2010 Authors
DEAN BAKOPOULOS, winner of both a 2008 Guggenheim and a 2006 National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, is professor of Creative Writing at Iowa State University. Soon to become a television series, his first novel, Please Don’t Come Back from the Moon, was a 2005 New York Times Notable Book. His second novel My American Unhappiness will be published in spring 2011.
Dr. KATHERINE S. SCHNEIDER, Senior Psychologist Emerita of the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire Counseling Service, is the 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). Schneider has also established The Schneider Family Book Award. Donated by Katherine Schneider, the award is given annually by the American Library Association to honor an author or illustrator for the artistic expression of the disability experience for children and teens.
JULIE BOWE, raised in Luck, Wisconsin, is the 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 Reviews ‘07 First Fiction Spotlight: Promising Debuts from Important New Voices. It also won the 2008 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People, and was a finalist for the 2008-09 Great Stone Face Book Award.
LORETTA ELLSWORTH, a Minnesotan, has written three novels for young readers: In a Heartbeat, The Shrouding Woman, and In Search of Mockingbird, which won the 2007 Midwest Bestseller’s Choice Award Honor Book for Children’s Literature and was named to the 2008 New York Library List of Teenage Books.
KATHRYN GIBBS DAVIS is the award winning author of 24 books for children. Her best selling title Wackiest White House Pets won the Parents’ Choice Gold Award. In 2008 and 2009 Barbara Bush and Gibbs read to over 11,000 students via teleconferencing at the annual Reading Discovery Program at the presidential library in College Station, Texas.
ERIN HART and PADDY O’ BRIEN, husband and wife, celebrate what is best about Irish storytelling and music. ERIN is the author of the Nora Gavin/Cormac Maguire crime novels. Haunted Ground was nominated for mystery’s prestigious Anthony and Agatha awards and won both the Romantic Times Best First Mystery and the Friends of the American Writers awards. Her second book, Lake of Sorrows, was short listed for a Minnesota Book Award. False Mermaid was published in early 2010. PADDY, an accordionist, is one of Irish music’s most important repositories. In a career that spans nearly forty years, he has collected more than 3,000 compositions. After receiving a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1994, O’Brien recorded some 500 tunes that make up The Paddy O’Brien Tune Collections: A Personal Treasury of Irish Jigs and Reels. O’Brien accompanies his wife in her readings.
KATIE McKY, who lives in Eau Claire, is a Harvard educated storyteller and author of three books for children: Wolf Camp, Pumpkin Town, and It All Began with a Bean. Along with Tough Kids, Tough Classrooms, a guide for teachers, McKy has an additional twelve books under contract. According to the author, “Stories are how kids best understand their world.”
DR. COLLEEN J. McELROY lives in Seattle where she is Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington. In addition to serving as Editor-in-Chief of the Seattle Review from 1995-2006, McElroy won the 2008 PEN/Oakland National Literary Award for her collection of poems Sleeping with the Moon (2007). Her latest collections of creative non-fiction include A Long Way from St. Louie and Over the Lip of the World: Among the Storytellers of Madagascar, a finalist in the 2000 PEN USA Research-based Creative Nonfiction category. Winner of the Before Columbus American Book Award, she has also received two Fulbright Research Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships, a DuPont Visiting Scholar Fellowship and a Rockefeller Fellowship. Recently, her work has been featured in Black Renaissance Noire, and online at poetryfoundation.org. Some of her poems have been translated into Russian, Italian, Arabic, Greek, French, German, Malay and Serbo-Croatian.
STEVE PAULSON is the executive producer of the nationally syndicated radio program To the Best of Our Knowledge. He is the 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. In 2006 Paulson became a Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellow in Science and Religion, resulting in TTBOOK’s 5-hour series “Electrons to Enlightenment.” In 2008 he traveled to Turkey as part of the International Reporting Project where he talked with religious leaders, filmmakers, journalists, Kurdish activists and politicians.
MICHAEL PERRY, a Wisconsin native, is both 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 as well as the essay collection Off Main Street. Perry writes for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Orion and Salon.com. He has produced two live audience humor recordings I Got It from the Cows and Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow, and he performs regularly with his band The Long Beds.
THE PRAIRIE FIRE POETRY QUARTET is a group of four well-published, seasoned performers who teach their audience how to have fun with poetry. Richard Roe lives in Middleton, Wisconsin. His works of poetry include Knots of Sweet Longing, What will You Find at the Edge of the World, and Bringer of Songs. Shoshuana Shy’s poems have been published in The Seattle Review, Cimarron Review, the Briar Cliff Review, Rattle and Rosebud. Shy won first place in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Triad Contest in 2002; three of her poems were finalists in the Wisconsin Academy Review Poetry Contest in 2004 and the Wisconsin People & Ideas Contest in 2010, and one of her poems was selected for the Poetry 180 Library of Congress program launched by Billy Collins, former US Poet Laureate. Her collection What the Postcard Didn’t Say won an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Wisconsin Library Association in 2008. John Lehman, who was twice a finalist for the Wisconsin Poet Laureate position, is the founder and publisher of Rosebud, a national magazine of short stories, poetry, and illustrations. His work has been nominated for three Pushcart Prizes (short story, poetry and creative non-fiction). Robin Chapman’s work has appeared in The American Scholar, The Hudson Review, On Earth, Poetry, and The Southern Review. A recipient of two Wisconsin Arts Board Individual Development Grants and a 2007 Literary Arts Fellowship, Chapman won an Outstanding Achievement Poetry Award from the Wisconsin Library Association for her collection The Dreamer Who Counted the Dead.
DAVID RHODES, who lives in Wisconsin’s Driftless region, sets his latest work of fiction, Driftless, in Words, Wisconsin, an imaginary hamlet in the southwest part of the state. Rhodes published his first three novels while still in his twenties in the 1970’s. Rock Island Line, published in 1975 was hailed a masterpiece, “one of the greatest novels ever to come out of the American Midwest.” A motorcycle accident in 1977 left Rhodes paralyzed from the waist down. Driftless, published by Milkweed Press, is Rhodes’ first book since the accident 33 years ago. The book has earned him the Milkweed National Fiction Prize as well as high praise from the ChicagoTribune as “the best work of fiction to come out of the Midwest in years.” Driftless has been selected for the 2010 All Iowa Reads Series and was a recent Chapter a Day selection on Wisconsin Public Radio.
GARY SCHMIDT, a major voice in young adult fiction with over 30 books to his credit, is the author of The Wednesday Wars, which was named a 2008 John Newbery Honor Book. Another of his books, Lizzie Bright and Buckminster Boy (2005) was named both a John Newbery Honor Book and a Michael L. Printz Honor Book by the American Library Association—a pair of the most prestigious honors in the world of children’s literature. The book has since won the Thumbs Up Award from the Michigan Library Association, the Lupine Award from the Maine State Library Association and was named a 2005 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book.
KAO KALIA YANG, author of The LateHomecomer: A Hmong Family Memoir (Coffee House Press, 2008), was born in the Ban Vinai Refugee Camp in Thailand in 1980. At the age of nine she settled in St. Paul with her family. Her work portrays the immigrant experience of Hmong refugees while also telling the personal story of her family and her close relationship with her grandmother. A graduate of Carleton College and Columbia University, Yang is also the co-founder of Words Wanted, a company dedicated to helping immigrants with writing, translating and business services. She has also produced The Place Where We Were Born, a film documenting the experiences of Hmong American refugees.
