Lesley Poling-Kempes

For more than a century, Ghost Ranch has attracted people of enormous energy and creativity to the high desert of northern New Mexico. Occupying twenty-two thousand acres of the Piedra Lumbre basin, this fabled place was the love of artist Georgia O'Keeffe's life, and her depictions of the landscape catapulted Ghost Ranch to international recognition.

Building on the history of the Abiquiu region that she told in Valley of Shining...

Reading almost like a novel, this book, says writer Marc Simmons, "gives the reader not only the history but the feel of this unusual place." Georgie O'Keeffe captured on canvas as the valley's cliffs, canyons, and turquoise sides, but her life and death here are only a small part of the centuries-long saga. Here, too, are Pueblo Indians, Utes, Navajos, Jicarilla Apaches, Hispanos, and Anglos - many lives tangled together, yet also separate and distinct....

A romance between an Anglo artist and a Hispanic widow in New Mexico. It is set in a community of people who have given up city life for the simplicity of the country. A debut in fiction.