Dancing with the Muse in Old Age

Priscilla Long is a Seattle-based writer of science, poetry, creative nonfiction, fiction, and history, and a longtime independent teacher of writing. Her most recent book, Holy Magic (MoonPath Press), won the Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award. Her how-to-write guide is The Writer's Portable Mentor (University of New Mexico Press). Her weekly science column, Science Frictions, ran for 92 weeks at The American Scholar online. She is the recipient of a National Magazine Award for a science-oriented piece titled "Genome Tome," which appeared in The American Scholar. Her book of memoirist creative nonfictions is Fire and Stone: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (University of Georgia Press). Christopher Hitchens called her first book, a history of coalmining titled Where the Sun Never Shines, "an intense and accomplished social history" (New York Newsday). She is the founding and consulting editor of HistoryLink.org, the free online encyclopedia of Washington state history