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Michele Anderson says “I am what you might call a ‘homecomer.’ Wendell Berry, the Kentucky writer and farmer, uses that word to describe people who have spent some time away, usually to pursue better opportunities in cities, and then choose to return to their rural roots.” Her recent opinion piece in the New York Times is headlined “Go Home to Your ‘Dying’ Hometown.” Michele Anderson says “I did, and it isn’t what I expected. I am more involved in social and racial justice, economic development and feminism than I ever was in a big city.”

Jessica Lahey’s The Gift of Failure focuses on the critical school years when parents must learn to allow their children to experience the disappointment and frustration that occur from life’s inevitable problems so that they can grow up to be successful, resilient, and self-reliant adults.

Poet Naomi Shihab Nye says “I grew up in Ferguson, Mo. No one ever heard of it, unless you lived elsewhere in St. Louis County. Then my family moved to Palestine – my father’s first home. A friend says, ‘Your parents really picked the garden spots.’ In Ferguson, an invisible line separated white and black communities. In Jerusalem, a no-man’s land separated people, designated by barbed wire.

Here is the unforgettable story of Captain Tom Barnes, whom we first meet as he is leading British troops in Afghanistan. We then meet two young Afghani boys—and the man who trains one of them to fight against the infidel invaders. Finally, there are the family and friends who radiate out from these lives: the people on all sides of a war where virtually everyone is caught up in something unthinkable. But this novel regards them not as they see themselves but as the objects surrounding them do: a helmet, a bag of fertilizer, a beer glass, dog tags—and a horrific improvised explosive device that binds them all together by blowing one of them apart. A work of extraordinary humanity and hope, Anatomy of a Soldier takes its place among the great novels that articulate the lives of soldiers. In the boom of an instant, we see things we’ve never understood so clearly before.

Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls―the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told. Now, drawing on unpublished manuscripts, letters, diaries, and land and financial records, Caroline Fraser―the editor of the Library of America edition of the Little House series―masterfully fills in the gaps in Wilder’s biography. Revealing the grown-up story behind the most influential childhood epic of pioneer life, she also chronicles Wilder's tumultuous relationship with her journalist daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, setting the record straight regarding charges of ghostwriting that have swirled around the books.

Native American Culinary Association founder, Chef Nephi Craig, is visiting Utah State University to conduct a series of foods presentations and deliver a lecture on his work with the “Three Sisters” of Native American cuisine—beans, corn and squash—and to teach nutrition and share cultural heritage.

More than 5 million Americans have Alzheimer's disease; including 30,000 in Utah who along with their 152,000 family caregivers face the highest rate per capita of the disease in the nation. In 2015, the Utah State Legislature declared Alzheimer’s a public health crisis, directing the Utah Department of Health to coordinate and implement the state’s response to this growing crisis.

Historians and novelists alike have described the vigilantism that took root in the gold-mining communities of Montana in the mid-1860s, but Mark C. Dillon is the first to examine the subject through the prism of American legal history, considering the state of criminal justice and law enforcement in the western territories and also trial procedures, gubernatorial politics, legislative enactments, and constitutional rights.

Growing up in a gang in the city can be dark. Growing up Native American in a gang in Chicago is a whole different story. This book takes a trip through that unexplored part of Indian Country, an intense journey that is full of surprises, shining a light on the interior lives of people whose intellectual and emotional concerns are often overlooked. This dark, compelling, occasionally inappropriate, and often hilarious linked story collection introduces a character who defies all stereotypes about urban life and Indians. He will be in readers’ heads for a long time to come.

Why has American politics fallen into such a state of horrible dysfunction? Can it ever be fixed? These are the questions that motivate Michael Tomasky’s deeply original examination into the origins of our hopelessly polarized nation. “One of America’s finest political commentators” (Michael J. Sandel), Tomasky ranges across centuries and disciplines to show how America has almost always had two dominant parties that are existentially, and often violently, opposed. When he turns to our current era, he does so with striking insight that will challenge readers to reexamine what they thought they knew. Finally, not content merely to diagnose these problems, Tomasky offers a provocative agenda for how we can help fix our broken political system―from ranked-choice voting and at-large congressional elections to expanding high school civics education nationwide.

Tyehimba Jess is winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book “Olio.” With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, his much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. “Olio” is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.

How can the stories we tell protect the places we love? Friends of Cedar Mesa and Torrey House Press are presenting a conversation on the unique ways desert communities can organize around and diversify narratives to protect Utah’s red rock landscapes. Desert Cabal Expanding the Desert Narrative is Friday, March 1 at 7 PM at the Bears Ears Education Center,

The story of history is a ceaseless conversation between past and present In his new book “American Dialogue: The Founders and Us” Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Joseph Ellis focuses on the often-asked question “What would the Founding Fathers think?” He examines four of our most seminal historical figures through the prism of particular topics using the perspective of the present to shed light on their views and, in turn, to make clear how their now centuries-old ideas illuminate the disturbing impasse of today’s political conflicts. He discusses Jefferson and the issue of racism, Adams and the specter of economic inequality, Washington and American imperialism, Madison and the doctrine of original intent. Through these juxtapositions Ellis illuminates the obstacles and pitfalls paralyzing contemporary discussions of these fundamentally important issues.

“Bridge of Clay” is the new sweeping family saga from Markus Zusak, author of the international bestseller “The Book Thief,” which swept the world and was made into a movie.

Clouds, Mountains, Birds, Different Ways of Speaking. Things That Matter, and Things That Do Not Matter. Things Found in a Local Grocery Store. Things Found in The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. Billboards, Clouds. One Week in April. Beautiful Things. Fires.

In their new book “Breakpoint: Reckoning with America's Environmental Crises,” eminent ecologist Jeremy B. C. Jackson and award-winning journalist Steve Chapple examine the looming threats from recent hurricanes and fires, industrial agriculture, river mismanagement, extreme weather events, drought, and rising sea levels that, they say, are pushing the country toward the breaking point of ecological and economic collapse.

For forty years, Rick Hammond has raised cattle and crops on his wife’s fifth-generation farm. But as he prepares to hand off the operation to his daughter Meghan and her husband Kyle, their entire way of life is under siege. Confronted by rising corporate ownership, encroaching pipelines, groundwater depletion, climate change, and shifting trade policies, small farmers are often caught in the middle and fighting just to preserve their way of life. Following the Hammonds from harvest to harvest, This Blessed Earth is both a history of American agriculture and a portrait of one family’s struggle to hold on to their legacy.

Author and ethnographer Rodney Frey won the 2018 Evans Handcart Award from Utah State University's Mountain West Center for Regional Studies for his book Carry Forth the Stories: An Ethnographer’s Journey into Native Oral Tradition (Washington State University Press, 2017).

Lily Hoang’s latest book is “A Bestiary,” In this genre-transcending work, selected by Wayne Koestenbaum as the winner of the 2015 Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s Essay Collection, Hoang teases apart mythology, familial memory, and investigative essay into searing fragments, then weaves them into a dazzling swarm. Hoang models her postcolonial bestiary on the Chinese zodiac—“A pack of dogs. A swarm of insects. A mischief of rats./ You desire the human equivalent”—and uses it to represent such concepts as fidelity, beauty, and “the disgust of desire.” In doing so, she confronts such topics as feminine subjection, familial suffering due to assimilation (“‘Vietnamese women suffer better than all other people,’ my mother used to tell me”), and a sister’s addiction and death with a precision that is by turns vulnerable and justly incensed. Hoang subverts the moralizing tendencies of folklore to form a new hybrid mythology that, like all belief systems, reassures the believer—and the reader—that human vu

A recent article in the online magazine Yale Environment 360 is headlined “The West’s Great River Hits Its Limits: Will the Colorado Run Dry?” And the sub-headline: “As the Southwest faces rapid growth and unrelenting drought, the Colorado River is in crisis, with too many demands on its diminishing flow. Now those who depend on the river must confront the hard reality that their supply of Colorado water may be cut off.”