Reading & Signing with BK Loren

Saturday, July 25 - 4:45-5:30 pm 

Please join us for a special event with BK Loren, award-winning author of Theft and Animal, Mineral, Radical: Essays on Wildlife, Family, and Food. Loren will discuss writing and will share excerpts and anecdotes from her books. 

About Theft: 

Willa Robbins is a master tracker working to reintroduce the Mexican wolf, North America’s most endangered mammal, to the American Southwest. But when Colorado police recruit her to find her own brother, Zeb, a confessed murderer, she knows skill alone will not sustain her. Willa is thrown back into the past, surfacing memories of a childhood full of intense love, desperate mistakes, and gentle remorse. Trekking through exquisite New Mexico and Colorado landscapes, with Zeb two steps ahead and the police two steps behind, Willa must wrangle her desire to reunite with her brother and her own guilt about their violent past. In this remarkable debut, Loren’s lyrical prose gives voice to the wildlife and land surrounding these beautifully flawed characters, breathing life into the southwestern terrain. Within this treacherous and mesmerizing landscape, Theft illustrates the struggle to piece together the fragile traces of what has been left behind, allowing for new choices to take shape. This is a story about family, about loss, and about a search for answers.

About Animal, Mineral, Radical: 

These meditative essays won the 2014 Colorado Book Award for creative nonfiction. The stories range in subjects from a transcendental encounter with a pack of coyotes ironically juxtaposed with her neighbor’s claim that nature “has gone out of vogue,” to Loren’s mother’s slow yet all-encompassing deterioration from Parkinson’s, and the unexpected way the Loma Prieta earthquake eroded her depression by offering the author a sense of her small place in a wild and worthwhile world. Loren has an empathetic and gentle approach to the world. In detailing the intricacies of human relationships and consciousness—fear of death and time, cooperation born of clashing viewpoints, tradition’s beauty even when destructive, a love of language, a sense of loss amid the fast-paced materialistic world—she peels back the film of popular thinking in order to expose herself to the secrets so few of us ever see.

About the Author: 

BK Loren is the award winning author of the novel Theft, and the essay collection, Animal, Mineral, Radical. Her short fiction and essays have garnered many national awards and have been published in The Best Spiritual Writing Anthologies (2004 and 2012), Parabola, Yoga International, Orion Magazine, and many others. She is from a working class family and has usually worked in jobs that allow space to write as she works. She’s been a ranch hand, a cook for a gourmet catering service in NYC, a cook, also, in a cafe run by a reverend healer who cured people’s ailments with a pendulum and herbs. She was also an aide on a locked psych ward, a tenured college teacher, and a furniture builder. She was extremely grateful for the chance to go to college (not a given)–and she attended the University of Colorado (Classics/Philosophy), the University of New Mexico (Lit), and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, (Fiction). She feels that her varied experiences in other fields inform her writing as much as her schooling has. The publishing editor of her first book told her I wrote like she was raised by wolves. She tries to live up to that daily.