WELCOME to the web site of Women Writing the West®, a non-profit association of writers and other professionals writing and promoting the Women's West.

Our stories are set in the Western United States — past and present — but our organization considers the "West" as more than a geographic location. The West represents a way of thinking, a sense of adventure, a willingness to cross into a new frontier.

As our foremothers sought a new way of life in a new land, so have women in our own time crossed their own barriers to create something new and unique.

We invite you to become connected to our writing community, a community preserving the Women's West. Women Writing the West membership is open to all interested persons worldwide.

The term "Women's West" is borrowed from the ground-breaking book of the same title, edited by Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson and published by the University of Oklahoma Press. That book and the subsequent flood of scholarly books on the same subject presented an entirely different view, literally a rediscovery, of women in the American West. More than a recognition that women played broader roles than being ranch wives or prostitutes, the new view of the Women's West speaks to the diversity of women of all cultures and all time periods. It acknowledges the rich variety of ways women responded to the western experience.

The Women's West is based on a tradition that includes such fine writers as Willa Cather, Mary Austin, B.M. Bower, Mari Sandoz, Dorothy Johnson, Juanita Brooks, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and Helen Hunt Jackson. Today's writers who set their work in the West are creating a literary explosion said to be comparable to the Southern literary renaissance in the 1930s. Women Writing the West is open to all persons worldwide.