Lucky enough to be near the Rocky Mountains on June 19? If so, consider making the trip to Aspen, Colorado, where man, myth, legend, and Orion columnist Luis Alberto Urrea will join Editor-in-Chief Chip Blake for a conversation about how authenticity and the sacred are found in even the starkest of landscapes.

Born in Tijuana, Mexico, to a Mexican father and an American mother, Urrea is a cultural and literary shape shifter who has received critical acclaim for his fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Find Luis’s writing in every other issue of Orion, in his column, The Wastelander, which he describes thusly:

The beat of The Wastelander is the clickety-clack of freight train wheels on a long dry weedy stretch of old rails; it’s the screaking of a pump-jack nodding all night in West Texas; it’s the clocking of Harry Dean Stanton’s bootheels on some hardpan out there; it’s the slow moan of border wind through a chain-link fence… I myself am a wasteland; got a desert in me that yearns for a rainforest. You can’t be from the Mexican border and the beat-down barrio and not find some kind of frightening comfort in gravel lots.

Learn more about this year’s Aspen Summer Words events, including this one, and sign up, here.