Meet the Authors
We're very excited to welcome the following authors to the 2022 Chippewa Valley Book Festival. Peruse the authors here and then hop over to the 2022 schedule of events to learn more about where and when you can meet them.
There's a whole separate group of authors visiting the children around the Chippewa Valleys through our Authors in the Schools program. Click here to learn more about these authors.
Alan Bergo
James Beard award-winning ALAN BERGO is one of America's leading voices in the world of foraging and wild food. Known for his website foragerchef.com, the internet's largest resource on cooking with wild mushrooms, his work has been featured on the Today Show, The Sundance Film Festival, and The Wallstreet Journal, with essays and recipe selections published in 15 books and counting. His online series “The Wild Harvest” (now called “Field Forest Feast”) won a 2022 James Beard Award in Instructional Visual Media as well as a Taste award for best Online Food Show in 2022. His first book, The Forager Chef's Book of Flora, now in its fourth printing was published through Chelsea Green Publishing in 2021.
Dorothy Chan
DOROTHY CHAN (she/they) is the author of BABE, Revenge of the Asian Woman, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold, and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets. They were a 2020 and 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, and a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Their work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary, a literary arts organization built by women of color.
Allen Eskens
ALLEN ESKENS is the USA Today best-selling author of eight novels: The Life We Bury, The Guise of Another, The Heavens May Fall, The Deep Dark Descending, The Shadows We Hide, Nothing More Dangerous, The Stolen Hours, and his most recent, Forsaken Country. His books have won The Barry Award, the Silver Falchion Award, the Rosebud Award (Left Coast Crime), and the Minnesota Book Award. He had been a finalist for The Edgar Award, the Thriller Award, and the Anthony Award. Eskens lives with his wife, Joely, in Greater Minnesota.
Jamie Ford
JAMIE FORD’s debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, spent two years on the New York Times bestseller list and went on to win the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. Recently, that same novel has been optioned for a stage musical, and also for film, with George Takei serving as Executive Producer. His second book, Songs of Willow Frost, was a national bestseller. Jamie’s latest novel is The Many Daughters of Afong Moy.
His work has been translated into 35 languages. (He’s still holding out for Klingon, because that’s when you know you’ve made it).
Nadia Owusu
NADIA OWUSU is a Ghanaian and Armenian American writer and urbanist. Her memoir, Aftershocks, was selected as a best book of 2021 by Time, Vogue, Esquire, NPR, and others. It was one of former President Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year and a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice. In 2019, Nadia was the recipient of a Whiting Award. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, The Paris Review Daily, The Guardian, Slate, Bon Appétit, Travel + Leisure, and others. Owusu teaches at Columbia University and in the Mountainview MFA program and lives in Brooklyn.
Jackie Polzin
JACKIE POLZIN’s first novel, Brood, won the Sue Kaufman First Fiction Prize, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, an Indie Next List selection, and was shortlisted for the 2021 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, a Los Angeles Times Book Award, and a Minnesota Book Award. Her writing has appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine, Literary Hub, and The Idaho Review. Polzin attended UW–Madison and earned an MFA from Boise State University. She currently lives in St. Paul, Minnesota, with her husband and two children.
Amy E. Reichert
AMY E. REICHERT loves to write stories that end well with characters you’d invite to dinner. All based in Wisconsin, her novels include The Optimist’s Guide to Letting Go, The Kindred Spirits Supper Club, and Once Upon a December (October 2022). Her books have been featured in People, Real Simple, Buzzfeed, Food & Wine, and many more. She serves on her library’s board of directors, is a member of Tall Poppy Writers, and lives in Wisconsin.
Patti See
PATTI SEE is the author of a new essay collection, Here on Lake Hallie: In Praise of Barflies, Fix-it Guys and Other Folks in Our Hometown. Her work has appeared in Salon Magazine, Women's Studies Quarterly, The Wisconsin Academy Review, The Southwest Review, HipMama, Inside HigherEd, Volume One, and many other magazines. She writes a monthly column, Sawdust Stories, for the Eau Claire Leader Telegram, and she was a frequent contributor to "Wisconsin Life" on Wisconsin Public Radio. Her blog "Our Long Goodbye: One Family's Experiences with Alzheimer's" has been read in over 100 countries.
Barrett Swanson
BARRETT SWANSON is a contributing editor at Harper's Magazine and the author of the essay collection, Lost in Summerland. He was the 2016-2017 Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and was the recipient of a 2015 Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Harper's, The New Yorker, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Atavist, The Paris Review, and two editions of Best American Travel Writing, among other places.
Angie Trudell Vasquez
ANGIE TRUDELL VASQUEZ is a poet, writer, editor, publisher, and activist. She is the current City of Madison Poet Laureate (2020-2024) and the first Latina to hold the position. Angie received her MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017. Recently, her poems have appeared in The Slow Down, Yellow Medicine Review, Poem-a-Day, About Place Journal and in several anthologies. She was a Ruth Lilly Fellow while at Drake University. In 2018 she was a finalist for the New Women’s Voices series and her book, In Light, Always Light, her third collection of poetry, was published by Finishing Line Press in May 2019. She guest edited the Spring 2019 edition of the Yellow Medicine Review with Millissa Kingbird. She co-edited a collection of poetry with Margaret Rozga, then 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, entitled Through This Door, that was released in late 2020 through her small press Art Night Books. Finishing Line Press published her fourth collection of poetry, My People Redux, in January 2022. Active nationally too, she has read poems, been a panelist, and presented at Split This Rock and AWP. In the summer of 2021 she became a Macondo Fellow or a Macondista.
Kawai Strong Washburn
KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN was born and raised on the Hamakua coast of the Big Island of Hawai’i. His first novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors, Won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut novel and the 2021 Minnesota Book Award; it was also longlisted for the 2020 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and was a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award. Former President Barack Obama chose it as a favorite novel of 2020, and it was selected as a notable or best book of the year by over a dozen publications, including the New York Times and Boston Globe. It has also been translated into eight languages and counting. Washburn lives with his wife and two daughters in Minneapolis.
