Three Silver City authors will read from, sign, and sell books that recently received the top awards in their genres from the New Mexico Book Awards. A fourth award-winning book will also be for sale. A wildlife tracking memoir, a botanical garden murder mystery, a cookbook, and a coffee table photography book show the diversity of the talents and interests of local authors. The event will occur from 1:00 to 3:00 at Avalon Books and Music, 405. N. Bullard St. in Silver City. Refreshments from The Bear Mountain Lodge Cookbook will be served.
Part lyrical memoir and part advocacy for wildlife conservation, What Walks This Way: Discovering the Wildlife Around Us Through Their Tracks and Signs (Columbia University Press, 2024) is an introduction to identifying the common tracks of mammals in North America. By the end of the book, readers should be able to look down at a print in the dirt and think, "Gray fox" or "Bobcat" or "Raccoon." Sharman Apt Russell is a professor emeritus at WNMU and teaches at the low-residency MFA program at Antioch University in Los Angeles The author of a dozen books, translated into nine languages, she is the winner of the 2016 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History Writing. Photographer and illustrator Kim A. Cabrera is a master tracker and well-known wildlife tracking educator. The book won the New Mexico Book Award for Nature/Environment.
Bones in the Back Forty, the second novel in the Bea Rivers botanical garden mystery series, was the New Mexico Book Award winner for cozy mystery, as well as a "Book of the Week" in the Albuquerque Journal, which declared it "light and lively." Some suspects live in the in the fictional mountain town of Copperton, New Mexico, which bears a certain resemblance to a town with a similar name. Marty is a retired botanical garden executive director and nonprofit professional who now delights in using the right side of her brain to write fiction. Death in a Desert Garden, her first novel, won several awards including the Arizona/ New Mexico Book Award for cozy mystery in 2022. The third book in the Bea Rivers series, Crime on the Coast, is due out in February 2026. Marty is a Silver City resident active in the Gila Native Plant Society and Great Old Broads for Wilderness, and is grateful for mountains, deserts and oceans that keep her in balance and refresh her soul.
Linda Brewer will represent The Bear Mountain Lodge Cookbook, the New Mexico Book Award winner for cookbooks. It was a labor of love for the Lodge and Silver City. The Lodge was built in 1928 and has had a cast of characters surrounding it ever since. That cast includes the staff, neighbors, guests, recipe testers, and animals both domestic and wild. The cookbook is the story of this time in the Lodge's history.
Jay Hemphill's New Mexico Book Award-winner, The Gila 100, a collection of photographs on the Gila on the occasion of its 100th anniversary
