Bio

I was born and raised in the small farming community of Emmett, Idaho, where my Czech-immigrant family settled in the early twentieth century. I was educated at Boise State University (BA & MA in English), after which I high school in Yuma, Arizona. Returning to graduate school, I enrolled at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where I studied American Literature, Folklore, and the Czech language and received my PhD in American Literature. I spent the next 25 years of teaching American literature and culture and researching at Utah State University in Logan, where I closed my university career as a Full Professor of American Literature, Associate Dean for the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, and Director of the Mountain West Center for Regional Studies.

I remain an active literary scholar who focuses mostly on American author Willa Cather. I have presented internationally and published widely on Cather, most recently on her engagement with Czech culture and people, and I am is currently at work on an interdisciplinary book entitled “Willa Cather and the Czechs.” I authored Weeds: A Farm Daughter’s Lament (a cultural family memoir about her Czech family farming in Idaho that won the Evans Handcart Award for autobiography), and, using that writing experience, I have taught several writing workshops on the subject of writing autobiography from family artifacts. I am co-author, with Joyce Kinkead and Lynne McNeill, of the interdisciplinary university textbook Farm: A Multimodal Reader, currently being revised for a 4th edition. In 2014, I presented the talk entitled “Farming is the New Sexy” for the 2014 USUxTED event. I have been affliated with the Western Literature Association for more than thirty years, and I and as a member of the Advisory Board for the Evans Biography Prize and on the Board of Directors for the national organization, the Czechoslovak Genealogical Society International.