User:Newberryr/John Keeble (writer)

John Keeble, Writer John Keeble (born November 24, 1944) is an American author whose work has come to be known for its political and ecological concerns, and the strength of its plots. Primarily a novelist, his one book of nonfiction, Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound, is regarded as the definitive, contemporary account of that event. He has held a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, won the 1992 Washington State Governor’s Award , has been represented in Best American Short Stories, and has won various prizes, including the 2006 Prairie Schooner Prize for fiction for Nocturnal America (a collection of short stories), . His most recent publication is Shadow of the Owls,a novel ....

Biography

Childhood

Keeble was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada and raised first in Saskatchewan and subsequently in California. He holds dual Canadian and U.S. citizenship.

He is a longtime resident (since l972) of Spokane County in Eastern Washington State where he and his wife, Claire, a musician, operate a small farm. They have three grown sons and three grandchildren. He attended the University of Redlands (Bachelor of Arts, magna cum laude, l966), and the University of Iowa (Master of Fine Arts, 1969). Additionally, he attended Brown University for one year(1971/72) to study electronic music composition and writing. He began adult life as a musician, but turned seriously to writing fiction while at the University of Iowa.

Education

He has also worked as an educator, having taught at Grinnell College and Eastern Washington University, where he founded the Master of Fine Arts Program and the Northwest Center for Writers, and is now Professor Emeritus. He has been Distinguished Visiting Writer at Boise State University, and on three occasions held the Coal Royalty Trust Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Alabama. And in 2002, he served at the University of Alabama as a Visiting Professor, and is a past-president of the Board of Directors for the Island Institute, a literary, community action, and philanthropic nonprofit organization based in Sitka, Alaska.

Literary Works

Themes and influences are....

Novels

• Crab Canon, 1971.
• Mine (co-authored with Ransom Jeffery), 1974.
• Yellowfish, 1980.
• Broken Ground, 1987. .Nocturnal America (stories), 2006.
• The Shadows of Owls, 2013.

Short Stories

Nocturnal America, 2006.

Short works of fiction and nonfiction have appeared in a wide variety of magazines, journals, and anthologies, including Northwest Review, The Idaho Review, Zyzzyva,Prairie Schooner, American Short Fiction, Rolling Stock, American Review, The Writer, The Village Voice, Outside, Technological Disaster at Valdez: Readings on a Contemporary Social Problem, Dreamers and Desperadoes: An Anthology of Contemporary Writers of the American West, Reflections from the Island’s Edge, Season of Dead Water, Home Ground, Best American Short Stories, and The Prairie Schooner Book Prize.

Non-Fiction

• Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound, 1991.Expanded and Revised Tenth Anniversary Edition, 1999

Film

In 1993, he received a Northwest Regional Emmy Award Nomination for television documentary writing for To Write And Keep Kind, a film on the life of Raymond Carver which aired on PBS in the same year and won First Prize in the Documentary Category of the New York Film Festival and was a National Endowment of the Arts funded film. And in 1995, he was the literary consultant for a documentary on western writing, WestWord, aired on PBS in 1995.

Awards and Honors

Year

• Bulleted list item

Eastern Washington University Trustee’s Medal, for Teaching and Research.

Year

• Bulleted list item

John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship.

1992

• Bulleted list item

Governor’s Award, State of Washington Commission for the Humanities and the Washington State Library.

1993

• Northwest Region Emmy Award Nominee.
• First Prize, Documentary Category, New York Film Festival.

Year

• Finalist, National Magazine Award for Short Fiction.
• Blue Ribbon, American International Video Festival

Year

• Bulleted list item

Broken Ground cited as one of the best hundred books in Literary Oregon, OneHundred Books, 1900-2000.

External links and Further Reading

• John Keeble’s Website: http://www.keeblefiction.com
• [1]http://sites.ewu.edu/mfa/the-people/john-keeble/
• [2] John Keeble Starts UAA Summer Reading, 2009, with excerpt from Nocturnal America
• Boise State (news.boisestate.edu/newsrelease/archive/2006/042006/0417keeble.html)
• Eastern Washington University Books by John Keeble (Author of Yellowfish)(www.ewumfa.com/jkeeble.html^Goodreads. (www.goodreads.com/author/list/145392.John_Keeble
• Home Ground (test.ourhomeground.com/authors/about/john_keeble)

Juneau Empire (search.juneauempire.com/fast-elements.php?type=standard...Juneau... ^PM Press - Derrick Jensen (www.pmpress.org/content/article.php?story=derrickjensen) ^University of Alabama (bama.ua.edu/~writing/main_pdf/printBVWSFall2002.pdf)

On Yellowfish

University of Washington Press (www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/KEESHA.html)Time, Books, R. Z. Shepherd, “Easy Driver,” Feb. 4, 1980. Carolyn Kizer, “Fictional Space, John Keeble,” in Picking and Choosing, EWU Press, 1995. New York Times Book Review, Tom Nolan, “In Short,” March 6, 1988.

On Broken Ground

Oregon Focus, Doug Marx, “Out of the Woods,” March, 1988.

On Out of the Channel: The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill in Prince William Sound

New York Times, Timothy Egan, “Accord Won’t End Finger-Pointing,” March 14, 1991.

On Nocturnal America

• Seattle Times, Mary Ann Gwinn, “Nocturnal America,” Nov. 29, 2006.
• L.A. Times, Ellen Slezak, “The Power of Place,” Dec. 17, 2006. articles.latimes.com/2006/dec/17/books/bk-slezak17/2

On Shadows of the Owls

The Shadows of Owls': storm clouds in the North PacificThe Seattle Times - Sep 9, 2013.

Who’s Who in the U.S., Writers, Editors, and Poets, 1988, December Press. Vermont Studio Center: www.vermontstudiocenter.org/visiting-artists-writers/SearchForm?Search=John+Keeble

Books otherwise reviewed in: Bloomsbury Review, Chicago Tribune, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Christian Century, Dallas Morning News, The Inlander, Kirkus Reviews, Los Angeles Times, New York Times Book Review, New Yorker, Newsweek, Northwest Review, Portland Oregonian, Publishers Weekly, Rolling Stock, San Francisco Chronicle, Science News, Seattle Post Intelligencer, Seattle Times Spokane Spokesman Review, Time, Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun, Washington Post, Whole Earth Review. '

Further Print Sources

• A memoir entitled “Trejo’s Perfect Havoc,” in Ruben Trejo: Beyond Boundaries / Aztlán y Más Allá, edited by Ben Mitchell, University of Washington Press, 2010.
• Dialogues with Northwest Writers, Northwest Review Books, Northwest Review, V. 20, Nos. 2 &3, 1982.
• The Writers Mind: Interviews With American Authors, V. III, ed. by Irv Broughton, University of Arkansas Press, l990.
• “Calling for a Change of Heart,” The Bloomsbury Review, V. 12, N. l, 1992.
• Talking Up a Storm: Voices of the New West, ed. by Gregory L. Morris, University of Nebraska Press, 1994.
• Listening to the Land: Conversations About Nature, Culture, and Eros, ed. by Derrick Jensen, Sierra Club Books, 1995.