Emily Ruskovich is ready to come home. Even though she really feels like she never left.

The North Idaho native is one of the headliners at this year’s Get Lit Festival, reading with award-winning poet Jamaal May on Friday night.

She was raised on HooDoo Mountain, up near Blanchard and Athol in Idaho’s Panhandle. She graduated from Coeur d’Alene Charter Academy in 2004, and left to pursue higher education, first in the creative writing program at the University of Montana, then at the University of New Brunswick, in Canada, and finally at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop in Ames, Iowa.

Still, she came home every summer and school holidays. And it was during one of those summers where her debut novel, “Idaho,” was born.

She was helping her parents load firewood for the coming winter on another mountain, she said in a phone interview last week/Carolyn Lamberson, SR. More here.

Question: Have you read "Idaho"?