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The Southwestern United States, also known as the American Southwest or simply the Southwest, is a geographic and cultural region of the United States that includes Arizona and New Mexico, along with adjacent portions of California, Colorado, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah. The largest cities by metropolitan area are Phoenix, Las Vegas, El Paso, Albuquerque, and Tucson. Before 1848, in the historical region of Santa Fe de Nuevo México as well as parts of Alta California and Coahuila y Tejas, settlement was almost non-existent outside of Nuevo México's Pueblos and Spanish or Mexican municipalities. Much of the area had been a part of New Spain and Mexico until the United States acquired the area through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the smaller Gadsden Purchase in 1854.
The Western United States is the region comprising the westernmost U.S. states. As American settlement in the U.S. expanded westward, the meaning of the term the West changed. Before around 1800, the crest of the Appalachian Mountains was seen as the western frontier. The frontier moved westward and eventually the lands west of the Mississippi River were considered the West.
Ellen Meloy was an American nature writer.
Susan Wittig Albert, also known by the pen names Robin Paige and Carolyn Keene, is an American mystery writer from Vermilion County, Illinois, United States. Albert was an academic and the first female vice president of Southwest Texas State University before retiring to become a fulltime writer.
Alicia Gaspar de Alba is an American scholar, cultural critic, novelist, and poet whose works include historical novels and scholarly studies on Chicana/o art, culture and sexuality.
Vassar Miller was an American writer and poet. She served as Poet Laureate of Texas (1988-1989).
Ofelia Zepeda is a Tohono O'odham poet and intellectual. She is Regents' Professor of Tohono O'odham language and linguistics and Director of the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) at The University of Arizona. Zepeda is the editor for Sun Tracks, a series of books that focuses on the work of Native American artists and writers, published by the University of Arizona Press.
Ann Cummins is an American fiction writer. She was born in Durango, Colorado, and grew up in New Mexico. She is a graduate of writing programs at Johns Hopkins University and the University of Arizona. She is the author of a short story collection, Red Ant House (2003), and a novel, Yellowcake. Cummins lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, where she teaches creative writing at Northern Arizona University, and in Oakland, California, with her husband, the musician S. E. Willis.
Effie Anderson Smith, also known as Mrs. A.Y. Smith, was an early Arizona impressionist painter of desert landscapes, many of Cochise County and the Grand Canyon.
Elizabeth Woody is an American Navajo/Warm Springs/Wasco/Yakama artist, author, and educator. In March 2016, she was the first Native American to be named poet laureate of Oregon by Governor Kate Brown.
Melissa Pritchard is an American short story writer, novelist, essayist, and journalist.
Wendy Barker was an American poet. She was Poet-in-Residence and the Pearl LeWinn Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at San Antonio, where she taught since 1982.
Valerie Martínez is an American poet, writer, educator, arts administrator, consultant, and collaborative artist. She served as the poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico from 2008 to 2010.
Peter T. Wild was a poet, historian, and professor of English at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. Born in Northampton, Massachusetts, he grew up in and graduated from high school in Easthampton, Massachusetts. Wild worked as a rancher and firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service, and served as a lieutenant with the U.S. Army in Germany. Wild earned his M.F.A. in 1969 from the University of California, Irvine. He then began teaching for nearly 40 years and wrote over 2,000 poems; also, he edited or wrote some 80 fiction and non-fiction books, largely dealing with the American West. His 1973 volume of poetry, Cochise, a eulogy to the Chiricahua Apache Indians and their leader Cochise, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Dorothy Lonewolf Miller was a Blackfoot activist from Iowa. She was a union organizer, social worker and health care advocate, who participated in the Alcatraz occupation, providing support at the health clinic established on the island. She spent 40 years researching social issues and providing social services to Native Americans, children, prisoners, and mental health patients in California and was posthumously inducted into the California Social Work Hall of Distinction in 2004.
Clara Lee Tanner was an American anthropologist, editor and art historian. She is known for studies of the arts and crafts of American Indians of the Southwest.
Sarah Cortez is a Latina poet, teacher, editor, and essayist from Houston, Texas. She is also a law enforcement officer who first gained acclaim for her poetry collection, How to Undress a Cop.
Halka Chronic was a geologist who traveled and wrote books about the geology of the western United States. She studied the Grand Canyon, Walnut Canyon and then resided in Boulder, Colorado where she continued to study the Rocky Mountains.
Janice Jones Monk is an Australian-American feminist geographer and researcher in the South West United States, and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Arizona School of Geography, Development and Environment.
Emma Pérez is an American author and professor, known for her work in queer Chicana feminist studies.
