J.M. Gist is a man of the West. Growing up in Wyoming, he was infused with Western sensibilities and came to see the ethic of the rugged individual as common sense. He has run traplines, worked as a cowhand,  a nurseryman, and as a vacuum salesman, among other things.

A high school dropout, Gist wandered for a time in search of meaning. His love of reading led him to the University of Wyoming where he studied literature and philosophy in old-school liberal arts fashion. He continued to graduate school where he earned an M.F.A. in Writing at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

Soon after graduating, he found himself working for a company that serviced portable toilets. When the opportunity arose, he gave up that job for a teaching position at a state college in New Mexico. As a professor, he came face-to-face with the horror of postmodern “higher education,” where critical thinking is replaced by political activism, where “social justice,” means social leveling and a rejection of excellence.

As a department chair and director of a state-sanctioned Applied Liberal Arts and Sciences initiative, Gist bore witness to the internal rot that has ruined not only academia but jeopardizes Western civilization at large. Dystopia is upon us.

As a writer, Gist has published books, short stories, poems, essays, and opinion pieces in outlets such as  The Imaginative Conservative, The Western Journal, Catholic World Report, Crisis Magazine, The New Oxford Review, Galway Review, St. Austin Review, and others.

Gist’s first love has always been the novel. The Yewberry Way: A Prayer, is the first installment in a trilogy.