On the evening of October 14, 2026, at the Country Bookshelf, Amy Talcott, the Country Bookshelf’s event coordinator, introduced Daniel Grant, Director of the Ivan Doig Center, co-sponsor of the event, who introduced MSU English Department’s new faculty member, Taylor Brorby, in conversation with his friend, award winning Montana author Joe Wilkins, to discuss Wilkins’ latest book, Every Sky at Home: Essays on Landscape and Family.

Joe Wilkins is the author of two novels, The Entire Sky and Fall Back Down When I Die; a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers; and five collections of poetry, including Pastoral, 1994 and When We Were Birds. His latest book is Every Sky at Home: Essays on Landscape and Family. Born and raised north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana, he lives with his family in the Willamette Valley of Oregon.

Taylor Brorby is the author of Boys and Oil: Growing Up Gay in a Fractured Land, Crude: Poems, and Coming Alive: Action and Civil Disobedience. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Huffington Post, Orion Magazine, and Literary Hub. Taylor has received fellowships from the National Book Critics Circle, the MacDowell Colony, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, and Mesa Refuge. He has been interviewed on MSNBC and NPR about his work and regularly speaks around the country. Taylor teaches nonfiction writing at Montana State University, where he is the Haynes Faculty Fellow, and is a contributing editor at North American Review.