Debra Gwartney
Debra Gwartney is the winner of the 2018 RiverTeeth Nonfiction Prize, judged by Gretel Ehrlich. Her hybrid memoir-history, called I Am a Stranger Here Myself, was published in the spring of 2019 by the University of New Mexico Press.
Debra’s first book is a memoir, Live Through This, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, and the Oregon Book Award. Debra has published widely, with work included in such journals as Granta, Tin House, American Scholar, The Normal School, Creative Nonfiction, Prairie Schooner, Washington Square Review, Kenyon Review, Salon, Triquarterly Review, the NYT "Modern Love" column, among others. She is the 2018 winner of the Real Simple essay contest. She is a contributing editor at Poets & Writers magazine and in 2015 won the Crab Orchard Review prize for nonfiction.
She has received fellowships from Hedgebrook, Playa, UCross, and the Wurlitzer Foundation. Debra is co-editor, along with Barry Lopez, of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, published in 2006 by Trinity University Press. She lives in Western Oregon with her husband.