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The Literary Awards

2025 Frank Waters Award Winner - Peter Heller

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The 2025 Frank Waters Award Winner is Peter Heller.  He is the national best-selling author of The Last Ranger (August 2023), a vibrant, lyrical mystery set in Yellowstone National Park where a skirmish between a local hunter and a wolf biologist turns violent, and a park ranger, adrift in his own life, becomes obsessed with discovering the truth. His previous linked novels, The River and The Guide, follow the story of two college students on a wilderness canoe trip–a gripping tale of a friendship tested by fire, white water, and violence – and then returns to Jack in The Guide, who is hired by an elite fishing lodge in Colorado, where he uncovers a plot of shocking menace amid the natural beauty of sun-drenched streams and forests. Heller has also written the novels Celine, The Painter, and The Dog Stars. The Painter was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the prestigious Reading the West Book Award, shared in the past by Western writers such as Cormac McCarthy and Terry Tempest Williams, and The Dog Stars, which was published to critical acclaim and lauded as a breakout bestseller, has been published in twenty-six languages to date.

Heller is also the author of four nonfiction books, including Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, which was awarded the National Outdoor Book Award for Literature, Hell or High Water: Surviving Tibet’s Tsango River, and The Whale Warriors: The Battle at the Bottom of the World to Save the Planet’s Largest Mammal. An award-winning adventure writer and a longtime contributor to NPR, Heller has been a contributing editor at Outside magazine, Men’s Journal, and National Geographic Adventure, and a regular contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek. He holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in poetry and fiction.
 

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2025 Golden Quill Award Winners - P.J. and Patrick Anderson 

The Golden Quill award recipient for 2025 is “Cheyenne Mountain: Here’s Looking at You. by P.J. Anderson and Patrick Anderson. The history of Cheyenne Mountain, named for the indigenous people of the region, is often overshadowed by Pikes Peak. Published in both softcover and hardcover collector’s edition, this well-researched work covers the history of Cheyenne Mountain, spanning an era beginning with its geologic period through its recent cultural history, including highlighted information from the Pike, Long, and Fremont expeditions to the foot of the mountain in the early 1800s. It includes the mythological stories of other indigenous peoples that populated this area through millennia. Stories also include the homesteaders, trail makers, fires on the mountain, and airplane crashes.

 

P. J. Anderson was born and raised in Muscatine, Iowa. He graduated from Colorado College in 1968, earned a Master’s Degree in Economics from Colorado State College in 1970 and a Juris Doctoral Degree from Washburn University in 1974. He served as Planning Director and County Administrator for El Paso County in the late 1970's. He then opened a law practice in Colorado Springs specializing in land use and local government and served as municipal attorney for three cities in El Paso and Teller Counties. He has volunteered his time to numerous citizen boards including serving six years on the City of Colorado Springs Trails, Open Space and Parks Program (TOPS) and chairing the County's Road Impact Fee Program Advisory Committee for eight years. He plays competitive tennis, enjoying sectional and national rankings in the senior divisions and splits the year with his wife Lynette between Arizona and Colorado.

 

Patrick Justus Anderson was born and raised in Colorado Springs, graduating from Manitou Springs High School in 2003. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts Degree in 2007 from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an Emphasis in Writing and earned a Juris Doctor Degree from Georgia State University College of Law in 2017, graduating as a member of its Order of the Coif honor society. Patrick works for an environmental law firm specializing in federal and state air quality issues. He currently lives in Atlanta with his wife Elizabeth and son Parker.

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