Margaret Coel Visits Library

“Wife of Moon” author, Margaret Coel will present a program on Thursday, April 15 at 6:30 p.m. at the library. Coel is the New York Times best-selling author of the acclaimed Wind River mystery series set among the Arapahos on Wyoming’s Wind River Reservation and featuring Jesuit priest Father John O’Malley and Arapaho attorney Vicky Holden.

Margaret Coel is a native Coloradan who hails from a pioneer Colorado family. The West, the mountains, plains, and vast spaces, are in her bones, she says. She moved out of Colorado on two occasions – to attend Marquette University and to spend a couple of years in Alaska. Both times she couldn’t wait to get back.

Along with the Wind River mystery series, Margaret Coel is the author of five non-fiction books, including the award-winning Chief Left Hand, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. This biography of an Arapaho chief and history of the Arapahos in Colorado has never gone out of print.

Coel’s novels have been on the bestseller lists of numerous newspapers, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News. The Spirit Woman won both the Colorado Book Award and the Willa Cather Award for Best Novel of the West. It was also a finalist for the Western Writers of America prestigious Spur Award for Best Novel. The Shadow Dancer was also a winner of the Colorado Book Award.

Speaking engagements on the people and places she loves best have taken her around the country and as far away as Australia. Coel visits the Wind River Reservation every year, “just to catch up with my Arapaho friends.” She writes in a small study in her home on a hillside in Boulder. The window frames a view of the Rocky Mountains and the almost-always blue sky. A herd of deer are usually grazing just outside, and one summer a couple of years ago, a mountain lion made its home close by. “Every day,” she says, “I drink in the West.”

This program is funded by grants from the Niobrara Recreation District, the Wyoming Arts Council through funding from the Wyoming State Legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Niobrara County Library and the Niobrara County Library Foundation.