Joe Wilkins’s debut novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist, was short-listed for the First Novel Prize from the Center For Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award. Fall Back Down When I Die won the 2020 High Plains Book Award and has now been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and German. Wilkins’s memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, was a finalist for the Orion Book Award and won the GLCA Emerging Writers Award, an honor that has previously recognized early work by Richard Ford, Louise Erdrich, and other luminaries. Wilkins’s latest novel, The Entire Sky, tells the intertwining stories of a young runaway who bears a striking resemblance to Kurt Cobain, a grieving sheep rancher, and a woman in the middle of her life not knowing which way to go. Long-listed for the Chautauqua Prize and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, The Entire Sky won the 2024 Montana Book Award and the 2025 High Plains Book Award.
Wilkins is also the author of four poetry collections, most recently Pastoral, 1994; Thieve, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in a host of venues, including The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Harvard Review, The Missouri Review, Idaho Review, Orion, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Sun, and High Country News, and his work has won the Pushcart Prize, appeared and earned multiple notable mentions in the Best American series, and been widely anthologized. Wilkins is the winner of a 2024 Oregon Career Literary Fellowship and has received grants and residencies from the Ellen Meloy Fund, the Richard J. Margolis Award, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and the Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Arts and Agriculture; as the recipient of the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, Wilkins and his family spent the summer and fall of 2015 living in a remote cabin in the Klamath Mountains along the Rogue River in southwest Oregon.
Wilkins was born and raised on a sheep and hay ranch north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana. After graduating from Gonzaga University with a degree in engineering, Wilkins spent two years teaching junior high math in the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America. He then went on to earn his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho, where he worked with the poet Robert Wrigley and the memoirist Kim Barnes.
Wilkins serves on the faculty of Eastern Oregon University’s Low Residency MFA Program, and he has presented and taught at a number of festivals and workshops, including the Breadloaf Environmental Writers’ Workshop, the Portland Book Festival, Fishtrap, StoryCatcher, the Kachemack Bay Writers Conference, and Orion in the Wilderness.
He lives with his family in the foothills of the Coast Range of western Oregon, where he directs the creative program at Linfield University.
joewilkins.org 