, his loves are his spiritual path, music, hiking, and collecting stories.

"We are seeing, being created right now, a new western for a new, young, hip audience, says Blevins. "Its heroes aren't cowboys and soldiers, but Indians, mountain men, women, blacks, Hispanics, Mormons, and all the other westerners who were shoved aside in the first myth. It's more complex, more interesting, more fully human than the old myth. It deals less with taming the country and more with living with it.

"A lot of researching, thinking, dreaming, and story-telling will be needed to bring this myth into its own. I'm lucky to be one of the story-tellers doing it."