Peter Bridges

In recent years Peter Bridges has published a wide range of works, including a diplomatic memoir entitled Safirka: An American Envoy, focused on his time as the American ambassador to Somalia; the biography of John Moncure Daniel, a once-famous Confederate editor; the biography of Donn Piatt, an anti-slavery activist and Union officer who became a famous muckraking Washington editor; a volume of sonnets; and seventy-plus articles, essays and reviews on foreign affairs, history, travel, and mountaineering. Bridges' second memoir has now appeared: "Woods, Waters, Peaks: A Diplomat Outdoors," produced by Politics and Prose, www.politics-prose.com. It recounts his climbs, hikes, treks and voyages on several continents, from his teens up into his eighties. H.W. Brands, renowned biographer, says that "His treks through the mountains of Europe...make for fascinating reading." He has just completed an historical novel, tentatively entitled Life and Times of Lincoln's Best Spy, about a Dartmouth professor who goes to Italy as a secret Union agent during the Civil War. Also forthcoming is a novel he calls The Adventure of Aulus, about a sixth-century Byzantine general whose adventures take him from the Mediterranean to the edges of the known world--south to Africa and then north to Arthur's Britain. The author was born in Louisiana, grew up in Illinois, and holds degrees from Dartmouth College and Columbia University. He served as a U.S. Army private in France during the Cold War. As a career officer of the U.S. Foreign Service, he spent three decades assigned to three Federal agencies in Washington and to American embassies at Panama, Moscow, Prague, Rome, and finally Mogadishu. He subsequently worked for a small foundation in Washington, a large corporation in Houston, and an international bank in Prague. Bridges' shorter work has appeared in American Diplomacy, California Literary Review, Christian Science Monitor, Copperfield Review, Crested Butte Magazine, Diplomacy & Statecraft, Eclectica, Foreign Service Journal, Los Angeles Times, Michigan Quarterly Review, Mountain Gazette, Notes & Records of the Royal Society of London, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He self-published in 2013 a book of a hundred "Sonnets from the Elk Mountains." He is a member of the advisory board of the MFA Program in Poetry, Western State Colorado University, and a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of American Studies, Akaki Tsereteli State University, Republic of Georgia. Bridges has lectured across the United States, at four foreign universities, and on cruise ships. He is a co-founder of the Elk Mountains Hikers Club in Colorado and a past member of the Österreichischer Alpenverein and Club Alpino Italiano. In recent years he and his wife have trekked and hiked across the mountains of Colorado and New England, Austria, Corsica, Italy, Scotland, and Spain.