Author Erica Berry, will present "Changing Earth, Changing Stories: Finding New Models Of Environmental Storytelling" in Willamette University’s Mary Stuart Rogers Music Center, Hudson Concert Hall at 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.

Erica Berry is author of the book Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear (Flatiron Books, 2023), a kaleidoscopic blend of memoir, science, cultural criticism, journalism and folklore. Researched over the course of a decade, the book has its roots in an Environmental Studies thesis she wrote about wolf repopulation in her home state of Oregon. Her academic project became personal after a handful of alarming encounters left Berry deeply rattled—not only afraid of being a woman in the world, but wary of the narratives she had inherited about fear, threat, and who could be predator and who could be prey. In untangling the mythos of the ‘Big Bad Wolf,’ Wolfish examines cultural narratives of wilderness, gender, power, and the body, offering new expressions for bravery in a warming world. With a family that includes hunters, a sheep farmer, and a former Sierra Club president, Berry’s exploration of how humans live beside wolves becomes a call for how we can better live beside one another.

The event is sponsored by the Dempsey Foundation and Willamette University’s Environmental Science Department. For more information, contact Joe Bowersox at jbowerso@willamette.edu

Mon, April 1 from 7:00 pm PDT

Literary Arts

925 SW Washington Street Portland, OR 97205

Please join us for a reading featuring some of this year’s Oregon Book Awards finalists in Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, and Poetry:

Creative Nonfiction:
Erica Berry
Alyssa Graybeal
Steven Moore

Fiction:
Patrick deWitt
Marcelle Heath
Lydia Kiesling
Rachel King
Jen Wheeler

Poetry:
Stephanie Adams-Santos
Jessica E. Johnson
Sara Quinn Rivara

I will be in conversation about Wolfish at the Portland Book Festival! Panel details TBA.

The faculty of the Attic Institute’s Atheneum -Brian Benson, Lee Montgomery, Erica Berry, and Joanna Rose - read from new work-in-progress.

Location: Rose City Book Pub, 1329 NE Fremont St.

A conversation featuring Erica Berry, Liz Weinberg, Becky Mandelbaum, and Caitlin Scarano.

In our divided social and political context, what can we learn from narratives about animals? What are the ethics, challenges, and joys of writing and imagining the nonhuman world? How can we undo the constructed divide between humans and animals? In this reading and conversation, four writers from across genres will read from their own animal narratives and discuss what it means to write from, for, and to nonhuman beings.  

Wolfish is the September Book Club selection for Katherine May’s ‘True Stories Book Club.’ I will be in conversation with her via ZOOM, at 11am PST, available to all who subscribe to her newsletter:

Erica Berry, author of WOLFISH, in conversation with Linda Kinstler, author of COME TO THIS COURT AND CRY and 2023 Nonfiction Whiting Award winner.

Brookland Location - 625 MONROE ST NE, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Erica Berry in conversation about Wolfish with environmental historian Bathsheba Demuth

Reading and Q+A

In the AWP Book Fair, Seattle, WA

On the first Sunday of the month, The Shanty at the New York Distilling Company is generous enough to let me host a short showcase of local literary talent – poetry, prose, and anything in between – with a particular focus on uplifting emerging and marginalized voices.