Meet the Authors SEPTEMBER Edition - Saturday, September 6th 2025

About the Authors and their books:

Fulbright Scholar Basia Irland is an artist, author, and activist who creates international large-scale water projects that are featured in her books. Irland is professor emerita, Department of Art, University of New Mexico, where she founded the Art & Ecology Program. Her projects have been featured in over seventy international publications. She has created worldwide projects including Waterborne Disease Scrolls, based on research with epidemiologists in Nepal, Egypt, and Ethiopia; A Gathering of Waters, which fosters dialogue and connects communities along the entire length of rivers, accompanied by portable backpack Repositories, archives of the projects; and Ice Receding/Books Reseeding, hand-carved ephemeral Ice Book sculptures embedded with native seed texts that are floated down streams to aid riparian restoration and raise awareness about climate disruption. Irland has constructed rainwater harvesting systems and produced documentaries about water.

What Rivers Know, Listening to the Voices of Global Waterways. 2025. Texas A&M University Press. Basia Irland insinuates herself as the voice of major waterways as they struggle to navigate their changing relationships with humans and climate change.

Wendi Schuller is a globe-trotter by nature, having travelled to over sixty countries and jungles on three continents. She got the idea for her children's’ book Jack Jack The Jungle Cat in Cambodia on one of those trips with her children, combining her love for jungle habitat and animals with a career that expanded on her innate compassion for family, children and all living things. Her first published book, The Global Guide to Divorce, was written in response to the need of many families to negotiate divorce with the least amount of trauma possible. Wendi is a dating coach, nurse, a Neuro-Linguistic Programmer, and a hypnotherapist.

Jack Jack isn’t your average ginger cat; he thrives on thrill and mischief. Dive into the heart of London with him as he leaps from the decks of pirate ships to the opulent halls of royal parties. Along the way, he encounters a cast of eccentric personalities and finds himself woven into their captivating tales. Explore London like never before, with Jack Jack – the city’s most adventurous feline – as your guide.

Marrying and becoming a mom at age seventeen shaped Sandra Schackel’s identity over the next three decades. Education proved to be the lifeline enabling her to reclaim her own dreams. She retired in 2010 as Emerita Professor, Boise State University, where she taught American Women's History and History of the American West for twenty-one years andpublished on twentieth-century women's lives. With Apron to Cap and Gown, she moved from recording other women's journeys to writing her own life story. Today she hikes, bikes, skis, and thrives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Suddenly, I thought: There must be some other way to be married.

This powerful epiphany underpins Schackel’s journey from a 1950s teen wife and mom living through second wave feminism—a cultural tremor that would shake up the way women in the 1960s and ‘70s viewed their lives and identity. At an age when youngsters typically dream of their destinies, Sandra’s focus shifted automatically to her husband’s and children’s futures. Like many women, her future—her identity—became obscured. This memoir paints her long and difficult journey toward recovering what was lost and restoring her full sense of self, and the crucial element of her continuing education in helping her succeed.