ELLIS, Reuben 1955-

PERSONAL: Born April 19, 1955, in Oceanside, CA; son of Joseph (a nursery employee) and Ione (a schoolteacher) Ellis; married Brenna Ryan, August 13, 1977 (divorced, 2000); married Linda Dove, May 21, 2001; children: Isaac, Daniel. Education: Western State College of Colorado, B.A., 1977; University of Idaho, M.A., 1985; University of Colorado—Boulder, Ph.D. (English), 1990. Hobbies and other interests: Mountaineering, archaeology.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Prescott College, 301 Grove Ave., Prescott, AZ 86301. E-mail—rellis@prescott. edu.

CAREER: Teikyo Lorretto Heights University, Denver, CO, assistant professor of English, 1991-94; Hope College, Holland, MI, associate professor of English, 1994-99; Prescott College, Prescott, AZ, associate professor of English, 1999—.

MEMBER: Modern Language Association of America, American Society for Aesthetics, Western Literature Association, Mary Hunter Austin Society.

WRITINGS:

Beyond Borders, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1996.

Stories and Stone, Pruett Publishing, 1997.

Vertical Margins, University of Wisconsin Press (Madison, WI), 2001.

WORK IN PROGRESS: Dangerous Man, a novel; Word Ruins: Representing Prehistory in Southwestern American Literature.

SIDELIGHTS: Reuben Ellis told CA: "My primary interest is how humans interact with the natural world, responding to it, adapting to it, and often riding rough shod over it, constructing it within the framework of their own limited cultural contexts.

"The American Southwest provides a remarkable laboratory for trying to understand all this, and my scholarly work with the writing of Mary Hunter Austin, one of the twentieth century's first important western regionalist thinkers, is designed to suggest frameworks for how we might use literature to better understand our relationship with place. Similarly, my work with literary representations of prehistoric cultures and archaeological sites in the Southwest undertakes to ask how our understanding of the past in relationship to specific natural environments might help us make better choices for the future.

"My interest in mountaineering literature comes from my love of the wilderness, particularly mountain places, and my instinct that mountaineering, like virtually all cultural practices, is bound up in a complex network of political and ideological forces that make what most of us think of as a 'sport' in fact a much richer and more complicated experience that actually speaks to how we impact the natural world and interact with other peoples on a global scale."