Robert Laxalt Distinguished Writer Program
The Robert Laxalt Distinguished Writer Program was established in 2001 to inspire new generations of writers in honor of Nevada writer Robert Laxalt, who developed from news reporter to fiction and nonfiction author during his prolific career. Considered by many to be Nevada’s finest writer, Laxalt founded the University of Nevada Press and wrote 17 books, four of which were entered for the Pulitzer Prize. He also wrote for National Geographic and served as a professor at the University of Nevada, Reno’s Reynolds School of Journalism for 18 years, teaching magazine writing and literary journalism. Since 2010, Nevada Humanities has joined the Reynolds School of Journalism as a partner in producing this program, which takes place in Reno each fall.
Photograph by Terray Sylvester.
2026 Awardee Sierra Crane Murdoch
Sierra Crane Murdoch is a journalist and essayist whose work concerns, primarily, communities in the American West. Her first book, Yellow Bird: Oil, Murder, and a Woman's Search for Justice in Indian Country, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Named one of the best books of 2020 by The New York Times, NPR, and Publisher’s Weekly, it was also nominated for the Edgar Award and won an Oregon Book Award. Part true crime, part social criticism, Yellow Bird chronicles a murder on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, tracing the steps of an Arikara woman, Lissa Yellow Bird, as she searches for a young white oil worker who went missing from the reservation. For eight years, Crane Murdoch reported on the oil boom in North Dakota and its impact on the Mandan Hidatsa Arikara Nation. Her writing has appeared on This American Life and in Harper’s, VQR, The Paris Review, The New Yorker online, Orion, The Atlantic, and High Country News, where she was a contributing editor. She has received fellowships from MacDowell and Bread Loaf, as well as from the Fund for Investigative Journalism, the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism, the 11th Hour Food and Farming Fellowships, and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California Berkeley. She was the 2023 Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Montana and has also taught at UC Berkeley and Middlebury College. Her second book, Imaginary Brightness: An Autobiography of American Guilt, is forthcoming from Random House. She lives in Oregon.
Past Robert Laxalt Distinguished Writers
John L. Smith, 2025
Linda Villarosa, 2024
Jon Ralston, 2023
Beth Piatote, 2022
Frank X. Mullen, 2021
Jessica Bruder, 2019
Timothy Egan, 2018
Sally Denton, 2017
Richard Ford, 2016
Jess Walter, 2015
Sheri Fink, 2014
Jim Lynch, 2013
Mark Kurlansky, 2012
Rebecca Solnit, 2011
Stephen G. Bloom, 2010
Isabel Wilkerson, 2009
James D. Houston, 2008
Clay Jenkins, 2007
Lou Cannon, 2006
Alicia Parlette, 2005
Paige Williams, 2005
William Albert Allard, 2004