Peter Chilson got his MFA in creative writing from Pennsylvania State University in 1994 and teaches writing and literature at Washington State University. His essays and short stories have appeared in The American Scholar, The North American Review, Audubon, Ascent, Creative Nonfiction, Clackamas Literary Review, Gulf Coast, Rain City Review, West Africa, North Dakota Quarterly and elsewhere. Chilson’s book, Riding the Demon (University of Georgia Press 1999) won the Associated Writing Programs Award in nonfiction. His second book, Disturbance-Loving Species: A Novella and Stories (Mariner Books 2007), won the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Bakless Fiction Prize and the Maria Thomas Fiction Prize. His work has twice appeared in the Best American Travel Writing anthology (the 2003 and 2008 issues) and other collections of creative nonfiction.
In 1985, Chilson went to West Africa. He taught junior high school English in Bouza, a village in southern central Niger, near the border with Nigeria. Later he was a reporter for the Associated Press in Hartford, CT. He is a former associate editor of High Country News, the magazine that covers public lands issues in the American West.
To research his first book, Riding the Demon: On the Road in West Africa, Chilson went back to West Africa in 1992 on a Fulbright Scholarship. Based in Niger, he spent a year on the road through Nigeria, Burkina Faso, and Ivory Coast, living and traveling with bush taxi and truck drivers to write about modern Africa and the African genius for survival.
