Ron Querry

Ron Querry (Choctaw) is the author, to date, of two novels, The Death of Bernadette Lefthand and Bad Medicine, both accounts of contemporary American Indian life in the Southwestern United States. The internationally acclaimed Bernadette has been honored with awards from the Mountains & Plains Booksellers and the Border Regional Library Association and as a finalist for the Prix littéraire Regional Book Award in France. In addition to the English language, the novels are translated and published in French, German, and Bulgarian. Querry’s non-fiction books include the memoir I See by my Get-Up, a juvenile text Discrimination, and the collection Growing Old at Willie Nelson’s Picnic. He has contributed essays, articles, and reviews to a broad range of newspapers and periodicals.

With an earned Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of New Mexico, Querry has taught and lectured at colleges and universities in Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, and Ohio. He has served as writer-in-residence at the University of Oklahoma and the Amerind Foundation in Arizona. And he has taught seminars and lectured abroad: at the Seminar in Native American Studies at Comune di Spello, Provincia di Prugia, Italy, and Étonnants Voyageurs, Festival International du Livre, Saint-Malo, France, as well as at a chapter of PEN International in Mexico.

Besides his experience as an author and university professor, Querry has worked variously as a ranch hand and wrangler, horse trainer and horseshoer, served as a racing official for the American Quarter Horse Association, and edited a nationally-circulated Quarter Horse racing trade publication. Of mixed ancestry—Choctaw, Scot and German—he is an enrolled member of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Ron Querry’s literary archives are housed at the Southwestern Writers Collection, Alkek Library, Special Collections, Texas State University at San Marcos, Texas. An avid fly fisherman, Querry, along with his wife Elaine—an accomplished fine art photographer—and their good Australian Cattle Dogs, Maggie and Beaudog, currently lives in northern New Mexico, in a hundred-year-old Victorian house.