Rick Skwiot

Rick Skwiot is the award-winning author of three published works set in Mexico and a critically praised childhood memoir.

He received the Hemingway First Novel Award for his debut work, Death in Mexico (formerly titled Flesh) and was the Willa Cather Fiction Prize Finalist for Sleeping With Pancho Villa in 1998.

When an infant his family moved across the Mississippi River from north St. Louis to rural Madison County, Illinois, which serves as the setting for his acclaimed childhood memoir Christmas at Long Lake.

Skwiot began his writing career as a newspaper reporter in MetroEast St. Louis.

He spent much of the 1980s in Mexico, a setting that has figured importantly in both his fiction and nonfiction work.