9-3-2010 News Release:
CVBF Awarded $4000 Tourism Grant
Authors with ties to the Midwest join readers and writers in the Chippewa Valley to celebrate the written word. Located in western Wisconsin, the Chippewa Valley is an exceptionally beautiful area offering outdoor recreation, unique attractions, and activities for the whole family.
Come meet a favorite author and have your book signed or listen to authors talk about their works. We hope to see you at one of our many events for children, teens, and adults during the seven day festival.
The 2010 festival includes the following presenters:
DEAN BAKOPOULOS, author of Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, a 2005 New York Times Notable Book and soon to become a television series. His second novel will be published in the spring of 2011.
JULIE BOWE, author of the Friends for Keeps series: My Last Best Friend, My New Best Friend and My Best Frenemy. My Last Best Friend was included in Kirkus Review’s 07 First Fiction Spotlight: Promising Debuts from Important New Voices.
LORETTA ELLSWORTH, author of three novels for young readers. In Search of Mockingbird was named to the 2008 New York Library List of Teenage Books.
KATHRYN GIBBS DAVIS, author of 24 books for children. Her best selling title Wackiest White House Pets won the Parent’s Choice Gold Award.
JAY GILBERTSON, author of the Madeline Island series of northern Wisconsin novels featuring independent women.
ERIN HART and PADDY O’ BRIEN celebrate what is best about Irish storytelling and music. ERIN is the author of the Nora Gavin/Cormac Maguire crime novels. PADDY has recorded some 500 Irish tunes.
JOHN HILDEBRAND, professor of English at UW-Eau Claire and author of three award-winning books:Reading the River: A Voyage Down the Yukon, Mapping the Farm: The Chronicle of a Family and A Northern Front.
KATIE McKY, author of three books for children, Wolf Camp, Pumpkin Town and It All Began with a Bean. Along with Tough Kids, Tough Classrooms, McKy has an additional twelve books under contract.
DR. COLLEEN J. McELROY, an internationally acclaimed writer of prose, creative non-fiction, and poetry. She has received the Before Columbus American Book Award, two Fulbright Research Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships in both fiction and poetry, a DuPont Visiting Scholar Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Fellowship.
STEVE PAULSON, executive producer of the nationally syndicated radio program “To the Best of Our Knowledge” and author of Atoms and Eden: Conversations on Religion and Science, a collection of 20 interviews he conducted with major figures in the science and religion debate.
MICHAEL PERRY, humorist and author of the best selling memoirs Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, Truck: A Love Story and Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting, plus the essay collection Off Main Street. Perry regularly writes for magazines and performs with his band The Long Beds.
JERRY POLING, news editor and columnist at the Leader-Telegram and author of After They Were Packers, A Summer Up North: Henry Aaron and the Legend of Eau Claire Baseball, and Downfield: Untold Stories of the Green Bay Packers.
THE PRAIRIE FIRE POETRY QUARTET, a group of four well published, seasoned performers. Richard Roe, Shoshauna Shy, John Lehman, and Robin Chapman teach their audiences how to have fun with poetry.
DAVID RHODES, author of Driftless and three earlier novels. The Chicago-Tribune praises Driftless as “the best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in years.” It was selected for the 2010 All Iowa Reads Series and featured on WPR’s Chapter a Day in 2009. In April 2010 Rhodes received the Guggenheim Fellowship Award.
KENNY SALWEY, author of Kenny Salwey’s Tales of a River Rat: Adventures Along The Wild Mississippi. Salwey’s life is documented in the Emmy award-winning film “Mississippi: Tales of the Last River Rat.”
GARY SCHMIDT, a major voice in young adult fiction with over 30 books to his credit. He is the author of Trouble and two Newbery Honor books, The Wednesday Wars and Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy.
DR. KATHERINE S. SCHNEIDER, Senior Psychologist Emerita of the UW-Eau Claire Counseling Service, is author of two books: To the Left of Inspiration: Adventures in Living with Disabilities and Your Treasure Hunt: Disabilities and Finding your Gold (designed for children in grades 1-3).
TRACI THOMAS CARD, an associate lecturer of English at UW Eau Claire and student research partner Kristin Chang will present a series of lectures/discussions on learning about Hmong culture and Kao Kalia Yang’s book The Late Homecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir.
KAO KALIA YANG, author of The Late Homecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir which recounts her family’s harrowing escape from Laos, their life in a refugee camp and the challenges and joys of adapting to life in a new land.
