Rick Bass
USA|2019
Rick Bass was born in Texas and worked as a geologist for some years in Mississippi before moving to Montana in 1987. There he works as an activist and writer, and also teaches and gives readings around the country and the world.
His fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lyndhurst Foundation, the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters and a Pen/Nelson Algren Special Citation. A collection of short fiction, The Hermit’s Story, was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, and another collection, The Lives of Rocks, was a finalist for the prestigious Story Prize, as well as a Best Book of the Year by the Rocky Mountain News. His most recent nonfiction book, Why I Came West, was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.
Rick is with us at Santa Maddalena for four days, all he could manage this year. But as he said on his first night here, “four minutes would have been worth it.”