<p>Portland's Molly Gloss will be the guest author at the Cannon Beach Library's Northwest Author Series on Jan. 10.</p><p><em>Submitted photo</em></p>

Molly Gloss, author of “The Jump-Off Creek,” “Wild Life” and “Hearts of Horses,” will be the guest author at the Cannon Beach Library’s Northwest Author Series in January.

Gloss will read sections from her works, answer audience questions and sign books beginning at 4 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 10 in the library.

The series is free and open to the public.

Molly Gloss is a fourth-generation Oregonian who lives in Portland.

Her novel, “The Jump-Off Creek, was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for American Fiction and a winner of both the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award and the Oregon Book Award.

“The Dazzle of Day” was named a New York Times Notable Book and was awarded the PEN Center West Fiction Prize.

“Wild Life” won the James Tiptree Jr. Award and was chosen as the 2002 selection for “If All Seattle Read the Same Book.” In 1996, Gloss received a Whiting Writers Award.

Her latest book, “The Hearts of Horses,” is the novel of a young woman breaking horses for several ranchers in Eastern Oregon in the winter of 1917.

Moss, who grew up in a blue-collar family in 1950s rural Oregon, says motherhood gave her what she needed to be a writer:

“Motherhood isn’t trivial; its activities may be trivial, but they put you in touch, deeply and immediately and daily, with the great issues of life: heavy-duty things like love and loss, growth and tolerance and dignity, control and conflict and power — which are the issues, incidentally, that make serious novels.

“I might have become a writer eventually without first having become a mother, but it’s hard for me to imagine it.”

Except for “Dazzle of Day,” which is set in the future, Gloss’s other books feature strong women protagonists living in the rural Northwest in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

She began writing “western” novels when she entered a competition for the best Western novel by an unpublished writer.

She had been a Western reader since she was 12, and it was her father’s favorite genre.

The Northwest Author Series promotes literary opportunities on the North Coast and celebrates Northwest authors. The program is sponsored by the Cannon Beach Library, Cannon Beach Book Company and The Ocean Lodge.

For more information, call the library at 503-436-1391.