Resounds

Maxim Loskutoff’s novel, essays, and short stories have received national recognition and awards, including two High Plains Book Awards, first for his short story collection Come West and See and another for his novel Ruthie Fear. His new novel Old King was published in June 2024.

Gavin Woltjer is in his eighth year as the director of the Billings Public Library. During his tenure, he and the library staff have sought to adapt to the new library building, challenges related to the pandemic, the ongoing discussion of censorship, and expanding resources for the community within and out of the library.

Humanities Montana serves Montana communities through a variety of programs, grants, and partnerships that keep the humanities alive in the state, speaking to Montana’s diverse history, literature, and philosophy.

Billings author and scholar Danell Jones has been teaching literature and creative writing for more than thirty years. Her extensive body of work includes poetry, fiction, essays, writing guides, and reviews.

Beginning in the 1870s, the U.S. government created boarding schools for the purpose of assimilating Native American youth into “civilized” life. Hundreds of Native children from across Montana were separated from their families, sometimes without contact for years, and sent to schools like the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories is a travelling exhibit currently at the Western Heritage Center in Billings that details both the generational trauma and isolation caused by this experience as well as the slow reforms enacted on the schools as the graduates themselves became forces for change in tribal politics and Native sovereignty organizations.

Dr. Melissa Ragain is an Associate Professor at Montana State University, where she teaches courses on modern and contemporary art history, specializing in environmental aesthetics and the intellectual history of art.Based in Livingston, Montana, her latest new research considers the importance of environmental emplacement to artmaking in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.

The Paul Harris and Marguerite Kirk Gallery is located in Belgrade, Montana, and is open by appointment and on the evening of opening art exhibitions. The gallery and storage facility houses over 500 pieces of Paul Harris’ art after they were transported from Bolinas, California. Paul Harris and wife Marguerite adored Montana, and Paul spent the last years of his life here before passing in 2018.

Ellen Ornitz has been a practicing ceramic and mixed media artist for nearly fifty years in the Gallatin Valley. She earned a B.A. in Painting and Printmaking from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Masters in Secondary Art Education from the University of Indiana, Bloomington.

In February 2024, the board of directors at Tinworks Art appointed Jenny Moore as the gallery’s founding director.The board selected Moore after a national search for a director. Previously, Moore was a curator at the New Museum and at the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York City. From 2013-2022 she was director at the contemporary Chinati Foundation Art Museum in Marfa, Texas, where she led the museum through a period of significant growth.

Douglas W. Smith, the well-known wolf biologist from Yellowstone National Park, has taken on a new and slightly smaller and less dangerous species for his most recent book. Yellowstone’s Birds: Diversity and Abundance in the World’s First National Park is a beautifully illustrated survey of Yellowstone’s breathtaking bird life, edited by Smith and written by a team of renowned ornithologists and wildlife biologists.