Join us for a literary Kaffeeklatsch! Books, coffee, snacks, and chats every Tuesday morning at MyAmour Café, located directly across from our first floor entrance.

Writer and artist Margaret Pettis, author of Back Roads of Utah and the poetry collection In the Temple of Stars, will join us in conversation with poet Nancy Takacs, author of Dearest Water.

Back Roads of Utah (published in November 2021) allows the reader to travel the beautiful back roads of Utah with Pettis, from the forests of the northern mountains to the plateaus and rugged ranges of the central country to the red rock deserts of the southern canyons—all in the pages of one charming book. Enjoy a running narration of places, share experiences and observations, and thumb through her 300 wash and line drawings. Find your favorite place, discover new ones, or just sit back and read about where you might like to explore next time. Hand-drawn maps illustrate each journey. This is a perfect companion for the back seat of the car, a beautiful book for a coffee table, or a gift for your favorite adventurer.

After working for the U.S. Forest Service as a wilderness ranger, Margaret co-founded the Utah Wilderness Association and the High Uintas Preservation Council with her husband, Dick Carter. A career high school English teacher, she has taught writing to state prisoners housed in the Cache County Jail and art workshops for Audubon, wilderness groups, and Navajo children. Pettis is also the author of a series of five novels of outdoor suspense, beginning with The Turquoise Bear.

Nathan Coombs will join us to read his children’s picture book, The No Monsters Spell, the story about an incantation that guarantees to banish all types of monsters from your house, apartment, condo, cabin, castle, shack, barn, yurt, tent, treehouse, lean-to, patch of earth, etc; basically anywhere you are that needs to be Monster-free. "Just cast the Spell and All Is Well."

Nathan F. Coombs has been a writer his whole life. He has worked in libraries and haunted bookstores as soon as he was able to read, and that has profoundly influenced his life. He now mostly reads children's books to his children and dreams of sleeping past 7 a.m.

(Juvenile Picture Book)

William Maz will join us to share his new political thriller, The Bucharest Dossier, set during the 1989 Romanian uprising.

In The Bucharest Dossier, CIA analyst Bill Hefflin is a disillusioned Romanian expat. At the start of the 1989 uprising in Romania, he arrives in Bucharest at the insistence of his KGB asset, code-named Boris. As Hefflin becomes embroiled in an uprising that turns into a brutal revolution, nothing is as it seems, including the search for his childhood love, which has taken on mythical proportions. With the bloody events unfolding at blinding speed, Hefflin realizes the revolution is manipulated by outside forces, including his own CIA and Boris—the puppeteer who seems to be pulling all the strings of Hefflin’s life.

William Maz was born in Bucharest, Romania, of Greek parents and emigrated to the U.S. as a child. He is a graduate of Harvard University, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, and Yale residency. During his high school and undergraduate years, he developed a passion for writing fiction. He studied writing at Harvard, the New School, The Writer’s Studio in New York City, and with Gordon Lish, and is now writing full time. He divides his time between homes in Pennsylvania and New York City. The Bucharest Dossier is his debut novel.

(Espionage thriller)

Share your poetry, short prose, music, monologue, comedy, magic, or bagpiping! Sign-up opens at 5:45 PM the night of, and available slots will be given on a first-come, first-served basis.