The University of Montana Environmental Studies Program, Camas, and Shakespeare & Co. are pleased to announce “Amy Irvine: The Future of Earth Writing” an evening of readings and conversation on Thursday, February 29, at 7 pm. Featured writers include Amy Irvine, author of Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place (with Pam Houston), Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness and Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, Toni Jensen, author of Carry: A Memoir of Survival on Stolen Land and From the Hilltop, Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America and American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God, and Public Lands in the West, and Priya Subberwal, whose work appears in Orion, Camas, the Michigan Quarterly Review. This event is free and open to the public.

Amy Irvine is the Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer in Environmental Studies at the University of Montana. Her books include Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness, Air Mail: Letters of Politics, Pandemics, and Place (with Pam Houston), and Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, for which she won the Orion Book Award. Her essays have appeared in Orion, Outside, The Best American Science and Nature Writing series, Pacific Standard, Climbing, Rock & Ice, and High Country News.

Toni Jensen's Carry is a memoir-in-essays about gun violence, land and Indigenous women's lives (Ballantine 2020) and was a Dayton Literary Peace Prize Finalist and a New York Times Editors' Choice Book. An NEA Creative Writing Fellowship recipient in 2020, Jensen's essays have appeared in Orion, Catapult and Ecotone. She teaches at the University of Arkansas and the Institute of American Indian Arts, She is Métis.

Betsy Gaines Quammen is a historian and writer. She received a PhD from Montana State University where she studied religion, history and the philosophy of science. Her dissertation focused on Mormon history and the roots of armed public land conflicts occurring in the United States. She is fascinated at how religious views shape relationships to landscape. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, New York Daily News, and the History News Network. She is the author of American Zion: Cliven Bundy, God, and Public Lands in the West and True West: Myth and Mending on the Far Side of America. Betsy lives in Montana with her husband, writer David Quammen, three giant dogs, a sturdy cat, and a lanky rescue python.

Originally from the high alpine Rockies in Colorado, Priya Subberwal is a writer and artist based in Missoula. Their work centers around collective liberation, queer ecology, and needless anthropomorphizing. Their work appears in Orion, Camas, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. When not at a desk, Priya can be found in the woods with their dog, talking to trees and conspiring with fungi.

Amy Irvine
Photo by Susie Grant

Toni Jensen
Photo by Sophia Spirlock

Betsy Gaines Quammen

Priya Subberwal