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Book Launch Party!Auntie's is happy to celebrate with Maya Jewell Zeller for her memoir book launch! Join us at West Central Abbey for a fun and entertaining event. There will be music performed by Mount Spokane High School string quartet, pie baked by Kate Lebo (& we can guarantee it'll be delicious!), and libations donated by Washington State Wine Commission. And of course, Auntie's Bookstore will be selling copies of Raised by Ferns! We hope to see you there!
Thursday, March 12th at 6:30PM at West Central Abbey
(1832 W Dean Ave)
This event is free and open to the public.
Raised by Ferns is being released on March 3rd! You can preorder the book on our website!
We will have copies of Raised by Ferns and Maya's other titles at the event.
About the book
Born in a Pacific Northwest gas station to itinerant, countercultural parents, Maya Jewell Zeller came of age in a landscape where poverty, wildness, and self-reliance intertwined. Raised by Ferns traces the path of a feral girl craving both freedom and safety to a middle-class adult life shaped by academia, motherhood, and uneasy privilege. Refusing tired narratives of bootstrap triumph, Zeller instead renders rural America with intimate complexity. She writes with sharp lyricism and attention about what it means to live between worlds-material scarcity and cultural wealth, inherited distrust and institutional legitimacy. From leaking rentals to library stacks, from ferns and fire codes to scholarship and marital strife, Zeller's life resists easy packaging yet finds form in layered essays that explore the complicated pursuit of belonging. Raised by Ferns offers a vital, compelling new take on the forces that shape identity and the choices that define home. It is a story of survival, but more importantly, of questioning for what-and who-it is worth surviving for.
About the author
Maya Jewell Zeller is a multi-genre author of several books and collaborations, most recently The Wonder of Mushrooms (AdventureKEEN, fall 2025); out takes/ glove box, selected by Eduardo Corral as winner of the 2022 New American Poetry Prize; and the co-authored textbook (with Kathryn Nuernberger) Advanced Poetry: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). Maya’s prose appears widely, and her essay, “Scavenger Panorama,” was honored by Vivian Gornick as a Notable in Best American Essays 2023. Maya is Professor of English for Central Washington University, and Affiliate Faculty of Poetry and Nature Writing for Western Colorado University’s low-residency MFA program. Maya lives in the Inland Northwest with her children. Her memoir, Raised by Ferns, will be out in early 2026 from Porphyry Press.
** Don't forget! This event is not taking place at Auntie's Bookstore! **
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
1832 W Dean Ave, Spokane, WA 99201-1829, United States
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.
