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Portland Book Festival, Main Stage
Frontiers: Reconsidering the American West
Sat, Nov 9, 2019 from 11:30 am - 12:30 pm
1119 SW Park Ave
Portland,
OR
97205
New perspectives on the stories and characters that have shaped and are still definiing the American West. Jake Skeets’s debut poetry collection, Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers, is an unflinching portrait of the actual West, and a fierce reclamation of a living place—full of beauty as well as brutality. A landscaped scarred by violence, but startlingly lush. An unforgettable human drama set against the rough-knuckled frontier, David Wolman and Julian Smith’s Aloha Rodeo unspools the fascinating and little-known true story of the Hawaiian cowboys, or paniolo, whose 1908 adventure upended the conventional history of the American West. Moderated by Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun.
Advance Portland Book Festival passes available now.
Julian Smith
Julian Smith writes about science, adventure, and history for Smithsonian, Wired, Outside, Men’s Journal, National Geographic Traveler, The Washington Post, and other publications. He is the author of Crossing the Heart of Africa, which won the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Award and a Banff Mountain Book Award, and the coauthor of Smokejumper. He lives in Portland, Oregon with his family. His most recent book is Aloha Rodeo, co-written with David Wolman.
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Jake Skeets
Jake Skeets is Black Streak Wood, born for Water’s Edge. He is Diné from Vanderwagen, New Mexico. He holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Skeets is a winner of the 2018 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Skeets edits an online publication called Cloudthroat and organizes a poetry salon and reading series called Pollentongue, based in the Southwest. He is a member of Saad Bee Hózhǫ́: A Diné Writers’ Collective and currently teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona. His debut poetry collection is Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers.
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Justin St. Germain
Justin St. Germain is the author of the memoir Son of a Gun, which won the Barnes & Noble Discover Award, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and was named a best book of 2013 by Amazon, Publishers Weekly, Salon, Library Journal, and BookPage, among others. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, Tin House, New England Review, and many other journals and magazines, and has been awarded the Pushcart Prize. He lives in Corvallis and teaches at Oregon State.
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