The NW Author Speaker series will welcome Portland author Erica Berry at 2 p.m. on Saturday, January 25. This will be a hybrid presentation, with patrons able to enjoy the talk in the library or from home via the library’s website (www.cannonbeachlibrary.org).

Berry received the 2024 Oregon Book Award for Creative Nonfiction for her debut nonfiction work “Wolfish: Wolf, Self, and the Stories We Tell About Fear.” Using memoir, scientific writing, ecological history, cultural history and personal narrative, Berry presents a complex analysis of the complex physical and mythological relationships between wolves and humans.

Berry examines the ways in which humans project their fears onto wolves, making them symbols of all that is scary and intimidating. At the same time she explores the world of wolves, since they have been reintroduced in Oregon and California, focusing on

OR-7, a radio-collared, gray wolf that migrated from the Wallowa Mountains in northeastern Oregon to the southern Cascade Range. And finally, she tells her own coming-of-age story, as she left home and learned to deal with her fears.

Erica Berry is a writer and teacher whose essays, often about the intersection between feelings and the natural environment, have appeared in The New York Times, Orion, The Yale Review, The Guardian, Wired and other publications. She is on the summer faculty of the Orion Environmental Writers’ Workshop and teaches at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology and the New York Times Student Journeys.

Berry received her MFA from the University of Minnesota. She is currently a Writer-in-the-Schools and an Associate Fellow at the Attic Institute of Arts and Letters.