Spoken Words

C.J. Box, bestselling Wyoming author, reads from the latest in his Joe Pickett series, Vicious Circle. He talks about what it means for a story to be a western, getting people to reveal state secrets, and why he’ll never retire to Florida.

Bruce Smith, an ecologist and former manager of the wildlife and conservation programs at the National Elk Refuge, talks about the passions that took him from Michigan to the most remote reaches of Wyoming. He reads from his new book, Stories From Afield: Adventures with Wild Things in Wild Places, on the expected and unexpected challenges of conservation.

Journalist Sara Hayden talks about the challenges of recreating a disjointed family history from Colorado to China and back. She reads from her essay, Living Room, and details the influence that growing up mixed race in Wyoming has had on her writing.

Wyoming writer Matt Daly talks about his collection of poetry and the every day, small town moments that make up his particular perspective of the rural west.

Bestselling author Jeff Guinn reads from (and remembers the awfully painful research for) Silver City, the final book in his Cash McLendon trilogy. And though his books are set in the late 1800s, he finds distinct parallels between the journalism of the past and today’s “alternative facts.”

In celebration of the National Parks Centennial, these Texas poets laureate are traveling across the country to visit 50 National Parks to write poems about them. They talk about Yellowstone, and what it’s like to write poetry that transmits powerful emotional experiences.

The Irish writer reads from his new novel, Days Without End, and discusses the pleasures and pitfalls of writing historical fiction. He traces adventure in America from the Civil War era to his time hitchhiking across the country in the 1970s, and looks hopefully toward the future for outsiders in the States.

Nina McConigley talks about her in-progress, untitled novel – breaking down the particulars of how she approached writing about identity, diversity, and 1980s Wyoming. Backtracking through her own memories of growing up in Wyoming, she compares the past and present state of Wyoming’s diversity, and talks about the challenges she has overcome in writing her novel.

Introducing Wyoming Public Media’s new podcast, Spoken Words. Listen for a sneak peek from its producers: students from the University of Wyoming’s MFA in Creative Writing Program. The first two episodes of Spoken Words drop June 13.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

In times of trauma and sorrow, Diane Les Becquets turned to the wilderness for solace. Now, as an award-winning author, she sets her books back in those most hidden places as a challenge to return on her own terms.

In 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.

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

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

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

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

Tom Johnson is a respected professional. He’s the Chief Performance Officer of the Wyoming Business Council, he has a wife and two children, he was even a star baseball player in high school and college. But he also has a secret, filed under Aden Thomas.

JJ Anselmi’s memoir is a gritty tale of growing up in a railroad town defined by coal, oil, and a sketchy history. Anselmi talks to us about what a place like Rock Springs can do to a teenage identity, and what it taught him about living a DIY life.

The difference between poetry and slam poetry is vibrant and apparent in this interview with University of Wyoming PhD student, Marlin Holmes. Taking inspiration from rap, hip-hop, and a high school English assignment, Holmes discusses his passion for the spoken word, and shares some of his creations; rotating between narratives of identity and race, and the journey of finding love.

While training for the Olympics, Janine Shepherd suffered a devastating accident. In Defiant, she depicts the nightmare that followed the accident and the new gifts the experience has given her.

Reliving her years of living in the Nebraska sand hills, Shannon Baker discusses the splendor of the land and how it inspired the perfect setting for her new mystery Stripped Bare. Even with murder playing the main roll, Shannon describes the inspiration she gained from the interesting and particular people she has met throughout her life.