The Mike File: A Story of Grief and Hope by award-winning author Stephen Trimble was recently recognized as the 2022 Human Relations Mental Health Awareness Book of the Year.

Stephen Trimble is known more as a nature writer, photographer, and conservationist, but he turned inward to write this memoir.

His mother, Isabelle, grew up Jewish in small-town Montana. She escaped into adulthood via a one-year-disaster of an early marriage that took her to Denver and left her with a son, Mike. Isabelle married again when Mike was five, and Steve was born three years later.

Psychosis overwhelmed Mike at fourteen. Trimble's parents had no choice but to commit Mike to the Colorado State Hospital. Diagnosed with "retardation" and schizophrenia, Mike left when Steve was six. He never lived at home again.

Now, when it's emotionally safe, long after his brother, mother, and father have died, Trimble returns to Mike's life. Beginning with a file of documents saved by his mother, he reconstructs his brother's story and searches for the empathy he could not feel as a self-involved youth.

Trimble takes readers along on Mike's heartbreaking trajectory--leading toward the tsunami of grief that overwhelmed Isabelle when Mike died a public and lonely death in 1976.

Mike's life parallels the history of our treatment of the mentally ill over the last 70 years. Part detective story, part journey of self-discovery, The Mike File will resonate with all readers with a family member or friend living with mental health issues--a link that embraces nearly everyone.

Following a 20-minute reading, the author will engage in conversation with retired clinical child psychologist, Lynne Cobb, and then take questions from the audience.

As writer, editor, and photographer, Stephen Trimble has published 25 award-winning books during 45 years of paying attention to the landscapes and peoples of the Desert West. He’s received The Sierra Club's Ansel Adams Award for photography and conservation and a Doctor of Humane Letters from his alma mater, Colorado College. In 2019, he was honored as one of Utah’s 15 most influential artists.Trimble speaks and writes as a conservation advocate and has taught writing at the University of Utah. He makes his home in Salt Lake City and in the redrock country of Torrey, Utah. For more about his work, see www.stephentrimble.net.