About Rick

Born in Kalispell, Montana, and educated at the University of Montana, Rick Newby is an award-winning poet, cultural journalist, independent scholar, and editor. Rick is the editor or co-editor of the anthologies Writing Montana: Literature Under the Big Sky (with Suzanne Hunger); An Ornery Bunch: Tales and Anecdotes Collected by the W.P.A. Montana Writers’ Project (with Megan Hiller, Alexandra Swaney, and Elaine Peterson); and The New Montana Story. He is also editor of Food of Gods and Starvelings: The Selected Poems of Grace Stone Coates (with Lee Rostad); Notes for a Novel: The Selected Poems of FriedaFligelman (with Alexandra Swaney); and Roger Dunsmore’s On the Chinese Wall: New & Selected Poems, 1966–2018.

In the field of western studies, Rick is the editor of On Flatwillow Creek: The Story of Montana’s N Bar Ranch by Linda Grosskopf; The Rocky Mountain Region, The Greenwood Encyclopedia of American Regional Cultures; A Most Desperate Situation: Frontier Adventures of a Young Scout, 1858–1864, by Walter Cooper (illustrations by Charles M. Russell); In Poetic Silence: The Floral Paintings of Joseph Henry Sharp, by Thomas Minckler; and The Whole Country was . . . “One Robe”: The Little Shell Tribe’s America, by Nicholas C. P. Vrooman.

Rick writes regularly about modern and contemporary art, and his essays on ceramic artists, painters, sculptors, and photographers have appeared in national and international journals and in numerous exhibition catalogs.

His contributions to the history of visual modernism in Montana include major essays in A Ceramic Continuum: Fifty Years of the Archie Bray Influence (Helena, MT, and Seattle, WA: Holter Museum of Art/University of Washington Press, 2001), and The Most Difficult Journey: The Poindexter Collections of American Modernist Painting (Billings, MT: Yellowstone Art Museum, 2002). He also contributed a monographic essay to Matter + Spirit: Stephen De Staebler (San Francisco: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco/University of California Press, 2012).

Rick’s most recent book on a visual artist is the monograph Theodore Waddell – My Montana: Paintings & Sculpture, 1959–2016, which received the High Plains Book Award, Art/Photography, 2018. In 2024, Drumlummon Institute published Rick’s selected essays, A Regionalism That Travels: Writings on (Mostly) Montana Arts, 1975-2022.

Rick’s books of poetry include A Radiant Map of the World (recipient of the Montana Arts Council’s 1981 First Book Award); The Man in the Green Loden Overcoat, with artist Jack Jasper (1983); Old Friends Walking in the Mountains, etchings by Doug Turman (1994); The Suburb of Long Suffering(2002); and Sketches Begun in My Studio on a Sunday Afternoon and Completed the Following Day Near the Noon Hour on the Lower Slopes of the Rocky Mountains (2008). As a poet, Rick has collaborated with printmakers, painters, sculptors, photographers, ceramic artists, videographers, performance artists, other poets, and jazz and classical musicians.

A past member of the Montana Arts Council and the Board of Directors of the Montana Center for the Book, Rick served from 2006–2017 as the executive director of Drumlummon Institute and editor of the online arts journal Drumlummon Views. In 2009, Rick received the Montana Governor’s Award for the Humanities, and in 2016, he received the Montana Governor’s Award for the Arts.

Rick makes his home in Helena, Montana, and San Francisco with his wife Liz Gans.

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Get in Touch

Rick Newby
1451 Montgomery Street #3 * San Francisco, CA 94133
rnewby@mt.net
ricknewbywritereditor.com
(406) 461-7494

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Books & Exhibition Catalogs

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