Kurt Caswell was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and grew up in the Cascade Range in Oregon. He has lived in Idaho off and on since 1987. Before coming to Texas Tech he worked as a teacher in Hokkaido, Japan, on the Navajo Reservation, and at schools in Arizona, California, and Wyoming. He holds an M.A. in English from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, and an M.F.A. in Literature and Creative Writing from Bennington College, where he was recipient of the Lucy Grealy Memorial Scholarship. Caswell is the author of four books of nonfiction, most recently, Laika's Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog (2018), which tells the story of the first animal to orbit the Earth. Laika's Window won a Foreword Indie Silver Medal for science writing. His other books are: Getting to Grey Owl: Journeys on Four Continents (2015); In the Sun's House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation (2009); and An Inside Passage (2009), which won the 2008 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize, and a Texas Tech University President's Book Award. His essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in American Literary Review, High Country News, Los Angeles Review of Books, Ninth Letter, Orion, River Teeth, and other publications. His work has earned numerous Pushcart nominations, fellowships at Fishtrap writers' conference and the MacDowell Colony, and other honors. Caswell teaches writing and literature, directs the Honors thesis program, and serves as faculty director of the Honors Sciences and the Humanities degree program (HSH). During the Maymester, he teaches an Honors summit study abroad course in which students walk the one thousand year-old Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route in Spain.

 

 

 

 

 

Education

 

— M.F.A. in Literature and Creative Writing from Bennington College

— Master of Arts in English from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College