Judy Blunt | |
---|---|
Born | 1954 (age 69–70) Phillips County, Montana, USA [1] |
Occupation | university professor [2] non-fiction author |
Education | M.F.A. from University of Montana [2] |
Genre | memoir, essay |
Notable awards | Whiting Award (2001) [3] PEN/Jerard Fund Award for work in progress (1997) [4] |
Children | three |
Judy Blunt (born 1954) is an American writer from Montana. Her most notable work to date is Breaking Clean , a collection of linked essays exploring her rural upbringing.
Blunt was raised on a cattle ranch in a remote area of Phillips County, Montana, [1] near Regina, south of Malta, Montana. In 1986 she moved with her three small children to Missoula to attend the University of Montana. [5]
She later turned the tales of her ranch life into her memoir, Breaking Clean (Knopf 2002), which won a Whiting Award, the PEN/Jerard Fund Award, [5] Mountains and Plains Nonfiction Book Award, and Willa Cather Literary Award, and was one of The New York Times' Notable Books. [2] She received a Jacob K. Javits Graduate Fellowship and a Montana Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. [6] In 2004 she received a National Endowment for the Arts writer's fellowship, and in 2006 she was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship in Nonfiction. Her essays and poems have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, Big Sky Journal and Oprah Magazine. [2]
Blunt received her M.F.A. from the University of Montana in 1994. [2] She currently resides in Missoula, where she is a retired Professor and director of Creative Writing at the University of Montana. [2]
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Breaking Clean is a memoir by Judy Blunt, published in 2002, after a decade in the writing. The book is about Blunt's life in the countryside of eastern Montana, in the United States. In the book the author describes her childhood, and how growing up on a ranch conditioned her whole life.
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