September Meeting - "The Power of Place" Presenter Ruth Nolan, Professor of English and Creative Writing, College of the Desert

Ruth Nolan is professor of English and creative writing at College of the Desert in Palm Springs, CA and is a Mojave Desert/Coachella Valley-based writer. A former wildland firefighter for the US Forest Service and BLM California Desert District, she is the author Ruby Mountain (Finishing Line Press); editor of No Place for a Puritan: The Literature of California’s Deserts (Heyday Books); and co-editor of Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager.) She is the winner of the 2018 Los Angeles Poetry Society Award and the recipient of a 2018 Love of Learning Award from the Phi Kappa Phi Honor Society for her forthcoming book Fire on the Mojave: Stories from the Deserts and Mountains of Inland Southern California, for which she also won a 2017 California Writers Residency Award. Her short story, “Palimpsest,” published in LA Fiction: Southland Writing by Southland Writers (Red Hen Press), was nominated for a 2016 PEN Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writer and also received an Honorable Mention Award in Sequestrum Magazine’s 2016 Editor’s Reprint contest. Her poetry and essays have been published in Women’s Studies Quarterly; Rattling Wall; The Cost of Paper; Angels Flight LA/Literary West; KCET Los Angeles; Desert Oracle; Cholla Needles; News from Native California; Sierra Club Desert Report; Lumen; Pacific Review; The Desert Sun/USA Today and Inlandia Literary Journeys. Ruth serves on the advisory board for Poets & Writers West, leads community-inclusive writing workshops throughout inland Southern California and holds her M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Writing for the Performing Arts from the University of California, Riverside. She’s the mother of a young adult daughter and grandmother of three toddlers. She may be reached at ruthnolan13@gmail.com

Topic: The Power of Place