Jana Harris

Jana Harris has been a Washington State Governor’s Writers Award winner and a PEN West Center Award finalist. Born in San Francisco and raised in the Pacific Northwest, she worked for six years as the director of Writers in Performance at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York City. She now lives with her husband in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains, where she raises horses. She studies the riding discipline of dressage and competes.

Jana is the editor and founder of Switched-on Gutenberg, the first internet poetry journal, which is been in continuous publication since 1995. Switched-on Gutenberg had a website before Microsoft had a website. Her seventh book of poems, The Dust of Everyday Life: An Epic Poem of the Pacific Northwest , concerning the lives of forgotten Northwest pioneers (Sasquatch), won the 1998 Andres Berger Award; she was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Manhattan as a Second Language.  Her poetry book Oh How Can I Keep On Singing?: Voices of Pioneer Women was adapted for television. She has published two novels, Alaska and The Pearl of Ruby City.

Her memoir, Horses Never Lie about Love was released by Simon & Schuster November 1, 2011.

Learn more on Wikipedia and at the Poetry Foundation. Listen to an NPR interview with Jana.