A longtime Coloradan, Reg Saner first saw mountains during military service when he was sent to Big Delta, Alaska, for alpine and arctic survival training. After combat duty as an infantry platoon leader in the Korean War, he studied renaissance culture at the University of Illinois, and as a Fulbright Scholar in Florence, Italy, at the Universitá degli Studi. Among other honors, his previous writings, all set in the American West, have won several national prizes, including the first Walt Whitman Award as conferred by the Academy of American Poets and the Copernicus Society of America. His second book was a National Poetry Series “Open Competition” winner selected by Derek Walcott, later a Nobel laureate. He has won an NEA fellowship, the Creede Repertory Theater Award, the State of Colorado Governor’s Award, and the Wallace Stegner Award conferred by the Center of the American West. His nonfiction books include The Four-Cornered Falcon: Essays on the Interior West and the Natural Scene (Johns Hopkins, 1993; Kodansha paperback, 1994) and Reaching Keet Seel: Ruin’s Echo & the Anasazi (Utah, 1998). In spring 2005 the Center for American Places published The Dawn Collector: On My Way to the Natural World. His prose and poetry have appeared in more than 50 anthologies.
