The Utah Humanities Book Festival continues this week with events for fans of children’s books, young-adult novels and critics alike. The biggest literary festival in the state is a month-long celebration of all things literary with a calendar of free events. Authors in attendance include James Dashner (The Maze Runner), Lidia Yuknavitch (The Backs of Small Children), and Daniel Miyares (Bambino and Mr. Twain). Local talent and writers with Utah ties will also be spotlighted throughout the festival, with University of Utah-supported and author-run Fiction Collective Two hosting authors Doug Rice and Marc Anthony Richardson for a reading on October 3.

Taking place at libraries, universities, museums and book stores, the festival provides readers with the opportunity to meet their favorite authors. Over 80 writers will hold readings, discussions and signings throughout October, which happens to be National Book Month. Have lunch with your favorite author, laugh over a beer while listening to local storytelling or join in on the discussion of contemporary works with social justice themes. Other special events include First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare tour, slam poetry from Salt City Slam! and a Collector’s Book Salon.

Utah Humanities is a local organization, enriching the lives of Utahns with free public humanities programming. Their Center for Local Initiatives offers grants to a number of humanities projects for museums, community groups, schools and other organizations across Utah. Involving the community by discussing current issues, history, philosophy, and literature, Utah Humanities supports Venture and Clemente courses. Bringing together accredited humanities courses from major institutions with students from low-income families, the program inspired a book that will be presented at this year’s festival.

For more information on the Utah Humanities Book Festival and a list of events, click here.

-Brieanna Olds

This year’s Utah Humanities Book Festival features a special event for fans of authors Doug Rice and Marc Anthony Richardson. Located at Trolley Square’s Weller Book Works, the reading and discussion allows readers to meet the authors of these two newly-published novels. Western Humanities Review and Fiction Collective Two are hosting the event on Monday, October 3 at 7 p.m. This is just one of many literary events held across Utah during the months of September and October as part of the festival.

In Doug Rice’s ninth publication, Here Lies Memory, the author delves into the effects of gentrification in a Pittsburgh neighborhood and the traumas two families face while living there. “A man wills himself to go blind, not to forget, but to remember in new ways. Another man drinks beer after beer until he can no longer drink away what he must face,” describes the novel on its back cover. Rice is a professor at Sacramento State and won their Outstanding Scholar Award in 2015 and the University President’s Award for Scholarship in 2007.

Nominated for Best New American Voice in 2010 by Mills College, Marc Anthony Richardson focuses his debut novel, Year of the Rat, on minorities and the poor, dysfunctional families, sickness and mental disorders, the elderly and disabled, substance abuse, and over-medicating. Outlining the novel on his website, Richardson says, “in Year of the Rat, an artist returns to the dystopian city of his birth to tend to his invalid mother, only to find himself torn apart by memories and longings.”

Fiction Collective 2 is a non-profit organization run by authors and supported by a number of foundations and universities, including the University of Utah. Growing in membership from six members in 1974 to over 100 today, FC2 publishes the unique submissions of members and holds literary contests ever year.

The reading will take place at Weller Book Works, located at 607 Trolley Square in Salt Lake City. For more information on the event, click here.

-Brieanna Olds

I first saw Rebecca Campbell‘s work when I was visiting my son in Los Angeles. We had gone out to Venice to LA Louver Gallery which represents several of my favorite artists—Terry Allen, David Hockney,  Ken Price, Gajin Fujita—and when the person at the desk found out I was from Utah, she jumped up to show me Rebecca  Campbell’s work. I fell in love immediately, mainly because of Campbell’s obvious love of paint. Her exuberant brushstrokes make you feel like she’s enjoying the physical process of painting, the gooshy swish of a paint-loaded brush on canvas. Even when the subjects are not lighthearted, the action of painting is.

Campbell grew up in Salt Lake City with deep LDS roots, revering the land and those who worked it, and living in the suburbs.. She lives in L.A. now, but her paintings still deal with Mormon-haunted memory and family and the complicated ways we find to deal with our personal history.

She’ll return to Salt Lake City this week, Thursday, September 29, and I suggest you go over to Ken Sanders at 7:00 and meet her in person. She’ll be signing her new book release, The Potato Eaters, and celebrating her show of the same name at BYU, opening September 30.

Go see that, too. Yes, this is the same name as Vincent Van Gogh’s famous and favorite work:

and Campbell’s series of paintings aims to show the connection between place and people and, perhaps, how the connection is strained and broken.