Oregon Book Awards Author Tour
Apricot Irving, Beth Wood, Leni Zumas
Sunday, May 5 at 2:00 p.m.
Apricot Irving: The Gospel of the Trees
- Winner of the Sarah Winnemucca Award for Creative Nonfiction
Apricot Irving's work has appeared on This American Life, Granta, and On Being, and she has received awards from the Rona Jaffe Foundation and Literary Arts. The founder of the Boise Voices Oral History Project, she lives in the Columbia River Gorge with her husband and two wildly imaginative boys.
The Gospel of Trees is a memoir in many voices, a lyrical meditation on ecology and loss in Haiti. A missionary's daughter grapples with the tangled legacy of those who wish to improve the world, while bearing witness to the defiant beauty of an undefeated country.
Beth Wood: Ladder to the Light - Winner of the Reader’s Choice Award
Inspired by an image from a Jane Hirshfield poem 'Mule Heart' in which grief and joy are carried in "two waiting baskets," Wood seeks to find balance again and regain footing after heartbreaking loss. Ladder to the Light chronicles her journey from grief to gratitude to believing in love again.
Leni Zumas: Red Clocks - Winner of the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction![Leni Zumas](images/programs/lz.jpg)
Leni Zumas's novel Red Clocks was a New York Times Editors' Choice, an Indie Next pick, and one of The Atlantic's Best Books of 2018. Zumas is also the author of Farewell Navigator: Stories and The Listeners. She directs the MFA in Creative Writing program at Portland State University.
In Red Clocks, four women in a small Oregon town confront new laws banning abortion, fertility treatments, and single-parent adoption. Their lives intersect when one of them-a forest-dwelling healer-is arrested for witchcraft and attempted murder.
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