Features

After checking herself in to a psychiatric hospital in 2013, writer Terese Mailhot was given a notebook. The result is her award-winning debut memoir Heartberries, which tells the story of her coming-of-age on the Seabird Island First Nation in British Columbia, sometimes-tumultuous family relationships, and adult struggles with mental illness.

"My book is essentially about how to love when you come from a dysfunctional home and you have these long shadows of shame kind of following you everywhere you go," said Mailhot, now a New York Times Bestselling author, in an interview with Wyoming Public Radio's Savannah Maher. During a recent visit to the University of Wyoming, Mailhot talked about the book's success and what Native writers risk and gain when they choose to put their stories out into the word.

Your phone, your house, your car. It all originally comes from the earth. Artist Nina Elder is fascinated by the complexity of land being at once something beautiful, sometimes sacred, and often extremely valuable - providing resources that the modern world depends on. Through long journeys to mining-based communities, Elder collects found materials and creates intricate drawings that help tell the multilayered stories that lands have to tell.

She's been supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation, Rauschenberg Foundation, and the Pollock Krausner Foundation. Elder has been features in VICE Magazine, PBS and Art In America. She's also held positions as an Art + Environment Research Fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art and Polar Lab Research Fellow. Wyoming Public Radio's Cooper McKim speaks with Elder about her latest exhibit now at the University of Wyoming's Visual Arts Building called Nina Elder: Accumulations.

In celebration of 150 years of women's suffrage in Wyoming, the University of Wyoming Department of History presented a limerick contest. Here are the winning entries.

The author of a book called A Disability History of the United States is visiting the University of Wyoming this week as part of a celebration of the Wyoming Institute for Disabilities. Kim Nielsen is a professor of Disability Studies at the University of Toledo. She tells Wyoming Public Radio's Bob Beck that her book was not planned.

If you listen to Wyoming Public Radio, you no doubt have heard the reoccurring promos for The Modern West. Some of you probably have checked the new and improved podcast out, but for the rest of you, podcast producer Melodie Edwards shifts into the guest chair to explain what it's all about.

An award-winning play has its Wyoming premier in Laramie. Relative Theatrics presents Madeleine George's play The (curious case of the) Watson Intelligence at Laramie's Gryphon Theater through November 16.

The work won an Outer Critics Circle Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2013. As George told Wyoming Public Radio's Megan Feighery, the inspiration came from the most unlikely of places.

There was a time when surgeries were a spectacle and one of the most unsanitary events you've ever seen. That's until a Doctor named Joseph Lister changed their ways. Author Dr. Lindsey Fitzharris came to the University of Wyoming this week to discuss her award winning and gory book The Butchering Art.

Lander writer and photographer Sara Wiles has been spending time with families on the Wind River Reservation, and taking their pictures, since she started a job as a social worker there in the 1970's. Her latest book, The Arapaho Way: Continuity and Change on the Wind River Reservation, is a culmination of those 40 plus year relationships. Through essays and photographs, it documents the contemporary history of the Wind River.

October 26 marks the opening of an exhibit at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West focusing on women throughout Wyoming. It showcases large-scale portraits and interviews with the women. The photographer Lindsay Linton Buk has traveled around the state to meet and learn their stories. Wyoming Public Radio's Kamila Kudelska sat down with the photographer and the two women co-curators of the exhibit, Karen McWhorter and Rebecca West and asked what stood out about this collection of portraits.

David Sedaris is a humorist, author, NPR contributor and soon he'll return to Laramie on Monday, October 28th. Dubbed "the master of satire," Sedaris will spend the evening sharing his hilarious observations on the human condition. In advance of this one-night only event, the author, whose works include Santaland Diaries, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, and his most recent bestseller, Calypso, speaks with Wyoming Public Radio's Cooper McKim.

Bestselling author Craig Johnson has just published his fifteenth book. Land of Wolves continues the adventures of Walt Longmire, a sheriff who solves mysteries in a fictional rural Wyoming county.

Wyoming Public Radio's Erin Jones learned about the ten years of perfecting his first novel, how to maintain relationships when you're an artist, and what it's like now to write a book a year.

African American history in the American West goes back hundreds of years, but not a lot of that history made it into the history books, and many stories are at risk of getting lost in time.

A museum in Denver is working to salvage them before that happens. Wyoming Public Radio's Melodie Edwards sat down with the Black American West Museum's re-enactor guild when they came to Laramie's Higher Ground Fair. She wanted to find out about each of the characters they portrayed in full costume on stage at the fair.

A New York City ballet company is coming to Cheyenne, with a performance called Cocktail Hour: The Show. It's exactly what it sounds like: dance vignettes of drinks. The Bloody Mary, the Mint Julep, the Shirley Temple...all performed with original choreography, music, and costumes. This is classical ballet with a twist. Wyoming Public Radio's Erin Jones got the scoop from choreographer Marilyn Klaus.

Jackson's Snow King Sports Center usually hosts skating lessons and peewee hockey games. But for one weekend in mid-September, it was filled with about $50 million worth of art.

The space had been taken over by the brand new Jackson Hole Fine Arts Fair. Visitors were greeted at the door by a giant inflatable goldfish — the work of Jackson artist Bland Hoke — before visiting booths from more than 50 galleries based all over the country.