Paul has been a featured performer at the Elko Cowboy Poetry Gathering for the past 20 years, has toured Australia and England, and has recited at the National Book, Folk, and Storytelling Festivals, The Santa Clarita Cowboy Poetry and Music Festival, The ProRodeo Hall of Fame, The Library of Congress, and the Reno Philharmonic Orchestra. He was also featured, in June 1999, on Garrison Keillor’s A Prairie Home Companion, aired from The Mother Lode Theater in Butte, Montana. 

His recent publications include Wolf Tracks on the Welcome Mat (OreanaBooks, 2003), winner of The Spur Award from the Western Writers of America, Blue-Collar Light (Red Wing Press, 1998) and All This Way for the Short Ride (Museum of New Mexico Press, 1996), which received The Western Heritage Award for Poetry from The National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City. Two recordings—Words Growing Wild (1998) and The Glorious Commotion of it All (2004)— both produced by Jim Rooney in Nashville, offer poems with accompaniment by Duane Eddy, John Hartford, Rich O’Brien, and other fine musicians.

Paul also has collaborated on song lyrics with Ian Tyson (Rodeo Road and Jerry Ambler), Tom Russell (Bucking Horse Moon and All This Way For The Short Ride), Dave Wilkie of Cowboy Celtic (Black Upon Tan and Flying, Not Falling, In Love With You), Don Edwards (West Of The Round Corral), Wylie Gustafson (Saddle Broncs And Sagebrush), and Betsy Hagar (Hope Chest, The Christmas Saguaro Soiree, Star Light Star Bright, and others).

Paul Zarzyski, the recipient of the 2005 Governor’s Arts Award for Literature, has been spurring the words wild across the open range of the page and calling it Poetry for 33 years. In the early ‘70s, he heeded Horace Greeley’s “go west young man, go west” advice and received his Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing from The University of Montana, where he studied with Richard Hugo. In the same breath, he took up a second “lucrative” vocation— bareback bronc riding. He rode both the amateur and the ProRodeo circuits, hung his hooks up in his late 30s, then cracked back out, after turning 40, for a couple more years on the senior circuit or, as Paul prefers to call it, The
Masters. On the lee side of his rodeo roughstock years, these days he “makes his living” (to borrow the title of a James Dickey essay) BARNSTORMING FOR POETRY.

[Download bios, reviews, and images from the PRESS KIT page]
[Download Paul’s PDF resumé (requires Adobe Acrobat Reader^®)]