Peter Anderson Wins 2018 Colorado Authors’ League Award

The Colorado Authors’ League, the oldest writer’s organization in the state, recently announced their 2018 Book Awards. This year, Crestone author and recently retired Adams State University instructor in composition and creative writing, won the Colorado Authors League creative nonfiction award for his book Heading Home: Field Notes  (Conundrum Press, 2017).  Established in 1931 to “foster the art and craft of authorship,” the Colorado Authors’ League is comprised of more than 250 professional writers, including authors of adult fiction and nonfiction, cookbooks, children and young adult books, playwrights, poets and bloggers.

Heading Home: Field Notes  is a collection of flash prose and prose poems exploring out-of-the-way places in the American West. Anderson describes the book as “a gathering of field notes—observations, recollections, and stories along the way, where home is understood as a work in progress and the way is a road that never ends.”

“Poetry, humor, wisdom, grace: these words best describe Heading Home,” says Colorado author Laura Pritchett, author of Stars Go Blue and Red Lightning, “Part cultural critic, part poet, part wanderer, Anderson is a funny gentle guide, whether pondering the sorrows of loss, the joys of the seasons or the cultural eccentricities of the modern day west.”

Writing in the Midwest Book Review, senior staff writer Diane Donovan described the book as “a powerful cocktail ofevocative, beautiful prose that is not to be missed by any who appreciate a literary voice from this part of the country….It is award-quality writing that should please readers who appreciated A River Runs Through It. Yes, it’s that good.”

In the early 1980’s, Peter Anderson worked as reporter for the Mountain Mail covering northern Chaffee County. He also wrote and self-published From Gold to Ghosts: A History of St. Elmo at that time. Since then he has written a dozen children’s books and several collections of essays on mountains and the West. Going Down Grand, an anthology of poems about the Grand Canyon, which he edited with Rick Kempa, won a Colorado Book Award nomination in 2016.