The Ozarks Studies Institute, an initiative of the MSU Libraries, is collaborating with the Springfield-Greene County Library District to sponsor two talks in September by Ozarks authors. Both talks will be held in the Auditorium in The Library Center on South Campbell Avenue in Springfield. Both events are free and open to all. 

• Tuesday, Sept. 17 at 7:00 p.m.:

  A History of the Ozarks: The Conflicted Ozarks

  The second volume of Brooks Blevins’s history of the Ozarks begins with the region’s distinctive relationship to slavery. Because the Ozarks were largely unsuitable for plantation farming, residents used enslaved persons on a smaller scale or, in some places, not at all. Blevins moves on to the devastating Civil War years where the dehumanizing, personal nature of Ozark conflict was made uglier by the predations of marching armies and criminal gangs.

  Brooks Blevins, the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies at Missouri State University, is the author or editor of nine books, including A History of the Ozarks, Volume 1: The Old Ozarks; Ghost of the Ozarks: Murder and Memory in the Upland South; and Arkansas, Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol’ Boys Defined a State.
  
  

• Monday, Sept. 30 at 7:00 p.m.: The Wolf Wants In: A Novel.

  In a small town ravaged by the opioid crisis, a woman confronts a dark secret about her brother’s shocking death. Sadie Keller is determined to find out how her brother died, even if no one else thinks it’s worth investigating.  Untimely deaths are all too common in rural Blackwater, Kansas, where crime and overdoses are on the rise, and the small-town police force is consumed with the recent discovery of a child’s skull in the woods.

  Laura McHugh, the author of award-winning and best-selling novels, such as The Weight of Blood and Arrowood, grew up in small towns in Iowa and southern Missouri. She lives in Columbia, Missouri with her husband and daughters.