Priscilla Long

Priscilla Long is a Seattle-based writer of poetry, essays, creative nonfictions, fictions, science, and history. She has an MFA degree from the University of Washington and teaches writing. Click on Courses, Readings, for upcoming offerings.

Her guide to writing is The Writer's Portable Mentor: A Guide to Art, Craft, and the Writing Life.

"My Brain on My Mind," an abecedarium, appears in the Winter 2010 issue of The American Scholar. "Genome Tome," which also appeared in The American Scholar, 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).

Her essays, short stories, and poems appear in 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, The Cincinnati Review, and in many other venues.

She was a Jack Straw writer for 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. For samples of her work, go to her second, alternate website: www.historylink.org/​PriscillaLong.

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

She was born in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, and grew up on a dairy farm on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. She attended Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

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.”