2025 Fall Events
Re-Wilding the West: Wolves, Bison, and Thinking Bigger for the Future
Thursday, October 2, 2025 | Natural History Museum, 7-8 PM
This event is free and open to the public.
Join us for a talk by Sean Robert Gerrity, author of Wild on Purpose and founder of the American Prairie Reserve, to discuss his re-wilding work in Montana, and what it might teach us about the future of ecological conservation and biodiversity across the American West.
Sean Gerrity is a conservation entrepreneur best known as the founder and former CEO of the American Prairie Reserve, one of the largest and most ambitious landscape-scale conservation projects currently underway in the United States. Established in 2001, the goal of the project is to assemble and restore the habitat and wildlife on a three and quarter million-acre wildlife reserve: larger than Yellowstone National Park and Glacier National Park combined.
With a background in business consulting from Silicon Valley, Gerrity brings a strategic and innovation mindset to conservation. His seventeen-year leadership history with American Prairie earned recognition from National Geographic and the National Wildlife Federation.
Gerrity is the author of the book: Wild on Purpose: The Story of the American Prairie and The Art of Thinking Bigger published by Torrey House Press.
He remains actively engaged in global conservation efforts, including as host of the podcast The Answers Are Out There. He serves on the Council of Advisors with Tanzanian-based African People & Wildlife, Namibia’s Orange River-Karoo Conservation Area, The Kratt Brothers Creature Hero Foundation and Adventure Scientists.
Beyond the Glittering World: Indigenous Feminisms and Futurisms
Thursday, November 20, 2025 | Finch Lane Gallery, 7-8 PM
This event is free and open to the public.
Join us for a series of lively readings by the writers and poets Stacie Shannon Denetsosie, Kinsale Drake, and Darcie Little Badger as they launch their groundbreaking new anthology, Beyond the Glittering World: An Anthology of Indigenous Feminisms and Futurisms. This anthology brings together twenty emerging and established Native women writers and writers of marginalized genders, presenting an array of singular voices at their genre-bending, boundary-breaking, and joyous best.
Stacie Shannon Denetsosie is the award-winning author of The Missing Morningstar and Other Stories (Torrey House Press, 2023), a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize and the Reading the West Award in Debut Fiction, and the winner of the Women Writing the West WILLA Award in Multiform Fiction and a Gold Foreward Indies Award.
Stacie is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts and holds an MA from Utah State University. An enrolled member of the Navajo Nation, she is Todích'íí'nii (Bitterwater Clan), born for Naakaii (Mexican Clan), her maternal grandparents are Tł'ízí lání (Many Goats), and her parental step-grandparents are Bilagáana (European American). She is from the Navajo Nation. She lives in Northern Utah with her husband and cat.
Kinsale Drake (Diné) is a winner of the 2023 National Poetry Series for her debut poetry collection THE SKY WAS ONCE A DARK BLANKET (University of Georgia Press, 2024). Her work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, Poets.org, Best New Poets, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She directs programming for NDN Girls Book Club, which distributes free books to Indigenous youth and communities, and lives in Nashville, TN.
Darcie Little Badger is a Lipan Apache writer with a PhD in oceanography. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, Elatsoe, was featured in Time Magazine as one of the best 100 fantasy books of all time. Elatsoe also won the Locus Award for Best First Novel and was a Nebula, Ignyte, and Lodestar finalist. Her second fantasy novel, A Snake Falls to Earth, received a Nebula Award, an Ignyte Award, and a Newbery Honor and was longlisted for the National Book Award. Her third book, Sheine Lende, a prequel to Elatsoe, was a USA Today bestseller. Darcie is married to a veterinarian named Taran.
2026 Spring Events
Instagram, Trad Wives, and Evolutions in Mormon Feminism
Wednesday, January 14, 2026 | Jewel Box, CTIHB, 3:30-5:00PM
This event is free and open to the public.
Join us for a fascinating conversation with Dr. Caroline Kline about the complex and controversial popularity of the trad wife movement, how it connects to Mormon women’s history, and what this Instagram trend might tell us about our current ideas and fantasies about American feminism.
Caroline Kline is Research Assistant Professor at Claremont Graduate University and Co-Editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. She holds a PhD in religion from CGU, and her areas of interest include contemporary Latter-day Saint women's communities, feminist theory, and oral history. Her book, Mormon Women at the Crossroads: Global Narratives and the Power of Connectedness (2022), explores Latter-day Saint women's lived experiences in Botswana, Mexico, and the United States.
Robert Sullivan
Thursday, February 5, 2026 | LNCO 3:30-5:00PM
This event is free and open to the public.
Please join us for this year’s annual American West Lecture, “Double Exposure: Photography and the Civil War in the American West,” delivered by Robert Sullivan. This talk, based on Sullivan’s book by the same title, documents the life of Timothy O’Sullivan, America’s most famous war photographer, whose photo “A Harvest of Death,” taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. The images of the American West O’Sullivan made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work “surrealistic and disturbing.” Double Exposure documents O’Sullivan’s career and impact on American photography, while also charting the long-lasting impact the Civil War had on the American West.
Robert Sullivan is the author of many books, including Rats, The Meadowlands, My American Revolution, The Thoreau You Don't Know, and most recently, Double Exposure: Resurveying the West with Timothy O'Sullivan, America's Most Mysterious War Photographer. His work appears in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and A Public Space, where he is a contributing editor. He is the recipient of a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship and, in 2024, won the American Academy of Arts and Letters award for literature.
Disabled Ecologies: A Multispecies Reckoning
Wednesday, March 18, 2026 | LNCO 2110, 3:30-5:00 PM
This event is free and open to the public.
Please join us for a groundbreaking talk by Dr. Sunaura Taylor from her newest book, Disabled Ecologies, which tells the story of a Tucson aquifer forever altered by a Superfund site, and the contamination’s ripple effects through the largely Mexican American community living above. Drawing on her own complex relationship to this long-ago injured landscape, Taylor takes us with her to follow the site's disabled ecology—the networks of disability, both human and wild, that are created when ecosystems are corrupted and profoundly altered. Disabled Ecologies maps out alternative modes of connection, solidarity, and resistance—an environmentalism of the injured. An original and deeply personal reflection on what disability means in an era of increasing multispecies disablement.
Sunaura Taylor is an artist and writer. She is the author of Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation (The New Press, 2017), which received the 2018 American Book Award. Taylor has written for a range of popular media outlets and her artworks have been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally. She works at the intersection of disability studies, environmental justice, multispecies studies, and art practice. She is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Her latest book is Disabled Ecologies: Lessons from a Wounded Desert (University of California Press, 2024).