Bozeman Magazine

Staring down heartbreak and regret, Stewart Simmons, flees a haunted Philadelphia for the beauty of the West. In a raw, yet lyrical, voice that gives life to the urgency and appetites of youth, West of Love takes place in a time before the internet, before cell phones, before technology changed the ways we live and love. And as an older Stewart looks candidly back at his younger self, a picture of the human heart emerges--one that offers a testament to how we heal, how we go on.

Francis Davis was born and raised in Philadelphia, but has lived most of his adult life in the West. A finalist for the 2016 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction for West of Love, his debut collection of stories, he’s won writing fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, The Millay Colony for the Arts and the Vermont Studio Center. A graduate of the University of Montana’s MFA program in fiction and the Ph.D. program at the University of Nebraska, his stories have appeared in Story, Natural Bridge and Weber: The Contemporary West, among other publications. He lives in Dillon, Montana, where he’s an assistant professor of English at University of Montana Western.