HOTSHOT Book Cover Reveal!

My book is coming out in August 2025!!!! It has a cover!

Many of you have been on the wild ride of my book revision process for the past four(!!) years. I am thrilled to announce that I now have a solid pub date, links for pre-order, and a (beautiful) COVER!

In 2019 I was working 50 hours a week as a nanny in Seattle. I didn't have stable housing and my life was up in the air, but I spent the dark early mornings and all of my weekends working on a book proposal. Over the next nearly six(!) years this book was the only constant in my life. From Seattle to Czechia to pet-sitting in Europe, moving back to Seattle during Covid, nannying and freelancing and spinal surgery and two and a half years of my PhD, I worked on writing and revising this book- the story of my life as a hotshot and the historical impacts of fire suppression in the United States. It's intimate, revealing, honest, and deeply researched.

Grove Atlantic did such a wonderful job crafting the cover of my dreams. I never imagined I'd be on the cover of my own book- but there I am, standing in front of a fire I'd started with a drip torch. It was the beginning of my first year as a hotshot, in 2002. I was twenty-one years-old.

Yep, that’s me on the cover! I was twenty-one, it was 2002, and this was my first year as a hotshot.

Here’s the book description, as written by the wonderful folks at Grove Atlantic:

“The fierce debut memoir of a female firefighter, Hotshot navigates the personal and environmental dangers of wildland firefighting

From 2000 to 2010, River Selby was a wildland firefighter whose given name was Anastasia. This is a memoir of that time in their life—of Ana, the struggles she encountered, and the contours of what it meant to be female-bodied in a male-dominated profession. 

By the time they were 19, Selby had been homeless, addicted to drugs, and sexually assaulted more than once. In a last-ditch effort to find direction, they applied to be a wildland firefighter. Soon immersed in the world of firefighting and its arcana—from specialized tools named for the fire pioneers who invented them, to the back-breaking labor of racing against time to create firebreaks—Selby began to find an internal balance. Then, after two years of ragtag contract firefighting, Selby joined an elite class of specially trained wildland firefighters known as hotshots. 

Over the course of five fire seasons, Selby delves into the world of the people—almost entirely men—who risk their lives to fight and sometimes prevent wildfires. Marked out in a sea of machismo, Selby was simultaneously hyper visible and invisible, and Hotshot deftly parses the odd mix of camaraderie and rampant sexism they experienced on their fire crews, and how, when challenged, it resulted in a violent closing of ranks that excluded them from the work they’d come to love. Drawing on years of firsthand experience on the frontlines of fire, followed by years of research into the science and history of fire, Hotshot also reckons with our fraught stewardship of the land—how federal fire policy is maladapted to the realities of fire-prone landscapes and how it has led to ever more severe fire seasons.

Hotshot is a work of intimacy and authority, nimbly merging a personal journey of reinvention and self-acceptance with expert insight into the textured history of ecological systems and Indigenous land tending, the modern practices that have led to their imbalance, and the people who fight fire.”

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It’s wonderful, right?

One of the challenges of this description was navigating my current and former identities. I am nonbinary, but didn’t have the tools to fully understand my identity in my twenties. Thus, you see the switches from “she” to “they.” I am okay with this, especially because so many of the toxic dynamics I experienced were because I was working as a female-bodied person in a male-dominated job. In the book I use my former name. This truly helped me get into that reflective narrative voice which is so necessary in a lot of memoir writing.

I have given my whole life to this book for over half a decade. I’ve sacrificed so much. For those of you that have supported me, either by being paying subscribers or commenting or simply subscribing to this newsletter: THANK YOU. You’ve helped sustain me in so many ways.

I don’t have links for indie bookstores yet— hopefully I’ll have those within the next couple weeks. Pre-orders are SO important for writers, so if you feel inclined, please do order the book!

Pre-order on Barnes & Noble and Amazon!

I know publication day is over half a year away, and I promise not to spam you with book related stuff for eight months. I am just too excited not to share this news with you!

Again, I am deeply grateful to all of you for being on this journey with me. <3

-River