Holdsworth, Kevin

1960 -

Green River, WY 82935
Email address
www.upcolorado.com
Sweetwater County

Biographical and Professional Information

In Big Wonderful: Notes from Wyoming (U. P. Colorado, 2006) Kevin Holdsworth writes of passing through wide-open Rock Springs in the early 1980s, during the last energy boom, and swearing he would never live in such a god-forsaken place. Nearly twenty years later, he finds himself living in nearby Green River and making his own roots in Wyoming. Holdsworth’s route to a home in Wyoming was circuitous and included a way station in New York City where he found himself writing genre westerns and dreaming of the mountains he’d skied and climbed in his youth. Holdsworth’s position as an insider/outsider informs much of Big Wonderful. He describes the ill-fated 1856 handcart trek of his great-great grandmother, Emma Girdlestone, and illuminates the recent controversy at Martin’s Cove. He also takes a hard look the current drill-o-rama on BLM land in Wyoming, its social costs, and the environmental threats to his beloved Wind River Mountains. Kevin Holdsworth’s work has appeared in numerous journals, including Creative Nonfiction, South Dakota Review and Denver University Law Review. He is currently at work on a book about his twenty years of part-time residence in Torrey, Utah.