Visiting Author - River Selby in conversation with Timothy Schaffert - Hotshot: A Life on Fire

Date and Time

• Wednesday, Oct 1, 2025  5:30pm - 6:30pm

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Arts

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You don't want to miss this visit from author River Selby on October 1st at 5:30. River will be in conversation with Timothy Schaffert presenting Hotshot: A Life on Fire! Learn more about this fascinating memoir about high stakes adventure, personal growth, and humanity below.

PRAISE FOR HOTSHOT:
Amazon Editor's Pick: Best Biographies & Memoirs of August
A Kirkus Best Book of the Month
A Most Anticipated Book by Autostraddle and featured in the New York Times
NPR's Books of the Summer

"What a wonderful, compassionate, sharply observed, beautifully researched, open-hearted book. Selby has lived a big, courageous life, and that largesse is evident on every page, in the form of the rigor and curiosity of the narrative voice. Ostensibly about fire-fighting, Hotshot turns out to be a beautiful reflection on justice, the environment, the self, and much more."--George Saunders, Booker Prize-winning and #1 New York Times Bestselling author of Lincoln in the Bardo

"Hotshot is a brave, powerful, deeply moving memoir of survival and strength. It is also a timely, urgent history of fire, climate change, and our complex, fraught relationship to land stewardship. River Selby's story is inspiring in its spiritual and emotional inventory. Selby is a wonderfully gifted writer about nature, about the complexities of trauma, and the hard-won possibilities of healing."--Dana Spiotta, author of Wayward

"Hotshot is the story of a life forged through crucible. In this wonderous memoir Selby's life reminds us courage can be grown, the self can be found and anything can change. A writer of shining talent and tenacity."--Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, New York Times bestselling author of Friday Black and Chain Gang All-Star

 To order a copy of Hotshot, please follow the link HERE!

ABOUT THE BOOK:
"A beautiful reflection on justice, the environment, the self, and much more."--George Saunders

The fierce debut memoir of a female firefighter, Hotshot navigates the personal and environmental dangers of wildland firefighting

From 2000 to 2010, River Selby was a wildland firefighter whose given name was Anastasia. This is a memoir of that time in their life--of Ana, the struggles she encountered, and the constraints of what it means to be female-bodied in a male-dominated industry. An illuminating debut from a fierce new voice, Hotshot is a timely reckoning with both the personal and environmental dangers of wildland firefighting.

By the time they were nineteen, Selby had been homeless, addicted to drugs, and sexually assaulted more than once. In a last-ditch effort to find direction, they applied to be a wildland firefighter. Two years later, they joined an elite class of specially trained wildland firefighters known as hotshots. Over the course of five fire seasons, Selby delves into the world of the people--almost entirely men--who risk their lives to fight and sometimes prevent wildfires. Simultaneously hyper visible and invisible, Selby navigated an odd mix of camaraderie and rampant sexism on the job and, when they challenged it, a violent closing of ranks that excluded them from the work they'd come to love.

Drawing on years of firsthand experience on the frontlines of fire and years of research, Selby examines how the collision of fire suppression policy, colonization, and climate change has led to fire seasons of unprecedented duration and severity. A work of rare intimacy, Hotshot provides new insight into fire, the people who fight it, and the diversity of ecosystems dependent on this elemental force

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
River Selby is a former hotshot and wildland firefighter, a writer, and a nonbinary person. They hold an MFA in creative writing from Syracuse University; they are currently pursuing their PhD. They were the recipient of the Emerging Writer's Prize for Fiction from Boulevard Magazine for their story, "How Certain Fires Burn." Their writing has appeared in the New Ohio Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Vox, and High Country News. They currently live in Tallahassee, Florida.