Chavawn Kelley

Chavawn Kelley earned her Master’s degree in American Studies at the University of Wyoming, where a telegram from Hemingway sits on the mantel at the Cooper House. She first read “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” while sitting by Fremont Lake near Pinedale. She has published more than 50 poems, essays, and short stories in journals and anthologies and is a writer and editor for the University of Wyoming Extension and the College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

In the life of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, scenes of hunting, a wedding, miscarriage, injuries and physical degeneration all found Wyoming settings. Friendships grew, he fished with his sons, and he wrote much of his best work here—with great energy, productivity, and vividness. 

Trained in Paris and Rome, Baltimore artist Alfred Jacob Miller attended the 1837 fur-trade rendezvous in what’s now western Wyoming. Miller sketched and painted all aspects of the fur trade for his patron, the Scottish adventurer William Drummond Stewart, and later reworked much of this material into oil paintings for a wider audience.