Arts-Entertainment
Washington poet Maya Jewell Zeller will read from her new memoir, Raised by Ferns, on Thursday, March 19th at Elk River Books. Zeller will be joined by Missoula poet Henrietta Goodman. The free event begins at 7 pm with a book signing and reception to follow.
“Born in a Pacific Northwest gas station to itinerant, countercul¬tural parents, Maya Jewell Zeller came of age in a landscape where poverty, wildness and self-reliance intertwined. Raised by Ferns traces the path of a feral girl craving both freedom and safety to a middle-class adult life shaped by academia, motherhood and uneasy privilege.”
Jess Walter, author of The Cold Millions, writes, “No book has so thoroughly changed me as this one did. Raised by Ferns urges us to converse with our past selves and examine, mourn, and celebrate the ways in which they form the wondrous selves we are now.”
A 2024 Washington State Artist Trust Fellow, Zeller is the author of outtakes/ glove box, winner of the 2022 New American Poetry Prize, and co-author of Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology. Recipient of a Promise Award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, a writing fellowship from Oxford, and a residency in the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, she serves as professor for Central Washington University and affiliate faculty in po¬etry and nature writing for the low-residency MFA at Western Colorado University.
Goodman is the author of four books of poetry: Antillia, All That Held Us, Hungry Moon, and Take What You Want. She is co-author (with the poet Ryan Scariano) of a chapbook titled Flicker Noise. Her poems and essays have been published in The New England Review, New Ohio Review, Terrain, Bennington Review, River Teeth, Cleaver, and more. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Montana Arts Council, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Fishtrap, and other organizations. She teaches in the English department of Rocky Mountain College in Billings, MT.
For those who can’t attend in person, the event will live-stream at YouTube.com/ElkRiverBooks. For more information, send an email to info@elkriverbooks.com or call (406) 333-2330.