With Alexander Lumans, Fernando Flores, Ramona Ausubel, Kimberly King Parsons, Marisa Matarazzo.

The Sand Creek Massacre, Yucca Mountain, Area 51—the West’s desolate “emptiness” belies depths of the dangerous and the bizarre. Writing its mysteries, consequently, runs deeply: from Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine to Joy Williams’s The Quick and the Dead. In this panel, five established and emerging prose writers read within this regional tradition, ranging in subject from mesa megafauna to ghosts of annihilation. These writers present an updated essence of the phantasmagorical American West.