A New Englander who married and moved to the ranching West, much of Waterston’s prose and poetry is inspired by the remote reaches of southeastern Oregon’s Outback. Her most recent title, "Walking the High Desert," received this review: “Woven out of her own remarkable stories, her trek becomes an insightful search for how we might all get along, here and elsewhere, in a perilously shifting world.” Of her collection of award-winning essays, "Where the Crooked River Rises," a reviewer said “Like Wallace Stegner and Ivan Doig, Waterston writes masterfully about what it means — what it really means — to live in the West.” She is also the author of a memoir, "Then There Was No Mountain," a Foreword and WILLA finalist.

Waterston has published four poetry titles and is winner of the Obsidian Prize in Poetry and two-time winner of the WILLA Award in Poetry. In addition to her work as an author, Waterston founded the for-profit Writing Ranch and two literary arts nonprofits, The Nature of Words and the Waterston Desert Writing Prize. She has instructed creative writing at undergraduate and graduate levels. Her work as an author and commitment to literary arts advocacy was recognized with an honorary Ph.D. in Humane Letters from OSU-Cascades in 2007 and, in 2024, with Literary Arts of Oregon’s Holbrook Award and Soapstone’s Bread and Roses Award. She received her B.A. from Harvard University and M.A. in Archeology from the University of Madagascar. www.writingranch.com