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Jeff Streeby

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Jeff Streeby grew up in Sioux City, Iowa, an historic terminal market for Western beef, and worked for Waitt Cattle Company while he attended Morningside College. During the early 1970s he competed in amateur rodeo as a bull rider, bareback rider, and saddle-bronc rider without spectacular results. Later, he went to Minnesota and Florida where he worked as a groom and stableman for dressage and A-Circuit hunter-jumper trainers. He has worked on the Thoroughbred race-tracks of Nebraska and Montana as both a groom and an assistant trainer.

He earned a teaching credential in English at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, in 1983. He has also earned graduate credit there, and at the University of Wyoming, Antioch University, the University of Texas at El Paso, at Montana State and at the University of California, Riverside.

After several years of teaching at Andress High School and Radford Academy in El Paso, Texas, working a few odd seasonal works on a couple of ranches down by Sierra Blanca, and boarding horses at his little New Mexico place, Jeff and his family then moved to Great Falls, Montana, where he taught English at Great Falls High School. Currently, Jeff is teaching English at Perris High School in Perris, California, and he is a candidate for the Master of Fine Arts degree in Poetry at New England College in Henniker, New Hampshire.

His work has appeared in Western Horseman magazine, Countryline magazine, Cowboy Gazette magazine, and Rope Burns magazine. His long work-in-progress, Sunday Creek, is a serial feature at the Bar-D website. His work has been included in three anthologies: The Big Roundup (AWA Book of the Year, 2002 and winner of the Buck Ramsey Award), Cowboy Poetry: The Reunion (Gibbs Smith publishers), and 200 Poets of the People (Australia). He has been a featured guest on "Love of the West", an Oklahoma-based PBS series. He is a member of Western Writers of America. He is a registered songwriter with BMI. He performs at cowboy poetry gatherings around the US and in Canada.

The character of LeRoi "Ace" Evans is based on the capsule biographies of several World War I Fighter Aces, especially Captain William Carpenter Lambert, an American who flew for the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Air Force and on Edward Corringham "Mick" Mannock, a British Ace killed in action July 26, 1918, near Lestrem, France. The "Austro-Hungarian Ace" is based on Godwin Brumowski and on the Prussian Ace Joachim von Bertrab. Von Bertrab was shot down by Mannock August 12, 1917. The "FAI ticket" was the colloquial term for the certificate issued by the Federation Aeronautique Internationale (FAI).