The Big Heartless tackles the intersection of humans and wolves, family and freedom, in a remote corner of the Mountain West. The play premiered in Laramie, Wyoming in April 2018 with an upcoming production in the author’s home state of New Mexico in February 2019.

Spoken Words

Spoken Words 29: Dale Dunn—The Big Heartless

Uncharted: A Journey Along the Edge of Time and Survival traces the evolution of Cate Cabot’s life in the aftermath of a hitchhike that nearly cost the author and her friends their lives.

Spoken Words 28: Cate Cabot— Uncharted: A Journey Along The Edge Of Time And Survival

Feminist, queer, fun, The Best Bad Things is an historical crime novel whose main character, Alma, is an ex-detective who goes undercover to infiltrate a Port Townsend, WA smuggling ring. But what she’s really up to becomes one of the central mysteries of the book.

Spoken Words 27: Katrina Carrasco—The Best Bad Things

This new hybrid-memoir explores the lives and stories of American women prophets and mystics, outliers and outcasts of the American religious story. Through this personal journey, Adrian Shirk discovers new alternatives for spiritual truth seekers.

Spoken Words 26: Adrian Shirk—And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy

Alyson Hagy’s new novel Scribe is about the power—and dangers—of storytelling. Amid a population decimated by civil war and disease that relies on a barter system, a woman known as Scribe exchanges her skill in letter-writing to get what she needs. One day, a strange man shows up in need of a letter, setting off a series of terrible events that bring Scribe to a crossroads she can escape.

Spoken Words 25: Alyson Hagy—Scribe

In Wildness , John Hausdoerffer and his co-editor Gavin Van Horn bring together authors from a variety of landscapes, cultures, and backgrounds to share their stories of what “wildness” looks like when people take an active role in becoming co-creators of well-being with the places they live, work, and play. In re-imagining the possibilities for wildness, Hausdoerffer discusses his hopes for creating communities attuned to the wild in their midst and able to work together across differences to care for these places.

Spoken Words 24: John Hausdoerffer—Wildness: Relations Of People And Place

In his new novel A Short in the Ruins , Kevin Powers explores the dark history of slavery in this country, using one plantation near his home in Virginia as the fictionalized setting and following characters generationally from the Civil War to the 20 th century in order to examine the ways we live with history and legacy of suffering and violence.

Spoken Words 23: Kevin Powers—A Shout In The Ruins

Sara Dant grew up in the American West and deeply loves its culture, history, and landscape. In Losing Eden , she traces the environmental history and development of this region in order to help readers understand how the land has shaped and been shaped by the people who here, while also offering some positive models for shaping the future well-being of the West.

Spoken Words 22: Sara Dant—Losing Eden: An Environmental History Of The American West

Jeffrey Lockwood continues his “Riley the Exterminator” mystery series, this time as Riley tries to solve a missing person case at the same time California’s agricultural industry is threatened by a Mediterranean fruit fly invasion. Lockwood discusses his love for weaving great storytelling, science, philosophy and crime in these mysteries.

Spoken Words 21: Jeffrey Lockwood—Murder On The Fly

In times of trauma and sorrow, Diane Les Becquets turned to the wilderness for solace. Now, as an award-winning author, she sets her books back in those most hidden places as a challenge to return on her own terms. In Breaking Wild , she tracks two women through the remote terrain of Northern Colorado, women who are lost in two very different ways.

Spoken Words 20: Diane Les Becquets — Breaking Wild

In his memoir The Mountain and the Fathers , Joe Wilkins reckoned with loss, poverty, and the landscape of his childhood in the Big Dry of eastern Montana. Now a father, Joe Wilkins’s poems in When We Were Birds attend to what is common to us all, to what binds us together and makes us human, from grief over the loss of a livelihood or health to the anxieties and hopes we have for our children.

Spoken Words 19: Joe Wilkins — When We Were Birds

The rugged, rural, conservative town of Mancos, Colorado was a hard place for Jenny Forrester to grow up. Her new memoir is the story of the relationships and landscape that shaped her life, against which she had to struggle to find her own truth. Facing poverty, isolation, and violence, Forrester talks about her journey toward self-acceptance and what that journey suggests about living in a politically and culturally divided America.

Spoken Words 18: Jenny Forrester — Narrow River, Wide Sky

When author and anarchist Edward Abbey died in 1989, his friends buried his body in a secret location in the desert southwest. More than twenty years later, Sean Prentiss goes looking for that grave and ends up finding something that changes his life.

Spoken Words 17: Sean Prentiss – Finding Abbey

Robert Moor set out to write about his personal experience hiking the Appalachian Trail. What he finished with was On Trails, an exploration of the history, biology, and philosophy of pathways. For Moor, trails are more than a dirt path under our feet, they’re a guide to better understanding the world around us.

Spoken Words 16: Robert Moor – On Trails

When the coyote howls, Dan Flores says we are hearing the original national anthem. Coyote America is the biography of an animal more than five million years in the making on this continent, and one that’s thrived despite the attempts at complete eradication. Urging tolerance and appreciation, Dan Flores offers a fresh look at this iconic animal.

Spoken Words 15: Dan Flores – Coyote America

Spoken Words tells the origin stories of storytelling. Produced in collaboration with the University of Wyoming MFA in Creative Writing program, the show features novelists, poets, non-fiction writers, and more writing from the West or writing about the West from around the world.

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Spoken Words

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