Join us for an evening with authors Renata Golden and Ellen Birkett Morris. Renata will discuss her collection of essays Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment, and Ellen will discuss her new novel Beware the Tall Grass. This event is free and open to the public, but registration is requested.

About the Renata Golden:

Renata Golden’s writing appears in literary journals and anthologies, including Dawn Songs:
A Birdwatcher’s Field Guide to the Poetics of Migration; First and Wildest: The Gila Wilderness at
100; and When Birds Are Near. Her essays have been finalists for the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction
Book Award, the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, the Annie Dillard Award for Creative Nonfiction, and the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University Award. Originally from the South Side of Chicago, she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. To read more, visit renatagolden.com.

About Mountain Time:

Mountain Time: A Field Guide to Astonishment is an essay collection that explores the inner and outer natures of remarkable human and nonhuman beings. It is a book about paying attention—with the mind and with the heart. The essays confront the ethical and personal challenges Renata Golden faced in a harsh and isolated environment and examine the power of nature to influence her understanding of the human spirit. The lessons she learned on the borders of Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico jolted her out of her customary way of seeing the world—which is the transformative power of a thin place, where the borders between the sublime and the profane melt away. The essays call attention to the animals that are often shunned—pack rats, rattlesnakes, ants, prairie dogs, and other desert dwellers that some consider better dead than alive. Many of the animals in these essays are at risk of extinction. The essays honor these animals for the role they play in the wild world and for their unique abilities, such as the forging of cooperative societies and complex language skills. By recognizing the animals’ value, Golden gives readers reasons to be moved to save them, if it’s not too late.

About Ellen Birkett Morris:

Ellen Birkett Morris is the author of Lost Girls: Short Stories, winner of the PenCraft Award. Her
novel Beware the Tall Grass is the winner of the Donald L. Jordan Award for Literary Excellence.
Her fiction has appeared in Shenandoah, Antioch Review, Notre Dame Review, and South
Carolina Review, among other journals. Morris is a recipient of an Al Smith Fellowship from the
Kentucky Arts Council. She is also the author of Abide and Surrender, poetry chapbooks. Her essays have appeared in Newsweek, AARP’s The Ethel, Oh Reader, and on National Public Radio.

About Beware the Tall Grass:

Beware the Tall Grass weaves the stories of the Sloans, a modern family grappling with their young son Charlie’s troubling memories of a past life as a soldier in Vietnam, and Thomas Boone, a young man caught up in the drama of mid-sixties America who is sent to Vietnam. Eve Sloan is challenged as a mother to make sense of Charlie’s increasing references to war, and her attempts to get to the bottom of Charlie’s past life memories threaten her marriage, while Thomas struggles with loss and first love, before being thrust into combat and learning what matters most. Beware the Tall Grass explores the power of love and mercy with grace and artful sensitivity in a world where circumstances often occur far beyond our control.