Photo by Anne Herman.

Priscilla Long is a Seattle-based writer of poetry, essays, creative nonfictions, fictions, science, and history. Her most recent book is Dancing with the Muse in Old Age (Epicenter / Coffeetown, 2022). Her book Holy Magic won Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award from MoonPath Press. Her how-to-write book is The Writer's Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life (University of New Mexico Press, 2018). Her other books include a collection of linked creative nonfictions titled Fire and Stone: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (University of Georgia Press); Minding the Muse: A Handbook for Painters, Composers, Writers, and Other Creators (Coffeetown Press); and Crossing Over: Poems (University of New Mexico Press). Long is a longtime teacher of writing to developing professional writers.

Her blog-column, Science Frictions, appeared for 92 weeks on The American Scholar website. In Science Frictions science rubs up against the rest of life. The complete set of Science Frictions essays are available here: http://theamericanscholar.org/the-complete-science-frictions/.

"Genome Tome," a literary nonfiction, including science, appeared in The American Scholar. In 2006 it received a National Magazine Award for best feature writing.

She is author of Where the Sun Never Shines: A History of America's Bloody Coal Industry (1989). Christopher Hitchens called this "an intense and accomplished social history" (New York Newsday). Barbara Kingsolver called it "One of those rare works that asks and answers important questions about who we are...as a nation and how we got to that point" (Women's Review of Books). Howard Zinn commented, "As a piece of historical investigation, it is superbly done. But it is more than a history of the coal industry; it illuminates the development of the American corporate economy in the late 19th and early 20th century, and gives a rare picture of intense class conflict in a country often presumed to lack that. Her account of the Colorado coal strike is not only impeccably accurate but recaptures the drama and excitement of that astonishing event with rare skill."

Priscilla's essays, short stories, and poems appear widely in literary journals such as The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, Fourth Genre, Southern Poetry Review, Raven Chronicles, North Dakota Quarterly, The American Scholar, Ontario Review, The Seattle Review, Chattahoochee Review, Passages North, Painted Bride Quarterly, Under The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Cincinnati Review.

She was a Hedgebrook Writer in Residence in 2012 and a Jack Straw writer in 2009. Her awards also include the Richard Hugo House Founder's Award and awards from the Seattle Arts Commission and the Los Angeles Arts Commission.

She reads her poetry and prose widely, and performed with the Seattle Five Plus One poets during most of the group's existence in the 1990s.

She serves as Founding and Consulting Editor of www.HistoryLink.org, the online encyclopedia of Washington state history.

She graduated from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, and has the Master's of Fine Arts (MFA) degree from the University of Washington.

She was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and grew up on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.

Her grandparents on her mother's side were Pennsylvania Dutch. Her paternal grandmother was Scottish, and her paternal grandfather, Walter Long, was descended from the Winslow family, English farmers who migrated to New England in the 1600s.

Walter Long was a reporter for The Philadelpia Bulletin and his grandfather, Stephen Winslow (1826-1907), edited the Philadelphia Commercial List and was known as "the grand old man in the newspaper life of Philadelphia."