Teresa Jordan was raised as part of the fourth generation on a cattle ranch in the Iron Mountain country of southeast Wyoming and has written or edited seven books about Western rural life, culture, and the environment, including the memoir Riding the White Horse Home and the classic study of women on ranches and in the rodeo, Cowgirls: Women of the American West.
The recipient of the Western Heritage Award from the Cowboy Hall of Fame for scriptwriting and a literary fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts as well as many other literary awards, her most recent book is Fieldnotes from Yosemite, the second volume in her series of Sketchbook Expeditions.
With her husband, folklorist and public radio producer Hal Cannon, she created The Open Road, a series of radio features for Public Radio International’s The Savvy Traveler. More recently, for venues ranging from the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering to the Conference on World Affairs, she has turned many of her “open road” experiences into stories, which she tells live on stage without notes in a storytelling tradition as old as Homer. Her current writing project is the blog The Year of Living Virtuously (Weekends Off), inspired by Benjamin Franklin’s list of thirteen virtues and the seven deadly sins. She plans to turn it into a book in 2012.
A frequent public speaker, Teresa has presented keynote addresses to such various organizations and conferences as the Oregon School of Arts and Crafts, the Fife Folklore Conference, the Center of the American West, and the Rocky Mountain Book Publisher’s Association. She has served as writer in residence at the University of Nebraska and the University of Utah, and has taught writing at colleges, universities, and workshops throughout the West.
Teresa received her BA in History from Yale University in 1977, graduating summa cum laude and winning election to Phi Beta Kappa. Her thesis, Wyoming Ranchers During the Great Depression, won the McClintock Prize for History of the American West.
As part of a “mid-life expansion,” Teresa turned to visual art and earned her BFA in Fine Art, with an emphasis in drawing and painting, from the University of Utah in 2002. She has had one- and two-woman shows in Salt Lake City at both the Phillips Gallery and the Finch Lane Gallery, at the University of Denver, and at the Lewis-Clark Center for the Arts and History in Lewistown, Idaho, and has exhibited in group shows in several Western states. Her artwork is represented by Phillips Gallery, 444 E. 200 St., Salt Lake City, UT 84103; 801.364.8284.
Teresa lives in Virgin, Utah, near Zion National Park.
