Jan D. Payne
Drawing from her years in the Southwest and the Navajo Nation, Jan Payne writes on themes of courage, regret, hope, and restoration in a world of created kinships. Through her characters’ lives and shared dangers—Marin Sinclair, end-of-life doula; Sergeant Justin Blue Eyes of the Navajo Nation Police; Cullen MacPherson, agent for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; Garret Washburn, teenaged ward of Marin’s, and Lewis George, Raven spirit-guide-cum-trickster—she takes readers on a journey through the complex interactions of cultural backgrounds and personal histories, highlighting the way kinships forged in crisis have the power to reshape our lives.
Jan Payne lived on the Dineh (Navajo) reservation in Sanostee, on the New Mexico side of the Lukachukai mountain range, where she spent summers climbing mesas, taking camping trips on horseback, exploring ghost towns in the mountains of Colorado, or working with her dad breaking and training horses in Sanostee. Her two most memorable summer jobs were at a Durango, Colorado dude ranch working with pack mule trains and a brief stint as a camp cook at a uranium mining site.
A graduate of Shiprock High School in Shiprock, New Mexico, she also holds university and medical degrees, as well as a graduate degree in Christian Studies from Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, where she focused on writing redemptive fiction.
Married to Jonathan Payne, she has since added to her life story with their adventures—hiking the north rim of the Grand Canyon, living on the Aleut island of St. Paul in the Bering Sea, working for the Alaska State Park Service in a canoe wilderness area, hiking the thirty-eight-mile Resurrection trail on the Kenai peninsula, teaching ultrasound methodology in a remote village in Kenya, Africa, and running Grandma’s Marathon in Duluth, Minnesota.
She attributes an early interest in writing to a large extended family of Texas-born storytellers, including that of a great-great aunt taken captive for nine months by Comanche/Kiowa raiders in 1870’s Texas.
Jan is a member of Western Writers of America and Women Writing the West and lives in the Leech Lake area of northern Minnesota with her husband and three big dogs—Kaibab, Rudi, and Orrin.
