PAM HOUSTON

Pam Houston (b. 1962) grew up in New Jersey, the only child of an actress and a businessman. After graduating in English from Denison University in Ohio, she rode across Canada on a bicycle and then down to Colorado, where she worked at various odd jobs, among them bartender and flagwoman on a highway crew. Eventually, she entered a doctoral program at the University of Utah.

Her first collection of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness, was published in 1992. Her stories have also appeared in Mirabella, Mademoiselle, the Mississippi Review, and Best American Short Stories and her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, Elle, and Vogue. She recently edited Women on Hunting: Essays, Fiction, and Poetry (1994), and wrote the text for Men Before Ten A.M. (1997), a book of photographs by the French photographer Veronique Vial. She has also released Waltzing the Cat.

Her stories have been selected for Best American Short Stories of the Century, The O. Henry Awards, and The Pushcart Prize. A collection of autobiographical essays, A Little More About Me, was published in the fall of 1999. In 2001 she completed a stage play called Tracking the Pleiades. Houston has edited a collection of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry called Women on Hunting, and she is at work on a novel called Sighthound.

A licensed river guide and accomplished horsewoman, Houston teaches at many writing conferences and programs in the United States and Europe. She lives in Colorado at 9,000 feet above sea level near the headwaters of the Rio Grande.

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