Award-winning author Deborah Jackson Taffa headlines this year’s Fort Collins Book Fest: Open Pages Open Minds. Taffa’s memoir, Whiskey Tender, was a finalist for the National Book Award and was named to best lists at Oprah Daily, The Washington Post, Elle, and Esquire Magazines. Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m. Free tickets to the author talk are available through the library’s event calendar. A book signing will follow the presentation. The Crowded Bookshelf, the official bookseller of the Fort Collins Book Fest, will be on-hand before and after Taffa’s session for book sales.
