Find Joe at Sisters Movie House - Saturday, September 14th
Reading 9:30-10:30, Signing 10:30 - 11:00
About The Entire Sky
With echoes of Demon Copperhead and Plainsong, a poignant story about a troubled boy on the run, an aging rancher, and a woman at a crossroads, who find unexpected solace and kinship in the family they make. With his long hair and penchant for guitar, teenage Justin is the spitting image of his idol, Kurt Cobain—a resemblance that has often marked him an outcast. When the long-simmering abuse from his uncle finally boils over, Justin has no choice but to break free, in a violent act that will haunt him, and try to make it on his own as a runaway.
Meanwhile, in rural Montana, Rene Bouchard, a rancher nearing retirement, grieves the recent death of his wife. Her passing has revealed precisely how fractured the family has become—particularly the relationship between Rene and his daughter, Lianne. As old wounds ache anew, father and daughter begin to doubt the possibility of reconciliation, even as they each privately yearn for it.
Justin’s wanderings bring him to the Bouchard family ranch, and soon Rene and Lianne take the boy in as their own. But before long, Justin’s past threatens to catch up with him, jeopardizing not only his new bond with Rene and Lianne but also the home he’s finally been able to claim. With its lyricism, tangible evocation of place, and piercing insight reminiscent of the novels of Barbara Kingsolver and Kent Haruf, The Entire Sky is an unforgettable piece of modern, American fiction.
Joe Wilkins is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die, praised as “remarkable and unforgettable” in a starred review at Booklist. Short-listed for the First Novel Prize from the Center For Fiction and the Pacific Northwest Book Award. Fall Back Down When I Die won the 2020 High Plains Book Award and has now been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, and German. Wilkins’s memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, was a finalist for the Orion Book Award and won the GLCA Emerging Writers Award, an honor that has previously recognized early work by Alice Munro, Richard Ford, and Louise Erdrich. His second novel, The Entire Sky, is slated for publication in July 2024 with Little, Brown.
Wilkins is also the author of four poetry collections, most recently Thieve, a finalist for the Oregon Book Award, and When We Were Birds, winner of the Oregon Book Award. His poems, essays, and stories have appeared in a host of venues, including The Georgia Review, The Southern Review, The Missouri Review, Orion, Copper Nickel, Ecotone, The Sun, and High Country News, and his work has won the Pushcart Prize, earned multiple notable mentions in the Best American series, and been widely anthologized. Wilkins is the winner of a 2024 Oregon Career Literary Fellowship and has received grants from the Richard J. Margolis Award, the Sustainable Arts Foundation, and PEN Northwest; as the recipient of the Boyden Wilderness Writing Residency, Wilkins and his family spent the summer and fall of 2015 living in a remote cabin in the Klamath Mountains along the Rogue River in southwest Oregon.
Wilkins was born and raised on a sheep and hay ranch north of the Bull Mountains of eastern Montana. After graduating from Gonzaga University with a degree in engineering, Wilkins spent two years teaching ninth grade pre-algebra in the Mississippi Delta with Teach For America. He then went on to earn his MFA in creative writing from the University of Idaho, where he worked with the poet Robert Wrigley and the memoirist Kim Barnes.
Wilkins serves on the faculty of Eastern Oregon University’s Low Residency MFA Program, and he has taught at a number of festivals and workshops, including the Breadloaf Environmental Writers’ Workshop, Fishtrap, the Kachemack Bay Writers Conference, and Orion in the Wilderness.