Roz Spafford grew up on a cattle ranch in northwestern Arizona, the landscape where several of her stories and her first novel, Telling Time, are set. Her second, Passion Play, is located in Berkeley and San Francisco in 1973 and in the present; like her first, it reflects on place, time and memory. She is currently working on a memoir about the early years on the ranch. A piece from it, “The Indian,” is included in the 2014 anthology, Manifest West: Different Roads.
Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous literary magazines. One of her stories from the southwest, “Drought,” won the 2010 David Nathan Meyerson Award from Southwest Review and was anthologized in Road to Nowhere and Other New Stories from the Southwest. Another, “The Season,” won the 2014 Obsidian Prize from the High Desert Journal.
Her first book of poems, Requiem, received the 2008 Gell Poetry Prize from Writers & Books in Rochester, New York.
Roz has been a writer, teacher and activist for a number of years, mostly near the central coast of California. She taught in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she also served as chair of Writing and provost of College Eight. She was coordinator of UCSC’s Journalism Program, and wrote book reviews and a column of media and cultural criticism—Mediations—for local and regional newspapers. Roz is currently writing and working as a writing instructor in Canada.