Roger James Dunsmore's Page

I came to the University of Montana, Missoula, as a freshman composition instructor in 1963, and continued on in the UM Humanities Program for the next 40 years. I taught my first course in American Indian Literature—"Indian Autobiographies"—in 1969, and I received an MFA in Creative Writing (poetry) under the guidance of Richard Hugo and Madeline DeFreese in 1971. That same year I helped found the Round River Experiment in Environmental Education, and my first volume of poetry—On the Road to Sleeping Child Hotsprings—was published.

From 1976-2003 I taught in the Wilderness and Civilization Program of the Wilderness Institute in the Forestry School at UM. In 1983 and again in 1987 I received NEH summer fellowships to study American Indian Literature. During 1988-89 I was the Arizona Humanities Council’s Scholar in Residence at the largest Indian high school in the U.S., on the Navajo Nation. In 1991 and again in 1997 I was the Exchange Fellow between UM and Shanghai International Studies University in mainland China. Also in 1997 my collection of essays, EARTH'S MIND: ESSAYS IN NATIVE LITERATURE, was published by the University of New Mexico Press. In 2001 a selection of poems from my collection TIGER HILL won a Montana Arts Council Fellowship. That same year I guided the 22nd Annual Wilderness Lecture Series, “The Poetics of Wilderness,” the Proceeding of which was published by UM in 2002. In 2005, after two years of retirement, I resumed full-time teaching in the English Department at UM Western in Dillon, Montana.

In 2006 I worked as one of nine editors under the leadership of Lowell Jaeger compiling Poets Across the Big Sky, an anthology of Montana poetry. Roger Dunsmore: GREATEST HITS, 1969-2006 was published by Pudding House in 2007. My essay on four Montana poets and my own poems have appeared recently in Drumlummon Views, the on-line journal of the Drumlummon Institute in Helena. I have been short-listed twice to the governor for the position of Montana Poet Laureate, and my fifth volume of poems, YOU'RE JUST DIRT, was published in 2010 as the first volume in FootHills Publishing's Montana Poets series.

I am married to the poet, painter, and Yoga teacher, Jenni Fallein, and between us we have five children.