Kathleen O'Neal Gear

Kathleen O'Neal Gear is an American novelist and archaeologist, born in 1954 in Tulare, California. Trained in American Indian history and archaeology, she has worked as a state historian and archaeologist for Wyoming, Kansas, and Nebraska. With her husband and co-author, W. Michael Gear, whom she met at a Wyoming archaeologists' meeting in 1981, she writes historical fiction set among prehistoric and early North American peoples, most notably the long-running First North Americans series that began with People of the Wolf (1990) and continues through the People of the Longhouse and related sequences. Her novels have been published in twenty-nine languages. Gear received the Owen Wister Award for lifetime achievement in Western literature in 2021 and was inducted into the Colorado Authors' Hall of Fame in 2023.