Stephen Bodio

Stephen Bodio was born in Boston in 1950. He studied Biology and English literature for years at both Universities of Massachusetts without ever quite managing to get his degree. He has lived in a remote rural village in New Mexico for over thirty years, and has traveled extensively in Europe, Africa, and especially Asia.

He has published ten books, and has been editor and anthologist of more, as well as a frequent contributor to magazines. He has been on the masthead of publications as various as the scholarly English Literary Renaissance and the upscale outdoor magazine Gray's Sporting Journal, where he wrote a book column for eleven years. He has reviewed everything from novels to natural history for many papers, including the Minneapolis Star Tribune and the (London) Times Literary Supplement. His articles, essays, and stories have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Smithsonian, Sports Illustrated, and the LA Times Magazine, and in literary quarterlies. Until recently, he was a contributing editor and book columnist for the magazine Living Bird. His last article there was an attempt to change the "paradigm" of dinosaurs from reptiles to birdlike creatures, titled "They Had FEATHERS!"

He was recruited by Annie Proulx to be the first resident faculty member at Sterling College's Wildbranch Writers Workshop in Vermont, where he taught for nine years.

He has a lifelong interest in birds, their behavior, and their relations with humans, as reflected in his books on falcons and pigeons. He has hunted with falcons for almost fifty years, kept rare pigeon breeds, and has bred and trained saluki dogs and their Asian relatives for thirty. He assisted retired Russian scientist and dog expert Vladimir Beregovoy with his translation of a 19th century Russian hunter's memoir, Notes of an East Siberian Hunter.

He has also contributed text and introductions to many works about and by artists, including Alan James Robinson, Thomas Quinn, Vadim Gorbatov, and Thomas Aquinas Daly. He recently contributed the introduction to a traveling show of paintings about sport from the Revolution to World War II which will be coming out as a book from the University of Oklahoma Press, called Wild Spaces, Open Seasons.

He was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease almost seven years ago, but he hasn't stopped moving yet. He has made a video with the UNM Neurology department, A Patient's Story, to highlight the advances in treatment for such diseases. If possible, more Asian books, including a collaboration with his photographer stepson on centuries of western travelers in the Szechuan- Tibetan border country, are in the pipeline, as are a novel, a memoir, and the second book of books. Meanwhile he still lives in Magdalena, a former cattle drive town in the mountains of southern New Mexico, with his wife, Elizabeth (Libby) Adam Frishman, a second- generation mountaineer, paleoarchaeologist, and former Outward Bound trekking guide. [adapted from Amazon.com Author Page, retrieved 11/20/2016]