Author Event with David Gessner and Zak Podmore

Join authors David Gessner and Zak Podmore for a reading and discussion on June 12 in Bluff, UT at 7PM, with music following by river-running musicians Peter McLaughlin and Chris Brashear. The event will be at the Bluff Community Center pavilion.

Gessner will be celebrating his latest book, A Traveler’s Guide to the End of the World. Gessner takes readers on an eye-opening tour of climate hotspots from the Gulf of Mexico to the burning American West to New York City to the fragile Outer Banks, where homes are being swallowed by the seas. He does so with his usual sense of humor, compassion, and a willingness to talk to anyone, providing an informative and sobering yet convivial guide for the age of fire, heat, wind, and water.

“An act of generational love and courage.”
—BILL MCKIBBEN, author The End of Nature

Zak Podmore is the author of Confluence: Navigating the Personal & Political on Rivers of the New West (Torrey House Press 2019)

After losing his river-running mother to cancer, author and paddler Zak Podmore disappears into the American West’s iconic canyon country to heal. What he finds is a wilderness infused with personal stories, as well as a landscape strained by political, environmental, and cultural tensions. A trip down the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park leads to a confrontation with US immigration policy. While canoeing down a rare release of water in the Colorado River delta, Podmore questions the economic foundations of Western water management. He reports on uranium tailings near the San Juan River, dam removals on Washington’s Elwha River, and a tourist development in the Grand Canyon. Moving and provocative, Confluence follows in the tradition of Thoreau or Edward Abbey — it takes us into the wild but always has one eye turned back toward the blessings and ills of civilization.

“Podmore’s essays resemble Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau with an extra dose of social, racial and political analysis.”
—ARIZONA DAILY SUN