Bob Sawatzki

Bob Sawatzki (legal name Robert Sawatzki) is an American fiction writer, essayist, and career librarian whose work joins the small-press West to the back-office life of the public library. He grew up in Walla Walla, Washington, one of thirteen children, attended DeSales Catholic High School there, and went on to Fairhaven College, the experimental cluster college at Western Washington University in Bellingham, which he left in 1974. After a Seattle stint that produced his first professional story sale, to the Seattle Times Sunday Magazine, he settled in Ogden, Utah in 1980 and stayed.

His writing life and his library life have been the same life. He spent roughly a quarter-century on staff at the Weber County Library in Ogden, where he edited its quarterly newsletter Rough Draft and compiled the 1996 Utah-Centennial anthology The WORD from Weber County: A Centennial Anthology of Our Best Writers (Friends of the Weber County Library), the work that earned him his Library of Congress name-authority record. He has placed fiction and nonfiction in Weber Studies and commentary in the Salt Lake Tribune, the Salt Lake City Weekly, the Ogden Standard-Examiner, and the Seattle Times, and he has served on the Utah Arts Council Literary Committee. He retired from the library in 2018.

His one novel, Return to Circa '96 (JEF Books, Vol. 58, 2015), is the project all of that prepared him for: an illustrated parable, its chapters ordered by Dewey Decimal, about a year in a small-town public library meeting the World Wide Web for the first time. It took First Place in the Novel category of the 2005 Utah Original Writing Competition in its earlier "Circa: 96" form, then the 2014 Kenneth Patchen Award for Innovative Novel, which brought him to JEF.

Start with Return to Circa '96, the most library-rooted novel in the JEF catalog.