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, as well as a book of essay between Pam and environmental activist Amy Irvine, called Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics and Place. Her 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. Her forthcoming book, Without Exception: Reclaiming Abortion, Personhood and Freedom, will be published in September 2024.

PRAISE FOR without exception: reclaiming abortion, personhood, and freedom

Forthcoming from Torrey House Press September 3, 2024

“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