Biographer Mike Lankford will read from and talk about Becoming Leonardo: An Exploded View of the Life of Leonardo Da Vinci, which was a Wall Street Journal 2017 Book of the Year. "A creative biography of the great Renaissance artist and inventor, taking the bare factual outline we have of da Vinci's life and and filling it in with 15th-century Italy's society, culture and history; the people and personalities who surrounded da Vinci; and the constancies of human nature."—Oregonian

Mike Lankford is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and the author of Life in Double Time: Confessions of an American Drummer, a memoir about his years as a white drummer in a black R&B band, selected by eight major newspapers including the Chicago Tribune and the Austin Chronicle, as the best music book of the year.