Kurt Caswell is the author or two books of nonfiction: In the Sun’s House: My Year Teaching on the Navajo Reservation, and An Inside Passage, for which he won the 2008 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Book Prize. He is the lead editor of an anthology of nature writing, To Everything on Earth. His essays and stories have appeared in High Country News, Isotope, Matter, Ninth Letter, Orion, Pilgrimage, River Teeth, Potomac Review, and other publications. He teaches creative writing and literature in the Honors College at Texas Tech University. “Crossing Over the Mountain” is an excerpt from A Shepherd’s Life, a book in progress about his time living with Peruvian sheep herders working in Idaho. For more information, please go to: www.kurtcaswell.com