ALAMOSA – The Adams State University English Department will host “Writing West: An Evening of Readings and Conversation” at 7 p.m. Tuesday, March 27, in the Nielsen Library Cooper Room.

In “White Plains” (Conundrum Press; 2017), a novel by author and Regis University professor David Hicks, Flynn Hawkins is a graduate assistant at a prestigious university, on his way to greatness and wisdom. But in the aftermath of 9/11, Flynn leaves his unhappy marriage and beloved children, resigns his teaching position and heads west, only to get lost in his guilt in the mountains of Colorado. When he ends up stuck overnight in a snow drift during a blizzard on the Continental Divide, he realizes he needs to remake himself into the kind of man his children need him to be.

In “Heading Home: Field Notes” (Conundrum Press; 2017), prose poet, essayist and Adams State writing instructor Peter Anderson maps out some of the places that he has explored and inhabited over the last 40 years in the American Southwest. His road eventually led him to Crestone and the San Luis Valley, where he chose to settle and raise a family 17 years ago.

These Conundrum Press authors read together for the first time in 2017 at a bookstore in Salida. They realized then that they had grown up near one another on the East Coast and that they both felt a deep connection with the mountains of Colorado. Come join them for an evening of reading and conversation about what it means to write stories, essays and poems set in the contemporary West. And what it means to settle into new territory, several thousand miles west of the place where you grew up.