Autumn 2026

september 16, 2026

Gretel Ehrlich

Gretel Ehrlich is an acclaimed essayist, poet, and travel writer whose work has shaped contemporary understandings of the American West. Her body of work spans more than a dozen books—including This Cold Heaven, Facing the Wave, and Unsolaced—and has earned honors from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Whiting Foundation, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Celebrating her acclaimed collection of essays, The Solace of Open Spaces, Ehrlich writes with a rare blend of lyricism, ecological insight, and cultural attentiveness, drawing from decades of living and working on ranches across Wyoming and her long relationship with the landscapes and communities of the Northern Rockies. 

October 8, 2026

Mark Spragg

Mark Spragg is the author of Where Rivers Change Direction, a memoir that won the 2000 Mountains & Plains Independent Booksellers award, and the novels, The Fruit of Stone, An Unfinished Life, and, Bone Fire. All four were top-ten Book Sense selections and An Unfinished Life was chosen by the Rocky Mountain News as the Best Book of 2004. Spragg’s work has been translated into fifteen languages. He lives in Wyoming with his wife, Virginia, with whom he wrote the screenplay for the film version of his novel, An Unfinished Life, starring Robert Redford, Morgan Freeman, and Jennifer Lopez, and released in 2005.

November 5, 2026

Debra Magpie Earling

Debra Magpie Earling is a Bitterroot Salish novelist and one of the most acclaimed Indigenous voices in contemporary American literature. Born in 1957 in Spokane, Washington, she is the author of the award‑winning novel Perma Red and the recent The Lost Journals of Sacajewea. 

Her work was recently included in Rock Art: An American Story, a 2024 art and cultural history volume featuring reflections from Indigenous leaders, writers, and scholars. In the book, she offers a meditation on the meaning and mystery of ancient rock art, asking, “What do we see when we look at ancient rock art? Do we see what we are meant to see? Do we hear the stories we are told?”