04/09/2022
Welcome to the campus Ruth! ✨
Joshua Tree Retreat Center
We're excited to welcome our first artist-in-residence Ruth Nolan, desert author and professor of creative writing at College of the Desert, in partnership with Whole Arts and the Joshua Tree Folk School. During her month-long residency, Ruth, who has worked as a wildland firefighter for the Bureau of Land Management's California Desert District and U.S. Forest Service, will be working towards completion of her community-inclusive, humanities-environmental project, "Fire On the Mojave: Stories from the Deserts and Mountains of Inland Southern California." Join us in welcoming Ruth to the campus and stay tuned for a public program with Ruth later this month.
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About Fire on the Mojave: Stories from the Deserts and Mountains of Inland Southern California
This is an ongoing story project evoked through written and spoken word. Taking a broad view of the role, presence and impacts of wildfire in our local desert and mountain regions, the project examines human relationships with our perennial wildfire events in this region. This project focuses on longtime, indigenous practices of using fire to help shape desert and mountain ecologic systems; the training and work of wildland firefighters; stories of major wildfire events; 20th and 21st century wildfire suppression and management practices and adaptations by federal, state and other fire agencies; and how residents here can prepare for personal and property against future, inevitable wildfire events. This project has been supported to date by Breadloaf Writers Conference; the Yefe Nof Artists Residency; California Humanities; Phi Kappa Phi Honorary Society and College of the Desert.
About Ruth Nolan
Ruth grew up in the Mojave Desert town of Apple Valley, and writes about life in California’s Mojave and Coachella Valley deserts and beyond. Her new poetry book, After the Dome Fire won first runner up award in the Hilary Gravendyk Regional Poetry Award, 2021 and is forthcoming from Bamboo Dart Press. Her prose writing is included in the new Wildsam Guidebook, Joshua Tree: Where Two Deserts Meet. Her essays and fiction have been published in Nevada Independent; Coachella Review; KCET Artbound; KCET Tending Nature; Desert Oracle; Boom, California; Desert Report; Basin and Range Watch; News from Native California; McSweeney’s; Women’s Studies Quarterly; Inlandia Literary Journeys; San Diego Poetry Annual and Los Angeles Fiction Anthology (Red Hen Press.)
Ruth, currently serving as the inaugural Mojave Desert Literary Laureate, is editor of the anthologies No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California (Heyday Books) and Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California (Scarlet Tanager Books.) She is co-founder of the popular Inlandia Institute writing workshop program, and has curated creative writing and literature workshops for the Desert Institute at Joshua Tree National Park for over 10 years. She holds her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of CA Riverside - Palm Desert low residency program. She divides her time between Palm Desert, Twentynine Palms and Cedar City, Utah. Visit her website at ruthnolan.com
