The Wilkes Center is thrilled to co-sponsor this event with the American West Center, the Natural History Museum of Utah, and the Stegner Center.

Bestselling author John Vaillant will be discussing his newest book, Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World, and life in the Pyrocene in the American West.

On Friday, November 8^th, from 11:30 to 1 PM, John Vaillant will be in conversation with students in LNCO 2110.  Light refreshments will be served.

All events are free and open to the public.

John Vaillant is an author and freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and  the Guardian, among others. His first book, The Golden Spruce (Knopf, 2005), was a bestseller and won several awards, including the Governor General's and Rogers Trust awards for non-fiction (Canada). His second nonfiction book, The Tiger (Knopf, 2010), won the B.C. Achievement Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, was a bestseller and has been published in 16 languages. Film rights were optioned by Brad Pitt’s film company, Plan B. In 2014 Vaillant won the Windham-Campbell Prize, a global award for non-fiction. In 2015, he published his first work of fiction, The Jaguar's Children (Houghton Mifflin), which was long-listed for the Dublin IMPAC and Kirkus Fiction Prizes, and was a finalist for the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize (Canada). Fire Weather (Knopf, 2023), a #1 bestseller in Canada, won the UK's Baillie Gifford Prize, a global award for English language non-fiction, and was a finalist for National Book Award and the Canadian Writers‘ Trust Nonfiction Prize. It was named one of the ten best books of 2023 by The New York Times, among many other prominent publications in Europe and North America. Feature film rights have been optioned by Vendôme Pictures, which won an Academy Award for CODA in 2022.