Loading…
Montana Book Festival 2018 has ended
Thursday, September 27
 

11:30am PDT

Mark Gibbons
Come listen to Mark Gibbons read and discuss his newest collection of poetry, The Imitation Blues, by Foothills Press.

Reviews of The Imitations Blues:

At times weary, at times sparkling with wonder, The Imitation Blues is a fierce meditation on what is lost, what is found. The poems here are burly, flexing, but there is grace in all the musculature. Political, but never indulgent; profound, but never ephemeral. These poems are deeply rooted. A tough guy eye on mortality, but a tender heart revealed as he squints. “This losing is what we do,” Gibbons professes, but this collection is a gift you will find meaning in, again and again.
 —Richard Fifield, author of The Flood Girls

This man has decided not to coat his tongue in silver. He has covered it with tree bark and Clark Fork River water. He reveals to us, the truth, the dishonesty, the actuality of how humans discover themselves. A true master who calls to the animals inside us, those beasts who know this is a good place. 
—Monty Campbell, Jr., author of A Large Dent in the Moon

Insofar that The Imitation Blues makes us descend into the root cellars of the poet's heart and history, it will also praise the living and light of our days. These pages pour libation and summon the dead: John Lennon, Johnny Cash, Jack Kerouac, Jack Spicer, Ed Lahey, Guy Lombardo, Smelley the cat, and dear departed friends and family. In these poems, a lost mother will keep sowing. A father will keep working a brutal graveyard shift. Reader, don't be afraid. There's a party going on. Dylan Thomas will guide us through Golden Gate Park! I've been a fan of Gibbons' poetry for almost twenty years, and this is classic Gibbo. These poems tell the truth, and they are unafraid. 
—Miles Waggener, author of Phoenix Suites and Sky Harbor

Speakers
avatar for Mark Gibbons

Mark Gibbons

Mark Gibbons is a Missoula poet and lifelong Montanan. His latest collection of poetry is The Imitation Blues from FootHills Publishing in 2017, and he's the editor of Moving On: The Last Poems of Ed Lahey, 2018, from Drumlummon Institute.


Thursday September 27, 2018 11:30am - 12:15pm PDT
Shakespeare & Co 103 S 3rd St W, Missoula, MT 59801, USA

1:00pm PDT

Writing the Short Story: Reading and Q&A
Celebrate the short story!  Join four authors of short story collections, all published by small presses.  Learn about the whys of short story, and the hows of small press publishing.

Elizabeth Colen is the author of True Ash, a collection of linked short stories, a collaboration with Carol Guess,  published by Black Lawrence Press
Michelle Blair Wilker  is the author of  Chain Linked Stories, published by Post Hill Press  
Jacob M. Appel  is the author of The Amazing Mr. Morality: Stories published by Vandalia Press
Bradley Jay Owens  is the author of  How I Met You, a collection of 15 short stories  published by    Brighthorse Books    


Speakers
avatar for Bradley Jay Owens

Bradley Jay Owens

Bradley Jay Owens is the author of "How I Met You," a collection of short fiction. He is a former journalist and Foreign Service officer who served in Washington, D.C. and Port-au-Prince, Haiti. His stories and essays have appeared in Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, "The Henfield... Read More →
avatar for Michelle Blair Wilker

Michelle Blair Wilker

Michelle Blair Wilker is a Los Angeles-writer and producer. Her work has appeared inAcross the Margin, Whistlingfire, Hollywood Dementia, Unheard LA, Felix Magazine, andThe Huffington Post. She was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s November 2012 contest fornew writers and shortlisted... Read More →


Thursday September 27, 2018 1:00pm - 2:00pm PDT
Shakespeare & Co 103 S 3rd St W, Missoula, MT 59801, USA

2:00pm PDT

Writing and Money
We’ve all heard of million-dollar advances, and if we’re honest, we’ve all imagined what we’d do with that kind of paycheck (first, call in rich to the day job). But what no one likes to talk about are the much more common four-figure deals—the kind that, when it’s all said and done, help you buy a new lawn mower instead of a new Land Rover.  

Writing is a business, and as the business owner, you need a realistic financial picture. Is this a side gig, a career, or something in between? Our panel, Danica Winters, best-selling author, Erin Steele, financial advisor, and Melissa Tenley and Clare Tallier, aspiring authors, is here to help you dive into the sexy, sexy world of financial management in the writing industry.  We’ll talk about a few of the biggest, burningest questions you probably have and a few you might not have considered, yet:
 · If you’re not one of the lucky few who gets a million-dollar advance, how much can you expect to make?
 · More importantly, how much can you expect to spend to get your career off the ground or maintain its momentum?
 · How do you budget for that?
 · When can you quit your day job?
 · Retirement, taxes, insurance…what? (Pinky swear, we’ll make it as exciting as possible.)
 · What do your industry partners need you to know about all this stuff?
 · How do you prepare yourself to grow your business?
 · Why do we keep calling you a business owner? Aren’t you just a writer? (Hint: NO—you’re so much more.)  

We’ll use actual industry numbers and case studies. Our financial expert has more than a decade of experience helping people achieve their financial dreams. Danica Winters has immersed herself in the business for the last decade. And Melissa Tenley and Clare Tallier are not afraid to ask (out loud) the uncomfortable questions.  Chances are, you’ve dedicated a sizeable portion of your time (and soul) to this writing “hobby.” You owe it to yourself to understand what that means from a financial perspective and how to protect your investment.

Speakers
MC

Melanie Calahan

Self Publishing Services, LLC.
Melanie Calahan combines a lifelong passion for reading and writing with a fifteen-year career in marketing and copywriting, including a stint as Marketing Director for a community development non-profit, Account Manager for an ad agency, and Lead Copywriter for an online electronics... Read More →
avatar for Danica Winters

Danica Winters

Owner, Self-Publishing Services
Danica Winters is a bestselling author who has won multiple awards for writing books that grip readers with their ability to drive emotion through suspense and occasionally a touch of magic.When she’s not working, she can be found in the wilds of Montana testing her patience while... Read More →


Thursday September 27, 2018 2:00pm - 3:00pm PDT
Fact and Fiction 220 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

3:00pm PDT

Great Montana Read Panel
What is Montana’s best loved novel? This spring, a panel of our own literary experts sought to answer this question as part of the nationwide search for the PBS program, the Great American Read. Though the selection process was tough, the judges narrowed their picks to 20. The final list features books published within an 80 year time span, including stunning debuts and heartfelt finales from established and up-and-coming authors.  Join Sarah Aronson, host of MTPR's "The Write Question" alongside a handful of our judges to celebrate the extraordinary literary achievements inspired by Montana’s authors and its place. Panel members will share their own judging process, including books that narrowly missed the final list as well as the qualities which make Montana literature stand out within the national literary scene. Classics, like James Welch’s “Fools Crow” will be discussed alongside contemporary contributions such as Emily Danforth’s “The Miseducation of Cameron Post.” Come get your crash course in Montana’s best books and join the conversation as we work to keep the Treasure State’s literary scene thriving.

Speakers
avatar for Kim Anderson

Kim Anderson

Director, Montana Center for the Book
Kim returned to her hometown of Missoula in 1989 and spent the next eleven years caring for her two children and working out of a home office as both a free-lance writer and editor and the executive director of several nonprofit arts organizations. Before returning to Missoula, she... Read More →
DF

Desiree Funston

Reference Librarian, Missoula Public Library
avatar for Robert Stubblefield

Robert Stubblefield

Robert Stubblefield is the faculty advisor for The Oval, the undergraduate literary magazine at the University of Montana, where he also teaches fiction and composition. His stories and essays have appeared in Dreamers and Desperadoes: Contemporary Fiction of the American West... Read More →


Thursday September 27, 2018 3:00pm - 5:00pm PDT
Missoula County Public Library 301 East Main

4:00pm PDT

Food as a Subject
Calling all foodies, beer drinkers, cocktail lovers and cookbook connoisseurs!

In The Bloody Mary, author Brian Bartels delves into the fun history of this classic drink. Did Hemingway create it, as legend suggests? Or was it an ornery Parisian bartender?

Author Jean Petersen presents locally sourced epicurean dishes that exude Montanan charm in The Big Sky Bounty Cookbook-Local Ingredients and Rustic Recipes, created in collaboration with Chef Barrie Boulds.

John Holl provides a complete guide to beer today, allowing readers to think critically about the best beverage in the world. Full of entertaining anecdotes and surprising opinions, Drink Beer, Think Beer is a must-read for beer lovers, from casual enthusiasts to die-hard hop heads. 

Moderators
Speakers
avatar for John Holl

John Holl

JOHN HOLL is an award-winning journalist covering the beer industry. He’s the author of several books including Drink Beer, Think Beer: Getting to the Bottom of Every Pint and The American Craft Beer Cookbook. He is the senior editor of Craft Beer and Brewing Magazine and the co-host... Read More →


Thursday September 27, 2018 4:00pm - 5:00pm PDT
Dana Gallery 246 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

5:30pm PDT

The Goldfish & Gummi Bears Reading: Missoula Writing Collaborative
Young writers ages 8 to 14 years of age who participated in the Words with Wings summer camp, sponsored by the Montana Writing Collaborative, will read their work.

Speakers
avatar for Nick Littman

Nick Littman

Programs Director, Missoula Writing Collaborative
As Program Director of the Missoula Writing Collaborative, Nick helped to collect the 500 place poems, illustrations, and recordings that make up the digital Missoula Children's Poetry Map. As a Writer in Residence for MWC he teaches poetry at schools around Missoula. He also teaches... Read More →
avatar for Caroline Patterson

Caroline Patterson

Executive Director, Missoula Writing Collaborative
Caroline Patterson published the collection, Ballet at the Moose Lodge, with Drumlummon Press in 2017. In 2006, she published theanthology Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart,which won a Willa Award. Her work has appeared inanthologies including Montana Noir (Akashic... Read More →


Thursday September 27, 2018 5:30pm - 6:30pm PDT
Fact and Fiction 220 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

7:00pm PDT

An Antietam Veteran's Montana Journey: The Lost Memoir of James Howard Lowell
This event is hosted by The Rocky Mountain Museum of Military History.

This book is the recently unearthed memoir of Katharine Seaton-Squires' great-great-grandfather's travels out West after the Civil War, from 1865 to 1871. James Howard Lowell spent much of this period in Montana, and he writes of vigilante justice in Benton, trading with Gros Ventre and Crow tribes near Camp Cooke, placer mining, pioneer women, hunting antelope, and the Marias Massacre of 1870. The Mass 13th veteran practiced law, what he characterizes as "tomahawk jurisprudence," in Benton from 1869-1871. Lowell has many near-death escapes from exposure and Indian attack. The book also features his Civil War correspondence and letters written home to his sweetheart, Kate Mary Roberts, a volunteer in Harrisburg who nursed him to health after he suffered a gunshot wound to his left leg at Antietam.

Speakers
avatar for Katharine Seaton Squires

Katharine Seaton Squires

Katharine Seaton Squires's primary career was in the news business, first as an on-air reporter and then as a writer-producer for CBS News, CBS Sports, NBC Sports and CNBC. She worked on three Olympic Games as a writer and producer. She holds a BA in art and English from Rutgers University... Read More →


Thursday September 27, 2018 7:00pm - 8:00pm PDT
Rocky Mountain Museum of Military History, Bldg. T-316 3400 Captain Rawn Way, Missoula, MT 59804

9:00pm PDT

Erotic Fan Fiction
This year's theme for **ErOtIc FaN FiCtIoN** is CHANGELINGS, i.e., mer-people, werewolves, etc.

Join us for a drink and a listen at the Union Club!

Speakers
avatar for Sarah Aswell

Sarah Aswell

Sarah Aswell is a freelance writer and comedian. Her work has appeared in places like The New Yorker, McSweeney’s, National Lampoon, Funny or Die, and many more. She’s a contributing writer at MAD Magazine, Scary Mommy, and Reductress.
SB

Sheri Boggs

Sheri Boggs is a librarian with the Spokane County Library District and has been published in Lilac City Fairy Tales and other Spokane area anthologies
avatar for Kris Dinnison

Kris Dinnison

Kris Dinnison spent nearly two decades as a teacher and librarian while dreaming of becoming a writer. Her first novel, You and Me and Him, came out in 2015 from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. She lives and writes in Spokane, Washington.  
MH

Melissa Huggins

Melissa Huggins is a prose writer currently at work on a collection of essays. Her stories and essays have appeared in theInlander, Lilac City Fairy Tales, Railtown Almanac, the Oyez Review, and elsewhere. Her author interviews with Joyce Carol Oates, William T. Vollmann, and Emily... Read More →
MP

Mara Panich-Crouch

Mara Panich-Crouch is a bookseller at Fact and Fiction Books in Missoula. She received her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing from Purdue University and found her home Missoula in 2002 while pursuing post-graduate studies at The University of Montana. She loves giving (and... Read More →
avatar for Acton Seibel

Acton Seibel

Acton Seibel currently resides in Western Montana with two dogs, a cat, and one amazing BFF.  He is a dedicated beer drinker and holds a degree in Creative Writing and English Literature.  
AK

Aileen Keown Vaux

Career Advisor, College of Arts, Letters and Education at EWU
Aileen Keown Vaux (Consolation Prize, 2018) earned her MFA from Eastern WashingtonUniversity, and her essays and poems can be found in Lilac City Fairy Tales, Railtown Almanac, and The Spokesman-Review.  Currently, she lives in Spokane, WA where she works as a Career Advisor for... Read More →


Thursday September 27, 2018 9:00pm - 10:30pm PDT
The Union Club
 
Friday, September 28
 

9:30am PDT

Start the Day with Poetry
This year The Public House will be the place for all things poetry!  So start your Festival day with poetry! Coffee will be provided.

Join poets Ken White (The Getty Fiend ) and Isabel Sobral Campos (Your Person Doesn't Belong to You), as well as Bernard Quetchenbach, editor of  The Bunch Grass Motel: The Collected Poems of Randall Gloege, recently published by University of Montana Press; and Joshua Beckman, tour coordinator of the Poetry Bus Tour, a literary event sponsored by Wave Books in 2006. It featured a tour of contemporary poets, traveling by a forty-foot Biodiesel bus, who stopped to perform in fifty North American cities over the course of fifty days.           

Speakers
avatar for Joshua Beckman

Joshua Beckman

Joshua Beckman was born in New Haven, Connecticut. He is the author of many books, including The Lives of the Poems and Three Talks (Wave Books, forthcoming 2018), The Inside of an AppleTake ItShakeYour Time Has Come, and two collaborations with Matthew RohrerNi... Read More →


Friday September 28, 2018 9:30am - 11:00am PDT
The Public House 130 E Broadway St, Missoula, MT 59802

10:00am PDT

Rewriting Cowboys and Indians: Decolonizing Mythologies of the West
This panel will look at the way that current writers (both of the western genre and Native writers) are rewriting the west in a non-stereotypical way. We will be discussing several writers and looking at our own work in order to talk about how writers are trying to establish themselves in a historically correct way that helps decolonize the way that cowboys and Indians are written about and read about in the West.

Speakers
avatar for Bruce Holbert

Bruce Holbert

Mt. Spokane High School
Bio:Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where he assisted in editing the Iowa Review and held a teaching writing fellowship.  His fiction has appeared in the Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, other voices, the Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, the Spokesman... Read More →
RM

Ruby Murray

Ruby Hansen Murray is the winner of the 2017 Montana Prize in Nonfiction, awarded fellowships at Ragdale, Hedgebrook and Fishtrap. Her work appears in World Literature Today, CutBank, About Place and The Rumpus. She received an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and... Read More →
avatar for Shann Ray

Shann Ray

Poet and novelist Shann Ray's work has appeared in Poetry, Esquire, McSweeney’s, Poetry International, Narrative, Montana Quarterly, and Salon. He grew up fishing the waterways of Montana and Alaska, and spent part of his childhood on the Northern Cheyenne reservation in southeast... Read More →
avatar for Russell Rowland

Russell Rowland

Russell Rowland is a fourth generation Montanan, born in Bozeman in 1957. He has a Master’s in Creative Writing from Boston University. His latest book is Arbuckle, the final novel in a trilogy based on his own family history. He has published four novels, In Open Spaces, The... Read More →


Friday September 28, 2018 10:00am - 11:15am PDT
Missoula Art Museum 335 N Pattee St, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

10:30am PDT

Self-Publishing Toolkit
There are a plethora of self-publishing services vying for your hard earned dollar and elusive time. Join Ramona Flightner as she reviews the essentials of self-publishing success while also sharing tried and true resources with you in this free session. Learn from her years of experience in self-publishing to avoid novice mistakes and enhance your success as an author.

Speakers
RF

Ramona Flightner

Ramona Flightner is a historical romance author of the Banished Saga and the Bear Grass Springs Series. She has attended the San Francisco Writer’s Conference, the New England Romance Writer’s of America Conference, and the Montana Festival of the Book. Ramona has self-published... Read More →


Friday September 28, 2018 10:30am - 11:15am PDT
Dana Gallery 246 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

11:00am PDT

Richard Hugo and Madeline De Frees in the 21st Century
Northwest natives Richard Hugo and Madeline De Frees were renowned poets, teachers, and colleagues in Montana and elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest and beyond. Besides inspiring a community literary center (Seattle's Richard Hugo House) which bears his name, Hugo gave us his Triggering Towns. De Frees gave us her iconic Blue Nun who eloped into the freedom of absolute commitment to poetry. Both were powerful storytellers on the page and in person. In this session, modeled on their examples, LOST HORSE PRESS poets will share their own writing and  stories relating how Hugo and De Frees have influenced them, and the  deveopment of contemporary American poetry.

Moderators
avatar for Carolyne Wright

Carolyne Wright

Faculty in Poetry, Northwest Institute of Literary Arts
Carolyne Wright's new book is This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and was included in The Best American Poetry 2009. Her ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace... Read More →

Speakers
avatar for David Axelrod

David Axelrod

Basalt
David Axelrod is the editor of basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts, and Sensational Nightingales: The Collected Poetry of Walter Pavlich, published by Lynx House Press. His new collection of poems, The Open Hand, appeared from Lost Horse Press in the autumn of 2017. His second... Read More →
avatar for Tami Haaland

Tami Haaland

Professor, Montana State University Billings
Tami Haaland is the author of three poetry collections, What Does Not Return (Lost Horse Press, 2017), When We Wake in the Night, and A Breath in Every Room, winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award. She earned a MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Bennington College... Read More →
avatar for Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny is the author of six books of poetry, including Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today, selected by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series (University of Washington Press 2017), Pictograph (Milkweed Editions 2015), and Reading Novalis in Montana (Milkweed... Read More →
avatar for Thomas Mitchell

Thomas Mitchell

Thomas Mitchell was raised in New York and California, but has lived in Oregon since 1980. He received his Masters from California State University, Sacramento, where he studied with the poet, Dennis Schmitz. He received an MFA from the University of Montana, where he worked with... Read More →


Friday September 28, 2018 11:00am - 12:00pm PDT
The Public House 130 E Broadway St, Missoula, MT 59802

11:30am PDT

Writing Through Grief
Join author Joyce Lynnette Hocker for a reading from her book The Trail to Tincup: Love Stories at Life’s End, followed by a discussion about grief, loss, and creation.

In The Trail to Tincup: Love Stories at Life’s End, a psychologist reckons with the loss of four family members within a span of two years. Hocker works backward into the lives of these people and forward into the values, perspective, and qualities they bestowed before and after leaving. Following the trail to their common gravesite in Tincup, Colorado, she remembers and recounts decisive stories and delves into artifacts, journals, and her own dreams. In the process the grip of grief begins to lessen, death braids its way into life, and life informs the losses with abiding connections. Gradually, she begins to find herself capable of imagining life without her sister and best friend. Toward the end of the book Hocker’s own near-death experience illuminates how familiarity with her individual mortality helps her live with joy, confidence, and openness.

This reading is in collaboration with the Missoula Art Museum, specifically the Understory/Overstory exhibit by Cathy Weber. Learn more about that exhibit here:

https://www.missoulaartmuseum.org/index.php/ID/ec34c10cdbf5301ab7bbe15388cbe3cf/fuseaction/exhibitions.detail.htm

Speakers
avatar for Joyce Lynnette Hocker

Joyce Lynnette Hocker

Joyce Lynnette Hocker grew up in Texas, a descendent of four generations of Texans on both sides.  She obtained a PhD in communication from the University of Texas--Austin, and later received a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Montana.  Her academic career as a... Read More →


Friday September 28, 2018 11:30am - 12:15pm PDT
Missoula Art Museum 335 N Pattee St, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

12:00pm PDT

Art of the Word
Aaron Parrett talks reads and discusses Maple & Lead, a critically acclaimed anthology of 11 short stories with illustrations by artist Seth Roby, letterpress-printed and hand-bound at The Territorial Press.

An article on Maple & Lead from the Great Falls Tribune:
https://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/life/2017/10/27/maple-lead-book-made-hard-way/763015001/



Speakers

Friday September 28, 2018 12:00pm - 12:45pm PDT
Shakespeare & Co 103 S 3rd St W, Missoula, MT 59801, USA

12:00pm PDT

Montana Mystery Reading
An exciting reading with local favorites: Keith McCafferty, Leslie Budewitz, and Gwen Florio!

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:

Gwen Florio: Her first novel, Montana, won the inaugural Pinckley Prize for Crime Fiction, and a High Plains Book Award, both in the debut category. It was a finalist for a Shamus Award, an International Thriller Award and a Silver Falchion Award. The fifth in the series, Under the Shadows (Midnight Ink Books) was released in March 2018.

She’s a member of International Thriller Writers, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers, and Western Writers of America. She worked with Judy Sternlight Literary Services in the initial editing of Montana, Dakota and Silent Hearts, and is represented by Richard Curtis.

Keith McCafferty: As well as being a novelist for Viking/Penguin Books, Keith McCafferty is the Survival and Outdoor Skills Editor of Field & Stream. He has written articles for publications as diverse as Fly Fisherman Magazine, Mother Earth News, Gray’s Sporting Journal and the Chicago Tribune, and on subjects ranging from mosquitoes to wolves to mercenaries and exorcism. Based in Montana and working on assignment around the globe–he recently spent a month in India trekking the Himalayas, fishing for golden mahseer and studying tigers–Keith has won numerous awards, including the Robert Traver Award for angling literature. He has twice been a finalist for a National Magazine Award.

Leslie Budewitz: Leslie is the first author to win Agatha Awards for both fiction and nonfiction. Death al Dente, first in the Food Lovers’ Village Mysteries, won the 2013 Agatha Award for Best First Novel. Her guide for writers, Books, Crooks & Counselors: How to Write Accurately About Criminal Law and Courtroom Procedure, won the 2011 Agatha Award for Best Nonfiction.

She is the Montana representative to the board of the Rocky Mountain chapter of Mystery Writers of America, and is also a member of the Authors of the Flathead and Montana Women Writers.


Friday September 28, 2018 12:00pm - 1:30pm PDT
Fact and Fiction 220 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

12:30pm PDT

Poets' Roundtable
Modeled after a similar and very successful Roundtable event held recently at Bozeman’s Rialto Theater, this event will feature five poets from the Northwest reading poems on a variety of specific subjects (a few examples: mother figures, machines, bears, gardens) and conversing about their work. Attendees are invited to help select the subject of each round of poems. The Roundtable approach is less formal and more interactive than a conventional reading and provides a unique view of each poet’s voice and approach. The poets involved are diverse in gender, background, age, orientation, and poetic style.

Speakers
avatar for Henrietta Goodman

Henrietta Goodman

Henrietta Goodman is the author of three books of poetry: All That Held Us (John Ciardi Prize, BkMk Press, 2018), Hungry Moon (Mountain West Poetry Series, 2013), and Take What You Want (Beatrice Hawley Award, Alice James Books, 2007). Her poems and essays have recently appeared in... Read More →
avatar for Ryan Scariano

Ryan Scariano

Ryan Scariano’s chapbook, Smithereens, was published by Imperfect Press. Some of his recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Phantom Drift; Basalt; the Willow Springs Books anthology: Heart of the Rat; Verde Que Te Quiero Verde: Poems after Federico Garcia Lorca; and Bright... Read More →
avatar for Corrie Williamson

Corrie Williamson

Co-Founder, Helena Area Literary Arts
Corrie Williamson is the author of Sweet Husk, winner of the 2014 Perugia Press Prize and finalist for the 2015 Library of Virginia Poetry Award. Her second book, The River Where You Forgot My Name, was selected by Allison Joseph for the 2018 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry, and will... Read More →
avatar for Tobias Wray

Tobias Wray

Director of Creative Writing Programs, University of Idaho
Born in Baton Rouge to a clarinetist and an English teacher who wished she were a nun, Tobias Wray’s work invests in Queer poetics and lyric storytelling. He holds an MFA in Poetry and Translation from the University of Arkansas and a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee... Read More →


Friday September 28, 2018 12:30pm - 1:30pm PDT
The Public House 130 E Broadway St, Missoula, MT 59802

1:30pm PDT

The Synthetic Age
Join us for a reading of Christopher Preston's book, The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World, by Christopher Preston.Christopher Preston is Professor of Philosophy and a Research Fellow in the Mansfield Center's Program on Ethics and Public Affairs at the University of Montana.Summary of The Synthetic Age:

Imagining a future in which humans fundamentally reshape the natural world using nanotechnology, synthetic biology, de-extinction, and climate engineering.

We have all heard that there are no longer any places left on Earth untouched by humans. The significance of this goes beyond statistics documenting melting glaciers and shrinking species counts. It signals a new geological epoch. In The Synthetic Age, Christopher Preston argues that what is most startling about this coming epoch is not only how much impact humans have had but, more important, how much deliberate shaping they will start to do. Emerging technologies promise to give us the power to take over some of Nature's most basic operations. It is not just that we are exiting the Holocene and entering the Anthropocene; it is that we are leaving behind the time in which planetary change is just the unintended consequence of unbridled industrialism. A world designed by engineers and technicians means the birth of the planet's first Synthetic Age.

Preston describes a range of technologies that will reconfigure Earth's very metabolism: nanotechnologies that can restructure natural forms of matter; “molecular manufacturing” that offers unlimited repurposing; synthetic biology's potential to build, not just read, a genome; “biological mini-machines” that can outdesign evolution; the relocation and resurrection of species; and climate engineering attempts to manage solar radiation by synthesizing a volcanic haze, cool surface temperatures by increasing the brightness of clouds, and remove carbon from the atmosphere with artificial trees that capture carbon from the breeze.

What does it mean when humans shift from being caretakers of the Earth to being shapers of it? And in whom should we trust to decide the contours of our synthetic future? These questions are too important to be left to the engineers.

Friday September 28, 2018 1:30pm - 2:30pm PDT
Shakespeare & Co 103 S 3rd St W, Missoula, MT 59801, USA

2:00pm PDT

Moving On: The Last Poems of Ed Lahey
The Drumlummon Institute in Helena will publish Moving On: The Last Poems of Ed Lahey, Butte/Missoula poet who died in 2011. Mark Gibbons found the poems in the remains of Ed's apartment after he died and edited a new collection of Lahey's poetry. Drumlummon director, Aaron Parrett, will host a panel discussion of Lahey's work and his place in Montana literature. Parrett and Gibbons will be joined by guest readers to share poems from the book, Lahey's body of work, and selections written in honor of the late author.

Moderators
avatar for Mark Gibbons

Mark Gibbons

Mark Gibbons is a Missoula poet and lifelong Montanan. His latest collection of poetry is The Imitation Blues from FootHills Publishing in 2017, and he's the editor of Moving On: The Last Poems of Ed Lahey, 2018, from Drumlummon Institute.

Speakers

Friday September 28, 2018 2:00pm - 3:15pm PDT
Fact and Fiction 220 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

2:00pm PDT

Andrew Martin and Alicia Mountain
Join us for the homecoming of two celebrated University of Montana MFA graduates, Andrew Martin (Early Work, 2018) and Alicia Mountain (High Ground Coward, 2018). These readings are sponsored by Cutbank, the University of Montana literary magazine, and the Pride Foundation.  This event will be directly followed by the the Cutbank sponsored current MFA reading.

ALICIA MOUNTAIN’s first collection, High Ground Coward (Iowa, 2018), was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy as a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize. She is also the author of the digital chapbook Thin Fire, selected by Natalie Diaz and published by BOAAT Press. She has been a Pushcart Prize nominee, an Idyllwild Arts Fellow and a resident at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is a lesbian poet, PhD student, and assistant editor of the Denver Quarterly. Mountain earned her MFA at the University of Montana in Missoula. Keep up with her on twitter at @HiGroundCoward.

ANDREW MARTIN's stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Zyzzyva, and Tin House's Flash Fridays series, and his non-fiction has been published by The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, and others. Early Work is his first novel.

Speakers
avatar for Andrew Martin

Andrew Martin

Andrew Martin's stories have appeared in The Paris Review, Zyzzyva, and Tin House's Flash Fridays series, and his non-fiction has been published by The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, and others. Early Work is his first novel.
avatar for Alicia Mountain

Alicia Mountain

Alicia Mountain received her MFA at the University of Montana in Missoula. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Barrow Street, Witness, Spillway, LIT, The Southampton Review and elsewhere. She is the recent recipient of an Idyllwild Fellowship and received a... Read More →


Friday September 28, 2018 2:00pm - 3:15pm PDT
The Public House 130 E Broadway St, Missoula, MT 59802

3:15pm PDT

Cutbank Reading
Friday September 28, 2018 3:15pm - 4:45pm PDT
The Public House 130 E Broadway St, Missoula, MT 59802

3:30pm PDT

Environmental Writing: Reading and Q&A
Three leading authors discuss the complexities and challenges of constructing true, yet hopeful, stories and environmental narratives in an age of ecological degradation and alienation.

Speakers
avatar for Julia Corbett

Julia Corbett

Professor, University of Utah
Julia B. Corbett is a Professor in the Department of Communication and Environmental Humanities Graduate Program at the University of Utah. Her scholarship investigates human relationships with the natural world. Books include Out of the Woods: Seeing Nature in the Everyday (2018), Seven... Read More →
avatar for Paige Embry

Paige Embry

Paige Embry is the author of Our Native Bees: North America’s Endangered Pollinators and the Fight to Save Them (Timber Press 2018). Her multi-year obsession with the lives of America’s native bees began with a gardening epiphany—honey bees, which came from Europe with the colonists... Read More →
avatar for Ben Goldfarb

Ben Goldfarb

Ben Goldfarb is an award-winning environmental journalist and the author of Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2018), which the Washington Post called "a masterpiece of a treatise on the natural world." His work has been... Read More →


Friday September 28, 2018 3:30pm - 4:30pm PDT
Dana Gallery 246 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

3:30pm PDT

Writers Under the Influence
What drives our work, whether consciously or unconsciously? How do writers embrace their influences? Four Northwest poets, all published with Spokane-based Scablands Books, will discuss the books, music, movies, food, and other obsessions they were “under the influence of” as they worked on their collections. Moderated by Scablands poetry editor Maya Jewell Zeller, poets Tim Greenup Aileen Keown Vaux, Kathryn Smith, and Ellen Welcker will also read selections from their books.

Moderators
avatar for Maya Jewell Zeller

Maya Jewell Zeller

Poetry Editor, Scablands Books
Maya Jewell Zeller (Scablands Poetry Editor & CWU Professor) is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017), the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015), and the... Read More →

Speakers
avatar for Tim Greenup

Tim Greenup

Spokane Falls Community College
Tim Greenup (Without Warning, 2016) is a poet and musician. His poems have been published inSixth Finch, BOAAT, Midwestern Gothic, LEVELER, and elsewhere. He teaches at Spokane FallsCommunity College.
avatar for Kathryn Smith

Kathryn Smith

Kathryn Smith (Book of Exodus, 2017) is a poet and collage artist in Spokane, WA. Her poemshave appeared in Poetry Northwest, Pinwheel, the Boiler, Blood Orange Review, and elsewhere, andher work has received funding from the Spokane Arts Grant Award program. Her website iswww.kathrynsmithpoetry.com... Read More →
AK

Aileen Keown Vaux

Career Advisor, College of Arts, Letters and Education at EWU
Aileen Keown Vaux (Consolation Prize, 2018) earned her MFA from Eastern WashingtonUniversity, and her essays and poems can be found in Lilac City Fairy Tales, Railtown Almanac, and The Spokesman-Review.  Currently, she lives in Spokane, WA where she works as a Career Advisor for... Read More →
avatar for Ellen Welcker

Ellen Welcker

Ellen Welcker has collaborated with visual artists, other writers, and as part of several multi-genre productions, including 2016's Terrain's Uncharted, a collaboration with the Spokane Symphony that reimagined the classic "Peter and the Wolf," and 2018's performance of her chapbook... Read More →


Friday September 28, 2018 3:30pm - 4:45pm PDT
Shakespeare & Co 103 S 3rd St W, Missoula, MT 59801, USA

3:30pm PDT

Young Adult Writers Group
Author, Erin Saldin will join the regular meeting of the Young Adult Writers Group at Missoula Public Library.  New members and visitors are welcome!

Speakers

Friday September 28, 2018 3:30pm - 5:30pm PDT
Board Room Missoula Public Library

5:00pm PDT

Author Reception
Join us for food, drinks and a good time! The reception will end before the 7:00 Music and Writers event at the Union Ballroom.

Friday September 28, 2018 5:00pm - 6:45pm PDT
Dana Gallery 246 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

7:00pm PDT

Writers and Music: Reading, Discussion and Performance
Russell Rowland, Aaron Parrett and Greg Keeler will read, discuss the influence of music in their writing, and play some tunes. The panel discussion will be moderated by local writer, musician and photographer, Chris La Tray. Join us after the author reception!

RUSSELL ROWLAND is a fourth generation Montanan, born in Bozeman in 1957. He has a Master’s in Creative Writing from Boston University. His latest book is Arbuckle, the final novel in a trilogy based on his own family history. He has published four novels, In Open Spaces, The Watershed Years, High and Inside, and Arbuckle. He is also the author of the non-fiction narrative Fifty-Six Counties, the story of his journey to every county in Montana. In Open Spaces made the San Francisco Chronicle’s bestseller list, and was named among the Best of the West by the Salt Lake City Tribune. The Watershed Years and High and Inside were both finalists for the High Plains Book Award for Fiction. He also co-edited the anthology West of 98: Living and Writing the New American West. He has taught at several colleges, and currently teaches online workshops and does private consulting with other writers.

AARON PARRETT started writing songs in 1995 while living on Barber Street in Athens, Georgia, while he was enrolled in graduate school in Comparative Literature. "The Sinners," his first CD, came out in 1996 to great critical acclaim. A year later he teamed up with Jason Anderson, Jon Mills, and John Neff to record a second showcase of his songs called "The Judge and the Jury: The Legend of Jim Collins," released in 2000 on the Pizzle label. He and Jason recorded a second Judge and Jury album in 2002, called "Left of the Mason Dixon Line," which also featured some fine pedal steel work by John Neff. Meanwhile, Aaron started writing stuff other than songs-an academic tome on traveling to the moon, various essays, and a dozen short stories that have appeared in places like The Massachusetts Review, Open Spaces, Wild Blue Yonder, The Wisconsin Review, and Janus Head. Some of these stories are available for your reading pleasure elsewhere on this website. Nowadays, teaching at the local college in Great Falls, Montana keeps him pretty busy, but he plays out regularly throughout the state, and gives readings when invited.

GREG KEELER has extensive teaching and publishing experience in both poetry and memoir. The Bluebird Run is his ninth book of poetry, and he has published two memoirs, Trash Fish: A Life and Waltzing With the Captain: Remembering Richard Brautigan. His writing, deeply rooted in the natural world, often uses humor to give structure to, what poet Mark Gibbons describes as "this journey of living and dying, this dog-eared catalog of loss."

Moderators
avatar for Chris La Tray

Chris La Tray

Chris La Tray is a writer, a walker, and a photographer. His freelance writing and/or photography has appeared in Montana Quarterly, The Drake, the Missoula Independent, the Missoulian, Knives Illustrated, Vintage Guitar, Montana magazine, Alaska Airlines’ Beyond magazine, and World... Read More →

Speakers
avatar for Greg Keeler

Greg Keeler

Greg has extensive teaching and publishing experience in both poetry and memoir. "The Bluebird Run" is his ninth book of poetry, and he has published two memoirs, "Trash Fish: A Life" and "Waltzing With the Captain: Remembering Richard Brautigan." His writing, deeply rooted in the... Read More →
avatar for Russell Rowland

Russell Rowland

Russell Rowland is a fourth generation Montanan, born in Bozeman in 1957. He has a Master’s in Creative Writing from Boston University. His latest book is Arbuckle, the final novel in a trilogy based on his own family history. He has published four novels, In Open Spaces, The... Read More →


Friday September 28, 2018 7:00pm - 9:30pm PDT
The Union Ballroom - Upstairs 208 E Main St, Missoula, MT 59802
 
Saturday, September 29
 

9:30am PDT

Poetry Worth Waking Up For
The Public House is this year's center for all things poetry! Get your morning cup provided by Clyde Coffee and start the day right with the work of these four poets whose work all pull from identity and place. Each poet will give a short reading and discuss their work with the audience.

PHILIP SCHAEFER, author of Bad Summons (University of Utah Press, 2017)

RICHARD ROBBINS, author of Body Turn to Rain: New and Selected Poems (Lynx House Press, 2017)

STEPHANIE HARPER, author of Sermon Series (Finishing Line Press, 2017)

CAITLIN SCARANO, author of Do Not Bring Him Water (Write Bloody Publishing, 2017)

Speakers
avatar for Caitlin Scarano

Caitlin Scarano

Caitlin Scarano is a poet based in Washington state. Her debut collection of poems, Do Not Bring Him Water, was released in Fall 2017 by Write Bloody Publishing.


Saturday September 29, 2018 9:30am - 11:00am PDT
The Public House 130 E Broadway St, Missoula, MT 59802

10:00am PDT

Exhibitor Fair/Zine Festival
The annual Book Fair is a wonderful way to get to know small presses, shop for festival merchandise, peruse books, and get to know some like-minded folks also attending the festival! This year’s Book Fair will also feature a Zine Fest! Zines are a great DIY-way to get new and exciting works out into the world, and we’re thrilled to involve Missoula’s thriving zine community in the festival this year.

We can’t wait to see you there!


Saturday September 29, 2018 10:00am - 4:00pm PDT
Florence Hotel 111 North Higgins, Missoula, MT 59802

10:15am PDT

Reimagine Your Poem as a Children's Picture Book
Welcome to Reimagine Your Poem as a Picture Book. We’ll spend this hour and fifteen minutes together selecting only the most precious words from you poem for a picture book. Then, if you are an artist, you will thumbnail sketches thumbnails to accompany those words. If you are not an artist, by “sketching” thumbnail pages, you may select more precise words for your picture book. 

You’ll come with your poem or a poem you love, or there are poems in the packet you hold.

I’ll read my poem that was the basis of Stella and the Bubble Man. Then we’ll read the picture book: text by me and art by Anait Semirdzhyan.



Speakers
avatar for Colleen Hansen

Colleen Hansen

Colleen Clancy Hansen holds a bachelor’s degree in SecondaryEducation with an English major, a speech/drama minor, and a Master’sDegree in the Art of Teaching. She retired after teaching secondaryEnglish for twenty-five years. Since 2006 she has been a member of theSociety of... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 10:15am - 11:30am PDT
Board Room Missoula Public Library

10:30am PDT

Howl Like a Wolf Storytime
Kathleen Yale, author of  Howl Like a Wolf, talks about animals in this interactive story time on the dragon rug at Missoula Public Library
        
HOWL LIKE A WOLF: Learn to Think, Move, and Act Like 15 Amazing Animals
Balance an egg like an emperor penguin! Stalk like a camouflaged leopard! This illustrated interactive guide invites kids ages 6 and up to join the animal world with creative play mimicking key behaviors of 15 fascinating animals.

       

Speakers
avatar for Kathleen Yale

Kathleen Yale

Kathleen Yale is the author of the children's book Howl Like a Wolf! She spent years working as a wildlife field biologist and likes to incorporateher conservation and research background into her writing. A former scriptwriter for the popular award-winning YouTube channels SciShow... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 10:30am - 11:45am PDT
Missoula County Public Library 301 East Main

10:30am PDT

Montana in Fiction: Reading and Q&A
Three women read from their new books, set in Montana, a place people return to, long to leave or learn to face the hardships. The readings will be followed by a self-moderated discussion and Q&A.

Carrie La Seur, author of  The Weight of an Infinite Sky.   Anthony suddenly finds himself back in the place he swore he’d left behind, the years have transformed the artistic dreamer, they’ve also changed Billings.    

Susan Henderson, author of A Flicker of Lost Dreams, reads from her novel, which is based in Winnett, MT.

Ellen Notbohm, author of The River by Starlight, Annie Rushton leaves behind an unsettling past to join her brother on his Montana homestead and make a determined fresh start.

Speakers
avatar for Susan Henderson

Susan Henderson

Author, HarperCollins
Susan Henderson is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is the author of two novels, The Flicker of Old Dreams and Up from the Blue, both published by HarperCollins. Susan lives New York, but her newest book is set in a town... Read More →
avatar for Ellen Notbohm

Ellen Notbohm

Author
An internationally renowned author in both fiction and nonfiction, Ellen Notbohm's work has informed, inspired, and delighted millions in more than twenty languages. Her award-winning novel The River by Starlight, set in the waning years of the Montana frontier era, weaves a sweeping... Read More →
avatar for Carrie La Seur

Carrie La Seur

Carrie La Seur’s critically acclaimed debut novel The Home Place (William Morrow 2014) won the High Plains Book Award, was short-listed for the Strand Critics Award for Best First Novel, and was an IndieNext pick, a Library Journal pick, one of the Great Falls Tribune’s To... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 10:30am - 11:45am PDT
Fact and Fiction 220 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

10:30am PDT

This is the Place: Women Writing About Home
One editor and six contributors from the New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice collection This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home will read from their essays and discuss how the notion of home informs and infiltrates their writing.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE

A thought-provoking collection of personal essays about home

What makes a home? What do equality, safety, and politics have to do with it? And why is it so important to us to feel like we belong? In this collection, 30 women writers explore the theme in personal essays about neighbors, marriage, kids, sentimental objects, homelessness, domestic violence, solitude, immigration, gentrification, geography, and more. Contributors--including Amanda Petrusich, Naomi Jackson, Jane Wong, and Jennifer Finney Boylan--lend a diverse range of voices to this subject that remains at the core of our national conversations. Engaging, insightful, and full of hope, This is the Place will make you laugh, cry, and think hard about home, wherever you may find it.

"This collection, encompassing a spectrum of races, ethnicities, religions, sexualities, political beliefs and classes, could not be timelier....open this book, hear its chorus of voices and remember that we are a nation of individuals, bound to each other by our humanity." --The New York Times Book Review

Speakers
avatar for Margot Kahn Case

Margot Kahn Case

Margot Kahn is the author of Horses That Buck, winner of the High Plains Book Award and a New West Best Book of 2008, and co-editor of the New York Times Editors' Choice anthology This Is the Place: Women Writing About Home. Margot’s essays, reviews and poems have appeared in The... Read More →
avatar for Kate Lebo

Kate Lebo

Kate Lebo is the author of poetry chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books) and the cookbook Pie School (Sasquatch Books), and she’s co-editor with Samuel Ligon of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze. Her writing has been anthologized... Read More →
avatar for Jane Wong

Jane Wong

Jane Wong's poems can be found in Best American Poetry 2015, American Poetry Review, POETRY, AGNI, New England Review, and others. Her essays have appeared in McSweeney's, Black Warrior Review, Ecotone, The Georgia Review, Shenandoah, and This is the Place: Women Writing About Home... Read More →
avatar for Maya Jewell Zeller

Maya Jewell Zeller

Poetry Editor, Scablands Books
Maya Jewell Zeller (Scablands Poetry Editor & CWU Professor) is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017), the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015), and the... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 10:30am - 11:45am PDT
Shakespeare & Co 103 S 3rd St W, Missoula, MT 59801, USA

10:30am PDT

Writing Across Cultures: Reading and Q&A
How does an author effectively write about a culture that is not their own? What are the limits and tensions around doing so, and how can the author write about another culture with respect? Join us for a reading and discussion on this topic between three respected authors, Bruce Holbert, Danell Jones, and Gwen Florio.

BRUCE HOLBERT is the author of Whiskey. Three generations of a Native American family struggle with hard lives, bad choices, and alcohol in this impressive novel. In the state of Washington, two brothers sit in their local tavern at a critical time. Andre is heading toward his second divorce from Claire, and Smoker is hunting his wayward wife so he can retrieve his 10-year-old daughter, Raven. The siblings embark on an odyssey that weaves through the book in scattered sections.

DANELL JONES is the author of An African In Imperial London: The Indomitable Life of A.B.C. Merriman-Labor. The book provides an intimate view of London through African eyes as Merriman-Labor navigates streets bustling with millionaires made rich by South African gold mines, suffragettes demanding the vote, and destitute women selling matches to feed their starving children.

GWEN FLORIO is the author of the Lola Wicks mystery series. Silent Hearts is her first literary novel. For fans of A Thousand Splendid Suns comes a stirring novel set in Afghanistan about two women—an American aid worker and her local interpreter—who form an unexpected friendship despite their utterly different life experiences and the ever-increasing violence that surrounds them in Kabul.

Speakers
avatar for Bruce Holbert

Bruce Holbert

Mt. Spokane High School
Bio:Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where he assisted in editing the Iowa Review and held a teaching writing fellowship.  His fiction has appeared in the Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, other voices, the Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, the Spokesman... Read More →
avatar for Danell Jones

Danell Jones

Co-Founder, Big Sky Writing Workshops
Danell Jones’s poetry, fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in various publications including the Denver Quarterly, Gingko Tree Review, and The Virginia Woolf Miscellany. Jones has a Ph.D. from Columbia University where she won a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities for her... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 10:30am - 11:45am PDT
Berkshire Hathaway Montana Properties 314 N Higgins

11:00am PDT

Twenty Years of Lost Horse Press
Now in its 20th year, Lost Horse Press was established in 1998 in Spokane, when founding publisher, editor and book designer Christine Holbert was an MFA student in Editing and Publishing at Eastern Washington University. Based since 1999 in Sandpoint, Idaho, Lost Horse Press is a 501(c) (3) nonprofit, independent press that publishes work of established as well as emerging poets, and makes available fine contemporary literature through cultural, educational and publishing programs and activities.  

To date, Lost Horse Press has published 125 books and anthologies of poetry as well as collections of essays and short fiction—all work of high literary merit often ignored by conglomerate publishers, chain bookstores, and mass culture in general. Lost Horse Press has given many opportunities to emerging poets, including winners of The Idaho Prize for Poetry—an annual, national competition offering $1,000 plus publication for a book-length poetry manuscript. The competition, established in 2004 and now in its fourteenth year, is conducted according to the CLMP’s Code of Ethics. Each year, after the entries are screened anonymously by preliminary readers, a different poet of national prominence serves as final judge to select the winner from among a small group of finalist manuscripts.  

In addition to running the Press, Christine Holbert is dedicated to contributing to the community. She has served on the board of the Idaho Center for the Book, organized creative writing workshops, literary readings, and a writing conference for adults—to promote the literary arts in Idaho and nationally. Another program, Young Writers of the Lost Horse, has helped children in elementary grades through high school strengthen their skills and heighten their interest in the process and pleasure of writing.  

Lost Horse also collaborates with the Bonner County Human Rights Task Force to host the Sandpoint, Idaho, celebration of 100 Thousand Poets for Change, a worldwide annual poetry and music event in which local artists in each participating community come together to express their visions for positive change on the local, national and global levels. A signal achievement of the Press, and an expression of its commitment to such change, is the Lost Horse Press Human Rights Series—anthologies proposed, created and curated by editors associated with the Press, and focusing on urgent humanitarian and human rights issues of our era. To date, four anthologies have appeared--editors of two of these (Kwasny and Wright) will take part in the proposed celebratory reading.  

For this event, the five authors will read from their poetry published by Lost Horse Press; tell a little about what it is like to work with a publisher of such quality and commitment to social justice, human rights, and environmental balance; and answer questions from the audience about writing, publishing, and finding a publisher.

Moderators
avatar for Carolyne Wright

Carolyne Wright

Faculty in Poetry, Northwest Institute of Literary Arts
Carolyne Wright's new book is This Dream the World: New & Selected Poems (Lost Horse Press, 2017), whose title poem received a Pushcart Prize and was included in The Best American Poetry 2009. Her ground-breaking anthology, Raising Lilly Ledbetter: Women Poets Occupy the Workspace... Read More →

Speakers
avatar for David Axelrod

David Axelrod

Basalt
David Axelrod is the editor of basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts, and Sensational Nightingales: The Collected Poetry of Walter Pavlich, published by Lynx House Press. His new collection of poems, The Open Hand, appeared from Lost Horse Press in the autumn of 2017. His second... Read More →
avatar for Tami Haaland

Tami Haaland

Professor, Montana State University Billings
Tami Haaland is the author of three poetry collections, What Does Not Return (Lost Horse Press, 2017), When We Wake in the Night, and A Breath in Every Room, winner of the Nicholas Roerich First Book Award. She earned a MFA in Creative Writing and Literature from Bennington College... Read More →
avatar for Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny is the author of six books of poetry, including Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today, selected by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series (University of Washington Press 2017), Pictograph (Milkweed Editions 2015), and Reading Novalis in Montana (Milkweed... Read More →
avatar for Thomas Mitchell

Thomas Mitchell

Thomas Mitchell was raised in New York and California, but has lived in Oregon since 1980. He received his Masters from California State University, Sacramento, where he studied with the poet, Dennis Schmitz. He received an MFA from the University of Montana, where he worked with... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 11:00am - 12:00pm PDT
The Public House 130 E Broadway St, Missoula, MT 59802

11:00am PDT

Missoula Writing Collaborative Poetry Map
The Missoula Writing Collaborative will talk about how the interactive Poetry Map came to be located in the library.   Hear the background story, then go upstairs in the library for a hands on experience.

Speakers
avatar for Nick Littman

Nick Littman

Programs Director, Missoula Writing Collaborative
As Program Director of the Missoula Writing Collaborative, Nick helped to collect the 500 place poems, illustrations, and recordings that make up the digital Missoula Children's Poetry Map. As a Writer in Residence for MWC he teaches poetry at schools around Missoula. He also teaches... Read More →
avatar for Caroline Patterson

Caroline Patterson

Executive Director, Missoula Writing Collaborative
Caroline Patterson published the collection, Ballet at the Moose Lodge, with Drumlummon Press in 2017. In 2006, she published theanthology Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart,which won a Willa Award. Her work has appeared inanthologies including Montana Noir (Akashic... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 11:00am - 12:00pm PDT
Missoula County Public Library 301 East Main

12:00pm PDT

People, Places and Things...but Mostly Place: Writing With Location: Reading and Q&A
Join us for a reading and self-moderated discussion of writing with a focus on location.

KISHA LEWELLYN SCHLEGEL is the author of Fear Icons (Mad Creek Books, 2018). “Who are we to each other when we’re afraid?” Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel asks in this moving and original debut essay collection. Her answer is a lyric examination of the icons that summon and soothe our fears. From Donald Trump to the Virgin Mary, Darth Vader to the Dalai Lama, Schlegel turns cultural criticism personal with bracing intelligence and vulnerability. Each essay is woven through with other voices [Baldwin, Auden, Du Bois, Cixous] positioning Schlegel's arguments and meditations within a diverse and dynamic literary lineage.  Fear Icons is a vital and timely inquiry into the complex relationship between love and fear—and the ways that each intensifies the other.

SCOTT F. PARKER 
is the author of A Way Home: Oregon Essays (Kelson Books, 2018). A Way Home is a love letter to Oregon and an ode to living in the present moment. Living for several years in Minnesota, Scott Parker finds himself longing for the Oregon of his youth. He explores this longing by returning to his home state both over the course several visits and through the unfolding of memory, to find out what he is capable of understanding about time, home, and himself. The temptation of nostalgia is regarded from many angles—rueful, ironic, yet always still beckoning. Its antidote: being present in the actual moment, with its paradoxes and mixed blessings. Parker's passion for his subject is apparent, and his meditations prove him to be a nimble and penetrating thinker on absence and presence.

BECKY MANDELBAUM 
is the author of Bad Kansas (University of Georgia Press, 2017). Winner of the 2016 Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. "With heart and precision, and a fresh and resilient humor, Bad Kansas reveals the lives people are living in that flyover state in a collection in which every sentence is a made thing, never merely a vehicle for conveying information to the reader. Mandelbaum’s sharp eye for detail, a deep emotional intelligence, and a slightly canted―yet ultimately compassionate―worldview combine to produce complex, authentic, empathic characters, reminiscent of two of the greatest place-based collections ever: Richard Ford’s Rock Springs and Annie Proulx’s Close Range." - Pam Houston author of Contents May Have Shifted

BERNARD QUETCHENBACH 
is the editor of The Bunch Grass Motel: The Collected Poems of Randall Gloege. The volume also includes three prose essays commemorating the poet, who is deceased. It is illustrated with photographs by the poet. Randall Gloege, Bernard Quetchenbach's colleague at Montana State University Billings, was a poet, musician, photographer, and advocate for the Montana wilderness. When he died in 2013, he left behind a significant body of mostly unpublished work. The Bunch Grass Motel is the result of a long process of transcribing and editing. Through the efforts of a variety of people throughout the state, these poems are now available to readers.

Speakers
avatar for Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel

Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel

Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel is the author of the essay collection FEAR ICONS, winner of the inaugural Gournay Prize. Her essays have appeared in journals such as Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, Gulf Coast and the anthology Marry a Monster. A graduate of the University of Montana's Environmental... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 12:00pm - 1:30pm PDT
Berkshire Hathaway Montana Properties 314 N Higgins

12:15pm PDT

Reading the West
Four books, two fiction and two nonfiction, with one thing in common: the West! This will be a reading and discussion about that commonality and how four very different works came from it.

BRUCE HOLBERT is the author of Whiskey. Three generations of a Native American family struggle with hard lives, bad choices, and alcohol in this impressive novel. In the state of Washington, two brothers sit in their local tavern at a critical time. Andre is heading toward his second divorce from Claire, and Smoker is hunting his wayward wife so he can retrieve his 10-year-old daughter, Raven. The siblings embark on an odyssey that weaves through the book in scattered sections.

DONNA M. MCNAMARA is the author of A Birth of Justice: The Vigilantes of Virginia City. Lying in southwestern Montana are the towns of Virginia City and Nevada City. In 1864 the towns possessed the lure of instant wealth, excitement, and adventure that came from gold mines. Along with this excitement came danger-danger posed by men of unsavory character who would not stop at anything to get what they desired. Five men who were residents of the towns fought back by forming a Vigilance Committee with the goal of bringing justice to the men who terrorized the towns.

C.W. GUTHRIE

ERIC SCOTT FISCHL 
is the author The Trials of Solomon Parker. This is Butte, Montana in 1916, the Richest Hill on Earth: a metal-fueled boomtown of industry, pollution, labor unrest, vice, and crime.  The Gibraltar of Unionism, where a man can get a fair wage for fair work, or maybe get himself killed down the mine, one way or another.  Butte, where fortunes are made.  The city of the Copper Kings.

Speakers
avatar for Eric Scott Fischl

Eric Scott Fischl

Eric Scott Fischl is the author of the speculative historical novels DR. POTTER'S MEDICINE SHOW, THE TRIALS OF SOLOMON PARKER and IN MEMORY OF THE GIRL IN GREEN. He lives in Montana's Bitterroot mountains.
CG

C.W. Guthrie

C. W. (Carol) Guthrie's love affair with Glacier began when she and her dad drove the Going-to-the-Sun Road when she was nine years old. For the past twenty-five years, following a career working for the Air Force, she has explored the park and its history and authored five books... Read More →
avatar for Bruce Holbert

Bruce Holbert

Mt. Spokane High School
Bio:Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers Workshop, where he assisted in editing the Iowa Review and held a teaching writing fellowship.  His fiction has appeared in the Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, other voices, the Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, the Spokesman... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 12:15pm - 1:30pm PDT
Shakespeare & Co 103 S 3rd St W, Missoula, MT 59801, USA

12:30pm PDT

Creative Collaboration & Creating Community
Writing can be lonely because it’s usually done alone. When the work is finished,
it’s often difficult to find an engaged or interested audience. Creative
collaboration refreshes and inspires the writing process while also establishing
community.

The poets Mackenzie Cole, Henrietta Goodman, Ryan Scariano, Karin Schalm,
Ellen Welcker and Maya Jewell Zeller have all participated in recent writing
collaborations that have changed their writing for the better. They will discuss
how their collaborations developed, what they learned from them, and how the
process influenced their writing styles. They will read from work that emerged
from their respective shared writing projects and engage the audience in the
creation of an impromptu collaborative piece.

Mackenzie Cole’s poems (collaborations with Alicia Mountain and Tony Ruzika)
are anthologized in They Said: A Multigenre Anthology of Contemporary
Writing that was released from Black Lawrence Press in June. Two years ago,
poets Henrietta Goodman and Ryan Scariano began a poem exchange via email
that developed into a collaborative book project consisting of two parallel
alphabets of acrostic poems contemplating the intersection of the human and
non-human animal worlds. Karin Schalm and Ellen Welcker share weekly word
exchanges, creating poems with similar touch points but very different topics and
styles. They are working together on a chapbook called The New
Economy. Maya Jewell Zeller collaborated with the artist Carrie DeBacker on a
book of watercolors and poems, Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts, that muse on
the philosophies of geologic time, climate change, human genomes, and
existential destruction.

All of the panelists have exciting ideas to share about creative collaborations and
the development of dynamic writing communities.


Speakers
MC

Mackenzie Cole

Mackenzie Cole is a founder of Milltownepress which published the portrait anthology, Missoula Rabble, among other works. He is the Office Assistant for Climate Ride and a trainer for No Bad Dogs. A graduate of the University of Montana MFA program, Cole has poems in They Said: A... Read More →
avatar for Henrietta Goodman

Henrietta Goodman

Henrietta Goodman is the author of three books of poetry: All That Held Us (John Ciardi Prize, BkMk Press, 2018), Hungry Moon (Mountain West Poetry Series, 2013), and Take What You Want (Beatrice Hawley Award, Alice James Books, 2007). Her poems and essays have recently appeared in... Read More →
avatar for Ryan Scariano

Ryan Scariano

Ryan Scariano’s chapbook, Smithereens, was published by Imperfect Press. Some of his recent poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Phantom Drift; Basalt; the Willow Springs Books anthology: Heart of the Rat; Verde Que Te Quiero Verde: Poems after Federico Garcia Lorca; and Bright... Read More →
avatar for Karin Schalm

Karin Schalm

Karin Schalm has poems and short prose published in Camas, CutBank, Epiphany, The Sun and other journals. Her work has been anthologized in Verde Que Te Quiero Verde: Poems After Federico García Lorca, Poems Across the Big Sky II, Lilac City Fairy Tales (Volumes 2 – 4) and Bright... Read More →
avatar for Ellen Welcker

Ellen Welcker

Ellen Welcker has collaborated with visual artists, other writers, and as part of several multi-genre productions, including 2016's Terrain's Uncharted, a collaboration with the Spokane Symphony that reimagined the classic "Peter and the Wolf," and 2018's performance of her chapbook... Read More →
avatar for Maya Jewell Zeller

Maya Jewell Zeller

Poetry Editor, Scablands Books
Maya Jewell Zeller (Scablands Poetry Editor & CWU Professor) is the author of the interdisciplinary collaboration (with visual artist Carrie DeBacker) Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts (Entre Rios Books, 2017), the chapbook Yesterday, the Bees (Floating Bridge Press, 2015), and the... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 12:30pm - 1:30pm PDT
The Public House 130 E Broadway St, Missoula, MT 59802

12:30pm PDT

Both Barrels: How Two Women Built an Anthology of Great American Gun Stories
Both Barrels: How Two Women Built an Anthology of Great American Gun Stories with contributor and editor BettyJoyce Nash
Fictional guns are powerful on the page, as they are in life, yet stories that use them effectively are rare. Lock & Load’s editors, BettyJoyce Nash and Deirdra McAfee solicited stories from American masters, among them Montana’s Rick DeMarinis. Others include Annie Proulx, Bonnie Jo Campbell, John Edgar Wideman, Pinckney Benedict, and thirteen new voices; more than half the stories were written by women.

On the day the world learned about the massacre in Las Vegas, the University of New Mexico Press published Lock & Load: Armed Fiction. These and other shootings have underscored the project's significance. Lock & Load’s audiences in New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, Youngstown, Greensboro, N.C., Richmond, Va., and Charlottesville, Va., have been eager to hold the sensible discussions that fiction fosters.

Lock & Load's stories—of love, war, and coming of age, in landscapes familiar or ordinary, distant or dystopian—reflect, and inspire readers to reflect, on the pervasive and complex meaning of guns in American life. Novelist Roxana Robinson, author of Sparta and Cost, called Lock & Load “a powerful, challenging and often exquisite response to gun culture” that reveals “our complicated relationship to weapons.”

BettyJoyce will discuss how she and Deirdra McAfee conceived and built Lock & Load and found its audience.

Speakers
avatar for BettyJoyce Nash

BettyJoyce Nash

writer, self
co-editor and contributor Lock & Load: Armed Fiction, a collection of literary gun stories featuring Rick DeMarinis, Bonnie Jo Campbell, Annie Proulx, John Edgar Wideman and 13 new voices. Don't miss the guns in literature conversation Sat., Sept. 29, at Fact & Fiction in Missoula.Fiction... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 12:30pm - 1:30pm PDT
Fact and Fiction 220 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

12:30pm PDT

Indie Author Success Workshop
Indie Author Success begins with an overview and then proceeds directly to questions and answers.

Topics we will cover include:
  • Writing a book
  • Self-editing tips
  • Writing fiction vs. writing nonfiction
  • Working with an editor
  • How to find an agent and a publishing company
  • Why you should bypass an agent and a publishing company
  • Publishing your own book (finding a printer, hiring a book designer, getting an ISBN, etc.)
  • e-books and audio books
  • Getting distribution
  • Promoting your book

Speakers

Saturday September 29, 2018 12:30pm - 1:45pm PDT
Missoula County Public Library 301 East Main

1:00pm PDT

Montana Center for the Book Celebration!
Join three of the 2018 Montana Center for the Book Prize winners, Aerie, Missoula Writing Collaborative, and Hooked on Books, to celebrate reading and writing with Missoula youth. The Montana Center for the Book, an affiliate of the Library of Congress and a program of Humanities Montana awards $1,000 cash prizes to five outstanding programs each year. Hear from students and staff about award-winning literary work in our community

Speakers
avatar for Kim Anderson

Kim Anderson

Director, Montana Center for the Book
Kim returned to her hometown of Missoula in 1989 and spent the next eleven years caring for her two children and working out of a home office as both a free-lance writer and editor and the executive director of several nonprofit arts organizations. Before returning to Missoula, she... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 1:00pm - 2:00pm PDT
Downtown Dance Collective

2:00pm PDT

Writing for Children and Young Adults
Come listen to and talk with five authors who write for young people: from picture books to young adult.  They discuss their motivations, genres, journeys to publication, and we’ll save plenty of time for audience questions and interaction.

Moderators
DM

Dana McMurray

Children's Librarian, Missoula Public Library

Speakers
avatar for Colleen Hansen

Colleen Hansen

Colleen Clancy Hansen holds a bachelor’s degree in SecondaryEducation with an English major, a speech/drama minor, and a Master’sDegree in the Art of Teaching. She retired after teaching secondaryEnglish for twenty-five years. Since 2006 she has been a member of theSociety of... Read More →
avatar for Brooke Herter James

Brooke Herter James

Author
Brooke Herter James started writing in fifth grade as a devotee of the Harriet the Spy school of journalism. Once she had exhausted all spying and journaling possibilities in her home town, she retired her pen and did not pick it up again until she had finished college, a career in... Read More →
avatar for Kathleen Yale

Kathleen Yale

Kathleen Yale is the author of the children's book Howl Like a Wolf! She spent years working as a wildlife field biologist and likes to incorporateher conservation and research background into her writing. A former scriptwriter for the popular award-winning YouTube channels SciShow... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 2:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
Missoula County Public Library 301 East Main

2:00pm PDT

Environment as Character: Writing About Place Reading and Q&A
A discussion on writing about place and incorporating the environment and the world around us as an equally vivid character.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Chris La Tray is a writer, a walker, and a photographer. His freelance writing and/or photography has appeared in Montana Quarterly, The Drake, the Missoula Independent, the Missoulian, Knives Illustrated, Vintage Guitar, Montana magazine, Alaska Airlines’ Beyond magazine, and World Explorer magazine. His short fiction has been published in various crime, noir, and pulp collections and anthologies. Chris is Chippewa-Cree Métis, and is an enrolled member of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians.

Ana Mara Spagna is the author of several award-winning nonfiction books including Reclaimers, stories of indigenous women reclaiming sacred land and water, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It) a humor-infused exploration of how to live more lightly on the planet, the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, and three essay collections, Potluck, Now Go Home, and most recently, Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going. Ana Maria’s work has been recognized by the Society for Environmental Journalists, the Nautilus Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and as a three-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

Robert Michael Pyle is the author of 17 books, including Chasing Monarchs, Where Bigfoot Walks, and Wintergreen, which won the John Burroughs Medal. A Yale-trained ecologist and a Guggenheim fellow, he is a full-time writer living in SW Washington.

Marcia Bjornerud is Professor of Geology and Environmental Studies at Lawrence University in Appleton. Bjornerud’s research focuses on the physics of earthquakes and mountain-building, and she combines field-based studies of bedrock geology with quantitative models of rock mechanics. Bjornerud has done research in high arctic Norway (Svalbard) and Canada (Ellesmere Island), as well as mainland Norway, Scotland, New Zealand, and the Lake Superior region. She is the author of a well-received book, Reading the Rocks:  The Autobiography of the Earth and a contributing writer to the New Yorker’s science and technology blog, “Elements”.

Speakers
avatar for Robert Michael Pyle

Robert Michael Pyle

Robert Michael Pyle is an essayist, poet, and novelist who resides along a tributary of the Lower Columbia River in Southwest Washington. His twenty-two books include Wintergreen (winner of the John Burroughs Medal), Sky Time in Gray's River (winner of the National Outdoor Book... Read More →
avatar for Ana Maria Spagna

Ana Maria Spagna

Ana Maria Spagna lives with her wife, Laurie, in Stehekin, Washington, a remote community in the North Cascades accessible only by foot, boat, or float plane. She is the author of several award-winning nonfiction books including Reclaimers, stories of indigenous women reclaiming sacred... Read More →
avatar for Chris La Tray

Chris La Tray

Chris La Tray is a writer, a walker, and a photographer. His freelance writing and/or photography has appeared in Montana Quarterly, The Drake, the Missoula Independent, the Missoulian, Knives Illustrated, Vintage Guitar, Montana magazine, Alaska Airlines’ Beyond magazine, and World... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 2:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
Fact and Fiction 220 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

2:00pm PDT

It's Never Too Late: Reading and Q&A
Three career women discuss finding writing later in life.

MILANA MARSENICH is the author of The Swan Keeper. Girlhood, courage, nature, and flight from a tyrant’s hand in post-frontier Montana. The Swan Keeper is an historical, coming of age novel set in Northwest Montana's Mission Valley in the late 1920s.

RITA SOMMERS-FLANAGAN is the author of Boomers. Award-winning professor and author, Rita Sommers-Flanagan has written a book that will charm, irritate, amuse, and engage readers. It will also change minds and lives. This novel provides an entertaining and excellent read for book clubs, families, and everyone contemplating the meaning of life. It’s about time somebody put the BOOM in Boomers! This book explores the hilarious, challenging, heart-warming, heart-breaking ups and downs of the sixty-something crowd, but it’s a book you can relate to, no matter what your age. I couldn’t put it down. –Jeanne Sheils Twohig, Senior advisor, Duke Institute on Care at the End of Life This book stinks, like aging stinks, like good cheese stinks. I highly recommend all three. –Dr. Scott Wolff, Emergency Care Physician, Duluth, MN

MARY PURDY is the author of Serving the Broccoli Gods. Mary Purdy was a clinical registered dietitian for 10+ years and has an expertise in integrative approaches to nutrition and lifestyle counseling. Her focus is on a food as medicine, whole foods and whole person approach to prevent, address and reverse disease as well as promoting sustainable eating practices. 

Speakers
avatar for Milana Marsenich

Milana Marsenich

Author, Open Books
Milana Marsenich lives in Northwest Montana near Flathead Lake at the base of the beautiful Mission Mountains. She enjoys quick access to the mountains and has spent many hours hiking the wilderness trails with friends and dogs. For the past 20 years she has worked as a mental health... Read More →
avatar for mary purdy

mary purdy

Registered Dietitian + Host, Arivale + Mary's Nutrition Show
Mary Purdy,(MS, RDN), integrative registered dietitian, is the host of the web series & podcast “Mary’s Nutrition Show” and author of the recently published book “Serving the Broccoli Gods.” She was in private practice for 8 years and spent 3 years as adjunct professor/clinical... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 2:00pm - 3:30pm PDT
Berkshire Hathaway Montana Properties 314 N Higgins

2:00pm PDT

FootHills Publishing Montana Poets Series #3 Book Launch
Montana Poets Series #3 Book Launch!
Foothills Press produces beautiful, hand-stitched collections of poetry and has now featured 18 Montana Poets.  The six poets in Series #3 all live in Missoula.
Mark Gibbons will introduce the poets of Montana Poets Series #3, and each poet will share a short reading.  

gary lundy  "each room echoes absence",  
Zan Bockes "ALIBI FOR STOLEN LIGHT",  
Casey Charles  "ZICATELA",  
Amy RattoParks  "THE AVENUES",  
Robert Lee "BREATH,  
Becca Carson "FLIGHT PATH".

Speakers
avatar for Zan Bockes

Zan Bockes

Zan Bockes (pronounced “Bacchus”) earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Montana. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, and she has had four nominations for a Pushcart Prize. CAUGHT IN PASSING, her first poetry collection... Read More →
avatar for Becca Carson

Becca Carson

Aerie Magazine Program Adviser; Teacher, English and Creative Writing, Big Sky High School
Becca Carson lives in Missoula, MT with her wife Cori, their kids, and their cats and dogs. Flight Path is her first book and she is excited for this debut with the Montana Poet Series. Becca competes in the occasional poetry slam and has published one non-fiction piece in Mamalode... Read More →
avatar for Mark Gibbons

Mark Gibbons

Mark Gibbons is a Missoula poet and lifelong Montanan. His latest collection of poetry is The Imitation Blues from FootHills Publishing in 2017, and he's the editor of Moving On: The Last Poems of Ed Lahey, 2018, from Drumlummon Institute.
avatar for gary lundy

gary lundy

gary lundy has published five chapbooks, the most recent, at | with early in 2017 (Locofo Chaps), and has two book length collections: heartbreak elopes into a kind of forgiving (Is A Rose Press, 2016); and each room echoes absence (Foothills Publishing, 2018). he has published his... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 2:00pm - 3:45pm PDT
The Public House 130 E Broadway St, Missoula, MT 59802

2:30pm PDT

Good Books, Fine Wine
What's so great about book clubs? We want to hear whether you go for the conversation or the wine. Montana Center for the Book staff and unrepentant book club members discuss why we join book clubs, the makings of the best conversations, and what keeps us coming back month after month, even when we haven't finished the book. Rita Collins, proprietor of St. Rita’s Amazing Book Apothecary; Caroline Patterson, director of the Missoula Writing Collaborative and a long-time member of a husband & wife book group; and Barbara Theroux, creator of Fact & Fiction bookstore and book group-organizer extraordinaire share their stories. Join Big Sky Reads Facebook group for book club members and those who love them to continue the conversation online

Speakers
avatar for Kim Anderson

Kim Anderson

Director, Montana Center for the Book
Kim returned to her hometown of Missoula in 1989 and spent the next eleven years caring for her two children and working out of a home office as both a free-lance writer and editor and the executive director of several nonprofit arts organizations. Before returning to Missoula, she... Read More →
RC

Rita Collins

St. Rita’s Amazing Book Apothecary
avatar for Caroline Patterson

Caroline Patterson

Executive Director, Missoula Writing Collaborative
Caroline Patterson published the collection, Ballet at the Moose Lodge, with Drumlummon Press in 2017. In 2006, she published theanthology Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart,which won a Willa Award. Her work has appeared inanthologies including Montana Noir (Akashic... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 2:30pm - 3:30pm PDT
Downtown Dance Collective

3:00pm PDT

Ellen Forney - Creativity & Mental Health
The Montana Book Festival presents a frank and funny talk with Ellen Forneyabout mental health, maintaining stability, and the curious links between creativity and mood disorders. Ellen will share slides from her graphic memoir, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, & Me and Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice from My Bipolar Life. An informal conversation and Q&A including local cartoonist Theo Ellsworth will follow. Sponsored by NAMI Missoula with a poetic introduction by Zan Bockes.

Rock Steady is a smart, funny, and helpful book, not only for those of us with a diagnosed mood disorder, but for anyone who experiences any emotions whatsoever.” — Roz Chast

Speakers
avatar for Ellen Forney

Ellen Forney

Cartoonist Ellen Forney is the author of bestselling graphic memoir, Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me and Rock Steady: Brilliant Advice From My Bipolar Life. She collaborated on the National Book Award-winning novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and... Read More →
avatar for Jenny Montgomery

Jenny Montgomery

Writer
Jenny Montgomery's work has appeared in publications such as Barrow Street, Tar River, CALYX, Unsplendid, Cleaver, the New York Times, and the Cairo Times. Her poem "Ballet with Boy and Wheelchair" was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. Her poetry installations have been shown at... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 3:00pm - 4:00pm PDT
Montgomery Distillery 129 W Front St, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

3:00pm PDT

What’s So Funny?: A Workshop On Writing Absurdist Poetry
“What’s So Funny?” is a poetry workshop I developed to talk about how one can use humor in
poetry as a coping mechanism to confront despair. Poetry that employs absurdist humor acts as
a perfect foil to political and social climates that create surreal experiences that defy rational
thought. Drawing on a diverse range of influences like Saturday Night Live’s Jack Handey’s
“Deep Thoughts,” poetry by Jennifer L. Knox, Eileen Myles, and Charles Simic, along with
stand-up comedians like Maria Bamford, the workshop will dissect how syntax, rising tension,
and surreal imagery work together to elicit laughs from readers and prepare them to confront
existential topics in poetry.

The workshop begins with an ice-breaker that asks students to consider what they think is
funny, transitions into a PowerPoint presentation that offers context for absurdism in poetry as
an act of defiance, then concludes with a discussion of three prompts that students would use
during the workshop to free-write and generate poem drafts.

This workshop is open to as many as 20 beginning to experienced writers who want to write
new poems and would like to think seriously about being funny. The would arrive to the
workshop with either a laptop or writing instrument/notebook to use during the generation
portion of the workshop.



Speakers
AK

Aileen Keown Vaux

Career Advisor, College of Arts, Letters and Education at EWU
Aileen Keown Vaux (Consolation Prize, 2018) earned her MFA from Eastern WashingtonUniversity, and her essays and poems can be found in Lilac City Fairy Tales, Railtown Almanac, and The Spokesman-Review.  Currently, she lives in Spokane, WA where she works as a Career Advisor for... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 3:00pm - 5:00pm PDT
Board Room Missoula Public Library

3:30pm PDT

Pop-up Prose
From Missoula Insectarium FB post:
 As part of the 2018 Montana Book Festival, Pop-Up Prose presents an afternoon of unconventional nonfiction at the Missoula Insectarium classroom! Bug out and join us for readings by Michael Fitzgerald, Laura Gould, Mark Lane, Austin Maas, Steven Pfau, and Ehlana Struth.



Saturday September 29, 2018 3:30pm - 4:30pm PDT
Missoula Insectarium Classroom 218 E Front St, Missoula, MT 59802

3:45pm PDT

Science Fiction: Reading and Q&A
Join Lindsey Drager, Gwendolyn N. Nix, Marty Essen, and AliciaKay Rehbein for readings of selected sci-fi works, followed by a discussion.

LINDSEY DRAGER is the author of The Lost Daughter Collective (2017)

GWENDOLYN N. NIX is the author of The Falling Dawn: Celestial Scripts Book One (2018)

MARTY ESSEN is the author of Time Is Irreverent (2018)

ALICIAKAY REHBEIN is the author of the literary science fiction novel Time of the Marked Souls: Equivocal (2017)

Speakers
avatar for Lindsey Drager

Lindsey Drager

Lindsey Drager is the author of the novels The Sorrow Proper (Dzanc, 2015), winner of the 2016 John Gardner Fiction Prize, and The Lost Daughter Collective (Dzanc, 2017) finalist for a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and winner of a 2017 Shirley Jackson Award. Her work has received support... Read More →
avatar for AliciaKay Rehbein

AliciaKay Rehbein

AliciaKay is the author of the upcoming Science Fiction series: Time of the Marked Souls. Science Fiction allows us to take the social and cultural issues of our time, drop them into a foreign landscape, and thoroughly examine all implications of the mater from all perspectives. If... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 3:45pm - 5:15pm PDT
Shakespeare & Co 103 S 3rd St W, Missoula, MT 59801, USA

4:00pm PDT

Notes From the Underground: Apropos of the New Publishing
Whiskey Tit publisher Miette Gillette leads a panel comprising some of the press’ established writers and some of its newest, including New Yorker Stefan O. Rak, Ukrainian Svetlana Lavochkina, and Wyoming writer Joey Truman. With more underground publishing options available to writers including micropresses, vanity presses, collaborative presses, digital-only distribution, and self-publishing, how does a writer choose a path that protects the work? How are the risks different for the writer? And what of the underground publisher? Have today’s tools for publishing and outreach made it easier or more difficult since the heyday of Ferlinghetti and R. Crumb? Can anyone win in the age of Amazon and Big Publishing, and what does winning look like?

Speakers
avatar for Stefan O. Rak

Stefan O. Rak

Stefan O. Rak lives in New York City, because it makes sense.In the 1940s, his grandparents fled Ukraine for NYC, otherwise he may have never been born. As a child, some neurologists suspected that he had hypergraphia, but it turned out that he had other issues. He graduated high... Read More →
avatar for Joey Truman

Joey Truman

Writer, Whisk(e)y Tit
Joey Truman is a writer and artist based in Brooklyn. He performs with the bands UM, Escalators, and Soft Inserts. His upcoming books from Whiskey Tit press include Cooking Cockroach: A Guide to Modern Poverty, a cookbook/memoir, and CockKnocker, a mystery novel.
avatar for M.B.F. Wedge

M.B.F. Wedge

Whisk(e)y Tit
Disturb the comfortable; comfort the disturbed. I'm from a little town in upstate New York and my memoir, Knickpoint, was a finalist for the 2017 Tarpaulin Sky Book Prize. Pedophiles? Mental Illness? Sneaking around? I'm your gal. I joined up with Whisk(e)y Tit Books in 2018 and am... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 4:00pm - 5:00pm PDT
Berkshire Hathaway Montana Properties 314 N Higgins

4:15pm PDT

Pie and Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze with guest poet Laura Read
This is not the usual Pie & Whiskey, hosted by Kate Lebo and Sam Ligon, that patrons of Montana Book Festival love to support. Instead, MT Book Festival is throwing Kate and Sam a party to celebrate their new collection, Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze. 

Join us at Montgomery Distillery for whiskey and pies donated by local favorite, Bernice's Bakery!

Joining Sam and Kate will be friend and contributor to the collection, poet Laura Read.

Pie & Whiskey is the tent revival of literary events where writers such as Anthony Doerr, Steve Almond, and Elissa Washuta present original works based on prompts that include the words pie and whiskey. This anthology collects the best of that writing along with new pieces to bring this spirited gathering to the printed page.

Pie & Whiskey, the book, is a literary collection of readings presented over the past six years in Spokane, WA, and Missoula, MT, at Pie & Whiskey, the event, run by Kate Lebo and Samuel Ligon. Writers like Jess Walter, J Robert Lennon, Kim Barnes, and ML Smoker were invited to generate new work based on prompts that involve pie or whiskey or both. Sam and Kate figured that good writing served with a slice of pie and a shot of whiskey would create an energized atmosphere uncommon at literary events. The contributors, drawn mainly from the west, but not exclusively, responded with surprising, funny, heartbreaking, fantastically written stories and poems. The book will include a smattering of pie recipes and whiskey-centric cocktails. Look here for tasty literary servings.

Speakers
avatar for Kate Lebo

Kate Lebo

Kate Lebo is the author of poetry chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books) and the cookbook Pie School (Sasquatch Books), and she’s co-editor with Samuel Ligon of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze. Her writing has been anthologized... Read More →
avatar for Samuel Ligon

Samuel Ligon

Samuel Ligon is currently writing and publishing a serial novel—Miller Cane: A True & Exact History—which will appear in fifty installments in Spokane’s weekly newspaper, The Inlander, as well as online, on Spokane Public Radio, and as a podcast. The author of four previous... Read More →
avatar for Laura Read

Laura Read

Laura Read's chapbook The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You won the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award in 2010, and her first full-length collection, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was chosen as the winner of the AWP/Donald Hall Prize for Poetry by Dorianne... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 4:15pm - 5:30pm PDT
Montgomery Distillery 129 W Front St, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

7:00pm PDT

Hearth: A Global Discussion of Community, Identity and Place
Join us for a reading and panel discussion of Hearth: A Global Discussion of Community, Identity, and Place with featured contributors Gretel Ehrlich, Christopher Merrill and Debra Earling.

A multicultural anthology, edited by Susan O’Connor and Annick Smith, about the enduring importance and shifting associations of the hearth in our world.
A hearth is many things: a place for solitude; a source of identity; something we make and share with others; a history of ourselves and our homes. It is the fixed center we return to. It is just as intrinsically portable. It is, in short, the perfect metaphor for what we seek in these complex and contradictory times—set in flux by climate change, mass immigration, the refugee crisis, and the dislocating effects of technology.

Featuring original contributions from some of our most cherished voices—including Terry Tempest Williams, Bill McKibben, Pico Iyer, Natasha Trethewey, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Chigozie Obioma—Hearth suggests that empathy and storytelling hold the power to unite us when we have wandered alone for too long. This is an essential anthology that challenges us to redefine home and hearth: as a place to welcome strangers, to be generous, to care for the world beyond one’s own experience.

Speakers
DE

Debra Earling

Debra Magpie Earling is Bitterroot Salish and a member of the Flathead Nation. She is the author of the novel Perma Red, and The Lost Journals of Sacajewea.  Her work has also appeared in Ploughshares and the Northeast Indian Quarterly as well as several anthologies including Talking... Read More →
GE

Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel EhrlichGretel Ehrlich moved to Wyoming in 1975. Her book, The Solace of Open Spaces is a record of her first years living on the range, cowboying and herding sheep. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Award, three National Geographic Expedition Grants... Read More →
CM

Christopher Merrill

Director of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa
Christopher Merrill was born in western Massachusetts and raised in New Jersey. He did his undergraduate work at Middlebury College and his graduate degree at the University of Washington. He has published four collections of poetry, including Watch Fire, for which he received... Read More →
avatar for Susan O'Connor

Susan O'Connor

Susan O’Connor is an environmental and arts advocate. She is coeditor with Annick Smith of Hearth: A Global Conversation on Identity, Community, and Place and The Wide Open: Prose, Poetry, and Photographs of the Prairie. She lives in Missoula, Montana.
avatar for Annick Smith

Annick Smith

Annick Smith is the author of several books, including Homestead, In This We Are Native, Big Bluestem, and most recently Crossing the Plains with Bruno. She is also the editor of Headwaters: Montana Writers on Water & Wilderness, and coeditor with Susan O’Connor of The Wide... Read More →


Saturday September 29, 2018 7:00pm - 9:00pm PDT
The Wilma
 
Sunday, September 30
 

12:00pm PDT

The Art of Linda Leslie
Brief reading by the author John Witham and discussions with artist Linda Leslie on:
Narrative in Art - letting the viewer complete the story
Color-reproduction - art books and color fidelity
Creative Collaborations - artists, writers, book-makers, filmmakers

Speakers
avatar for John Witham (author/designer)

John Witham (author/designer)

video producer, editor and writer, Art Com Dev
John Witham, an award-winning filmmaker and interactive media producer, was born in Miami, Oklahoma.John studied Art and Photography at Austin College in Sherman, Texas where he also briefly dabbled in painting.His career in commercial media production began in Detroit in the late... Read More →


Sunday September 30, 2018 12:00pm - 12:45pm PDT
Shakespeare & Co 103 S 3rd St W, Missoula, MT 59801, USA

12:00pm PDT

Memoir
Join these writers as they discuss the art of the memoir.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS:
Sneed B. Collard III is the author of more than eighty award-winning books including Hopping Ahead of Climate Change—Snowshoe Hares, Science, and Survival; Catching Air—Taking the Leap with Gliding Animals; Shep—Our Most Loyal Dog; Dog Sense (novel); and The Prairie Builders—Reconstructing America’s Lost Grasslands, winner of the AAAS/Subaru/Science Books & Films Prize for Excellence in Science Books. Sneed has evolved through several life-history stages on his way to becoming one of today’s leading children’s authors.

Bernice Ende: As a fearless young girl on her parents' Minnesota dairy farm, Bernice Ende loved to gallop bareback through pastures and cornfields. Today, at a slightly more sedate pace, she has become Lady Long Rider, with more than 29,000 miles in the saddle, criss-crossing the United States, Canada, and in 2018, southern France. Readers can follow Bernice's travels through her blog. Between long rides, Bernice makes her home in Trego, Montana.

Susan Devan Harness: "I have been given many gifts and many experiences that created a unique space in which to write BITTERROOT: A SALISH MEMOIR OF TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION. I am a member of the Confederated Salish-Kootenai Tribes, a transracial adoptee, a cultural anthropologist and a writer. The stories I've collected for my scholarly work MIXING CULTURAL IDENTITIES THROUGH TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION: OUTCOMES OF THE INDIAN ADOPTION PROJECT (1958-1967) validated my experiences and, in essence, validated my existence as a member of two cultural groups who experience very real and significant tensions."

Melissa Stephenson earned her B.A. in English from The University of Montana and her M.F.A. in Fiction from Texas State University. Her writing has appeared in publications such as The Rumpus, The Washington Post, Barrelhouse, Mutha, Blackbird, and Fourth Genre. Her memoir, Driven, was released by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in July of 2018. She lives in Missoula, Montana with her two kids.

Moderators
Speakers
BE

Bernice Ende

As a fearless young girl on her parents' Minnesota dairy farm, Bernice Ende loved to gallop bareback through pastures and cornfields.  Today, at a slightly more sedate pace, she has become Lady Long Rider, with more than 29,000 miles in the saddle, criss-crossing the United States... Read More →
avatar for Susan Devan Harness

Susan Devan Harness

Susan Harness, author of BITTERROOT: A SALISH MEMOIR OF TRANSRACIAL ADOPTION, is a member of the Confederated Salish Kootenai Tribes, a cultural anthropologist, a writer, lecturer and oral historian. She received her B.A. from University of Montana, her M.A. in cultural anthropology... Read More →


Sunday September 30, 2018 12:00pm - 1:30pm PDT
Fact and Fiction 220 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

12:00pm PDT

State of the State: Grizzlies and the PNWT
Join us for a discussion between writers and environmental activists, Rick Bass (All the Land to Hold Us, For a Little While) and Todd Wilkinson ( Last Stand: Ted Turner’s Quest to Save a Troubled Planet and Grizzlies of Pilgrim Creek: An Intimate Portrait of 399, the Most Famous Bear of Greater Yellowstone). Moderated by local writer Chris LaTray, Bass and Wilkinson will discuss the need for a larger grizzly bear conservation strategy. 

Moderators
avatar for Chris La Tray

Chris La Tray

Chris La Tray is a writer, a walker, and a photographer. His freelance writing and/or photography has appeared in Montana Quarterly, The Drake, the Missoula Independent, the Missoulian, Knives Illustrated, Vintage Guitar, Montana magazine, Alaska Airlines’ Beyond magazine, and World... Read More →

Speakers
avatar for Rick Bass

Rick Bass

RICK BASS' fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters (in fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism categories), fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lyndhurst Foundation... Read More →
avatar for Todd Wilkinson

Todd Wilkinson

TODD WILKINSON is an American journalist and author proudly trained in the old-school tradition of asking tough questions and pressing for honest answers.  He is the founder of Mountain Journal. Since he began as a violent crime reporter with the legendary City News Bureau of Chicago, Wilkinson’s work has appeared in a wide variety of national publications, ranging from National Geographic and Christian Science Monitor to The Washington Post and many others (on topics of enviro... Read More →


Sunday September 30, 2018 12:00pm - 3:00pm PDT
Dana Gallery 246 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

1:30pm PDT

Get Lit! 20th Anniversary Anthology Reading
To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Spokane, Washington's literary festival GetLit!, Willow Springs Books and GetLit! Programs published the GetLit! 20th Anniversary Anthology.

"Get Lit! is much more than a big-name reading series. In fact, the bold names might be the least interesting part of the story. The festival has been a part of a burgeoning artistic spirit in Spokane, a creative ethos of Why-Not-Here that has celebrated and nurtured local writers over the last twenty years until you can't throw a journal in a coffee shop without hitting a working writer . . . But turn to the table of contents of this anthology of twenty years of GetLit! and you'll see a few of those names, and get an idea for the magic of the festival -- great national writers who have made Spokane their home, award-winning story writers and notable novelists and poets and essayists and memoirists from around the region and around the country, all coming together to celebrate the written word."
                                                                                                     - Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins

Speakers
avatar for David Axelrod

David Axelrod

Basalt
David Axelrod is the editor of basalt: a journal of fine and literary arts, and Sensational Nightingales: The Collected Poetry of Walter Pavlich, published by Lynx House Press. His new collection of poems, The Open Hand, appeared from Lost Horse Press in the autumn of 2017. His second... Read More →
avatar for Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny is the author of six books of poetry, including Where Outside the Body is the Soul Today, selected by Linda Bierds for the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series (University of Washington Press 2017), Pictograph (Milkweed Editions 2015), and Reading Novalis in Montana (Milkweed... Read More →
avatar for Kate Lebo

Kate Lebo

Kate Lebo is the author of poetry chapbook Seven Prayers to Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Entre Rios Books) and the cookbook Pie School (Sasquatch Books), and she’s co-editor with Samuel Ligon of Pie & Whiskey: Writers Under the Influence of Butter and Booze. Her writing has been anthologized... Read More →
avatar for Samuel Ligon

Samuel Ligon

Samuel Ligon is currently writing and publishing a serial novel—Miller Cane: A True & Exact History—which will appear in fifty installments in Spokane’s weekly newspaper, The Inlander, as well as online, on Spokane Public Radio, and as a podcast. The author of four previous... Read More →
avatar for Laura Read

Laura Read

Laura Read's chapbook The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You won the Floating Bridge Chapbook Award in 2010, and her first full-length collection, Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral, was chosen as the winner of the AWP/Donald Hall Prize for Poetry by Dorianne... Read More →


Sunday September 30, 2018 1:30pm - 3:00pm PDT
Montgomery Distillery 129 W Front St, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

1:45pm PDT

Representation in Literature
ABOUT THE PANELISTS:

Casey Charles lives in Missoula, Montana, where he teaches queer studies, law in literature, and Shakespeare at the university. Charles’s writing draws on his experience as an activist, a trial lawyer, and a researcher.

Samina Hadi-Tabassum is a Clinical Associate Professor at the Erikson Institute in Chicago. She earned her doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction with a specialization in cultural and linguistic anthropology. Her published work includes "Language, Space, and Power" as well as essays in "Multicultural Science Education - Theory, Practice, and, Promise" and "Women of Color in STEM." She also writes poetry and fiction.

Molly Caro May is a writer whose work explores body, place and the foreign. Her memoir "The Map of Enough" was called "addictive" by Elle Magazine. She received a writing fellowship at the Taft Nicholson Environmental Humanities Center, where she wrote the first draft of her second book, Body Full of Stars.

Alicia Mountain received her MFA at the University of Montana in Missoula. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Barrow Street, Witness, Spillway, LIT, The Southampton Review and elsewhere. She is the recent recipient of an Idyllwild Fellowship and received a 2014 Academy of American Poets Prize. She’s finishing her first collection of poetry.

Ana Maria Spagna is the author of several award-winning nonfiction books including Reclaimers, stories of indigenous women reclaiming sacred land and water, 100 Skills You’ll Need for the End of the World (as We Know It) a humor-infused exploration of how to live more lightly on the planet, the memoir/history Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus: A Daughter’s Civil Rights Journey, winner of the River Teeth literary nonfiction prize, and three essay collections, Potluck, Now Go Home, and most recently, Uplake: Restless Essays of Coming and Going. Ana Maria’s work has been recognized by the Society for Environmental Journalists, the Nautilus Book Awards, the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Awards, and as a three-time finalist for the Washington State Book Award.

Speakers
avatar for Alicia Mountain

Alicia Mountain

Alicia Mountain received her MFA at the University of Montana in Missoula. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Pleiades, Barrow Street, Witness, Spillway, LIT, The Southampton Review and elsewhere. She is the recent recipient of an Idyllwild Fellowship and received a... Read More →
avatar for Ana Maria Spagna

Ana Maria Spagna

Ana Maria Spagna lives with her wife, Laurie, in Stehekin, Washington, a remote community in the North Cascades accessible only by foot, boat, or float plane. She is the author of several award-winning nonfiction books including Reclaimers, stories of indigenous women reclaiming sacred... Read More →


Sunday September 30, 2018 1:45pm - 3:45pm PDT
Fact and Fiction 220 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

2:00pm PDT

Great American Read Trivia Contest
Teams of up to five people will test their knowledge of the books on the Great American Read's top 100 list and compete for fabulous prizes. Four rounds of trivia questions will be based on the themes, characters, authors and plots of the books found on the top 100 list.  

The Great American Read is an eight-part PBS television series that explores and celebrates the power of reading, told through the prism of America’s 100 best-loved novels (as chosen in a national survey). It investigates how and why writers create their fictional worlds, how we as readers are affected by these stories, and what these 100 different books have to say about our diverse nation and our shared human experience.

Speakers
JD

Joshua Daidone

Library Assistant, Missoula Public Library
DF

Desiree Funston

Reference Librarian, Missoula Public Library


Sunday September 30, 2018 2:00pm - 4:00pm PDT
Missoula County Public Library 301 East Main

2:15pm PDT

Researching and Writing History: Reading and Q&A
Join Gary L. Gillette (Director of The Missoula City Band & author of The Missoula City Band: Stories in Time), John Lawton (North Western Journeys: Spokane Pioneers and Scablands Settlers), and Katharine Seaton Squires (An Antietam Veteran's Montana Journey: The Lost Memoir of James Howard Lowell) for a discussion about the ins and outs of digging up the past and preserving it via writing.

Speakers
avatar for Gary L. Gillett

Gary L. Gillett

Director, The Missoula City Band
The history of the Missoula City Band, in many ways, is a mirror image of the history of Missoula, Montana. Since Missoula’s virtual beginning—since the time Montana was only a territory and not yet a state—the Missoula City Band played.Through two world wars, the Great Depression... Read More →
avatar for John Lawton

John Lawton

Author Bio:JOHN LAWTON grew up in Yakima, Washington. He holds degrees from The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. and Washington State University in Pullman. He spent his career in city finance and management with positions as City Manager of Great Falls, Montana, and... Read More →


Sunday September 30, 2018 2:15pm - 3:45pm PDT
Shakespeare & Co 103 S 3rd St W, Missoula, MT 59801, USA

3:00pm PDT

Bright Bones: Contemporary Montana Writing Celebration
Bright Bones is an anthology of innovative literature, and is currently available at Open Country Press. The cover art is by Butte artist Kelly Packer. Bright Bones includes fresh poems, stories, lyric essays and translations, as well as cross-genre, collaborative and experimental works. Emerging and established writers from Montana and/or those who have spent a significant amount of time in Montana are featured.

Speakers
avatar for Jenny Montgomery

Jenny Montgomery

Writer
Jenny Montgomery's work has appeared in publications such as Barrow Street, Tar River, CALYX, Unsplendid, Cleaver, the New York Times, and the Cairo Times. Her poem "Ballet with Boy and Wheelchair" was nominated for a 2019 Pushcart Prize. Her poetry installations have been shown at... Read More →
avatar for Natalie Peeterse

Natalie Peeterse

Natalie Peeterse has an MFA from the University of Montana. She is the editor of Verde Que Te Quiero Verde: Poems after Federico Garcia Lorca. She was included in I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights (Lost Horse Press). Her chapbook Black... Read More →


Sunday September 30, 2018 3:00pm - 4:15pm PDT
Montgomery Distillery 129 W Front St, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

4:00pm PDT

Multitudes
Multitudes is an hour and ten minute long, original one-man play about the Father of American Poetry, Walt Whitman. The play was written by Kim and Valerie Nuzzo and has been performed throughout Colorado in theaters, at literary events and educational institutions; it is a featured event this July at Writing the Rockies Conference at Western Colorado University in Gunnison, Colorado. 

Kim Nuzzo gives a sustained performance of Walt looking back on his life, and Valerie Nuzzo's script is faithful to Walt's own writings. They 'borrowed the best' of Walt's deeply felt experiences as a nurse in the Civil War (harrowing), his loves and lovers (delicately done), and his published views as an abolitionist. 

With white hair and beard and period suit, Kim carries us along as a raconteur blending facts and poetry and vigorous acts. If you didn't know, or care, anything about America's most radical poet before, you will emerge richer for having seen this event.

The play ran for one week at the International Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, Scotland in August 2017. It addresses death, slavery, sexuality, the Civil War and Whitman’s poetic vision of democratic ideals.

This is the ONLY ticketed event for the Montana Book Festival 2018. Tickets are $12 and can be purchased at the door.

Speakers
KN

Kim Nuzzo

Zephyr Stage


Sunday September 30, 2018 4:00pm - 5:30pm PDT
Dana Gallery 246 N Higgins Ave, Missoula, MT 59802, USA

4:00pm PDT

Big Read Launch Party
Missoula Public Library invites you to The Big Read Launch Party.  Get your copy of a Wizard of Earthsea of Catwings and enroll in the Wizard's Academy!

Sunday September 30, 2018 4:00pm - 6:00pm PDT
Downtown Dance Collective
 
Filter sessions
Apply filters to sessions.