“Make yourself big when you enter a room, when you meet a bear in the woods. Make yourself big. Meet the eyes.”

Roger Epp’s poetic meditations about the best, the hardest, the loneliest times of leading a small university campus through significant change are depicted in a series of elegant yet understated prose pieces, alongside images by his life partner, Rhonda Harder Epp. Taking a candid look at the many challenges such a position brings, Roger Epp humanizes, scrutinizes, and upholds the integrity of academic administrative work. Only Leave a Trace will resonate with those who work in universities, hold leadership roles in them, or care about the connections between higher education, students, and place.

Roger Epp is Professor of Political Science at the University of Alberta. He served as founding Dean of the University's Augustana Campus in Camrose from 2004 to 2011. Much of his recent writing has explored what it means to live in the prairie West with a sense of memory, inheritance and care. He is author of We Are All Treaty People: Prairie Essays (2008), contributing co-editor of Writing Off the Rural West (2001) and co-producer of the documentary "The Canadian Clearances" for CBC Radio Ideas.

Roger Epp's profile page

Rhonda Harder Epp is a painter whose work is held in private and institutional collections. Her work has been shown in galleries across western Canada.

Rhonda Harder Epp's profile page

#2 on Edmonton Non-Fiction Bestsellers list, April 30, 2017