Michael Rutter

Michael Rutter is a writer/photographer who has published fifty books and hundreds of articles for magazines, journals, and newspapers. He is a recipient of the Ben Franklin Book Award for Excellence and the Rocky Mountain Book Publishers’ Award. He is passionate about the American West, cutthroat trout, good poetry, and bears. An “addicted” fly fisherman, his outdoor essays and articles have been widely published (from Yale University to Outdoor Life). Michael has worked with American Experience on “The Wild West Series” and is interviewed in the A&E documentary Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Netflix, PBS). He has been a Christa McAuliffe Fellow and an AT&T Scholar. New readers might be interested in Frontier Terror: Murders, Lynching, and Vigilantes and Colorado Madams. Some of his other book projects include: Utah Off the Beaten Path; Myths and Mysteries of the Old West; Boudoirs to Brothels: The Intimate World of Wild West Women; Wild Bunch Women; Upstairs Girls: Prostitution in the American West; Outlaw Tales of Utah; Bedside Book of Bad Girls: Outlaw Women of the American West; Fly Fishing Made Easy; Fly Fishing for the Compleat; and Basic Essentials: Fly Fishing. Michael has also cowritten textbooks on business, marketing, and technical communication. Michael and his wife, Shari, spend their summers wandering the West in a red retro trailer, photographing bears, digging into historical documents, photographing wildlife, and throwing copious amounts of fly line. He teaches advanced writing at Brigham Young University and lives in Orem, Utah, with Shari, two cats, and a large, spoiled dog, a Turkish Akbash named Star.