Molly Murfee | 2024 August
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Creative nonfiction and place-based author, Molly Murfee, pens her prose from the rural heart of the Southern Rocky Mountains. She has studied, written and taught the subjects of ecofeminism, mythology, women’s studies, environmental literature, anthropology, and indigenous culture and history for over 30 years.
In addition to the 2024 Aldo & Estella Leopold Writing Residency, Molly has been honored with the following: 2024 Wild Woman Story Contest Honorable Mention; 2023 Mountain Words Local Writer-in-Residence; 2022 Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction Finalist; 2022 Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference Contributor; and 2019 Colorado Creative Industries Career Advancement Award recipient, among other honors. Her local community has supported her writing journey through a 2020 Artistic Enrichment Grant with the Crested Butte Arts Festival and a 2018 Crested Butte Creative District Award. Her articles published in the Crested Butte Magazine have garnered a 2019 Tell It Like It is Award and a 2018 Gary Snyder Award. She was selected as a Red Lady in 2007 by the High Country Conservation Advocates for her environmental activism through writing to represent Mount Emmons and the fight to keep her molybdenum mine-free. Molly authors the Earth Muffin Memos column and blog, focused on fostering environmental and social change, and has over 500 published articles, from local venues to national journals and magazines such as Tulip Tree Review, Mountain Journal, the Mountain Gazette, and Powder Magazine. Molly holds Bachelor and Master of Arts degrees in literature, creative writing, and environmental writing; and has served as faculty teaching the same with Colorado College, Colorado State University, and the Audubon Expedition Institute at Lesley University. With Western Colorado University in her current home place, she has taught study abroad and field courses with the Clark Family School of Environment & Sustainability, the Honors Program, the Center for Learning and Innovation, the Teacher Institute, and the Nature Writing Concentration of the MFA Graduate Program in Creative Writing. As a creative activist, Molly co-directs the Autumn Equinox celebration, Vinotok, generating earth-honoring and community-building practices through storytelling, mythmaking, public art, and street theatre. She has additionally presented her work and taught classes at conferences such as the Mountain Words Literary Festival and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. During the Residency, Molly will be working on her creative nonfiction book in-progress, The Adventure of Home, re-membering our indigeneity to this Earth through braided lyrical narratives, unravelling the destructive foundations of colonialism, and reweaving mythologies of a sacred wild. It answers Aldo Leopold’s question of why we practice “philosophical imperialism” towards the natural world, offering instead an interconnected relationship of reverence and reciprocity. This is her first book. Website: www.mollymurfee.com
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