Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sonora Babb

Please join Pulitzer Prize-winning author Forrest Gander and award winning-biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle to discuss Iris' new biography, Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb, alongside Gander’s latest poetry collection, Mojave Ghost.

Riding Like the Wind resurrects the silenced voice of Sanora Babb, peerless author of midcentury American literature and a writer done dirty by her fellow scribes and the publishing industry.

In 1939, when John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was published, it became an instant bestseller and a prevailing narrative in the nation’s collective understanding of the era. But it also truncated the publication of Babb's fiction, silencing a gifted writer who was more intimately connected to the true experiences of Dust Bowl migrants than Steinbeck ever was. In Riding Like the Wind, renowned biographer Iris Jamahl Dunkle revives the groundbreaking voice of Sanora Babb.

Dunkle follows Babb from her impoverished childhood in eastern Colorado to California. Once there, she befriended the era’s literati (including Ray Bradbury and Ralph Ellison), entered into an illegal marriage, and was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee. It was Babb’s field notes and oral histories of migrant farmworkers that Steinbeck relied on to write his novel. But Riding Like the Wind is not merely a saga of literary usurping; on her own merits, Babb’s impact was profound. Her life and work feature heavily in Ken Burns’s award-winning documentary The Dust Bowl and inspired Kristin Hannah in her bestseller The Four Winds. Riding Like the Wind reminds us that the stories we know—and who tells them—can change the way we remember history.

Forrest Gander's Mojave Ghost is a “a novel poem,” taking us to his birthplace in the Mojave Desert and his current northern California home, where "tumultuous memories coalesce with the present."

Iris Jamahl Dunkle is an Emerita Poet Laureate of Sonoma County and a faculty member at UC Davis. She has authored two biographies: Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2020) and Riding Like the Wind: The Life of Sanora Babb (University of California Press, 2024). Her fourth poetry collection, West : Fire : Archive, was recently published by The Center for Literary Publishing. Dunkle writes a weekly blog called Finding Lost Voices, which revives the voices of women who have been forgotten or misremembered and serves as the Poetry and Translation Director at the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She is the co-VP of Awards on the board of the National Book Critics Circle.

Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and lives in California. A translator/writer with degrees in geology and literature, he’s received the Pulitzer Prize, Best Translated Book Award, and fellowships from the Library of Congress, Guggenheim, and US Artists Foundations. A signal voice for environmental poetics, Gander often writes about human and ecological intimacies. His latest books, focused on California, are Mojave Ghost: a Novel Poem and the collaboration Across/Ground: Photographs by Lukas Felzmann.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Clio's, 353 Grand Avenue, Oakland, United States