Faith A. Colburn

Faith A. Colburn is the author of two family memoirs, two novels, and a collection of short essays. Like Kirstin Hanna, she has focused on families and their resilience in the face of trauma.

Daughter of a big band canary Faith A. Colburn has unique insights into the backstage lives of the Big Band singers who worked without the support of anti-harrasment policies during some very hard times. Her other half, a World War II combat veteran and family farmer, provided some very different perspectives. With her grandmother, she walked the grasslands, smelling tiny onion blossoms so sweet they'll make your ears ring and watching pronuba moths fall like petals from the waxy, white blossoms of yucca--while her parents struggled to get the two halves together. As a public information officer for the state Game and Parks Commission, she canoed the Dismal, rode the Sandhills with dog trainers, cross country skied the Missouri bluffs, seined carp, fixed nets, picked trout eggs, and camped out along Bone Creek. She photographed wildlife, from Sandhill cranes to elk and, as a sixth-generation Nebraskan, knows the landscape that often appears as a character/catalyst in her work.

She earned a master's degrees in creative writing and another in journalism from the University of Nebraska. She has published two award-winning family memoirs. She received the Outstanding Work in Fiction Award during its 2009 student conference and several awards from the Nebraska Federation of Press Women. Her fiction has appeared in KINESIS and THE PLATE VALLEY REVIEW, and her poetry has been published in THE REYNOLDS REVIEW. While at the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission, she wrote numerous articles for NEBRASKAland magazine, including a Centennial history of game and fish management in Nebraska entitled SPORTSMAN'S SCRAPBOOK. She is the winner of the 2020 Nebraska Book Award for Fiction for her novel SEE WILLY SEE, and is a BookWorks featured author.