Jana Harris
A poet, novelist, short story writer, and essayist, Jana Harris’s award-winning books include Manhattan as a Second Language, Poems ( Harper & Row) and Oh How Can I Keep On Singing? Voices of Pioneer Women, Poems (Ontario Press, Princeton), both Pulitzer Prize nominees. Oh How Can I Keep On Singing? was a Washington State Governor’s Writers Award winner, a PEN West Center Award finalist, and has been adapted for educational television, as well as for the stage. Her novel Alaska was a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection. Born in San Francisco and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she worked for six years as director of Writers in Performance at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York. She now lives with her husband in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, where they raise horses. Ms. Harris teaches creative writing at the University of Washington where she is editor and founder of Switched-on Gutenberg, one of the first electronic poetry journals of the English-speaking world. Her seventh book of poems, The Dust of Everyday Life, an epic concerning the lives of forgotten Northwest pioneers, (Sasquatch) won the 1998 Andres Berger Award. Her second novel, The Pearl of Ruby City was released from St. Martin’s Press. In 2001 she won a Pushcart Prize for poetry. Jana is a member of the National Book Critics Circle, PEN, Poetry Society of America, and AWP. Recently she has been writer-in-residence at the University of Wyoming, St. Catherine’s College (St. Paul, MN), and Washington State University. Her eighth collection of poetry We Never Speak of It, Idaho-Wyoming Poems, 1889 (Ontario) was published in 2003 and nominated for the Kingsley Tufts Award. She won a Reader’s Choice Award in poetry from Prairie Schooner in 2004.
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Books
Oh How Can I Keep On Singing: Voices of Pioneer Women
When Washington Territory was created, the narrow, isolated Okanogan River Valley was considered a wasteland and an Indian reservation, the Chief Joseph Reserve, was established there. But when silver was discovered near what became Ruby City, the land was re-appropriated, and the Native Americans were moved to a more confined area. The Okanogan was then opened up to white homesteaders, with the hope of making the area more attractive to miners.
The interconnected dramatic monologues in Oh How Can I Keep On Singing? are the stories of the forgotten women who settled the Okanogan in the late nineteenth century, arriving by horse-drawn cart to a place that purported to have such fine weather that a barn was unnecessary for raising livestock. Not all of the newcomers survived the cattle-killing winter of 1893. Of those who did, some would not have survived if the indigenous people had not helped them.
It was made into a Moving Images/Washington State PBS documentary.
(Open Road, August 2015)
Alaska
This saga chronicles the lives and fortunes of four generations of women in the York family, from the Russian occupation of Alaska to the building of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System. Detailing the triumphs and trials of what became a dynasty of fish and timber barons during a crucial century in Alaska’s history, the novel opens with teenage Nadia Karimoff, a half-Russian, half-Native American orphan living in Sitka, being kidnapped and sold to a mysterious Yankee named Noah York.
(Open Road, August 2015)
Horses Never Lie About Love
Award-winning poet Jana Harris tells the inspiring story of her twenty-four year relationship with a troubled but beautiful, blood-red feral mare who, in spite of her troubled past, has a talent for healing and helping every human and other being she comes into contact with.
In Horses Never Lie About Love, Harris lyrically recounts how this wounded, implacable beast held a magical influence over the other horses of the ranch and how she eased uncannily into the role of mother after having a foal. In time she became the heart of the ranch—now thirty-three years old, she is a matriarchal presence without whom the other horses cannot sleep at night, and whose quiet wisdom transmits strength of character that transcends the thin line between animals and the humans they love.
(Atria, November 2011)