Literary Sojourn

For the health and safety of our authors, our attendees and our community, the 28th Annual Literary Sojourn has been postponed until Saturday, September 11, 2021. Read more

We are proud to be the Official Literary Sojourn Bookseller!

Literary Sojourn is an annual festival of authors and readers celebrating the power of the book. Each fall, an esteemed slate of authors and over 500 book lovers from all over the country gather in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Together they revel in the written word, fueled by award-winning writers who share the stories and inspiration behind their exceptional books.

Why buy Literary Sojourn authors' books from Off the Beaten Path?

  • A portion of the proceeds from all sales of current Literary Sojourn authors’ books are donated to this non-profit event.
  • Book sales through the Literary Sojourn official bookseller are an important factor in a publisher’s decision to support an author’s participation at the Sojourn.
  • Your purchase from Off the Beaten Path ensures that Literary Sojourn will continue to thrive with the brilliant authors and compelling reads you’ve come to expect.

2021 Authors

Maaza Mengiste

Maaza Mengiste was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A novelist and essayist, her fiction and nonfiction stories examine the individual lives at stake during migration, war and exile, and consider the intersections of photography, memory and violence. Mengiste is the author of The Shadow King, a gripping novel set during Mussolini’s 1935 invasion of Ethiopia, which takes us back to the first real conflict of World War II and casts light on the women soldiers who were left out of the historical record. Author Salman Rushdie raves the Shadow King is “a brilliant novel, lyrically lifting history towards myth. It’s also compulsively readable.” Former Sojourn author Andrew Sean Greer calls the book “beautiful, horrifying, elegant, and haunted…a modern classic.” Her debut novel, Beneath the Lion’s Gaze, was selected by The Guardian as one of the 10 best contemporary African books and named one of the best books of the year by Christian Science Monitor, Boston Globe and other publications. Mengiste is the recipient of fellowships from the Fulbright Scholar Program, National Endowment for the Arts and Creative Capital. Her work can be found in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, Rolling Stone and BBC, among other places. She was a writer on the documentary projects Girl Rising and The Invisible City: Kakuma, and is a professor in the MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation program at Queens College.

Maaza Mengiste's Books

 

Julia Phillips

Julia Phillips is the debut author of the nationally bestselling novel Disappearing Earth, a finalist for the National Book Award. She is a Brooklyn native who studied Russian language in college at Barnard, and holds a special interest in Russia’s remote and sparsely populated Kamchatka peninsula. “Socially, politically, geographically, Kamchatka is full of extremes. The more I learned about it, the more the region’s isolation, natural beauty and dynamic history appealed. By the time I went to Kamchatka for over a year to write this book, I was convinced: this was the perfect setting for an enormous locked-room mystery,” she says. Disappearing Earth describes the abduction of two young girls and the yearlong process of local strangers who, in their own ways, were all affected by the crime. The story “dismantles the conventions of detective fiction,” says The New Yorker. The New York Times calls it “a superb debut…a nearly flawless novel.” A Fulbright fellow, Julia has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Moscow Times and The Paris Review.

Julia Phillips' Book

 

 Jess Walter (Master of Ceremonies)

Coinciding next fall with the release of his brand-new novel, Nothing West of Dead, past Sojourn author Jess Walter returns as our 2020 Master of Ceremonies. A National Book Award finalist for Citizen Vince and winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Award for The Zero, Walter is the author of six novels, one nonfiction book and a collection of short stories. The Washington Post calls him “as talented a natural storyteller as is working in American fiction these days.” Beautiful Ruins was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and Notable Book of the Year. Salon.com says, "Jess Walter has already proven that he’s one of our great comic writers, a cerebral postmodernist and a savvy plotter of thrillers. Now he has his masterpiece, Beautiful Ruins, an interlocking, continent-hopping, decade-spanning novel with heart and pathos to burn, all big dreams, lost loves, deep longings and damn near perfect." The Financial Lives of the Poets ranked as Time Magazine's No. 2 novel of the year, a book that Esquire called, "brilliant – and brilliantly funny." Kirkus Reviews calls his short story collection, We Live in Water, “a witty and sobering snapshot of recession-era America." His short fiction has won a Pushcart Prize and appeared three times in Best American Short Stories. He was a finalist for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize as part of a team covering the shootout and standoff at Ruby Ridge, in Northern Idaho.

Jess Walter's Books

Literary Sojourn is an annual festival of authors and readers celebrating the power of the book. Each fall, an esteemed slate of authors and 500 book lovers from all over the country gather in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Together they revel in the written word, fueled by award-winning writers who share the stories and inspiration behind their exceptional books.

Event date: 
Wednesday, August 11, 2021 - 1:00pm
Event address: 
Steamboat Springs, CO 80487