Kurt Caswell is the author of five books of nonfiction, most recently, Iceland Summer: Travels Along the Ring Road (2024), illustrated by Julia Oldham. Among his other books are Laika’s Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog (2018), which tells the story of the first animal to orbit the Earth; Getting to Grey Owl: Journeys on Four Continents (2015); In the Sun’s House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation (2009); and An Inside Passage (2009), which won the 2008 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize, and a Texas Tech University President’s Book Award. Caswell was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and grew up in the Cascade Range in Oregon. He has worked as a teacher in Hokkaido, Japan, on the Navajo Reservation, at schools in Arizona, California, and Wyoming, and in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts. A graduate of both the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College (MA), and the Bennington College Writing Seminars (MFA), his work has earned numerous Pushcart nominations, the Lucy Grealy Memorial Scholarship, fellowships at Fishtrap writers’ conference and the MacDowell Colony, and other honors. He is co-editor with James Perrin Warren of Going to See: 30 Writers on Nature, Inspiration, and the World of Barry Lopez, and his essays, stories and reviews have appeared in Fourth Genre, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ninth Letter, North American Review, Orion, Prairie Schooner, Terrain.org, and other publications. He is professor in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, where he teaches writing, literature, and an intensive study abroad course walking the Camino de Santiago in Spain.
