Joe Wilkins’s debut, Killing the Murnion Dogs, was published by Black Lawrence in 2011 and subsequently named a finalist for a number of national post-publication book awards, including the Paterson Poetry Prize and the High Plains Book Award. Wilkins’s other books include a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers (Counterpoint 2012), winner of a 2014 GLCA New Writers Award—an honor that has previously recognized early works by the likes of Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, and Alice Munro, among others—and another book of poems, Notes from the Journey Westward (White Pine 2012). He has recently published two chapbooks, one of essays, We Had to Go On Living(Red Bird Chapbooks 2014) and one of poetry, Leviathan (Iron Horse 2014); his fiction chapbook Far Enough: A Western in Fragments was published by Black Lawrence Press last year.

A Pushcart Prize winner and National Magazine Award finalist, Wilkins has published poems, essays, and stories inThe Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, The Sun, Orion, and Slate. Of Wilkins’s work, Deborah Kim, editor at the Indiana Review, writes, “The most striking component of it is its awareness of ‘the whole world.’ What is ordinary becomes transcendent. In places derelict and seemingly unexceptional, Wilkins compels us to recognize what is worth salvage, worth praise.”

Wilkins lives with his wife, son, and daughter in McMinnville, Oregon, where he teaches writing at Linfield College. As the winner of the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency from PEN Northwest, he and his family spent the summer and fall of 2015 living in a remote cabin along the Rogue River in southwest Oregon.