William Borden

William Borden is a novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist. His novel Dancing with Bears is just out from Livingston Press. His novel Superstoe, first published in the U.S. by Harper & Row and in England by Victor Gollancz, was reissued by Orloff Press.

His plays have won over 100 national playwriting competitions and have had over 300 productions, at Actors Theatre of Louisville and in New York, Los Angeles, India, South Africa, Spain, Canada, Germany, Norway, and elsewhere. The film adaptation of his play, The Last Prostitute, starring Sonia Braga and produced by Universal Studios, was shown on Lifetime Television and in Europe. His play "Reunion," retitled I Remember You Now and starring Deborah Harry, was filmed for theatrical release by Darinka Productions and has been shown in New York, Paris, London, Croatia, Romania, and Wales. His plays have been published in Scenes and Monologues from the Best New International Plays, The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2009, More Scenes and Monologues From The Best New Plays, The Best Stage Scenes 1998, The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2007, The Playwrights' Center Monologues for Women, and many other anthologies. They have been translated into French, German, Spanish, Catalan, Czech, and Guajarti.

His short stories have won the PEN Syndicated Fiction Prize and The Writers Voice Fiction Contest and been published in in over 30 magazines, including The New Orleans Review, The Louisville Review, New York Stories, The Prague Review, and Stickman Review, where "Lake People" was named a Notable Story of 2005 by Million Writer's Award Contest, and in numerous anthologies, including XX Eccentric: Stories About the Eccentric Lives of Women (Main Street Rag), American Fiction (New Rivers Press), Prairie Volcanoes (Dakotah Territory Press), and Tartts Three (Livingston Press).

His narrative poem, Eurydice’s Song, with monotypes by Douglas Kinsey, was published in 1999 by Bayeux Arts, Calgary, and St. Andrew’s Press, Laurinberg, NC. His poems have appeared in over 20 anthologies, including Of a Certain Age: Voices of Experience (Turtle House Ink, Wayzata, MN), Love After 70 (Wising Up Press, Decatur, GA), Winged Spirits (Bayeux Arts, Calgary & London), Fresh Water: Poems from the Rivers, Lakes, and Streams (Pudding House, Johnstown, OH), GRRRRR (Arctos Press, Sausalito, CA), Streets of New York (P&Q Press, New York), And We The Creatures: Poetry for the Rights of Other Animals (Dream Horse Press, Aptos, CA), The Runner's Literary Companion (Breakaway Books, New York), Mixed Voices: Contemporary Poems about Music (Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis), The Tie That Binds: Mothers and Sons/​Fathers and Daughters (Papier-Mache Press, Manhatten Beach, CA), and The International Haiku Contest Work Collection (The Modern Haiku Association, Tokyo, Japan), and in over 80 magazines, including Rattle, Cincinnati Poetry Review, Colorado State Review, The South Dakota Review, Minneapolis Star Tribune, and Mainichi Daily News, Tokyo, Japan, and in a chapbook, Slow Step and Dance.

Essays have appeared in American Scholar, Bayou Magazine, Flyway, and elsewhere. Balloon and Ford Times have published his travel articles. He has had book reviews in The Minneapolis Tribune and The Grand Forks Herald. He has given over 60 readings of his work, from the Mildred Pierce Café in St. Paul, MN, McNally Robinson Books in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and Tom’s Burned-Down Cafe on Madeline Island, WI, to U Knihomola Bookstore in Prague, Czech Republic, America House in Cologne, Germany, and the West Side Y in New York City.

He has received play commissions from Actors Theatre of Louisville, the Science Museum of Minnesota, and the University of North Dakota, and he has been awarded a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, a Minnesota Region 2 Individual Artist Grant, a Minnesota State Arts Board Career Opportunity Grant, and a Minnesota Region 2 Arts Council Distinguished Artist Award in Theatre Arts. He has been Artist in Residence at the Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Red Wing, MN, and Artist in Residence at The Ucross Foundation, Ucross, WY.

I Want To Be An Indian has been studied in courses in Cologne, Germany, and at the State University of New York at Binghamton, the University of North Dakota, Little Hoop Community College, and Standing Rock Community College. Sakakawea is discussed at length in Cultural Images of Sacagawea by Donna J. Kessler, University of Alabama Press. Turtle Island Blues has been studied at the Native American Educational Services College in Minneapolis, MN, and is the subject of graduate papers at Purdue University, University of Illinois at Urbana, and University of Minnesota, Morris.

A Core Playwright Alumnus at The Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis, he was Fiction Editor of The North Dakota Quarterly 1986-2002. He is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at The University of North Dakota. He is a member of PEN, The Dramatists Guild, ASCAP, and the Authors Guild. He has a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.A. from the University of California at Berkeley.

Born and raised in Indianapolis, he lived on the wind-swept plains of North Dakota for 27 years, on a sun-splashed Greek island for 2 years, on a pine-shaded lake in northern Minnesota for 15 years, and, since 2004, in the scrub country 30 miles east of Dallas, TX. He and Nancy Lee-Borden, his wife of 49 years, have 3 adult children and 7 grandchildren.