Jana Harris

Born in San Francisco, Jana Harris is the author of Manhattan as a Second Language and Other Poems (1982), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; Oh How Can I Keep on Singing?: Voices of Pioneer Women (2003), finalist for the PEN West Center Award; We Never Speak of It: Idaho-Wyoming Poems, 1889–90 (2003), nominated for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and You Haven’t Asked About My Wedding or What I Wore: Poems of Courtship on the American Frontier (2014). She authored the memoir Horses Never Lie About Love (2012) and the mystery novel The Pearl of Ruby City (2015). Harris earned a BS from the University of Oregon and an MA from San Francisco State University.
 
Harris is the winner of a Washington State Governor’s Writers Award, an Andres Berger Award, a Pushcart Prize for poetry, and a Reader’s Choice Award in poetry from Prairie Schooner. She has taught or been a writer-in-residence at the University of Washington, the University of Wyoming, St. Catherine’s College, and Washington State University. In 1995, Harris founded Switched-on Gutenberg, one of the first electronic poetry journals in the English-speaking world. She lives near the Cascade Mountains in Washington, where she raises horses.