Nolan, Ruth: - Ruth Nolan grew up in California's Mojave Desert and worked as a wildland firefighter for the Bureau of Land Management's California Desert District and also for the U.S. Forest Service, fighting wildfires throughout the western U.S. Her writing is forthcoming in Writing the Golden State: The New Literary Terrain of California (Angel City Press) and has been notably published in Boom, California; McSweeney's; East Bay Times; Joshua Tree: Where Two Deserts Meet (Wildsam Guide); Los Angeles Fiction: Southland Writing by Southland Writers (Red Hen Press;) and Desert Oracle. Ruth also writes for News from Native California; Inlandia Literary Journeys; KCET Artbound L.A. and KCET Tending Nature. Ruth is Professor of English and creative writing at College of the Desert. She is curator of the humanities project Fire on the Mojave: Stories from the Deserts and Mountains of Inland Southern California, and editor of the critically acclaimed anthology, No Place for a Puritan: the Literature of California's Deserts (Heyday.) Ruth was named the inaugural Mojave Desert Literary Laureate in 2021.