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

Spoken Words 19: Joe Wilkins — When We Were Birds

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

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

Spoken Words 29: Dale Dunn—The Big Heartless

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

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

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

Spoken Words 27: Katrina Carrasco—The Best Bad Things

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

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

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

Spoken Words 19: Joe Wilkins — When We Were Birds

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