The first woman to receive the coveted PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction, Annie Proulx is considered one of contemporary literature's most gifted writers. Proulx won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for her novel The Shipping News, and her short story "Brokeback Mountain" was made into an Academy Award-winning film. In Bird Cloud, Proulx vividly recounts the ups and downs of building her dream house on a nature preserve in Wyoming.