Oklahoma native Tony Hillerman grew up among Potawatomie, Seminole, and Sac and Fox Indians. He attended grade school at St. Mary’s Academy, a boarding school for Indian girls which admitted local farm boys as day students, and Konawa High School, where he did his first writing as class historian. After serving in the military, he earned a Journalism degree from the University of Oklahoma, spent 17 years as a reporter and newspaper editor, and earned a master’s degree in English at the University of New Mexico, where he spent 20 years as a Journalism professor. Both his popular mysteries and his non-fiction work reflect Hillerman’s interest in the southwest. He received the American Anthropological Association’s Media Service Award, the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Public Service Award and, in 1991, was declared a Grand Master of the “Mystery Writers of America.”