Reading and Signing with Western Icon Katie Lee

Ken Sanders Rare Books is pleased to announce a reading and book signing with the legendary Katie Lee to celebrate the release of her new book, The Ballad of Gutless Ditch, on Friday, May 11th at 7:00 p.m. at our downtown bookstore (268 South 200 East). Copies of Ballad ($80.00, Limited Edition Signed Hardcover) will be available for purchase at the reading. This event is free and open to the public.

Lee’s free-verse Western adventure is set in Gutless Ditch, a Western mining town of the late 1800s. There are as many provocative and captivating twists through love, lust, betrayal and redemption as the sinuous canyons of the great Southwest canyons that Katie has explored and written so evocatively about. Robin Anderson, nationally renowned artist from Jerome, Arizona, has illustrated the book with twelve remarkable etchings.

Katie Lee has emerged as one of the Southwest's most outspoken environmental activists. Following in the tradition of David Brower and Ed Abbey, Katie has taken up the torch they left burning- to sing, write and lecture about the importance of preserving and restoring wilderness refuges, the lonesome characters the West still breeds, and the histories of ancient races embedded in its sandstone canyons.

Just as the Sierras were John Muir's refuge, Glen Canyon was Katie's. For more than a decade she regularly ran, guided, photographed and explored the canyon. She knew the river guides and characters that roamed there, and named many of its side canyons. In 1953 she was the 175th person to run the Grand Canyon after John Wesley Powell's first run in 1869, and the third woman to run all the rapids in Grand Canyon.

Now in her nineties, Katie Lee has had an eclectic career. A native Arizonan, Katie began her professional career in 1948 as a stage and screen actress. Katie was a pioneer actress and folk music director in the early ‘50s, and then left Hollywood to spend 10 years as a performer in coffeehouses and cabarets throughout the US, Canada and Mexico, singing folksongs to her guitar.

Lee’s books include Ten Thousand Goddam Cattle, A History of the American Cowboy in Song, Story and Verse, All My Rivers Are Gone, (republished in 2006 under the new title Glen Canyon Betrayed) and Sandstone Seduction.

Lee has recorded numerous albums, including Colorado River Songs, and her DVD, Love Song to Glen Canyon, features Katie talking and singing about Glen Canyon against the background of 140 color photographs that she took on her river journeys through the canyon in the fifties and sixties, before this beautiful canyon was drowned.

Lee now serves on the Advisory Board of the Glen Canyon Institute, a nonprofit organization that advocates the draining of Powell Reservoir and the restoration of the natural ecosystem and beauty of the Colorado River. She still performs for many educational and non-profit organizations.

For more information on Katie Lee, visit: http://www.katydoodit.com

For more information on the event:

Ken Sanders Rare Books 268 South 200 East SLC, UT 801-521-3819 www.kensandersbooks.com books@dreamgarden.com