About Deep Wild Journal

Published annually each June in a handsome print format, Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry features work in celebration of and defense of places where there are no roads. We are a self-sustaining independent journal with a national and international following. In our first six years, we have featured over 260 writers and artists from throughout the United States and beyond, including over a dozen New Mexicans. In addition to Nancy and Anne’s contributions to the current issue, the cover art is by Santa Fe artist Kathleen Frank.

About the Presentors

Nancy Beauregard is a legally blind poet from the high desert of New Mexico. She received her BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and her MFA in Creative Writing with an emphasis on Poetry from Western Colorado University. She teaches Creative Writing courses to incarcerated students through correspondence whilst exploring nature and disability in her own poetry. Beauregard’s works have appeared in several publications including Sky Island Journal, The MacGuffin, The Santa Fe Literary Review, and The Normal School among others, as well as in her chapbook, I Heard a Train.

When she is not floating rivers or exploring mountains by foot or ski, Anne Haven McDonnell teaches creative writing and literature at the Institute of American Indian Arts. A recipient of a 2023 NEA Poetry fellowship and a MacDowell fellowship, Anne is the author of two poetry books: Breath on a Coal (Middle Creek Press) and Living With Wolves (Split Rock Press). Anne Haven’s work explores the connections between inner worlds and the living more-than-human world, and she is endlessly interested in ways we can deepen our seeing and connection to each other and to other creatures.

Born in upstate New York, essayist and poet John Nizalowski moved to Santa Fe in the mid-1980’s, where he taught college English at PNM and wrote for the Santa Fe New Mexican and New Mexico Magazine. In 1990, he moved to Grand Junction, where he taught writing, mythology, and cultural studies at Colorado Mesa University He has published six books, most recently Chronicles of the Forbidden, a finalist for the 2020 Colorado Book Award in Creative Non-Fiction, and The Emergence of Frank Waters, a volume of scholarly essays he co-edited with Alexander Blackburn. A board member of the Frank Waters Foundation, Nizalowski is currently working with photographer Stephen Collector on Land of the Sun Father, a photobook based on Frank Waters’s writing.

A former Santa Fean and graduate of St. John’s College, Rick Kempa earned his MFA from the University of Arizona, taught for many years at Western Wyoming College in Rock Springs, and now resides in Grand Junction, Colorado. He is the editor of two collections of writing about the Grand Canyon and founding editor of the literary journal Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry, now in its sixth year. Kempa has authored three books of poems, most recently Too Vast for Sleep (Littoral Press, 2020), and a collection of short essays about the philosophy of backpacking, Truths of the Trail (Deep Wild Press, 2024).