Spoken Words 20: Diane Les Becquets — Breaking Wild

In the early 20th century, tribal members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma became extremely wealthy after discovering oil underneath their reservation. Then, dozens of Osage members started turning up murdered in a vast conspiracy meant to redirect their wealth into the hands of white men.

In the recent book Killers of the Flower Moon, author David Grann explores this chapter in American history. Grann visited the University of Wyoming as a guest lecturer, and Wyoming Public Radio's Caroline Ballard spoke with him about how he first became interested in the Osage Indian Murders and their legacy. 

In his memoir The Mountain and the Fathers, Joe Wilkins reckoned with loss, poverty, and the landscape of his childhood in the Big Dry of eastern Montana. Now a father, Joe Wilkins’s poems in When We Were Birds attend to what is common to us all, to what binds us together and makes us human, from grief over the loss of a livelihood or health to the anxieties and hopes we have for our children.

What would you do if your best friend were sexually assaulted? That’s the question Casper author Kiersi Burkhart tackles in her new young adult novel Honor Code – where an allegation of sexual assault rocks “Edwards Academy,” a prestigious private high school on the East Coast. Burkhart and Wyoming Public Radio’s Caroline Ballard discussed the book and its message at her home in Casper.

Wind City Books in Casper will hold a launch party for Honor Code Saturday, March 3 at 11 a.m.

The rugged, rural, conservative town of Mancos, Colorado was a hard place for Jenny Forrester to grow up. Her new memoir is the story of the relationships and landscape that shaped her life, against which she had to struggle to find her own truth. Facing poverty, isolation, and violence, Forrester talks about her journey toward self-acceptance and what that journey suggests about living in a politically and culturally divided America.

For her popular book, The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier, Healthier, and More Creative, Florence Williams traveled the world talking to researchers, practitioners and real people who rely on nature to thrive.