Elizabeth Fackler

I was born on a dairy farm in Okemos, Michigan, and came of age in Ocean Beach, California. Since then I have lived on a cattle ranch in Tamaulipas, along the river in Santa Fe, among the Confederate graves of Lee's last battle in Virginia, in the sunrise shadow of El Paso's Crazy Cat Mountain, in a boxcar adobe in Tombstone, above the Clear Fork of the Trinity River in Fort Worth, and in the Pecos Valley of New Mexico. I now make my home beneath Sierra Blanca in Capitan, New Mexico. I tell you all this because I believe every place leaves its imprint on a person.  I am, therefore, inhabited by the ghosts of all these places I have lived.

My latest book, My Eyes Have a Cold Nose, won Best Historical Novel in the New Mexico Book Awards of 2009. It is the story of Gigi Garrett, a blind piano teacher in a small town on the vast prairie of southeastern New Mexico, and her blossoming friendship with Sheriff Sly Rendt as he investigates the disappearance of a young woman. Gigi is the daughter of frontier sheriff Pat Garrett. As the plot evolves, the reader is taken through the remnants of divided Lincoln County fifty years after it was ravaged by war. Gigi's story, like her life, is a testament to her love for her famous father.