An Evening with Deborah Lee Luskin and Alexis Lathem

Phoenix Books Burlington is thrilled to host Vermont authors Deborah Lee Luskin and Alexis Lathem to celebrate the releases of their new books, Reviving Artemis and Lambs in Winter! Both books tell the stories of how the authors found connection to the land and confidence through their place in the natural world. 

Deborah Lee Luskin earned a PhD in English Literature from Columbia University and expected to become an academic, not a deer hunter. She moved from New York City to Vermont for the summer in 1984, fell in love with the landscape, the community, and the new doctor in town. Forty years later, she’s still in Vermont, where she’s raised daughters, taught, and—always—wrote. Reviving Artemis is her second book, following her 2010 novel, Into The Wilderness.

Alexis Lathem is an essayist, poet, journalist, teacher, activist, gardener, and craftsperson. She is the author of the poetry collection Alphabet of Bones and two chapbooks, and holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her work has been supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Vermont Arts Council, the Black Earth Institute, the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, the Marble House Project, and the Chelsea Award for Poetry. She has worked in food and environmental justice organizations for many years and reported widely on farm policy and environmental conflicts in Indigenous communities. Her essays and poems have appeared in About Place, AWP Chronicle, The Hopper, Hunger Mountain, Gettysburg Review, Solstice, West Branch, and elsewhere. She lives with her musician husband on a small farm in the Winooski River Valley, ancestral land of the Abenaki.  

About the books: 

Reviving Artemis

Reviving Artemis is the unlikely story of a woman raised in mid-twentieth-century suburbia who lived in New York City as a young adult and moved to Vermont in 1984. For more than thirty years, she raised domestic livestock, kept bees, and cultivated fruits and vegetables while teaching literature and telling stories. But when she turned sixty, something shifted. Deborah Lee Luskin was overtaken by a primal urge to step out of the garden, off the blazed trails, and into untracked forest by learning to hunt deer. Deeply personal, lyrically told, and funny, Reviving Artemis reveals Luskin's ambivalence about guns and her fear of entering the forest alone in the dark.

She persisted, using her literary acumen to read the forest and, as thoughtfully as she hunts for words, to hunt for deer. With the stories of Artemis, goddess of the hunt, childbirth, and wild nature to inspire her, Luskin became a huntress, determined to age fiercely and compelled to tell this story of finding her place in the natural world.

Lambs in Winter

After half a lifetime spent moving from place to place, Alexis Lathem at last settled down with her husband on a small farm near Vermont’s largest city. The lyric essays of Lambs in Winter take readers through the seasonal cycles of raising sheep and hens and growing fruits and vegetables while confronting the challenges of winter storms, summer floods, invasive weeds, pests, and diseases.

Ever conscious of her place in a historically colonized and ecologically degraded landscape, Lathem wrestles with ethical questions that come to many rural dwellers who—following Thoreau—set out to “live deliberately,” in a time of climate crisis, persistent racial inequity, and growing economic inequality. Likewise, she grapples with the moral complexities of small-scale animal husbandry. Through her efforts at self-provisioning, without holding illusions of the self-reliant individual, Lathem finds herself deeply embedded in the community and reliant on others, especially as her region deals with repeated catastrophic flooding brought on by climate change.

Through elegant prose and insightful investigations into pressing contemporary issues, Lathem evokes the world of her farm and the surrounding countryside with a spiritual awareness of the human journey on this earth. Living in place, attuned to the unfolding changes in the world around her, gives her much to grieve, but the pages of Lambs in Winter are luminous with moments of joy and beauty. 

DATE: Tuesday, November 4, 2025 at 7PMLOCATION: Phoenix Books, 89 Church Street, Burlington VT 05401

ADMISSION: $3. Your ticket comes with a coupon for $3 off one of the featured books. Coupons expire at closing the evening of the event. Tickets can be purchased at the registration link below, or at the door. BOOKS: Copies of each author’s books will be available at the event for signing and personalization 

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

89 Church St, 89 Church Street, Burlington, United States