A night sky is not an absence of light; it is the presence of the universe. In “The Wild Dark: Finding the Night Sky in the Age of Light” (Torrey House Press, 2025), master storyteller Craig Childs embarks on a quest to bike from the blinding lights of the Las Vegas Strip to one of the darkest spots in North America. Childs is a fearless explorer of both the natural world and the human imagination, making him the perfect guide to help us rediscover the heavens and to ask: “What does it do to us to not see the night sky?” In a book that is at once an adventure story, a field guide, and a celebration of wonder, Childs invites us to look up and to look inward, eyes wide and sparkling with stars.

Registration recommended to join us in person. Book signing to follow.

Craig Childs, a November Writer-In-Residence at the Hemingway House with The Community Library, writes about cultural history, science, climate, nature, and the visceral experience of living on Earth. With more than a dozen published books, his subjects range from water in deserts to pre-Columbian migrations across the Southwest. His nonfiction narratives and journalism have appeared in The Atlantic, Outside, High Country News, The Sun, the LA Times, New York Times, NPR, and Radiolab. He’s won the Ellen Meloy Desert Writer’s Award, Reading the West Award, Orion Book Award, the Colorado Book Award, the Galen Rowell Art of Adventure Award, and three times he has won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. The New York Times says, “Childs’s feats of asceticism are nothing if not awe inspiring: he’s a modern-day desert father.” The LA Times says his writing, “stings like a slap in the face.” Born in Arizona, Craig lives in Southwest Colorado.