Saturday August 18: Missoula-based author Jesse Bier joins us for a reading from his final collection of poetry, Phenomenal Farewell. 1pm.

Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, and eventually transplanted to Montana, WWII veteran writer and retired professor of English Jesse Bier penned several novels, short stories, plays, and scholarly essays and nonfiction during his tenure at the University of Montana. In 1997, he published his first volume of poetry, Don't Tell Me Trees Don't Talk, an immensely varied and accessible collection, and continued writing well into his retirement, published The Cannibal, Ocho Rios, Transatlantic Lives, After Dying, The Silly People's Orchestra, and this, his final, rousing collection of poetry, Phenomenal Farewell, published in his 93rd year. A celebration of life, beauty, and comradeship, this masterful, multi-faceted portrait of human and Mother Nature also offers up some haunting, powerfully affecting, starkly honest poems, as well as Bier's take on creativity and the discipline of poetry itself.