Win Blevins October 21, 1938 ~ July 2, 2023

Win Blevins, the award-winning author best known for his fiction and non-fiction books of western lore and Native American leaders, lifestyle and spirituality, recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Western Writers of America, and a member of the Western Writers Hall of fame, has died.
Blevins died July 2 after suffering with the effects of dementia and two strokes. He was 84.
Blevins, whose own origins were a mix of Cherokee, Welsh-Irish, and African-American, published his first novel in 1973.
Give Your Heart to the Hawks, a tribute to mountain men, is still in print fifty years later and recently returned to the New York Times best-seller list.
According to Amazon, the 2015 film, “The Revenant” starring Leonardo DiCaprio, was based in part on Blevins’s book.
Over his long career Blevins wrote nearly forty books, among them Stone Song, a novel of the life of Crazy Horse, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Others included the historical fiction Rendezvous Series, set in the West’s most spectacular landscapes.
Blevins’s wife, novelist Meredith Blevins, co-authored several of his later books. He was also the author of a dozen successful screenplays.
Blevins was an honors graduate of Columbia University, where he earned a master’s degree, and the Music Conservatory of the University of Southern California.
He began his writing career as a music and drama critic for the Los Angeles Times and The Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He also served as the Gaylord Family Visiting Professor of Professional Writing at the University of Oklahoma. For fifteen years he was a book editor for Macmillan Publishing and TOR/Forge Books.
For two decades Blevins and his wife lived among the Navajo in the Four Corners area of the West. He and his family lived in Scottsdale, AZ when he died.
Blevins is survived by his wife Meredith; four children, Pam Blevins Hinkle, Adam Blevins, Ethan Blevins, and Allegra Lynch; and eight grandchildren. His family plans a celebration of his life this winter.