Events

Please join us for a book launch party and short reading with DJ Lee, author of the memoir Remote: Finding Home in the Bitterroots.

When DJ Lee’s dear friend vanishes in the vast Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana, she travels there to seek answers. The journey unexpectedly brings to an end her fifteen-year quest to uncover the buried history of her family in this remote place. Although Lee doesn’t find all the answers, she comes away with a penetrating memoir that weaves her present-day story with past excursions into the region, wilderness history, and family secrets.

As she grapples with wild animal stand-offs, bush plane flights in dense fog, raging forest fires, and strange characters who have come to the wilderness to seek or hide, Lee learns how she can survive emotionally and how the wilderness survives as an ecosystem. Her growing knowledge of the life cycles of salmon and wolverine, the regenerative role of fire, and Nimíipuu land practices helps her find intimacy in this rugged landscape.

Skillfully intertwining history, outdoor adventure, and mystery, Lee’s memoir is an engaging contribution to the growing body of literature on women and wilderness and a lyrical tribute to the spiritual connection between people and the natural world.

D J Lee is Regents Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Washington State University and earned a PhD from the University of Arizona and an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her creative work includes over thirty non-fiction pieces in magazines and anthologies. She has published eight books on literature, history, and the environment, most recently the 2017 collection The Land Speaks: New Voices at the Intersection of Oral and Environmental History. Lee is the Director of the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness History Project and a scholar-fellow at the Black Earth Institute.

Please join us for the launch of Subduction, Kristen Millares Young's debut novel, to be published by Red Hen Press on April 14, 2020. Kristen will perform a short reading; Alexandra Teague, of the University of Idaho, will moderate the Q&A that follows. This BookPeople reading is the very first performance of the author's national tour. Seattle-based essayist Katie Lee Ellison will be joining Kristen to read at this event.  A graduate of the University of Idaho MFA program, Katie is a former fellow at Hugo House as well as editor of COAST/noCOAST, a literary review bringing to light Seattle's freshest literary voices.

photo by Jenn Furber

"In Young’s lyrical and atmospheric debut, two damaged outsiders, estranged from their families and cultures, struggle to discover where they really belong...Alternating between Claudia’s and Peter’s perspectives, the author creates moving portraits of two lonely, prickly people seeking to find their places in the world after so much pain and loss. Her lush, dense prose vividly captures the beauty of the Olympic Peninsula coast." -Kirkus Reviews

“In this utterly unique and important first novel, Young examines themes of love, intrusion, loss, community and trust against a backdrop of a Makah reservation in the Pacific Northwest.” — Ms. Magazine

"Subduction is a gritty novel in which floundering people find hope and understanding where they least expect it." — Foreword Reviews

Kristen Millares Young is the author of the novel Subduction (Red Hen Press). A prize-winning investigative journalist, book critic and essayist, Kristen serves as Prose Writer-in-Residence at Hugo House in Seattle. Her writing appears in the Washington Post, the Guardian, Joyland Magazine, Poetry Northwest, Crosscut, Hobart, Cascadia Magazine, Proximity and Moss, as well as the anthologies Pie & Whiskey, a 2017 New York Times New & Notable Book, Latina Outsiders and Advanced Creative Nonfiction. Kristen was the researcher for the New York Times team that produced “Snow Fall,” which won a Pulitzer and a Peabody. From 2016 to 2019, she served as board chair of InvestigateWest, a nonprofit newsroom she co-founded to protect vulnerable peoples and places of the Pacific Northwest.

www.kristenmyoung.com