Jerry Wilson

In Jerry Wilson’s new novel, Eden to Orizaba, two journeys intersect at an immigration checkpoint north of the US-Mexico border in February 2009. Desperate to provide for his family and his young wife Maria, Pablo has fled the valley of his birth at the foot of Orizaba, Mexico’s highest peak, a valley ravaged by a million corporate hogs and the swine flu epidemic they have brought. Lantry crosses south, dodging the wreckage of his life in Dallas and the alcoholism that has destroyed his marriage and his journalist job. Pablo gets two years in prison in Eden, Texas. Lantry’s stumbling quest takes him to Mexico City, and eventually to Orizaba, where after a harrowing night on the mountain, he finds and falls in love with Pablo’s wife. The two men’s paths will cross again ten months later—after Pablo’s daring escape from Eden and his return to Orizaba. Eden to Orizaba is a love story set against the devastation of Mexican families and communities by poorly-regulated, NAFTA-facilitated agribusiness and industry that drives desperate workers north. (More at jerrywilson.us)

Jerry lives with his poet wife, Norma, on Prairie Bluff, 150 acres of woods and restored prairie in southeast South Dakota. He taught literature and writing at several colleges and universities, then served as managing editor of South Dakota Magazine. He now devotes himself to books that explore the natural world and to fiction that reimagines history and contemporary life. His 2018 book Seasons of the Coyote spans one calendar year, 103 encounters routine and extraordinary in the natural realm of which he is part.

Jerry was born west of the Cimarron River in Oklahoma, near the homesteads two of his great grandfathers claimed in the 1892 Land Run into Cheyenne Arapaho country. Jerry’s family worked a small marginal farm in a neighborhood of hard-up blacks and whites. In 1957 he witnessed the great Cimarron River flood that took his settler grandparents’ lives. From those experiences, from his ancestors’ stories and from historical research grew his 2016 novel Across the Cimarron.

Having lived most of his life near the Pan American Highway, US Highway 81, Jerry drove 5,000 miles south from Winnipeg, Canada, to the Darien Gap in Panama, stopping in every city and town and listening to whomever he met. The socio-historical travel book that emerged he called American Artery: A Pan American Journey.

As a young man Jerry worked as a farmhand, handyman, gas station attendant, oil field flunkey, carpenter and preacher, and served two Vietnam-era years in the US Army. From those years evolved his collection of short stories, Blackjacks and Blue Devils.

Thirty-five years ago, Jerry and his wife Norma built the geo-solar house where they still live on the Missouri River bluff in South Dakota, raised two kids and restored native prairie. His Eco-memoir Waiting for Coyote’s Call shares a quarter century of working with and learning from nature in the bluff’s prairies and woods.