MODESTO –The Modesto Junior College Literature and Language Arts Division will host a reading and book signing by author Suzanne Roberts on Thursday, November 7 at 7 p.m. in the MJC Little Theatre on East Campus.  The event is free and open to the public.

 Roberts will read from her latest book “Almost Somewhere: Twenty-eight Days on the John Muir Trail.”  The book is the winner of the Literature Category of the 2012 National Outdoor Book Awards.  A question and answer session and book signing will follow the reading. 

 The publisher, University of Nebraska Press, gives this description for the book: “Day One, and already she was lying in her journal. It was 1993, Soberts had just finished college, and when her friend suggested they hike California’s John Muir Trail, the adventure sounded like the perfect distraction from a difficult home life and thoughts about the future. But she never imagined that the twenty-eight-day hike would change her life. Part memoir, part nature writing, part travelogue, Almost Somewhere is Roberts’s account of that hike.”

 Roberts, named “The Next Great Travel Writer” by National Geographic Traveler magazine, is the author of the poetry collections Shameless, Nothing to You, Three Hours to Burn a Body: Poems on Travel, and Plotting Temporality.  She has also published work in numerous journals and anthologies.

The book reading is supported by a grant from the James Irvine Foundation to Poets & Writers, Inc. and is co-sponsored by the MJC Literature and Language Arts Division and the MJC Write Club. For more information contact English Professor Dimitri Keriotis at (209) 575-6465 or keriotisd@mjc.edu.