Jane Little Botkin

Award-winning author ​Jane (Janie) Little Botkin is a retired teacher turned historical investigator and author. After graduating from the University of Texas at El Paso with a BA in English, Jane taught high school students for thirty years. In 2008, the Texas State Legislature honored her career in education by formal resolution. In post-retirement, Jane has continued to write about and participate in local historical preservation, dividing her time between communities in New Mexico’s White Mountain Wilderness.

A member of the Western Writers of America since 2017, Jane has judged entries for the WWA's prestigious Spur Award and reviewed new releases. She presently sits on the WWA Board of Directors.

A double Spur-Award-winner herself, Frank Little and the IWW : The Blood That Stained an American Family is her first nonfiction book. The subject of the book is Botkin’s great-granduncle, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, who was lynched for his words on August 1, 1917.

Jane’s second book, The Girl Who Dared to Defy: Jane Street and the Rebel Maids of Denver (University of Oklahoma Press 2021) traces the life of a woman who was not even a maid, but who had remarkable success organizing the “unorganizable”--housemaids in the homes of Denver’s elite Capitol Hill--and her downfall due to sex. Themes involving sexual exploitation, violent assault, misogyny, and virile syndicalism permeate the narrative. In the book’s periphery, western women, with their unique spirits and backgrounds, strive to bring independence to all classes of women—except for the housemaids.

A third book, currently in research, narrates the life of Hank Boedeker, a Wyoming lawman who was also a friend of Butch Cassidy’s. Their worlds collide, not surprisingly.

Though not typical of Botkin’s western-history writing, The Pink Dress, Memoir of a Guyrex Girll is a memoir revealing the hilarity and sometimes-absurdity of the Texas beauty pageant business while under control of famous beauty-queen-makers Richard Guy and Rex Holt. Janie Little (Botkin) was their first Miss El Paso—and the beauty duo’s trial and error—before they mastered queen-making and produced the Texas Aces (Five consecutive Miss USAs) during the 1980s. A somber thread of women’s shared issues weaves the fun together. This book is currently being written.