The 2024 One Book Yuma selection is Brave the Wild River: The Untold Story of Two Women Who Mapped the Botany of The Grand Canyon by Melissa L. Sevigny. Make this a true community-wide reading event! Pick up your copy of Brave the Wild River at your local library, or check out a digital copy.
Brave the Wild River is an evocative and beautifully written chronicle of botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter’s history-making journey through the Grand Canyon in the summer of 1938. Driven by boundless curiosity and determination, Clover and Jotter set out with an ambitious but relatively inexperienced expedition leader and three amateur boatmen, eager to “botanize” the beautiful and bizarre plant life of this little-known corner of the American West. Subjected to surges of snowmelt, muddy landslides carrying boulders and debris, frothy whirlpools, and perilous waves, the Colorado River was considered the most dangerous river in the world and at the time only a handful of men, and no women, had survived a boat journey through the Grand Canyon.
Author Melissa L. Sevigny will visit Yuma Thursday, March 21st, to lead two community discussions:
Thursday, March 21st • 2:00-3:00 p.m.
AZ Western College – MAC Lecture Hall #106
2020 S Ave 8 E, Yuma, AZ 85365
Thursday, March 21st • 6:00-7:00 p.m.
Main Library - 1st Floor Meeting Rooms
2951 S 21st Drive Yuma, AZ 85364
Melissa L. Sevigny grew up in Tucson, Arizona where she fell in love with the Sonoran Desert’s ecology, geology and dark desert skies. Her lyrical nonfiction explores the intersections of science, nature, and history, with a focus on the American Southwest. She earned a B.S. in Environmental Science & Policy from the University of Arizona and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing and Environment from Iowa State University.
Her work has been supported by grants from the Ellen Meloy Fund for Desert Writers and the Arizona Commission on the Arts, and honored with numerous awards. She’s currently the science reporter at KNAU (Arizona Public Radio) in Flagstaff, Arizona. Her radio stories have aired nationally on NPR, been featured on Science Friday, and received regional Edward R. Murrow Awards for excellence.
Sevigny is the author of Brave the Wild River, Mythical River, and Under Desert Skies. Her writing has appeared in Orion, The Atavist Magazine, River Teeth, City Creatures, Terrain.org, Fourth Genre, Flyway, and elsewhere.
One Book Yuma is brought to you by Arizona Western College/Northern Arizona University-Yuma Academic Library, Yuma County Library District, Newspapers in Education, and the Yuma Sun.
