Bio
“I want to experience the slight shift in consciousness and the small opening of the heart that almost any place can offer if we pause long enough to allow it.”
Jana Richman is the author of a memoir, Riding in the Shadows of Saints: A Woman’s Story of Motorcycling the Mormon Trail; two novels, The Ordinary Truth and The Last Cowgirl, which won the Willa Award for Contemporary Fiction and was runner up for the Utah Book Award. Her most recent book is a collection of personal essays, Finding Stillness in a Noisy World.
Jana’s fiction and nonfiction traverse landscapes—personal and historical, internal and external—populated with fierce female characters pitted against time, betrayals, and the heft of family. In her new collection of essays, Jana intimately shares with readers the ways place, space, and the rigors of working toward peace can transform a life.
Running through all of Jana’s work are the elements that threaten to destroy the essence of our lives: overpopulation, consumption, rapidly dwindling water aquifers, stupidity, ignorance, arrogance, and greed. And the elements that might save us: passion, beauty, kindness, and love.
Richman was born and raised in Utah’s west desert and currently lives in the irascible small town of Escalante, Utah, surrounded by the magnificent Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which inspires setting, scene, character, and thought for her work.