Kurt Caswell was born in Fairbanks, Alaska, and grew up in the Cascade Range in Oregon. He has worked as a teacher in Hokkaido, Japan, on the Navajo Reservation, and at schools in Arizona, California, and Wyoming.

 

He holds an MA in English from the Bread Loaf School of English at Middlebury College, and an MFA in literature and creative writing from Bennington College, where he was recipient of the Lucy Grealy Memorial Scholarship. He was a 2001 fellow at Fishtrap writers’ conference, and a 2007 fellow at the MacDowell Colony.

Caswell is the author of five books of nonfiction, most recently Iceland Summer: Travels Along the Ring Road. His other books are Laika's Window: The Legacy of a Soviet Space Dog; Getting to Grey Owl: Journeys on Four Continents; In the Sun's House, and An Inside Passage, for which he won the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize. He is co-editor with James Perrin Warren of Going to See: 30 Writers on Nature, Inspiration, and the World of Barry Lopez.

He has taught in the MFA program at Vermont College of Fine Arts, and is professor of creative writing and literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University.