Bio
Proud to be a 3rd-generation Wyoming rancher, Rhonda Sedgwick Stearns has spent most of her six decades with cattle and horses. Reared within 30 miles of where both her grandfathers pioneered in the livestock business, she has followed a lot of their pony tracks.
Ranching, rodeoing, breeding, breaking, training, showing and competing on horses have been her first loves. A national champion in high school rodeo, she moved on through successful years in amateur rodeo to the professional ranks, and is a Gold Card member of the Professional Rodeo Cowboy’s Association. The former Miss Rodeo Wyoming and National High School Rodeo Queen was inducted a 1977 Cowgirl Honoree to the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame at Fort Worth, Texas.
Rhonda played the organ for major prorodeos in 13 states from coast to coast for more than two decades, starting in 1966. In 1977 she began a journalistic career that has produced thousands of published articles in horse and rodeo magazines, a weekly horse news column, and four books to date, with another set for publication in 2008. As a historian she has received honors for the preservation of history through both her writing and her Double Spear Ranch Radio Show.
As a cowboy poet she has been featured since the 80’s at gatherin’s in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, North and South Dakota, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. In 2000 she became the first woman to receive the All Around Cowboy Culture Award at the National Cowboy Symposium & Celebration at Lubbock, Texas. In 2003 the Academy of Western Artists named her Top Cowgirl Poet of the year.
Whether reciting the works of classic cowboy poets Badger Clark, S. Omar Barker, Sharlot Hall, Gail Gardner or that great writer “Anonymous” – or her own original poems – Rhonda is insistent upon maintaining authenticity and portraying the cowboy honestly as he was and is.
She believes having grown up ranching and maintaining that close relationship with cattle, horses and ranch people gives her a strong foundation in the reality of the life. Today, doing ranch day work with her husband on big, historic ranches where they sometimes live in a cowboy tepee for a week at a time during spring and fall works, often riding 30 – 50 miles daily in rough country, continues to maintain a solid background from which to write and recite true cowboy rhyme, both old and new, with passion and realism.
Rhonda has never produced a serious book of her poetry. A modest chapbook “Mush Creek Musings” contains some of her earlier works and some short essays. One of her poems was selected for the Gibbs-Smith publication “Cowgirl Poetry” some years ago; and a poem was chosen for the 2007 Bar D Roundup CD. She produced an audiocassette of her piano music and poetry titled “Over The Corral Fence” in the 1980’s, but it is sold out. A poetry book and CD are on her list of urgent “things to do”.