Linda Hussa was born in 1941 in Nevada, but she came to womanhood in the relatively lush hills of Northern California, "at the base of the Diablo Meridian, a point from which California and Nevada are surveyed, mapped, locked into certainty." As a girl growing up surrounded by horses, she would ride to the top of Mount Diablo, and with her telescope look east, toward the desert of Nevada, a land of mirage. This desert drew her back eventually, and it is from the desert that she writes.

Hussa interprets the landscape, the isolated nature of ranching and the relationships of Great Basin rural communities in poem and essay. She has authored the poetry collections Ride the Silence (2001) and Where the Wind Lives (1994). Blood Sister I Am to These Fields (2002) received three national awards: the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum's Wrangler Award; the Spur Award, from Western Writers of America; and the Willa Cather Award from Women Writing the West. She also received the 1999 Nevada Writers' Silver Pen.

Hussa's nonfiction includes Sharing Fencelines (2002) which elaborates on issues facing rural communities and their desert landscape; Lige Langston: Sweet Iron (1999) and Diary of a Cowcamp Cook (1990). She has read her works for First Lady Laura Bush (2005), at the Library of Congress (1994), and at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering (1991-2006). She is on the Board of Directors of the Western Folklife Center.