Rick Bass


Rick Bass is an American writer and an environmental activist. He has a Bachelor of Science in Geology with a focus in Wildlife from Utah State University. Right after he graduated, he interned for one year as a Wildlife Biologist at the Weyerhaeuser Timber Company in Arkansas. He then went onto working as an oil and gas geologist and consultant before becoming a writer and teacher. He has worked across the United States at various universities: University of Texas at Austin, Beloit College, University of Montana, Pacific University, Montana State University, Iowa State University. He teaches at the Stonecoast MFA low-residency program in Maine. He has done many workshops and lectures on writing and wildlife throughout his career. Texas Tech University, Texas State University, and University of Texas at Austin have collections of his written work.

Life

Bass was born in Fort Worth, Texas. He studied petroleum geology at Utah State University. He grew up in Houston, and started writing short stories on his lunch breaks while working as a petroleum geologist in Jackson, Mississippi. In 1987, he married the artist Elizabeth Hughes Bass, with whom he had two children before their divorce in 2015. He moved to Yaak Valley, where he worked to protect his adopted home from roads and logging. Rick serves on the board of the Yaak Valley Forest Council. He teaches and gives readings in the U.S. and abroad.
His papers are held in two collections: the Sowell Family Collection in Literature, Community, and the Natural World, part of the Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library at Texas Tech University, and Texas State University–San Marcos's Wittliff Collections.

Awards

Bass won The Story Prize for books published in 2016 for his collection of new and selected stories, For a Little While. He won the 1995 James Jones Literary Society First Novel Fellowship for his novel in progress, Where the Sea Used to Be. He was a finalist for the Story Prize in 2006 for his short story collection The Lives of Rocks. He was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Why I Came West. He was also awarded the General Electric Younger Writers Award, a PEN/Nelson Algren Award Special Citation for fiction, and a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship.

Works

Fiction

Category:1958 births
Category:American nature writers
Category:American male non-fiction writers
Category:20th-century American novelists
Category:20th-century American male writers
Category:Utah State University alumni
Category:Living people
Category:People from Missoula County, Montana
Category:Writers from Montana
Category:Novelists from Texas
Category:Novelists from Utah
Category:Writers from Fort Worth, Texas
Category:21st-century American novelists
Category:American male novelists
Category:American male essayists
Category:American male short story writers
Category:20th-century American short story writers
Category:21st-century American short story writers
Category:20th-century American essayists
Category:21st-century American essayists
Category:21st-century American male writers