David Stevenson

About David Stevenson –

David Stevenson is the author of five books, including a fiction collection, Letters from Chamonix, winner the Banff Mountain Book Award for Fiction and Poetry in 2014 and, most recently Points of Astonishment: Alpine Stories (DreamStreet Press, 2022). His writing has received many awards, including the Boulevard Award for Emerging Writers, the Montana Prize for Fiction, The Contributions to Literacy in Alaska Award, and the H. Adams Carter Award for Literary Excellence by the American Alpine Club. His nonfiction essays have been noted twice in the Best American Essays series. He holds a PhD from the University of Utah and worked as the director of the Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at the University of Alaska Anchorage from 2008–2022. Since 1995 he has served as the book reviews editor for the American Alpine Journal. He and his wife live on the central coast of Oregon.

“This [the essay “Securing the Shadows”] is a powerful, exact, and beautifully written article that explores the relationship between photograph, subject, and observer in a series of images of climbers who have died in the mountains. Its spare prose and flattened affect at first recall art criticism, or even the forensics of an autopsy, but this is not the whole story: it soon modulates into something questing, passionate and deeply personal which will remain in the mind of the reader. In short compass this is an extraordinary literary achievement.”––Tony Whittome, 2023 Banff Book Competition Jury