About Us
Elk River Arts & Lectures
Elk River Arts & Lectures cultivates and celebrates Livingston’s literary legacy by bringing world-class authors to interact with students, artists and the public through classroom experiences and public lectures.
Our Literary Heritage
Our home has a long history of a literary tradition rooted in Place.
The land spoke first. The mountains, moraines and braided riverbanks convey an ancient narrative of shifting rock, volcanoes and glaciers that surged down from the Yellowstone plateau and carved out Paradise Valley. Native Americans who hunted the herds of bison and elk that came to graze on the rich bottomland filled the valley with the sound of drum circles and storytelling. The Apsaalooke (or Crow) people called the wild waters flowing north and east through their territory the Elk River.
Time passed. Writers and makers came and went. Many stayed for a lifetime, exploring the Paradise Valley on their way toward inspiration.
Started in 2013, Elk River Arts & Lectures aims to honor our literary heritage while inspiring a new generation of writers. Celebrating early traditions, our storytelling events feature true tales and modern myths, local legends sharing their spark for all ages. We inspire creativity in elementary school students through our Poetry In the Classroom program and promote intergenerational collaboration by involving teen artists. We’ve designed our Lecture Series and Writers Workshop to introduce Park County residents of all ages to a dazzling variety of voices from around the world.
We are always scheming and dreaming our way into the future, a horizon articulated by and for those of us who live in this windy place. As Elk Rier Arts & Lectures finds new ways to strengthen our community and find connection through the allure of literature, we hope you’ll join us.
Staff
Yetta Stein
Executive Director
Cmarie Fuhrman
Director, Elk River Writers Workshop
CMarie is Idaho’s Writer in Residence, and an instructor at Western Colorado University’s Poetry and Nature Writing program. The author of Camped Beneath the Dam: Poems (Floodgate 2020) ,and co-editor of Native Voices (Tupelo 2019), she has published poetry and nonfiction in multiple journals including Emergence Magazine, Yellow Medicine Review, Cutthroat a Journal of the Arts, Whitefish Review, Broadsided Press, Taos International Journal of Poetry and Art, as well as several anthologies. CMarie is a regular columnist for the Inlander, translations editor for Broadsided Press, Non-Fiction editor for High Desert Journal, and She resides in the mountains of West Central Idaho with her partner Caleb and their dogs Carhartt and Cisco.
Board of Trustees
Cynthia Kohler
Treasurer
Cynthia Kohler is an accountant with over 35 years of accounting experience having organized and helped small businesses and nonprofits with their accounting, personnel, and administrative needs. She has owned a home in Park County for 20 years during which time she and her husband owned and operated the Sport restaurant and bar. Their children attended Winans Primary School and they have deep connections to many family and friends in the area. She currently works as a Realtor in Livingston.
Mitch Grady
Secretary
Mitch Grady grew up in northeast Nebraska the middle of three brothers and amidst his mother’s cat collection. He has lived in Montana since the summer of 2006, when for unclear reasons he and his wife moved to Missoula. In 2015 his family, now consisting in two parents and two daughters, moved to Livingston where he is the Library Director.
Mitch enjoys poring over maps, tooling around and camping in a near-decrepit VW bus, and listening music, among other, minor things. Notably, he was once dealt a royal flush—in diamonds—in a poker game.
Sara Andrews
Sara is passionate about accelerating the pace of regenerative agriculture by contributing to a food system that works with nature instead of against it. She believes that a food system should be climate-friendly (sequestering carbon and protecting biodiversity), equitable, and nourishing.
The granddaughter of Montana ranchers, Sara has worked in various parts of the food ecosystem —including as an agricultural policy advisor to U.S. Senator Max Baucus and the U.S. Senate Finance Committee and as a consultant with the NGO TechnoServe in Zimbabwe. In addition, she has spent many years as a strategy consultant helping to grow and build emerging businesses within large organizations.
After spending time working in Zimbabwe, she realized that a new type of food company was needed to provide the type of products that customers want. She founded Bumbleroot to provide nutrient dense, delicious food and beverage products with full supply chain transparency to consumers and to celebrate the farmers, ranchers, and harvesters contributing to a regenerative food system.
Sara holds a bachelor’s degree and a Masters of Business Administration from the University of Notre Dame.
Melissa Potter Atkinson
A lifelong avid reader, Melissa believes in the power of books and of community
engagement. She is a founding member of two active book clubs. Her friends sometimes refer
to her as their biblio-therapist.
Melissa has a BA in American Studies and a Masters of Library Science. Before retirement, she
was a RareBooks cataloguer at the University of Tulsa specializing in American West and
Native materials.
Melissa and her husband Michael divide their time between the Shields River Valley and a
residence in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Megan Brenna
Megan Brenna, a Livingston native, is currently a 5th-grade teacher at East Side
Intermediate in Livingston, MT. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Elementary. Her teaching career began in a 4th grade classroom at Brunson-Dargan Elementary in Darlington, South Carolina, where she was recognized as First Year Teacher of the Year.
In 2002, Brenna returned to her home state of Montana. From 2007-2018, Brenna worked as the kidsLINK Program Director for the Greater Gallatin United Way. During this time, Brenna was able to learn about public education from an out-of-school-time perspective, while fostering school-community partnership and leveraging private/public philanthropy.
In 2018, Brenna returned to the classroom, taking her current position at East Side Intermediate.
Todd Goddard
Todd Goddard grew up in Philadelphia. He holds a PhD in literary studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Widely published and presented on topics pertaining to American and English literature, his newest project, Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life, will be published by Blackstone Publishing in November 2025. Todd splits his time between Livingston and Utah where he serves as an associate professor of literary studies at Utah Valley University.
Jamie Harrison
Jamie Harrison is the author of seven novels, including The River View, The Widow Nash, and The Center of Everything, and is the former editor of Clark City Press. She’s lived in Livingston, Montana, since 1987.
Photo credit: Lynn Donaldson
Wendy Heckles
Wendy Heckles taught in elementary public school classrooms for 25 years, the last 19 of them in Livingston, where she has lived since 1996. She has a Master’s degree in Elementary Education, with a focus on reading skills. Teaching ties one into a place quickly and this sense of community has permanently endeared Livingston to her (despite the wind). Wendy is honored to help promote literacy and the arts for all ages.
Fenia Hiaasen
Originally from Greece and later South Florida, I’ve spent over 20 years in Montana and feel deeply connected to the West. A lifelong love of books and friendships with many wonderful authors have shaped my appreciation for the writing world.
I now feel lucky to call Livingston home—an eclectic, creative community that continually inspires me. I also have a successful real estate career in Montana, and I’m a proud mom to two amazing young men.”
Stewart Parker
Stewart Parker grew up in North Carolina but has been a part-time resident of Paradise Valley for over 30 years. Coming from a family of readers and writers, but having no talent of her own, she majored in Russian language and literature in order to read the great Russian writers in the original. Believing Russian was a better avocation than a vocation, her career has been in biotechnology, in Seattle, and now in North Carolina. She hopes her love of reading, coupled with her nonprofit experience with arts groups, will enhance her contributions to Elk River Arts.
Elliott Woods
Maryanne Vollers
Chair & Ex Officio Board Member
Maryanne is an author, journalist and producer based in Livingston, Montana. A former editor at Rolling Stone magazine, Vollers reported for Time and NBC News from Africa. Her work has been published in magazines including Esquire, Mother Jones, and The New York Times Magazine, among many others. She is a noted ghostwriter who has collaborated on projects with Jerri Nielsen, Connie Rice, Sissy Spacek, Hillary Clinton and Ashley Judd. Vollers’ books include Lone Wolf and Ghosts of Mississippi, which was a finalist for the National Book Award.
Andrea Peacock
Ex Officio Board Member
Andrea is an author and journalist who has covered Western politics and environmental news for more than two decades. She has written two books, Libby, Montana: Asbestos and the Deadly Silence of an American Corporation, and The Essential Grizzly: The Mingled Fates of Men and Bears (co-authored with Doug Peacock). A former editor of the Missoula Independent, she has been published in Mother Jones, High Country News, and the Denver Westword, among others, and was former assistant politics editor at the Austin Chronicle. She received an Alicia Patterson Fellowship for her work on a project about the ways oil and gas development affects communities in the West. She is the co-owner of Elk River Books in Livingston, Montana.
Marc Beaudin
Ex Officio Board Member
Marc is a co-owner of Elk River Books, a Spur Award finalist and the author of Life List: Poems, Vagabond Song: Neo-Haibun from the Peregrine Journals and co-editor of Unearthing Paradise: Montana Writers in Defense of Greater Yellowstone. He was a founder and artistic director of the 303 Collective, a nonprofit radical arts and theatre group in Saginaw, Michigan. Before that, he was a founder and artistic director of Saginaw’s Collective Artists Gallery. Currently he is the artistic director of the Caldera Theatre Company. His poetry has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, and collected into the book The Moon Cracks Open: A Field Guide to the Birds and Other Poems. His plays have been produced at theaters in Michigan, Montana and Minneapolis. More information is at CrowVoice.com.
Gretel Ehrlich
Advisory Board Member
Gretel Ehrlich is the author of eleven books of nonfiction including Unsolaced, The Solace of Open Spaces, Facing the Wave, In the Empire of Ice, The Future of Ice, This Cold Heaven, John Muir, Nature’s Visionary, Cowboy Island, Questions of Heaven, A Match to the Heart, and Islands, the Universe, Home. She is also the author of four works of fiction: Heart Mountain, Drinking Dry Clouds, and A Blizzard Year, and the forthcoming Gin Chow’s Book of Predictions, plus three chapbooks of poetry: Arctic Heart, To Touch the Water, and Geode Rock Body.
Ehrlich’s books have received the PEN West Award for Nonfiction, the PEN New England Henry David Thoreau Award for Nature Writing, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Distinguished Prose, and a Whiting Award. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her book Facing the Wave was longlisted for a National Book Award in 2013. She received four National Geographic Expedition grants for expeditions and culture and climate writing in Greenland and the high Arctic.
