Pam Houston

Pam Houston (born January 9, 1962, Trenton, New Jersey) is an American author of short stories, novels and essays. She is best known for her first book, Cowboys Are My Weakness (1992), which has been translated into nine languages, and which won the 1993 Western States Book Award. Also, "Cowboys Are My Weakness" was named a New York Times Notable Book in 1992.
Houston's stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, The O. Henry Awards, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She is a winner of the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, and The Evil Companions Literary Award, and multiple teaching awards.
Major themes in Houston's work include relationships between men and women, the outdoors, animals and childhood trauma.

Houston was born in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to an actress and a businessman. She attended Denison University in Ohio, graduating in 1983 with a BA in English. She held several odd jobs before entering a graduate program at the University of Utah. She is currently the Director of Creative Writing at U.C. Davis, and teaches in the Pacific University low residency MFA program, and at writer’s conferences around the world. Houston currently lives on a ranch at 9,000' above sea level in Colorado, near the headwaters of the Rio Grande River.

• "Contents May Have Shifted: A Novel". Hardcover: 320 pages, Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1 edition (February 6, 2012), ISBN 0393082652, ISBN 978-0393082654
• "Sight Hound: A Novel". Paperback: 352 pages, Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; Reprint edition (January 17, 2006), ISBN 978-0393058178
• "A Little More About Me". Paperback: 304 pages, Publisher: Washington Square Press (October 1, 2000), ISBN 978-0743406338
• "Waltzing the Cat". Paperback: 288 pages, Publisher: Washington Square Press; First Edition (September 1, 1999), ISBN 978-0671026370
• "Cowboys Are My Weakness". Paperback: 171 pages, Publisher: Washington Square Press (February 1, 1993), ISBN 978-0671793883

• Cheuse, Alan. "Book Review: 'Contents May Have Shifted'." All Things Considered 13 Feb. 2012. Literature Resource Center. Web. 9 Jan. 2014. Gale Document Number: GALE|A281923875
• ^ WorldCat author page. January 9, 2013

B.A. (Denison University, Granville, Ohio) 1983; M.A., University of Utah, 1992; Creative writing (fiction, nonfiction and plays), modernism, contemporary fiction, the short story, wilderness literature