Author Talk: Shelley Read

Join the Gunnison Library on Thursday, June 29 at 6 pm for an evening with local author, Shelley Read. Shelley’s novel, “Go As a River” was published in the U.S. on February 28, 2023, and in 20+ countries after that. She is excited to add her home community of Gunnison & Crested Butte to her international book tour and discuss her novel that is set here in the Valley, in the Iola basin.

About “Go As A River”:

Seventeen-year-old Victoria Nash runs the household on her family’s peach farm in the small ranch town of Iola, Colorado–the sole surviving female in a family of troubled men. Wilson Moon is a young drifter with a mysterious past, displaced from his tribal land and determined to live as he chooses. Victoria encounters Wil by chance on a street corner, a meeting that profoundly alters both of their young lives, unknowingly igniting as much passion as danger. When tragedy strikes, Victoria leaves the only life she has ever known. She flees into the surrounding mountains where she struggles to survive in the wilderness with no clear notion of what her future will bring. As the seasons change, she also charts the changes in herself, finding in the beautiful but harsh landscape the meaning and strength to move forward and rebuild all that she has lost, even as the Gunnison River threatens to submerge her homeland–its ranches, farms, and the beloved peach orchard that has been in her family for generations. Inspired by true events surrounding the destruction of the town of Iola in the 1960s, Go as a River is a story of deeply held love in the face of hardship and loss, but also of finding courage, resilience, friendship, and, finally, home–where least expected. This stunning debut explores what it means to lead your life as if it were a river–gathering and flowing, finding a way forward even when a river is dammed.

Copies of “Go As a River” will be available to purchase on-site from Abracadabra and have signed by the author.

About the author:

Shelley Read is a fifth generation Coloradoan who lives with her family at 9,000 feet elevation in the Elk Mountains of the Western Slope. Her debut novel, Go as a River, is inspired by her ancestors and the wild landscape where she wanders and wonders.

An award-winning Senior Lecturer at Western Colorado University for nearly three decades, Shelley taught writing, literature, environmental studies, and Honors, and was a founder of the interdisciplinary Environment & Sustainability major, the Prague study abroad program, and a support program for first-generation and at-risk students. She holds a double major honors BA in English and journalism from the University of Denver, and an MA from Temple University’s Graduate Program in Creative Writing and the Temple Rome Seminar in Aesthetics. Shelley was also a Dean’s Fellow in the PhD Program in English at the University of Denver where she studied 19th and 20th-century world literature and philosophy.

She is currently a board member and writing instructor for Vita Institute for the Arts in the U.S. and Italy. She also conducts writing and literary workshops for the Crested Butte Arts Center and is a regular contributor to Crested Butte Magazine and Gunnison Valley Journal.

Shelley is a mom, mountaineer, world traveler, and friend to small creatures and old dogs. She loves few things more than the first steps of a new adventure and a hot cuppa tea after a grand day out.

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This event is free and open to all.