available in a Bison Books edition. She is a professor of English at the University of Idaho and has twice won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award, once in fiction and once in nonfiction. She is also the winner of a Western Heritage Award and the Western Literature Association's Distinguished Achievement Award. Imagine a windswept northern plain, a two-lane highway, and the ramshackle ranch buildings you see from the road. If you're curious about the lives and dreams of the people in such places, if you're curious about who moves on and who stays behind to run the ranch, and if you're curious about a woman forging her way in an academic world resistant to women, Mary Clearman Blew's This is Not the Ivy League is a must-read memoir. As a little girl Mary Clearman watched her mother "stand over her pitch-pine fire to tend the branding irons. Every chance she gets, she'll unroll her knitting from a clean dish towel and add a row or two before my father strides over to reach through the corral fence and swap a cold iron for a hot one." Her multi-tasking mom is a role model, but the author takes a new route. She consumes the few books available and her schoolteacher grandmother finds her more. She craves more than teaching in a one-room schoolhouse before marriage. A year into her scholarship-funded education at the University of Montana, she married her first husband. Instead of dropping out to find work and fund his