Winner of the 2020 Reading the West Advocacy Award Winner of the 2020 Colorado Book Award for Creative Nonfiction "This is a book for all of us, right now." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild On her 120-acre homestead high in the Colorado Rockies, beloved writer Pam Houston learns what it means to care for a piece of land and the creatures on it. Elk calves and bluebirds mark the changing seasons, winter temperatures drop to 35 below, and lightning sparks a 110,000-acre wildfire, threatening her century-old barn and all its inhabitants. Through her travels from the Gulf of Mexico to Alaska, she explores what ties her to the earth, the ranch most of all. Alongside her devoted Irish wolfhounds and a spirited troupe of horses, donkeys, and Icelandic sheep, the ranch becomes Houston’s sanctuary, a place where she discovers how the natural world has mothered and healed her after a childhood of horrific parental abuse and neglect. In essays as lucid and invigorating as mountain air, Deep Creek delivers Houston’s most profound meditations yet on how “to live simultaneously inside the wonder and the grief… to love the damaged world and do what I can to help it thrive.”

The author of "Cowboys Are My Weakness" and "Waltzing the Cat" turns to nonfiction with essays that celebrate real-life adventures spanning five years and five continents. Through her stories, readers meet some good dogs, a few good men, and the occasional grizzly as Houston proves that fiction has nothing on real life.

“An absorbing, generous, ravishing book by a high priestess of you-have-to-read-this prose." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild Pam Houston, an "early master of the art of rendering fiercely independent, brilliant women in love with the wrong men" (Sarah Norris, Barnes & Noble Review), delivers a novel that whisks us from one breathtaking precipice to the next. Along the way, we unravel the story of Pam (a character not unlike the author), a fearless traveler aiming to leave her metaphorical baggage behind as she seeks a comfort zone in the air. With the help of a loyal cast of friends, body workers, and a new partner who helps her to be at home, she finally finds something like ground under her feet.

Key Selling Points A young teen earns a scholarship to go to space camp. The first in the Teen Astronauts series featuring Houston at space camp. Examines themes of perseverance, leadership and growth mindset. This is an adventure story with an exciting setting: astronaut training camp. Eric Walters is very well known to librarians and booksellers.

Beginning after World War I, Houston was transformed from a black-and-white frontier town into one of the most ethnically and racially diverse urban areas in the United States. Houston Bound draws on social and cultural history to show how, despite Anglo attempts to fix racial categories through Jim Crow laws, converging migrations—particularly those of Mexicans and Creoles—complicated ideas of blackness and whiteness and introduced different understandings about race. This migration history also uses music and sound to examine these racial complexities, tracing the emergence of Houston's blues and jazz scenes in the 1920s as well as the hybrid forms of these genres that arose when migrants forged shared social space and carved out new communities and politics. This interdisciplinary book provides both an innovative historiography about migration and immigration in the twentieth century and a critical examination of a city located in the former Confederacy.

Sam Houston was one of the most extraordinary figures in American history. During his life, he held an astonishing range of positions: governor of two states (Tennessee and Texas), congressman (Tennessee), senator (Texas), and president of the Republic of Texas during its independence. He was an ardent expansionist who helped make Manifest Destiny a reality, and more than any other individual, he was responsible for Texas's entry into the United States. But Houston was a complex man whose life was marked by disappointments and failures. He had a lifelong drinking problem, which probably caused the dissolution of his first marriage, a scandal that caused him to resign as governor of Tennessee. Following that disgrace, Houston fled into Indian Territory and oblivion. After years of wandering in the wilderness, he came to Texas and political rebirth. Houston's military fame, forged in the War of 1812, brought him to the attention of the commanding general, Andrew Jackson, who made Houston his protégé and nurtured Houston's military career. In Texas, Houston's fellow settlers, determined to break free from Mexico, chose him to command the Texas Army. After a series of tactical retreats, Houston won a decisive victory at San Jacinto, crushing the army of Mexican general Santa Anna and guaranteeing Texas's independence. But even Houston's own officers quarreled over his victory and how much credit Houston deserved for it. As governor of Texas in 1861, Houston, fiercely pro-Union, refused to swear allegiance to the Confederacy when Texas joined the new Southern nation, and he was forced from office. He died in 1863, a bloody war raging as he predicted it would following succession. This is a vivid, exciting biography of one of the giants of nineteenth-century America.

Against the tumultuous backdrop of early Texas history, Williams sketches a vivid portrait of a truly American legend. Map.