Caskey Russell & Rena Priest, THE DOOR ON THE SEA & POSITIVELY UNCIVILIZED

Join Caskey Russell and Rena Priest in store to celebrate and discuss their new books, The Door on the Sea and Positively Uncivilized. The Door on the Sea is Russell's debut novel, an epic quest fantasy that is the Tlingit indigenous response to The Lord of the Rings. The essays in Positively Uncivilized examine the necessity of community to overcome damage done by human inhabitants, from an Indigenous perspective.

About The Door on the Sea

When Elān trapped a salmon-stealing raven in his cupboard, he never expected it would hold the key to saving his people from the shapeshifting Koosh invaders plaguing their shores. In exchange for its freedom, the raven offers a secret that can save Elān’s home: the Koosh have lost one of their most powerful weapons, and only the raven knows where it is.

Elān is tasked with captaining a canoe crewed by an unlikely team including a human bear-cousin, a massive wolf, and the endlessly vulgar raven. To retrieve the weapon, they will face stormy seas, cannibal giants and a changing world. But Elān is a storyteller, not a warrior.

As their world continues to fall to the Koosh, and alliances are challenged and broken, Elān must choose his role in his own epic story.

About Positively Uncivilized

From an Indigenous perspective, Positively Uncivilized examines the impact of human inhabitants on the planet earth. Alongside personal accounts of the deterioration of salmon populations in the Pacific Northwest and the loss of Indigenous history, the twelve essays in this collection emphasize the necessity of community to overcome the damage done by human socioeconomic and political systems designed to isolate and shame those vulnerable to those unfair systems.

"Rena Priest’s Positively Uncivilized is a necessary read. Priest writes with lyrical curiosity, sharp resistance, and immense tenderness. This is an essay collection rooted in storytelling—singing forth with gratitude, community, indigenous futures, and entangled relation. As Priest insists: 'Stories are powerful.'" —Jane Wong, author of Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City

Caskey Russell is from Washington State and has lived in Oregon, Iowa, Wyoming, and New Zealand. He is a father, a musician, and a professor of poetry and songwriting at Fairhaven College in Bellingham. He earned his BA and MA from Western Washington University and his PhD from the University of Oregon. He's an enrolled member of the Tlingit Nation (Eagle / Kooyu Kwáan) of Alaska. His novel The Door on the Sea is the first of a trilogy titled The Raven and Eagle Series. Book 2 will be out next October. The Door on the Sea was selected as one of NPR's "Best Books of 2025."

Rena Priest is a citizen of the Lhaq’temish [Lummi] Nation. In a historic appointment, Priest was named Washington State’s sixth Poet Laureate (2021-2023), becoming the first Indigenous person to hold the position. In this role, she championed poetry that celebrated the ecological gifts of her ancestral homelands, the bioregion. She is an Academy of American Poets Fellow, a Maxine Cushing Gray Distinguished Writer, and a winner of a Washington State Book Award for poetry. Her new essay collection, Positively Uncivilized, was published as the winner of the 2025 Keepers of the Fire Award from Raven Chronicles Press. She is also honored to be a Seattle City of Literature grantee, selected to participate in an international literary exchange co-sponsored by the Melbourne City of Literature and the UNESCO City of Literature Network. Learn more at renapriest.com

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