Pam Houston and Stephanie Land

We are pleased to host authors Pam Houston and Stephanie Land reading from their most recent books.

With prose as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Pam Houston’s memoir Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country delivers her most profound meditations yet on how “to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief… to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.” On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. With her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect.
Houston is also the author two novels, Contents May Have Shifted and Sight Hound, two collections of short stories, Cowboys Are My Weakness and Waltzing the Cat, and a collection of essays, A Little More About Me. She teaches in the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, is Professor of English at UC Davis, and is the co-founder and creative director of the literary nonprofit Writing By Writers.

Stephanie Land’s debut book Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive explores the underbelly of upper-middle class America and the reality of what it’s like to be in service to them. Her compassionate, unflinching writing as a journalist gives voice to the “servant” worker and to those pursuing the American Dream from below the poverty line. Maid is Land’s story, but it’s not her alone–it is an inspiring testament to the strength, determination, and ultimate triumph of the human spirit. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Vox, and Salon. Land lives in Missoula, Montana.