Sara Spurgeon

Welcome to my webpage! 

Here’s a little about me as a writer (and a human)!
I’m the author of Exploding the Western:  Myths of Empire on the Postmodern Frontier, co-author of Writing the Southwest, co-editor of the essay collections Hellbent for Leather: Sex and Sexuality in the Weird Western (2025) and Weird Westerns: Race, Gender, Genre (shortlisted for the 2021 Locus Award for best scholarship on speculative fiction).  My essays and short stories have appeared in Slate.com, The Sun Magazine, Terrain.org, the forthcoming collection We Are Nature Defending Itself: Women on Bodies, Borders, & Place, The Bridge: A Journal of Fiction and Poetry, Sideshow from Somersault Press, and the anthology Stiller’s Pond: New Fiction from the Upper Midwest. 

I had so much fun talking about Weird Westerns on the podcast
Words to that Effect:  Stories of the Fiction that Shapes Popular Culture,
hosted out of Dublin, Ireland by journalist and author Conor Reid!

Supporting my commitment to the natural world and its humans, I co-direct the Literature, Social Justice, and Environment initiative at Texas Tech University, where I’m also a professor of American Literature.  I’ve given readings and scholarly presentations at multiple conferences, including the Comic Arts Conference at San Diego Comic Con. (Yes, I was in costume!)