Rick Newby

Poet, editor, and arts writer Rick Newby is the author of four collections of poems, A Radiant Map of the World (recipient of the Montana Arts Council’s 1981 First Book Award); Old Friends Walking in the Mountains; The Suburb of Long Suffering; and Sketches Begun in My Studio on a Sunday Afternoon and Completed the Following Day Near the Noon Hour on the Lower Slopes of the Rocky Mountains.

Rick is the editor or co-editor of the anthologies Writing Montana: Literature Under the Big Sky; An Ornery Bunch: Tales and Anecdotes Collected by the W.P.A. Montana Writers’ Project; and The New Montana Story as well as of Food of Gods and Starvelings: The Selected Poems of Grace Stone Coates; Notes for a Novel: The Selected Poems of Frieda Fligelman; and Roger Dunsmore’s On the Chinese Wall: New & Selected Poems, 1966–2018.

He also writes regularly about modern and contemporary art, and his essays on ceramic artists, painters, sculptors, and photographers have appeared in national and international journals and in numerous exhibition catalogs. Rick’s most recent book on a visual artist is the monograph Theodore Waddell—My Montana: Paintings & Sculpture, 1959–2016, which received the 2018 High Plains Book Award in the Art/Photography category.

A past member of the Montana Arts Council and the Board of Directors of the Montana Center for the Book, from 2006–2017 Rick served as the executive director of Drumlummon Institute and the online arts journal Drumlummon Views. In 2009, Rick received the Montana Governor’s Award for the Humanities, and in 2016, he received the Montana Governor’s Award for the Arts.

He makes his home in Helena, Montana, with his wife Liz Gans.