Shelley Armitage

I grew up in the small ranching and farming community of Vega, Texas, in Oldham County in the northwest Texas Panhandle. I still own and operate a family farm inherited from my parents. My dad purchased the 1200 acres of native grass, wheat and milo farmland bordering Highway Interstate 40 on the south and the Canadian River Breaks on the north in l929, when part of it had temporarily been converted to a golf course with sand greens. It was originally part of the XIT ranch. This landscape I shared from childhood on, riding with my dad and granddad to check crops and cattle and later jogging and now walking the farm roads.

Though most of my adult life has been spent away from the Panhandle as a university professor in Texas, New Mexico, and Hawai'i, I always return to "the farm"--particularly in the summers--which offered until recently a 360 degree view of earth and sky. Observing the natural world and its changes remain a centering and care-giving activity, following my dad's legacy.

Growing up in small-town Texas you can be a basketball player one night and a candidate for Miss Oldham County the next, giving you a chance to try your hand at lots of things. One of my dearest memories is of our band director who personally taught everyone in the band how to play an instrument. English teachers submitted our names to national contests; math teachers taught us how to read the stock market and use the slide rule in junior high. But running a farm later in life was not one I expected.

Today the landscape surrounding Armitage Farms is sometimes almost overwhelmed by the massive wind turbines, soaring microwave towers, constant oil pumping rigs, and persistent sand and gravel pits. Restoration and conservation of land seems even more than ever a necessity. The farm today is in a conservation program returning it to grass designed to restore fragmented habitat for the benefit of wildlife and long-term health of the land. "Writing Llano," as I call it is also an act of restoration by connecting one's place through story and memory.

My professional life has offered me a more philosophical connection with landscape through studies of photography, environmental literature, cultural and place studies. Choosing to live and work in diverse places--Fulbright grants in Portugal, Poland, Finland, and Hungary, teaching positions in the Southwest and Hawai'i, other grants in New York, D.C., Oregon, Illinois, Missouri, and Connecticut--place has taken on special meanings and promoted fresh curiosities. As author of eight award-winning books and fifty articles and essays, I've held Fulbright Chairs in Warsaw and Budapest, a Distinguished Senior Professorship in Cincinnati, and the Dorrance Roderick Professorship at the University of Texas at El Paso where I am an emerita professor, as well as three National Endowment for the Humanities grants, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Rockefeller grant.

Most recently Walking the Llano was named to Kirkus Reviews Best Books of 2016 and was a finalist for the Sarton award, the Arizona/New Mexico book awards, and received a five star award with Foreword Reviews.