Portland author Erica Berry joins us to read from her debut nonfiction book Wolfish, a lyrical inquiry into the relationship between humans and wolves, anchored in the dual stories of one legendary tagged wolf, OR-7, and the author's own experiences coming of age in a gendered landscape of predator and prey. In this enthralling, kaleidoscopic exploration of wolves both real and symbolic, Berry weaves historic and scientific findings alongside criticism, journalism, and memoir to illuminate the strands of our cultural constructions of predator and prey and what it means to navigate a world in which we can be both. In Wolfish the author wrestles with inherited narratives around fear, danger, and the body--from her grandfather's sheep farm to a wolf sanctuary on an aristocratic English estate--untangling binaries of predator and prey, self and other, and wild and domestic, while finding new expressions for how to be a brave woman, human, and animal in our warming world.
Berry graduated from Bowdoin College in 2014 and received her MFA from the University of Minnesota as a College of Liberal Arts Fellow in 2018. Her essays and journalism have appeared in Outside Magazine, Catapult, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Literary Hub, Gulf Coast, The New York Times Magazine, Colorado Review, Fourth Genre, The Atlantic, Pacific Standard, and Guernica, among others. Winner of the 2018 Steinberg Essay Prize and a 2018 AWP Intro Journals Award, she has received grants and fellowships from the Ucross Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, and Tin House. She has taught writing workshops at Literary Arts, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the New York Times Student Journeys, and Oxford Academia, and she was the 2019-2020 National Writers’ Series Writer-in-Residence and Teaching Fellow at Front Street Writers in Traverse City, Michigan. She now lives in her hometown of Portland, where she works as a Writer-in-the-Schools.
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