Ruth Nolan, M.A, a lifelong resident of the California desert and southern California's Inland Empire, is professor of creative writing and desert literature at College of the Desert in Palm Desert. She is also editor of the critically-acclaimed regional literary anthology, No Place for a Puritan: the literature of California's deserts, published by Heyday Books, Berkeley, in 2009. A former helicopter hotshot firefighter for the Bureau of Land Mangement's California Desert, District, she is also a poet/writer, photographer, lecturer and visual arts and film collaborator whose desert-based poetry, articles and photographs focusing on California desert culture, arts, literature and conservation are widely published. She is featured scholar/author in the 2010-11 California Legacy “Nature Dreaming” radio project, sponsored by the California Council for the Humanities and Santa Clara University, and part of an artist-planner collaboration, the Riverside County Art VULUPS project, 2010-11, which won the California Planning Association Award in 2011. She was also a featured scholar/lecturer at the 2011 Green Festival, speaking on desert environmental issues related to federal renewable energy development in the Mojave Desert, and was a featured author/speaker at the Western Wilderness Conference at University of California, Berkeley in 2010. She collaborated, as a writer, to the film "Escape to Reality: 24 hrs @ 24 fps," based in Joshua Tree National Park, which was produced by the University of California, Riverside / California Museum of Photography in 2008. She contributes desert conservation and culture articles on regularly to the the award-winning Desert Star Alternative News Weekly, and writes a guest blog, "Desert Word Walk, for Heyday Books, as well as editing a Phantom Seed: a magazine of California desert writing, which she founded in 2008. Her poetry has recently appeared in The Night Goes On All Night: Noir Inspired poems (2012); New California Writers, 2011 (Heyday); Inlandia: A Literary Journal (Spring, 2011); and Inlandia: A Literary Journey through Southern California’s Inland Empire (2006.) She was the recipient of a Joshua Tree National Park Affiliate Writers Residency for 2008-09; has twice been awarded a Vermont Studio Writers Fellowship, in 2006 and 2004; and received, in 2004, a major award from the Two Year College English Association of the National Council of Teachers of English: Outstanding Programs in English Award for Two-Year Colleges and Teachers for a poetry/expository writing program she designed for community college writing instruction. She is also the co-founder/facilitator of the Inlandia Institute Writers Workshop in Riverside, CA since 2008, and edits the workshop's literary magazine, Slouching Towards Mt. Rubidoux Manor.