Welcome!
Welcome to the website of Luke Wallin, award-winning author whose 11th book, The Night We Called the Owls: Stories and Poems, was published by Ember Press in 2023. (Learn more)
Luke was born and raised in Mississippi in a family of foresters, storytellers, and musicians. His own songwriting was the key to his first novel, The Redneck Poacher's Son.
On the journey to understanding nature and religion, Luke graduated from Mississippi State then earned an M.A. in Philosophy from Alabama. There he met Charles Entrekin, and through him, Sena Jeter Naslund, two close writer friends throughout his life.
After earning an MFA in Fiction Writing from Iowa, Luke moved to New York City where he taught nursery school, sanded floors, played music, and taught Philosophy for five years at the School of Visual Arts.
Luke's eight novels for children and young adults have been selected Best Books by the American Library Association's Booklist, the New York Public Library, Voya, and others. Ceremony of the Panther is recommended for K-12 on the Smithsonian Institute’s Anthropology Outreach website, in its Critical Bibliography on North American Indians; it has been recorded for the blind by the Library of Congress.
In the Shadow of the Wind is recommended for high school history classes by the Committee on U.S. History Standards. While teaching as a Visiting Fulbright Professor at University College Dublin, Luke contributed to and co-edited the book Nature and Identity in Cross-Cultural Perspective. His book, Conservation Writing: Essays at the Crossroads of Nature and Culture, was published by the Center for Policy Analysis at UMass Dartmouth.
Luke continued his family's legacy of forestry and forest conservation by earning a Master of Regional Planning degree at UMass Amherst, and combining his conservation perspective with his teaching and writing. He taught Fiction Writing, Creative Nonfiction, and Writing for Children and Young adults for 12 years in Spalding University's MFA in Creative Writing program. For 20 years he taught Writing and Literature at UMass Dartmouth, where he is now Professor Emeritus of English.
(Pictured at top right: Luke Wallin visiting the port of Boca, Buenos Aires, Argentina, as a faculty member of the Spalding University MFA in Creative Writing program)
(Pictured at bottom right: Luke Wallin, Sena Jeter Naslund, & Eva Sage Gordon in Buenos Aires, Argentina)