Utah author Ellen Meloy died unexpectedly in 2004, three months after completing Eating Stone: Imagination and the Loss of the Wild, which went on to become a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Only a few years earlier, her book The Anthropology of Turquoise had been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. This spring, Torrey House Press, in partnership with RadioWest, is honored to publish Seasons: Desert Sketches, an original collection of essays by Meloy with a foreword by Annie Proulx.
“This cinematically vivid collection feeds both intellect and soul, and shows that Meloy possessed the brevity and vision of a poet, and the coy sass of an understated comedian.”
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Join Torrey House Press and RadioWest for
A Celebration of Ellen Meloy
with Friends of Cedar Mesa
featuring Zak Podmore, Amy Irvine, and Elaine Clark
Wednesday, April 17 at 7 PM
Bears Ears Education Center
Bluff, UT
This event is free and open to the public.
Ellen Meloy was a native of the West and lived in California, Montana, and Utah. Her book Eating Stone (2005) was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for nonfiction. The Anthropology of Turquoise (2002) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and won the Utah Book Award and the Banff Mountain Book Festival Award in the adventure and travel category. She is also the author of Raven’s Exile (1994) and The Last Cheater’s Waltz (2001). Meloy spent most of her life in wild, remote places; at the time of her death in November 2004 she and her husband were living in southern Utah.
About the featured panelists:
Elaine Clark, producer of KUER’s RadioWest, is a Hoosier, and studied Folklore and Germanic Studies at Indiana University. She earned a Master’s degree in Middle East Studies from the University of Utah, which included a year of academic research and work for an education NGO in the West Bank. In her free time, Elaine dreams about her former days as a rugby fullback, wanders the desert and mountains with her husband and stepdaughter, and, as a self-confessed history nerd, reads 19th century newspapers and census records for sport.
Amy Irvine is a sixth-generation Utahn, long-time public lands activist, and author of Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness. Her memoir, Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land, received the Orion Book Award, the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award, and the Colorado Book Award. Irvine teaches in the MFA program of Southern New Hampshire University. She lives and writes off the grid in southwest Colorado, just spitting distance from her Utah homeland.
Zak Podmore is a Utah-based freelance writer, film producer, and editor who covers conservation issues and Utah politics. He is editor-at-large for Canoe & Kayak magazine and editor of the Canyon Echo: A Journal of Southeast Utah. He has previously written for Outside, Sierra, High Country News, Four Corners Free Press, High Desert Journal, and the Huffington Post. His essay collection Confluence is forthcoming from Torrey House Press.
Canyon Echo 