Date: Wednesday, October 14
Time: Doors: 6:00 pm, Program 7:00 pm
Venue: Rice Theatre @ The Citadel
Tickets: $25 / $10 (student/low income)

LitFest is thrilled to invite you to join us on Wednesday, October 14, 2026 for our opening night festivities! There will be a reception with light refreshments, special musical guests Mikayla Bortscher and Rabbits Three Cultural Connections, and more! Our featured author of the evening will be Trina Moyles, speaking with Conor Kerr about her newest work, Black Bear: A Story of Siblinghood and Survival.

Black Bear is a dazzling memoir about one woman’s coexistence with bears in the boreal forest and a singular meditation on sibling loss.

When Trina Moyles was five years old, her father, a wildlife biologist known in Peace River as “the bear guy,” brought home an orphaned black bear cub for a night before sending it to the Calgary Zoo. This brief but unforgettable encounter spurred Trina’s lifelong fascination with Ursus americanus—the most populous bear on the northern landscape, often considered a nuisance to human society. As a child roaming the shores of the Peace in the footsteps of her beloved older brother, she understood bears to be invisible entities: always present but mostly hidden and worthy of respect. Growing up during the oil boom of the 1990s, the threats in the siblings’ hard-drinking resource town were more human, dividing them from a natural reverence for the land, and eventually, from each other.

Impassioned and eloquent, Black Bear is a story of grief and a vision of peaceful coexistence in a divided world. It captures the fragility of our relationships with human and nonhuman species alike, and the imperative to protect the wild—along with the people we hold closest.