| An Arizona author and native, a fifth-generation Westerner, and great-granddaughter of wagon-train pioneers, Donna Ashworth received her degrees in history and literature from Arizona State University. After fifteen years of teaching high school English and Humanities, during which time she built, with her own hands, a house of stone in the desert north of Phoenix, she resigned from public schools to become a seasonal fire lookout on the Coconino National Forest. In the quarter century she spent on mountain tops, she wrote The Small Mountain Quartet. In 2005 she represented fire lookouts in Washington, D.C., when the Smithsonian Institution offered 100 years of Forest Service culture as part of its 39th annual Folklife Festival on the National Mall. |
