Coming soon to Fort Collins Book Fest
This month sees the return of the annual Fort Collins Book Fest, from October 22-24. The 2021 theme, Up, Up, & Out, speaks to our collective desire to get up from our couches, meet up with family and friends (and soon-to-be friends), and get back out into the world. The free event is a mix of in-person and live streamed sessions with more than 40 local, national, and international authors.
To help you get energized for what you’ll experience at the Book Fest, check out some of the featured authors’ books and poetry collections from the Poudre Libraries. And, visit the Fort Collins Book Fest website to view the entire author lineup and browse the schedule of book talks, writing workshops, readings, family activities, and more!
Alex Elle
After the Rain: Affirmations, Meditations, and Lessons from Life
Celebrated self-care storyteller Alexandra Elle delivers 15 lessons on how to overcome obstacles, build confidence, and cultivate abundance. Part memoir and part guide, Elle shares stirring stories from her own remarkable journey from self-doubt to self-love. This soulful collection is filled with illuminating reflections on loss, fear, bravery, healing, love, acceptance, and more.
Dara Saville
The Ecology of Herbal Medicine: A Guide to Plants and Living Landscapes of the American Southwest
Saville introduces botanical medicine through an in-depth exploration of the land, presenting a unique guide to plants found across the American Southwest. An accomplished herbalist and geographer, Dara Saville offers readers an ecological manual for developing relationships with the land and plants in a new theoretical approach to using herbal medicines.
Andrés Salguero of 123 Andrés
This fun, bouncy bilingual song from 123 Andrés’ Grammy Award-winning album is brought to life in a whole new way that’s perfect for storytime sharing!
¡Esta canción divertida y vivaz de 123 Andrés, incluida en su album ganador de un Grammy, cobra vida de un modo totalmente nuevo, perfecto para la hora del cuento!
Samantha Silva
Love and Fury: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft
In radiant prose, Silva delivers an ode to the dazzling life of Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the world’s most influential thinkers and mother of the famous novelist Mary Shelley. But at its heart, Love and Fury is a story about the power of a woman reclaiming her own narrative to pass on to her daughter, and all daughters, for generations to come.
Stephen Graham Jones
Jade Daniels is an angry, half-Indian outcast with an abusive father, an absent mother, and an entire town that wants nothing to do with her. She lives in her own world, a world in which protection comes from an unusual source: horror movies, especially the ones where a masked killer seeks revenge on a world that wronged them. But when blood actually starts to spill into the waters of Indian Lake, she pulls us into her dizzying, encyclopedic mind of blood and masked murderers, and predicts exactly how the plot will unfold.
James Bridle
New Dark Age: Technology, Knowledge and the End of the Future
Bridle, a technologist, journalist and visual artist, describes how the modern idea of enlightenment through technology and massive amounts of on-demand quantitative data may actually force us into a dark age of uncertainty and incomprehension. In New Dark Age, Bridle surveys the history of art, technology, and information systems, and reveals the dark clouds that gather over our dreams of the digital sublime.
Jim Davidson
The Next Everest: Surviving the Mountain’s Deadliest Day and Finding the Resilience to Climb Again
The Next Everest portrays the experience of living through the biggest disaster to ever hit the mountain. Davidson’s background in geology and environmental science makes him uniquely qualified to explain how this natural disaster unfolded and why the seismic threats lurking beneath Nepal are even greater today. But this story is not about “conquering” the world’s highest peak. Instead, it reveals how embracing change, challenge, and uncertainty prepares anyone to face their “next Everest” in life.
Kyce Bello
Bello’s stunning debut ponders what it means to inhabit a particular place at a time of enormous disruption, witnessing a beloved landscape as it gives way to, as Bello writes, something other and unknown, growing beyond us. These vivid poems touch upon history, inheritance, drought, and most of all, trees, be they Western conifers succumbing to warming temperatures, ramshackle orchards along the Rio Grande, or family trees reaching simultaneously into the past and future.
Kali Fajardo-Anstine
Fajardo-Anstine’s magnetic story collection breathes life into her Latina characters of indigenous ancestry and the land they inhabit in the American West. Against the remarkable backdrop of Denver, Colorado—a place that is as fierce as it is exquisite—these women navigate the land the way they navigate their lives: with caution, grace, and quiet force.
Claire Boyles
A knock-out debut story collection that follows women and families facing economic and environmental justice issues in the American West. Firmly rooted in the rural spaces and small towns of Colorado and Nevada, Site Fidelity spans the decades from the 1970s to a plausible near future.
Anne Waldman
Celebrated poet Anne Waldman looks to the imagination of mercurial possibility, to the spirits of the doorway and of crossroads, and to language that jolts the status quo of how one troubles gender and outwits patriarchy. She summons Tarot’s Force Arcana, the passion of the suffragettes, and various messengers and heroines of historical, hermetic, and heretical stance, creating an intersectionality of lived experience: class, sexuality, race, politics all enter the din. These are experiments of survival.