From the Texas panhandle to the mountains of Arizona, Amy Auker has lived the cowboy life-as wife, as mother, as cook, as ranch hand, as writer. In fine-grained detail she captures the prairie light, the traffic on small farm-to-market roads, the vacant stillness of shipping pens when fall works are over. But she also captures the unmistakable westernness of the people and creatures around her: the son who must get back on the horse that just bucked him off, the husband who gives great gifts, the animals whose names and temperaments are as recognizable as family. Auker understands those who live in the sway of nature's moods far off the main roads, and she commends them to us in luminous prose backlit by her own hard-earned experience.

The winter Bride wears diamonds. To those down below, she appears to be sleeping, locked inside a chastity belt of cold. She naps lightly behind the veil of ice and snow, letting it shield her from the sun and throw it back into the sky. But her chill is only skin deep. Inside her hidden folds and caves and recesses, the heartbeat of her lives and breathes and curls around the seeds of what willbe. The winter Bride is pregnant, gestating the future, smiling quietly at the snores of the bears and the mountain lions, allowing all of the fertile places to swell and burgeon with the life that is to come. The winter Bride is holding a flood in deposit for the sun's withdrawal in spring. This is the canvas on which Amy Hale Auker paints the lives of her characters. Shiney, the ranch owner; Monte, the foreman; Rafe, the old hand; Jody, the new hand; Blake and Brenna, who can't seem to grow up even though they have a houseful of children. These, and many more, are waiting to show you how they live, love, work, and play in the shadow of the Bride. Auker's writing is extraordinary, as evidenced by these reviews of her award-winning Rightful Place: "Her focus is sharp and discerning, intimate and clear - so refreshing that her writing transcends the contemporary cattle-culture and her harsh Texas landscape to become a template for creating a richer life." John Dofflemyer, author of Poems from Dry Creek "Auker is fiercely connected - and will connect you as well - with the most elemental spirits of the earth and the heart." Margo Metegrano, Director of The Center for Western and Cowboy Poetry Winter of Beauty is a novel by Amy Hale Auker, winner of the 2012 WILLA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction, which will bring joy to your heart and tears to your eyes. Her words come from the heart and will melt you, just like the sun melts the snow on Bride Mountain. A working cowgirl, Auker writes and thrives on a ranch in Arizona where she is having a love affair with rock, mountains, pinon and juniper forests, the weather, and her songwriter husband, who is foreman of the ranch. As Amy says, "For years I cooked for cowboys, cleaned up after cowboys, listened to cowboys tell stories, but for the past five years I have done my own time in the saddle. And I write. Always I write." She guides her readers to a place where the bats fly, lizards do pushups on the rocks, bears leave barefoot prints in the dirt. Where hummingbirds do rain dances in August, spiders weave for their food, and poetry is in the chrysalis and the cocoon. Winter of Beauty will please the adult reader who enjoys the apt description of people and things; the understanding of nature, human or otherwise; and becoming immersed in them through a turn of phrase that brings both clarity of thought and joy in the reading."

Amy Hale Auker's first book of essays, Rightful Place, was the story of a woman finding beauty in her place, the Llano Estacado. Her new collection of creative non-fiction, Ordinary Skin, explores her mid-life transition with prose poems and essays that illustrate a new terrain as well as new ways of being in the world. Touching on faith and body image and belonging, these essays explore our role in deciding what is favorable or unfavorable, as well as where we someday want to dwell, and who came before us. In that touching, they feel their way with observations about current affairs, drought, mystery, and the hard decisions that face us all as we continue to move toward more questions with fewer answers. This exploration is informed and softened by hummingbirds, Gila monsters, bats, foxes, bears, wildflowers, and hidden seep springs where life goes on whether we are there to see it or not. It is about work in a wild and wilderness environment. In the end, even as life changes drastically around us, we are better off for knowing that the ugly mud bug turns into a jewel-toned dragonfly.