Photo by Mike Blakeman
Pam Houston is the author of the memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope In The High Country, as well as two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me, a book of essays between Pam and environmental activist Amy Irvine, called Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics and Place as well as Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom. Her forthcoming book of essays, Animals Taught Me Everything, will be published October 2026.
Houston’s stories have been selected for volumes of The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Travel Writing, and Best American Short Stories of the Century among other anthologies. She is the winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA Award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award and several teaching awards. She teaches in the Low Rez MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is Professor of English at UC Davis, and co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers, which puts on between seven and ten writers gatherings per year in places as diverse as Boulder, Colorado, Tomales Bay, California and Chamonix, France.
Pam’s passions include Icelandic Horses (especially the ones who live in Iceland, where she goes as often as possible,) Irish Wolfhounds, travel, mentoring and teaching, particularly teaching writing about the more than the human world. She lives on a homestead at 9,000 feet near the headwaters of the Rio Grande in Colorado with her husband Mike and two dogs, a quarter horse, a miniature donkey, four Icelandic ewes, four hens and a rooster.
PRAISE FOR animals taught me everything
“Animals Taught Me Everything is a gift to readers, especially those scalded by world events. The radical generosity of Houston’s heart and spirit worked on me like the strongest medicine. This is a book I desperately needed—I am grateful it fell into my hands!”
—MONA SUSAN POWER, A Council of Dolls
“Pam Houston’s words fly across the page in this rich essay collection, echoing the strength and grace of the Icelandic horses that are among her most beloved teachers.”
—ANNETTE MCGIVNEY, Plastic Shaman
“Beauty, dignity, and grace are abundant in Animals Taught Me Everything. In Houston’s companionable prose, the wisdom of the animal world proves itself heroic and indispensable in the face of our present darkness, showing us, with pain and pleasure and everything in between, a way forward.”
—KATIE PETERSON, Fog and Smoke
“Houston has spent a lifetime paying attention to the animals who share her life and the land beneath their feet. In Animals Taught Me Everything, she reminds us that horses, dogs, sheep, and the wild beings who live alongside us are not scenery, but teachers. These essays honor the kinship, endurance, and fierce love that binds a life together.”—CMARIE FUHRMAN, Salmon Weather
“Once again Houston shows us how to love the world with everything we have. By page fifteen I was openly weeping over the honest beauty of Animals Taught Me Everything and didn’t really stop until the last page was turned. We are all so lucky to have Houston—a writer who so fearlessly shows us the way through.”
—CHARLIE J. STEPHENS, A Wounded Deer Leaps Highest
“Animals Taught Me Everything is bound to become a classic in the literature of the natural world, alongside Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces and Barry Lopez’s Of Wolves and Men. It’s a glorious, necessary manifesto for living a more awake and grateful life on Earth. Read these pages, and you’ll understand how the world still sings—if only we’re willing to listen.”
—SAMANTHA DUNN, Not By Accident
“Houston has that special ability to put into words what we may have thought but have not fully distilled: how we recognize and coexist with all animals wild or tame.”
—TODD D. MILLER, Arcadia Books
“From her ranch in Creede, to Iceland and the African savanna, Houston introduces the animals that shaped her life in this beautiful, surprising book. Her prose is as varied as her subjects, blending originality with deep feeling. With wisdom and clarity, Houston shows us how to become better people by learning from the creatures around us.”
—ARSEN KASHKASHIAN, Boulder Bookstore
“These essays feel alive—running, jumping, rolling, flying. Early on, when Houston describes what animals have taught her, it reads like everything you wish you’d learned sooner about living well and freely. Each reflection lingers, settling into body and heart, mind and soul. The contrast of sweetness and violence, abundance and loss, is powerful. It’s a wild ride you’ll be glad you took.”
—JEAN DEVINE, Garcia Street Books
“This collection is both heartening and heartbreaking. Houston’s voice is candid and unwavering as she shares rich stories about her lifelong connection to animals, and we are better for taking the journey with her.”
—KIM BISSELL, Broadway Books
“Using resplendent prose, Houston explores why we love animals and shows how listening to them helps us understand ourselves. Animals Taught Me Everything moves from Houston’s home in the Rocky Mountains to the horse trails of Iceland, offering hard-won truths about climate, COVID-19, and capitalism. This book is for anyone whose heart aches for the world, assuring them they are not alone.”
—ARVIN RAMGOOLAM, Townie Books
PRAISE FOR without exception: reclaiming abortion, personhood, and freedom
Torrey House Press
“Finally a full-throated, unapologetic anthem bringing reproductive rights into galactic song. Forget bombs bursting in air and celebrate a woman warrior who has fought for her own voice and agency her whole life, and whose work has thus forged open paths for those who are on their way. I've been reading and writing alongside Pam Houston my entire adult life. Every time I felt puny or exhausted, Pam slipped me a lifeline by reminding me we're here to do good work, and when we fail, we're here to get the hell up and try again. Her writing is vivid and clear and filled with wisdom, and that wisdom changes over the years, as it should, as her aims have moved more and more into the world, into shared experience, into an ethos of love and creativity in the face of death and destruction. When trouble comes, and it always does, there is no one I'd rather stand alongside, shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, into the revolution, as many times as it takes. Without Exception is a body story from the inside out told with eloquence, immediacy, rage, and courage. Dear patriarchy: your cultural incarceration didn't work. Pam Houston is staging a breakout.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, Chronology of Water, Thrust, Book of Joan
“Everyone knows what an important writer Pam Houston is; she has for decades taken as her subjects our most important and existential crises. Now, in Without Exception, Houston’s written a remarkable, lasting book about empire’s project of ensuring women find themselves “without resources and too overwhelmed to fight.” Charlie Parker famously quipped, “if you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn,” and that’s what I always think of when I read Houston. There is a demotic unpretentiousness, an irreducible clarity that can only come with having walked the walk, spent years doing the kind of quiet behind-the-scenes lifework that matures the spirit and affords certain rare writers a lucid integrity towards which all others must merely pretend. This to say, Houston isn’t merely an important writer, she’s also just really fucking good at writing. And risky too, formally and in her content. Houston says ugly true things she doesn’t need to say, things no one would fault her for leaving out, because she knows there’s a reader somewhere who will find the world more hospitable for having read them. To me, that's rigor. That’s love.”
—Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
“We forget that books and art have shaped and changed the course of history. Uncle Tom’s Cabin springs to mind, of course, or Cezanne presaging Einstein’s understanding of the relativity of everything, or Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time showing us how the revolution could be accomplished through love. Without Exception is such a book, arriving precisely at the moment when we need to hear the message that Pam has dedicated her brave life to crafting. Lincoln wrote that if this nation and its ideals were to fail, that would come about not through foreign invasion but through self-destruction. Without Exception, and the activism I hope it inspires, may save us from that fate, by showing us the challenging but more rewarding path forward.”
—Fenton Johnson, Scissors, Paper, Rock
"Without Exception is a miracle, a revelation, a revolution on the page. Pam Houston is writing about the patriarchal assault on female autonomy and the natural world, but she is also weaving a collective memoir, one that ricochets from personal to political cruelty, from trauma to transcendence, from natural wonder to ecological doom. She is telling the stories here that every woman, and girl, and citizen of the earth, needs to hear. A ruthless, tender, urgent dispatch that travels to heart of our struggle as a species. It will leave you transformed, inspired, braver than you were before.”
—Steve Almond, All the Secrets of the World and Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow
"Pam Houston writes about difficult and beautiful things with a kind of precision and lyricism that few writers can achieve. She has written an important book, a powerful book, one that challenges the way we think about choices and compassion and resilience. Pam Houston continues to amaze me! She is one of our best writers working today."
—Brandon Hobson, The Removed
“As Pam Houston writes, one in three American women will have an abortion by the age of 45. Without Exception is the unflinchingly honest story of one.Without Exception retells more than 50 years of a personal and collective push for a woman to be able to claim her body and her choices as her own. I thank Pam Houston for this timely and timeless book.”
—Camille T. Dungy, Soil: The Story of a Black Mother's Garden
“In Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood, and Freedom, Pam Houston has given us among the most urgent texts of our time, not only for fertile people in the United States but for everyone who understands that full humanity is inextricable from bodily autonomy, of which the right to abortion is but one profoundly important expression. With rage, heartbreak, fear, grief, and an absolutely bottomless love of the natural world and belief in the generations behind us, Houston lays bare what it really means to be free, cutting through political doublespeak that upholds patriarchy and white supremacy, forging connections between abuses against vulnerable bodies and the annihilation of our planet, yet somehow never failing to leave room for the radical, wild joy of what is possible when we refuse to be silenced.”
—Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down: A Story of Family, Feminism, and Treason
“Houston has written a deeply personal, taboo-busting collection of micro-essays illustrating the hypocrisies and shell game of abortion. Houston argues that abortion is a basic health right, motherhood is a choice, and we need to fight like hell for the freedom to make these decisions.” —Julie Buckles, owner of Honest Dog Books
Listen to Pam in conversation with Brian Koppelman on “The Moment” podcast
Listen to Pam in conversation with Bobby Bascomb on “Living On Earth.”
Read the transcript of Pam and Bobby’s conversation here.
PRAISE FOR DEEP CREEK: FINDING HOPE IN THE HIGH COUNTRY
“…good writing can make you envious, no matter how foreign the terrain. Other times, you read a good memoir and find yourself wanting to track down the author and become friends. A third kind of book is so insightful and evocative, you shelve it beside other favorite and instructive titles. “Deep Creek” might just do all three.”
-Nathan Deuel for the L.A. Times
“Pam Houston is in possession of a deep, heart-achingly beautiful love for her own personal piece of earth. And as equally deep is her ability for hope. In a time where the world is either drowning, or burning, or being drilled-into, Houston’s outlook promises a better tomorrow – even if that means we’re no longer here.”
-Sara Cutaia for the Chicago Review of Books
“If Cowboys Are My Weakness was Pam Houston’s call to millions of women—blasting us with self-recognition of how we give away our own power—then her new book is the response to that call.”
-Amy Reardon for The Rumpus
“A profound and inspiring love letter to one piece of Earth—and to the rest of it, as well.” – Kirkus, Starred Review
“Highly recommended as a memoir that combines nature, writing, and personal reflection.”—Library Journal, Starred Review
“Houston’s vision finds a solid place among the chronicles of quiet appreciation of the American wilderness, without the misanthropy that often accompanies the genre; her passion for the land and its inhabitants is irresistibly contagious.”– Publishers Weekly Starred Review
“Houston firmly establishes herself as a key voice from the rural West… her talent remains remarkable and her words extraordinarily affecting and effective.”–Booklist, Starred Review