San Juan College professor earns national honors for historical novel

A San Juan College faculty member in Farmington has brought national literary attention to San Juan County, with Ron Striegel’s historical novel Land Shadows collecting several major honors for its examination of New Mexico’s past.

The book, released May 1, 2025, won the Eric Hoffer Da Vinci Eye Award, was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer First Horizon Award for debut authors, was shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize, and placed runner-up in Historical Fiction in the Eric Hoffer Awards. It also won the Maxy Award for Historical Fiction, was named one of Shelf Unbound’s Top 100 Notable Indie Books, and received a Kirkus Reviews “Get It” recommendation.

San Juan College said the recognition is notable because thousands of books are evaluated each year across multiple divisions in the Eric Hoffer Awards. For a local faculty member to surface in that field gives the college national visibility and adds a public literary credential to the work of the Teacher Education program, where Striegel works closely with Diné and Latino/a pre-service teachers.

Land Shadows is set during the era of the Maxwell Land Grant and links the Highland Clearances in Scotland with the forced displacement of Indigenous and Hispano communities across New Mexico and the broader Southwest. The novel follows Scottish immigrant Murdoch McNeil, while publisher materials say a second thread centers on Kewanee, a Potawatomi girl who resists forced assimilation at the Carlisle Indian School.

That history has direct resonance in San Juan County, where questions of land, memory and cultural survival are still part of the civic landscape. Striegel’s own background deepens that connection: he is a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and he has said that living and teaching in the Southwest shaped how he thinks about history and the stories left out of traditional Western accounts.

Public listings say Striegel lives in Farmington with his wife, librarian Jennifer Goodland, and their blue heeler, Bodhi. But the bigger local effect is institutional, not personal. A national award run like this places San Juan College’s teacher-training work, and the students who move through it, in a wider conversation about how the region’s history is told, who gets included in that telling, and how New Mexico’s past continues to shape classrooms in the Four Corners.