Jana Harris

A poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist, Jana Harris’s award-winning books include Manhattan as a Second Language, Poems (Harper & Row) and Oh How Can I Keep On Singing? Voices of Pioneer Women, Poems (Ontario Press, Princeton), both Pulitzer Prize nominees. Oh How Can I Keep On Singing? was a Washington State Governor’s Writers Award winner, a PEN West Center Award finalist, and has been adapted for educational television as well as for the stage. Her novel Alaska was a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection. Ms. Harris teaches creative writing at the University of Washington where she is editor and founder of Switched-on Gutenberg, one of the first electronic poetry journals of the English-speaking world. Her seventh book of poems, The Dust of Everyday Life, an epic concerning the lives of forgotten Northwest pioneers, won the 1998 Andres Berger Award. Her second novel, The Pearl of Ruby City was released from St. Martin’s Press. In 2001 she won a Pushcart Prize for poetry. She is member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN, Poetry Society of America, and AWP. Her eighth collection of poetry We Never Speak of It, Idaho-Wyoming Poems, 1889 (Ontario) was published in 2003 and nominated for the Kingsley Tufts Award. She won a Reader’s Choice Award in poetry from Prairie Schooner in 2004.