About the Author
In 1983, Peter Anderson began writing for a small town daily in a mountain town just east of the Continental Divide. He covered school board and town council meetings and wrote features about trappers, circus people, rodeo clowns, miners, honky-tonk musicians, wildlife biologists, and late night ski hill groomers among others. After covering similar mountain town beats for the Pueblo Chieftain and the Denver Post, he wrote interpretive texts for state and national parks and authored a dozen children’s books on the cultural and natural history of the American West. For twenty years, he taught writing and literature, most recently at Adams State University in southern Colorado. For the last few decades, he has been performing in coffee houses, bars, libraries, colleges and other literary venues throughout Colorado with a gang of high country poets known as the River City Nomads.
Peter lives with his family on the western edge of the Sangre de Cristo Range in Crestone, Colorado, an eccentric mountain town full of spiritual seekers, old hippies and neo-rastafarians, Buddhist monks, modem cowboys, retired bikers, former executives turned poets, ranchers, philosopher-plumbers, green-leaning realtors, artists, writers, and musicians. From 2012-2022, he wrote about rural life in an end-of-the-road column called Dispatches from the Edge, which appeared monthly in Colorado Central Magazine and the Crestone Eagle.
From 2003-2009, Peter served as editor of Pilgrimage Magazine. From 2005-2008, he was the poetry editor for the Mountain Gazette, a legendary publication which was rooted in the Rocky Mountain region. In 2009, he edited Telling it Real: The Best of Pilgrimage Magazine (Pilgrimage Press), an anthology of poetry and nonfiction organized around the themes of story, place, spirit, and witness. In 2015, he co-edited (with Rick Kempa) an anthology of Grand Canyon poems called Going Down Grand (Lithic Press), which was nominated for a Colorado Book Award. For the 2015-16 school year, he was the Bennett Fellow Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy. In 2018, he launched the Crestone Poetry Festival (poemfest.com), an annual gathering of southwestern poets.
Peter's books include Riding the Wheel (Kelsay Books 2024), a lyrical almanac of prose poems and flash prose which affirms and celebrates the great wheel of life in the San Luis Valley; Reading Colorado: A Literary Road Guide (Bower House Books, 2023), an anthology of placed-based writings, which won a 2024 Colorado Book Award; Heading Home: Field Notes (Conundrum Press, 2017), a collection of short essays, flash prose, and prose poems, which Colorado novelist Laura Pritchett describes as offering "gorgeous meditations on traveling, the natural world, small towns, parenting, and...the cultural eccentricities of of the modern day west" ; and First Church of the Higher Elevations (Conundrum Press, 2015), which explores the ecology of story, spirituality, and landscape. His poems have appeared in various anthologies including New Poets of the American West (Many Voices Press) and Storied Wheels (Somos Publications).