Ana Maria Spagna will read from her new book Reclaimers Saturday, March 19th, 2016 at 1pm at the Hood River Library.

The event is co-sponsored by Waucoma Bookstore, Gorge Owned, and the Hood River Library.

For most of the past century, Humbug Valley, a forest-hemmed meadow sacred to the Mountain Maidu tribe, was in the grip of a utility company. Washington’s White Salmon River was saddled with a fish-obstructing, inefficient dam, and the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland was unacknowledged within the boundaries of Death Valley National Park.

Until people decided to reclaim them.

In “Reclaimers,” Ana Maria Spagna drives an aging Buick up and down the long strip of West Coast mountain ranges–the Panamints, the Sierras, the Cascades–and alongside rivers to meet the people, many of them wise women, who persevered for decades with little hope of success to make changes happen. In uncovering their heroic stories, Spagna seeks a way for herself, and for all of us, to take back and to make right in a time of unsettling ecological change.

About the Author

Ana Maria Spagna lives and writes in Stehekin, Washington, a remote community in the North Cascades. She s the author of three books, and after 15 years working on backcountry trail crews, she now teaches creative nonfiction in the Whidbey Writers Workshop low-residency MFA program. Her writing on nature, work, and life in a small community appears regularly in “Orion”, “High Country News”, “Mountain Gazette”, “Oregon Quarterly”, and elsewhere.