HOTSHOT is a Real Book

Forthcoming August 22, 2025

Hello Wilderness readers!

I am super excited to announce that my memoir, HOTSHOT, is officially forthcoming! The publication date is August 12, 2025.

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 moving to Florida 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, my publisher, 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.

Thank you to everyone who's supported and believed in me through this process. And everyone who's forgiven me for being unreliable and inconsistent. I gave everything to this book. I wrote it in the hopes that it will help others, and (in my wildest dreams) educate people about the importance of fire and help our planet. It will be published on August 22nd. Pre-order links are at the bottom of this post.

Pre-orders are SUPER important: my book is coming out in hardcover, and if there are enough pre-orders it could make it to paperback.

If you have a reading club, nonprofit, local library, local bookstore, school, or any other organization that would be interested in acquiring this book and having me either come in person or Zoom in and speak about it, please let me know. Likewise, please consider requesting that your local library carry this book.

Here’s the catalog copy, written by Grove Atlantic:

“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.”

PRE-ORDER LINKS:

I promise I will be posting more here. This book took over my life! Thank you so much to all of you for pre-ordering and helping to promote this book.