Susan Marsh - WRITER, POET, ARTIST

My poetry collection This Earth Has Been Too Generous 2022.

My column Back to Nature is published in Mountain Journal (mountainjournal.org).

Selected Works

Winner, May Sarton Award for contemporary fiction When ostracized daughter Agnes Clayton, now middle-aged and alone, returns to the wilds of the Northwest after a life in various western cities, she is determined to make moving her father out of their family home in War Creek as quick and painless as possible. Reconnecting with her estranged father, a retired ranger, proves difficult at best, and extracting him from his fiercely beloved ranger station seems impossible. Over the course of a long summer she becomes entangled with opposing forces in the isolated rural community in the Cascade Mountains. Agnes hopes to answer questions from her past and find not only closure but redemption.

A Hunger for High Country

"A Hunger for High Country is the real deal, written from the heart and head by someone who was there. She is spot on in her descriptions and analysis of two National Forests from the 1980s to 2010. The Greater Yellowstone Region is perhaps the most remarkable piece of wild land left in the lower 48 states, and this memoir is the story of a professional life lived in that place. But what makes this book unique is that it’s written by one of the first generation of women to work as a field-going professional for the U.S. Forest Service."

–Louise Wagenknecht, author of Light on the Devils

Saving Wyoming’s Hoback: The Grassroots Movement that Stopped Natural Gas Development

"A fine, personal story of how people who don't always agree with each other found common cause in opposing the industrial development of a magnificent mountain backcountry. Success stories are rare in the environmental field, and this ‘win’ in the Wyoming Range was a big one.”

—Fred Swanson, author of Where Roads Will Never Reach (University of Utah Press 2015)

Cache Creek: A Trailside Guide to Jackson Hole's Backyard Wilderness

The Wild Wyoming Range

"The Wild Wyoming Range is a luscious book in both words and photographs about one of the most spiritual places on the planet—a place of unforgettable natural beauty, landscape, wildlife and western history."

–Tom Mangelsen, photographer

WRITER, POET, ARTIST

Ancient metamorphic rock in the Teton Range

Born in Seattle in 1953, I have lived in Jackson, Wyoming since 1988. I write poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction and natural history. I've published a novel, ten non-fiction books, and my poetry chapbook This Earth Has Been Too Generous came out in 2022.

My writing has appeared in Orion, North American Review, Fourth Genre, Talking River Review, Weber Studies, North Dakota Quarterly, and numerous other journals. I write a column on the natural world for Mountain Journal.

Awards and recognition: I received a creative writing fellowship from the Wyoming Arts Council for an excerpt of my novel-in-progress Eye of the Mountain and a Neltje Blanchan Memorial Award, also from the Wyoming Arts Council for an essay based on the natural world. My novel War Creek won the Sarton Women's Literary Award for contemporary fiction and was a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Writer's Association's Pearl Award. Saving Wyoming's Hoback, co-authored with Florence Rose Shepard, won the Wallace Stegner Prize in Environmental Humanities.

My poetry chapbook, This Earth has been too Generous, came out in 2022. A second chapbook, Passings, is in press as of the end of 2024.

The beauty I find in forests and mountains never fails to move me, and I have never strayed far from places that inspire me. I am interested in people's ability to discover hidden aspects of themselves through encounters with wild nature, and how we change as a result. Whether in the form of a novel, memoir, non-fiction narrative, or poem, these are the things I write about.