I have a bachelor’s degree in business and a master’s degree in English, both from Colorado State University. I won the CSU fiction-writing contest two years in succession, and used the prize money to buy new shoes. I taught writing, literature and the history of cinema at Genesee Community College in Batavia, New York for three years (and also at our branch campus inside nearby Attica State Prison). During my brief teaching career I wrote a short story titled “Cache La Poudre” which was published by Little, Brown in a book containing stories by Phillip Roth and Erica Jong. I left teaching and went into business, but I never stopped writing. I wrote play and film reviews while living in Great Falls, Montana. Later, as a Senior Fellow at Denver’s Center for the New West and while working for the State of Nebraska, I regularly published articles about applications of the Internet in rural economic development. And I authored and delivered countless speeches on that subject across the US and Australia. US West and SCORE sponsored nationally distributed videos about my work as a “digital pioneer.”

I am currently working on adapting The Elk in the Attic into a musical play for children. With a great deal of help and advice from Prescott College drama professor Charissa Menefee and Elks Opera House Events Coordinator Dawn Castaneda, I have re-written the story as a play. It is our intention to present the play to the public on the stage of the renovated Elks Opera House in the Fall of 2010. If everything goes as planned, the play will feature original music, numerous wild animal costumes, and many happy local children. Auditions will begin in the Spring of 2010.

I like to write crime fiction for adults and, when the mood comes over me, tongue-in-cheek short stories. I have finished a novel called “Club Red” about a feisty old lady who believes she knows the real story behind the JFK assassination, but gets tangled up in nearly calamitous political intrigue when she decides to make a few dollars by sharing what she knows with the world. And I’m outlining a mainstream novel about a stranger who jumps to his death from a building in an obscure little village and has a huge impact (pardon the pun) on almost everybody who lives there.

In December, 2009, I completed three years as president of Citizens Water Advocacy Group. In November, 2009, I was elected Secretary/Treasurer of the Verde River Basin Partnership. I chaired the first Urban Wildlife Symposium in Prescott in 2005 and assisted with the second one in 2007. Last year the Prescott Earth Day Network presented me with their 2008 Environmental Achievement Award. And in 2008 I was a guest curator at Sharlot Hall Museum, helping to do the research and write the narrative for a gallery exhibit called "Quest for Water." Finally, as all fiction writers know, it's fun to create imaginary worlds and characters, but it's real-life stuff that provides authentic material for those stories. I hope my friends don't mind that I sometimes put their actual personalities into characters in my stories. Or, if I need a specific kind of cadaver . . . their bodies!

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Copyright © 2007
Illustrations Copyright © 2007 by Walt Anderson