Deanne Stillman

Deanne Stillman brakes for sand. Her latest book is the critically acclaimed "Desert Reckoning: A Town Sheriff, a Mojave Hermit, and the Biggest Manhunt in Modern California History," a Rolling Stone "must-read for the summer" and an Amazon editors' pick for July 2012. It's based on her Rolling Stone piece, "The Great Mojave Manhunt," which appears in Best American Crime Writing '06 and was a finalist for a PEN journalism award. Her previous book was "Mustang: The Saga of the Wild Horse in the American West" (Houghton Mifflin), a Los Angeles Times "best book 08," and well-reviewed in the Atlantic Monthly, the Economist, NPR's "On Point," Seattle Times, Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Tucson Citizen, Albuquerque Journal, and elsewhere. She also wrote the bestseller "Twentynine Palms: A True Story of Murder, Marines, and the Mojave," recently published in a new, updated edition by Angel City Press, with a foreword by T. Jefferson Parker and preface by Charles Bowden. It was originally a Los Angeles Times "best book 2001," and Hunter Thompson called it "a strange and brilliant story by an important American writer."

In addition, she is the author of "Joshua Tree: Desolation Tango" (University of Arizona Press), a celebration of Joshua Tree National Park with photographs by Galen Hunt. Her work has appeared in the LA Times, Slate, the LA Weekly, the New York Times, Los Angeles Magazine, the Boston Globe, Orion, the Huffington Post, the New York Observer, Tin House, the Village Voice, and elsewhere, and in various anthologies. Her plays have won prizes in theatre festivals around the country. She is a core faculty member of the UC Riverside low-residency MFA creative writing program at Palm Desert, and she also writes the "Letter from the West" column for www.truthdig.com.