Writing the World Outside
Brian Laidlaw and Jonathan C. Slaght
Saturday, November 7, 2026
12pm, Gateway Room
The best nonfiction can be as lyrical as a poem or as narratively gripping as a novel, and such is the case with the books here. Poet and songwriter Brian Laidlaw presents his first nonfiction book, Erratica: On Climbing, Language, and Touching Stone, as part love letter to ascending the world’s craggy heights one step at a time, and part philosophical exploration of how the human body can connect to the deep geologic time of Earth. As a wildlife biologist and Regional Director of the Wildlife Conservation Society, Jonathan C. Slaght brings the saga of the effort to save the Siberian Tiger to vivid life, showing in Tigers Between Empires how determination and cooperation can result in the comeback of an endangered species.
About the Authors
Brian Laidlaw is an author of the two collections of poetry, The Mirrormaker and The Stuntman. A songwriter and musician, he has released several albums, most recently This Aster. He writes for outdoor magazines including Outside, Climbing, Alpinist, and Orion. Based out of Moab, Utah, he moonlights—often by literal moonlight—as a rock climber.
Jonathan C. Slaght is the author of Owls of the Eastern Ice, which won the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the Minnesota Book Award for General Nonfiction and was long-listed for the National Book Award. He is the regional director of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Temperate Asia Program, where he oversees strategic conservation planning in China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Russia, and Central Asia. He published an annotated translation of Across the Ussuri Kray by Vladimir Arsenyev and cotranslated Winter Ecology of the Amur Tiger by A. G. Yudakov and I. G. Nikolaev. His work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Guardian, and Scientific American, and on the BBC and NPR. He lives in Minneapolis.