People

Judy Blunt

Retired Director of Creative Writing

Contact

Office
LA 112
Phone
243-2275 but email is better
Email
bluntj@mso.umt.edu
Office Hours

To request a ZOOM conference, please email me at bluntj@mso.umt.edu and we'll make arrangements.  

During safe times, I'm in my office Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday 11:30-2:00 & by appointment.  

 

Website
http://hs.umt.edu/english/people/default.php?s=Blunt

Personal Summary

Judy Blunt spent more than 30 years on wheat and cattle ranches in northeastern Montana, before leaving that life to attend the University of Montana.  Her book of poems, Not Quite Stone won the Merriam-Frontier Award, and was published in 1991.  Her best-selling memoir, Breaking Clean, was published by A.A. Knopf in 2002 and met with wide critical acclaim. 

Her essays explore the complexity of growing up a girl in cowboy country.  She challenges the Hollywood mythology but honors the ranching community, paying tribute to a West few people know from the inside out.  In her current research, she documents turn-of-the-century homesteaders’ narratives.  These are the stories that showed generations how to live where the land doesn’t want you, the rules of behavior and expectation and hope handed down from mother to daughter like recipes, like old love letters.  

Recognition of Blunt’s work includes a PEN/Jerard Fund Award for nonfiction, the 2001 Whiting Writers’ Award, 2003 Mountains and Plains Bookseller’s Award, Willa Award for Nonfiction Book of the Year, and a 2004 National Endowment for the Arts writer’s fellowship.  Blunt received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2005.  She teaches creative nonfiction courses and directs the Creative Writing Program at the University of Montana.

Education

M.F.A., University of Montana (1994)

Publications

Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt ... - Penguin Random House

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/15208/...

About Breaking Clean. In this extraordinary literary debut third-generation homesteader Judy Blunt describes her hardscrabble life on the prairies of eastern Montana in prose as big and bold as the landscape. On a ranch miles from nowhere, Judy Blunt grew up with cattle and snakes, outhouse and isolation, epic blizzards and devastating prairie fires.