Nick Hershenow

I'm the author of two novels: "Groundtruth (2026) and "The Road Builder" (2001 Blue Hen/Penguin Putnam), which won the Western States Book Award for Fiction in 2002. Robert Olen Butler's description of that book – “a novel that seamlessly and artfully blends a beautifully nuanced, character-driven story with a story of epic scope, one that resonates into the largest issues of our world” – could easily be applied to "Groundtruth".

I now live with my wife in the Methow Valley, Washington state, where I write, wander the nearby hills, mountains, and rivers, and work part-time as a preschool teacher/outdoor educator. But for twenty years very different jobs took me flying, driving, riding, walking, and bushwalking into urban mazes, rural backwaters, and the front and back country of Latin America and the Intermountain West. My family and I lived on a large Honduran orphanage, where I had a job similar to my character Chele’s in "Groundtruth", traveling deep into country and city, reuniting children with their families. Like Chele, I was chaperone, chauffeur, bodyguard, observer. Later, my wife and I worked for an Ecuadorian NGO as itinerant health educators and puppeteers in poor rural communities in the outback of southern Ecuador. And for about fifteen years I worked for the U.S. Forest Service as a wide-ranging field tech in the mountains of central Idaho, where I learned much about wildfire and fire ecology, rivers, sheepherders, back country ranchers, pilots, horse packers, miners, and solitary canyon dwellers.

None of those real people or places are depicted in "Groundtruth". But they provided the spark and insight for the characters and settings that took shape in my imagination and then on the pages of the book.