, Visiting assistant professor
Office phone: (406) 243-6720

While pitching the day's headlines onto front porches in Tucson, Ariz., 13-year old Michael Downs came to realize that a life without ink-smudged fingers is a life badly lived. The result? Stints at The Tombstone Epitaph, the Arizona Daily Star, The Hartford Courant and the Missoulian.

Downs spent most of his decade-long daily journalism career as a sports writer, covering such diverse events as high school field hockey, auto racing, amateur cricket and NCAA Division I basketball (including the 50th Final Four), but he also reported on government and business. He worked most recently as a restaurant critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette while earning his Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from the University of Arkansas.

Since joining the faculty at the University of Montana, he has also taught as a writing coach at Montana newspapers, and for the Freedom Forum at its American Indian Journalism Institute and its Diversity Institute.

Downs’ book of literary journalism and memoir, “House of Good Hope,” won the River Teeth Prize Literary Nonfiction Prize in 2006. He continues to write and publish short fiction in such places as Gettysburg Review, The Georgia Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Five Points and Witness. Two of his stories have been anthologized in the Best American Mystery Stories series. He is the recipient of a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

And, though it hurts his knees, Downs can dunk on a 9-foot rim.

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