Desolation Ridge

LaVonne Griffin-Valade was born and raised in the high desert country along the John Day River of eastern Oregon. It’s a vast and luminous landscape made up of wind-sculpted fossil beds, pine and juniper forests, grasslands, indigo mountains, and river-fed valleys—a place that stoked her imagination and inspired her to become a lifetime writer of short stories, essays, poetry, and novels. LaVonne has carried her love of language, story, and imagery wherever life has taken her, whether it was the eastern Oregon high desert, the islands of Saipan, Guam, and American Samoa, Alaska, Montana, Wyoming, New York, Washington D.C., or western Oregon’s green, lush Willamette Valley.