Working-Class Novelist Willy Vlautin Headlines Get Lit! Event in Coeur d'Alene

Three days after his eighth novel, "The Left and the Lucky," hits shelves, Willy Vlautin will read from it at Emerge in downtown Coeur d'Alene. The free event runs 11 a.m. to noon on Friday, April 17, presented by North Idaho College's Writing Center Visiting Writers Series as part of the 28th annual Get Lit! Festival.

Jonathan Evison has called Vlautin "one of America's greatest storytellers," and the body of work supports it. Since "The Motel Life" in 2007, Vlautin has published eight novels, three of which became major motion pictures: "The Motel Life" (starring Kris Kristofferson and Emile Hirsch), "Lean on Pete" (Charlie Plummer and Steve Buscemi) and "The Night Always Comes." He has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, and won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize for "The Horse" (2024), which was also a finalist for the 2025 Oregon Book Award.

His new book, published by HarperCollins at 256 pages, has been described as "a heartbreaking and tender novel about two young brothers, the vicissitudes of fate, and unexpected connection." It publishes April 14, meaning the Emerge audience will meet Vlautin with his newest work barely 72 hours old.

What separates Vlautin from most novelists is the parallel music career. He was the lead singer, guitarist and songwriter of Portland rock band Richmond Fontaine from 1994 to 2016, releasing 14 studio albums across more than two decades. He now plays with soul-influenced group The Delines and teaches in the master's writing program at Pacific University. The working-class American West runs through all of it, rendered with the compression of a songwriter and the patience of a novelist.

The Coeur d'Alene stop is one event across Get Lit!'s April 17-19 run, with programming spread across Spokane, Cheney and Coeur d'Alene. Christine Holbert founded the festival in 1998 as an EWU graduate student with a $1,200 budget; it drew roughly 300 people its first year and an estimated 10,000 by 2004. Now a nonprofit literary arts organization housed within EWU's College of Arts, Letters, and Education, it is the region's only annual literary festival, with past headliners including Salman Rushdie, Anne Lamott, Colson Whitehead, Anthony Doerr and David Sedaris. The 2026 program also features poets Keetje Kuipers and Tessa Hulls.

On Saturday, Vlautin headlines a second Get Lit! keynote produced by Northwest Passages, The Spokesman-Review's literary events series, in conversation with Spokane novelist Jess Walter. The Friday reading at Emerge, 119 N. Second St., is free and open to the public. NIC associate professor of English Jonathan Frey can be reached at 208-769-3337 or jonathan.frey@nic.edu.