Novelist, essayist, and poet Joe Wilkins was raised on a sheep ranch north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana. His novel The Entire Sky recently won the 2025 High Plains International Book Awards for Fiction.
Wilkins’ novel Fall Back Down When I Die was short-listed for the First Novel Prize from the Center for Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award. The novel won the 2020 High Plains Book Award.
Wilkins’ memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, was a finalist for the Orion Book Award and won the GLCA Emerging Writer’s Award. He graduated from Gonzaga University in Engineering and received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho. He teaches at Eastern Oregon University’s MFA Program.
