The Cline Library at Northern Arizona University is pleased to announce the debut of a new exhibit celebrating the life and living legacy of outspoken Southwest environmental activist, author, and folksinger Katie Lee. Stop by Special Collections (second floor) and check it out.

As part of the exhibit festivities, the Cline Library will host a free public event with Katie on Saturday, October 4 from 5:00 to 6:00 p.m. in the Cline Library Assembly Hall. Please plan on attending for a memorable evening of Katie's stories, songs, and readings, featuring rarely-seen or heard photos and folk operas. Books and CDs will be onsite for purchase and signing by Katie after the event. Parking is available behind the Library (see campus map: http://home.nau.edu/maps.asp) in Lot 13 off of Riordan Ranch Rd.

A confirmed westerner, who hails from Tucson, Arizona, Katie grew up exploring the desert. She has done what she set out to do not once but twice. An accomplished singer and songwriter, although in the days before it was very profitable, Katie researched one of her favorite types of music—cowboy music of the Old West. Her first book, entitled Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle, documents cowboy songs and verse. Katie followed-up the book with a double-album of 28 songs and a film. She appeared at the National Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City and produced an award-winning PBS documentary, The Last Wagon.

When she was in her thirties, Katie began taking boat trips down the Colorado River with her friends, such as Frank Wright and Tad Nichols. She fell in love with Glen Canyon. In attempt to raise awareness of the splendor and mystery of the Colorado River and to fight the Bureau of Reclamation (Wreck the Nation), Katie not only wrote her own songs about the river, but she also discovered those written by others, collecting them on two albums: Colorado River Songs and Glen Canyon River Journeys.

When the Glen Canyon Dam was closed in 1963, all of Katie's beloved places, Music Temple, Hidden Passage, and Moki Canyon, drowned in the backflow. Katie shared her journals of those river trips in a 1998 book, All My Rivers Are Gone, and in a 2007 reprinted version (many new photographs and additions) of her elegy to the spectacular canyon in Glen Canyon Betrayed. As author Chuck Bowden penned for the back of Betrayed, "There once was a real river, a living rasty thing, called the Colorado. And there once was [a] Canyon called Glen. Katie Lee has fought for both, for those one hundred and twenty-five canyons murdered by our government and buried under that cesspool called Lake Powell. [She] has taught us to do better and the lesson is simple. Fight."

Today, Katie is active with the advisory board of the Glen Canyon Institute.