Friday, November 15, 2024 – 6:00pm

Join us for a reading and signing of the 2024 edition of the Deep Wild Journal with contributors to this year’s issue.

Copies of this year’s issue and years past will be available for purchase at the event.

Deep Wild 2024 has hit the trail!

Well-made words from wild places: That’s what each issue of Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry holds: 160+pages of stories, essays, and poems by dozens of writers, in celebration of and in defense of places where there are no roads. The journal is printed on FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) paper in a compact, durable format. It wants to go camping!

The 2024 issue, our sixth, is now available. Thank you to Santa Fe artist Kathleen Frank for her magnificent oil-on-canvas painting, “Glacier Peaks,” which graces our front cover. The issue also contains a portfolio of landscape drawings from the Northern Rockies by Tucson artist Andrew Lincoln Nelson, and the well-made words of 49 writers, including the winners of our Graduate Student Prose Contest. 

Sarah Scruggs learned to love the outdoors through family adventures in central Virginia. She developed her own identity in the outdoors by hiking, climbing, and running throughout the western part of the United States. She has recently, excitedly moved back to New Mexico after a hiatus in Southern California. Scruggs advocates for justice, inclusion, representation, and revolution in the outdoors whenever and wherever she is able.

Aaron Denham is a former professor of anthropology and global health. His first book, Spirit Child: Illness, Poverty, and Infanticide in Northern Ghana, offers in-depth accounts of why families in Ghana interpret some infants and children as spirits sent to destroy the family. He has published over 25 articles and chapters on how people experience, understand, and derive meaning from misfortune, uncertainty, risk, and disorder. Denham now directs a psychotherapy practice and continues to write about place, culture, and the desert southwest.

Born in upstate New York, essayist and poet John Nizalowski moved to Santa Fe in the mid-1980’s, where he taught college English at PNM and wrote for the Santa Fe New Mexican and New Mexico Magazine. In 1990, he moved to Grand Junction, where he taught writing, mythology, and cultural studies at Colorado Mesa University He has published six books, most recently Chronicles of the Forbidden, a finalist for the 2020 Colorado Book Award in Creative Non-Fiction, and The Emergence of Frank Waters, a volume of scholarly essays he co-edited with Alexander Blackburn. A board member of the Frank Waters Foundation, Nizalowski is currently working with photographer Stephen Collector on Land of the Sun Father, a photobook based on Frank Waters’ writing..

Natalie Cunningham is an archaeoastronomer as well as a book artist, designer, and repairer. She earned an MFA in non-fiction creative writing from the University of Arizona, and her essays and poetry appear in a variety of literary magazines and a chapbook, Looking to the Sky. Her research of Ancestral Puebloan astronomy in southeastern Utah is featured mostly in reports to the federal government but also in a recent exhibition catalog, Art of Ancient Astronomy. She is a native of the St. Louis area, now transplanted to Albuquerque. In New Mexico, she maintains a small garden and orchard in order to address her adoration for pie.

Rick Kempa earned his MFA from the University of Arizona, taught for many years at Western Wyoming College in Rock Springs, and now resides in Grand Junction, Colorado. He is the editor of two collections of writing about the Grand Canyon and founding editor of the literary journal Deep Wild: Writing from the Backcountry, now in its sixth year. Kempa has authored three books of poems, most recently Too Vast for Sleep (Littoral Press, 2020), and a collection of short essays about the backpacking life, Truths of the Trail (Deep Wild Press, 2024).

Event address: 

4022 Rio Grande blvd nw

Bookworks

Albuquerque, NM 87107

Link to Bookworks listing: https://www.bkwrks.com/event/deep-wild-writing-backcountry