Kinłání & Kingman

     Sedona & Seligman

     Tuba City & Kachina Village

     Winslow & Williams

     Verde Valley & Blue Gap

     Glen Canyon & Grand Canyon

     Lake Mary & Tolani Lake

 

For millennia, these sites—and many more across the Colorado Plateau—have served as gathering points: physical, cultural, and storied. With a debt of gratitude to this tradition, the Northern Arizona Book Festival brings together a singular list of regional voices writing from place.

 

With each poem or short prose piece geolocated to an exact latitude and longitude, Gathering Points offers readers a simple but radical invitation: come see. These works trace the shapes of old houses, ochre hogans, river-bend rescues, dark-sky trailheads, sacred mountain silhouettes, KTNN feed lines, USPS mail routes, craggy ash fields, water-drinking sinkholes, and the burled bark of butterscotch pines. It is not only an evocation of these points of interest, but a solemn convocation: of readers called to community.

 

As a literary field guide, Gathering Points is meant to be read in motion. It is accompanied by an ever-expanding digital edition (accessible at noazbookfest.org) that incorporates creative placemaking, GIS mapping, and visual design.