Author Liese Greensfelder will read from her new book, Accidental Shepard, and will be joined in conversation by Iowa Writers’ Workshop alum, Mary Swander. Based on what was supposed to be a summer job on a remote sheep farm in Norway that turned into a yearlong experience, Accidental Shepard is praised by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder as a book that “keeps an open, smart, frank tone, and Liese Greensfelder’s good humor working through problems shines…She offers a good balance of light and dark with lots of enlightening detail.” Meanwhile, Kirkus Reviews praises Accidental Shepard as a “gritty” memoir that’s “a testament to the resilience of an outsider who not only made her way in a patriarchal society but also became a Norwegian celebrity.”

Liese Greensfelder is a freelance writer focusing on medicine, biology, and agriculture. She has worked as a farm advisor for the University of California Cooperative Extension and as a science writer for UC San Francisco and UC Berkeley, and she initiated an agricultural development project in the Guatemalan highlands. In 1975, an epistolary account of her first six months on Johannes’s farm became a bestselling book in Norway. She lives in rural Nevada County, California, on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada mountains (www.upress.umn.edu).

Mary Swander is an award-winning writer of drama, poetry and nonfiction with a national and international reputation. She has published books with major New York publishing houses as well as university presses. She has won grants and awards from such places as The National Endowment for the Arts, the Whiting Foundation, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Her latest book is The Maverick M.D., a biography of Dr. NIcholas Gonzalez. She was also a former Iowa Poet Laureate, founded Blazing Star Literary Journal,  and now has a podcast called Mary Swander’s Buggy Land. She spends her summers teaching in Ireland and the rest of the year in an old Amish one-room schoolhouse (maryswander.com/about/).