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Craig Childs. Craig Childs has spent entire winters walking the canyons of Utah, and has vanished without a trace into dune seas and appallingly vast deserts only to emerge tattered and dripping with sands at book events around the country. His first few books were written in laundromats and libraries, wherever he could find to plug in a computer. Mostly, though, his work is written by hand. His journals are filled with words and artwork, and his stories come pouring out of the land like flash floods.
Craig Childs was born in Arizona and has spent much of his life in the Four Corners region. He was a river guide at the age of eighteen. By twenty-one he was hitchhiking the coast of British Columbia on bush planes. He has worked as a field instructor for Prescott College, an editor of a small mountain newspaper, a jazz and symphony performer on trombone, a beer bottler, and a gas station attendant (not necessarily in that order).
Childs is winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Spirit of the West Literary Achievement Award, given to a writer whose body of work captures the unique spirit of the American West. He frequently contributes commentary to National Public Radio’s Morning Edition. He has written for Outside, Audubon, Sierra, Backpacker, Arizona Highways, High Country News, and the Los Angeles Times. He is the author of eight books of natural history and wilderness travel. Of his most recent book, Soul of Nowhere, The San Francisco Chronicle says, “Where his language is as taut as the lands he chronicles, Childs achieves the spare elegance of these Southwestern landscapes.” The New York Times Book Review wrote, “Childs’s feats of asceticism are nothing if not awe inspiring: he’s a modern-day desert father.” About his book The Secret Knowledge of Water, the Washington Post wrote, “Utterly memorable and fantastic…. Certainly no reader will ever see the desert in the same way again.”
Childs lives with his wife and son in western Colorado. He has a master’s degree in Desert Studies from Prescott College in Arizona, where he has taught as an adjunct professor in field sciences.
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Last updated July 7, 2006.
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