Panelist Biographies
Lynne Spriggs O’Connor
Lynne Spriggs O’Connor spent ten consecutive summers on northern Montana’s Blackfeet Indian reservation while doing fieldwork for her Ph.D. in Native American Art History from Columbia University. After moving to Montana in her early forties, she curated a three-year project called Bison: American Icon, a major permanent exhibit of Native American art for the C.M. Russell Museum on bison in the Northern Plains. For the past 15 years, she has lived with her husband on a cattle ranch in an isolated mountain valley in northeastern Montana. In 2021, O’Connor and her husband partnered with the National Audubon Conservation Ranching Initiative, utilizing regenerative grazing practices to help sustain this increasingly threatened habitat. Elk Love is her first memoir.
Mark Sundeen
Mark Sundeen is the author of Delusions + Grandeur, The Unsettlers, The Man Who Quit Money, The Making of Toro, and Car Camping. His work has been translated into eight languages. A contributing editor for Outside Magazine, his work has appeared in the New York Times, The Believer, National Geographic Adventure, McSweeneys, and Best American Essays. He has won the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and fellowships from Macdowell Colony, Montello Foundation, Montana Arts Council and Utah Arts Council. A former river guide and Outward Bound instructor, he is an associate professor of environmental writing at the University of Montana.
Robin Patten
A freelance writer, naturalist, and teacher, Robin Patten has spent most of her life exploring and writing about the natural world. Her lyrical nonfiction weaves together ecology, environmental history, and personal narrative, often delving into the human relationship with nature and the environment. She received the John Burroughs Nature Essay Award for “The Carcass Chronicle,” and her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Georgia Review, and elsewhere. Her first book, The Mountain: Journeys in High Places, continues her exploration of people and place.