William A. Douglass - 2012 Nevada Writers Hall of Fame Inductee

William A. Douglass (BA, Spanish, '61) was born and raised in Reno, Nevada. After receiving his BA from the University of Nevada and his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of Chicago, in 1967 he founded the Basque Studies Program (now the Center for Basque Studies) at the University of Nevada.

Douglass served as the Coordinator for the Center of Basque Studies for over 33 years, building the largest Basque library in the Western Hemisphere and becoming one of the world's leading experts in Basque Studies. He also edited the Basque Book Series (about 50 titles in print) of the University of Nevada Press. Douglass's publication list is lengthy and includes his major book Amerikanuak: Basques in the New World (1975, with Jon Bilboa), as well as the oral histories Beltran, Basque Sheepman of the American West (1979) and Tap Dancing on Ice: The Life and Times of a Nevadan Gaming Pioneer (1996) about his father, one of the founding partners of Reno's Club Cal Neva and the Comstock Hotel-Casino. His book, Casting About in the Reel World: Fishing on the Fly (2002), is a collection of fishing stories from the bonefishing flats of the Pacific nuclear-testing ground of Bikini Atoll, to the tiamen rivers of Outer Mongolia.

Elizabeth Raymond - 2012 Silver Pen Recipient

Elizabeth Raymond is a cultural historian of place, who teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in U. S. history at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and include American landscape and sense of place, American regionalism, and American women's history.

She is the author or editor of three books: George Wingfield: Owner and Operator of Nevada (1992); with Peter Goin, Stopping Time: A Rephotographic Survey of Lake Tahoe (1992); and with co-editor Ronald James, Comstock Women: The Making of a Mining Community (1997). Her most recent book, Changing Mines in America (2004), is an interdisciplinary study—with landscape photographer Peter Goin–of the physical and cultural legacies of mining in the U.S. Currently the two are collaborating on a study of photographer Arthur Rothstein's 1940 images of Nevada.

Claire Vaye Watkins - 2012 Silver Pen Recipient

Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984. She was raised in the Mojave Desert, first in Tecopa, California and then across the state line in Pahrump, Nevada.

Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011: New Stories From the Wide Side of the Missouri, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. She teaches creative writing at Bucknell University and the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference and is the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a non-profit creative writing camp for rural Nevadans. Her collection of short stories, Battleborn, was released by Riverhead Books on August 2, 2012.

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