Meet the Authors
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We're very excited to welcome the following authors to the 2019 Chippewa Valley Book Festival. Peruse the authors here and then hop over to the 2019 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.
Adam Regn Arvidson
Adam Regn Arvidson is a landscape architect and writer living in Minneapolis. His written work has been featured in magazines ranging from Landscape Architecture and Metropolis to Michigan Quarterly Review and Utne Reader. He is currently the director of strategic planning at the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board. His most recent book, Wild and Rare: Tracking Endangered Species in the Upper Midwest, is a look at the landscape of the upper midwest through the lens of endangered plants and animals.
Kim Blaeser
Kimberly Blaeser, writer, photographer, and scholar, is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Apprenticed to Justice; and editor of Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. She served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2015-16. Blaeser is Anishinaabe and grew up on the White Earth Reservation. A professor of English and Indigenous Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Blaeser is also on the faculty for the Institute of American Indian Arts low residency MFA program in Santa Fe. Her fourth collection of poetry, Copper Yearning, will be published in fall 2019.
Kim Brooks
Kim Brooks is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recipient of numerous fellowships. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, New York Magazine, Good Housekeeping, Chicago Magazine, Salon. Brooks has spoken as a guest on CBS This Morning, PBS NewsHour, 20/20, NPR’s All Things Considered, Good Morning America, The Brian Lehrer Show, as well as podcasts such as Note to Self, Mom and Dad Are Fighting, Femsplainer, and Matt Lewis and the News. Her novel, The Houseguest, was published in 2016. Small Animals: Parenthood in the Age of Fear was designated A Best Book of 2018 by National Public Radio.
Dorothy Chan
Dorothy Chan is the author of Revenge of the Asian Woman, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold, and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She is the Poetry Editor of Hobart and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.
Art Cullen
Art Cullen is editor of The Storm Lake Times in Storm Lake, Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 for a series of editorials on surface water pollution in Iowa caused by agricultural drainage. He is the author of Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience and Hope from a Heartland Newspaper. He owns the twice-weekly newspaper with his brother, John, who is serves as publisher. He also works with his wife, Dolores, a photographer, and son Tom, a reporter. He is a graduate of the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Beth Dooley
Beth Dooley has covered the local food scene in the Northern Heartland for thirty years: she writes for the Taste section of the Star Tribune, and appears regularly on local television and radio. She co-authored The Sioux Chef’s Indigenous Kitchen with Sean Sherman, winner of the James Beard Award for Best American Cookbook. Other titles include: Savory Sweet: Preserves from a Northern Kitchen, In Winter’s Kitchen: Growing Roots and Breaking Bread in the Northern Heartland, Minnesota’s Bounty: The Farmers Market Cookbook, The Northern Heartland Kitchen, and Savoring the Seasons of the Northern Heartland, coauthored with Lucia Watson.
Loretta Ellsworth
Loretta Ellsworth grew up in Iowa and is a former teacher and a graduate of Hamline University with an MFA in Writing for Children. She is the author of four novels for younger readers, including In Search of Mockingbird, which won the 2007 Midwest Bookseller’s Choice Honor Award in Children’s Literature, and was named to the 2008 New York Library’s Best Books for Teens list. Ellsworth’s first adult historical novel, Stars Over Clear Lake, is set in Clear Lake, Iowa during World War II. She currently resides in Lakeville, Minnesota.
Leif Enger
Leif Enger was raised in Osakis, Minnesota, and worked as a reporter and producer for Minnesota Public Radio before writing his best-selling debut novel, Peace Like a River, which won the Independent Publisher Book Award and was one of Los Angeles Times and Time Magazine’s Best Books of the Year. His second novel, So Brave, Young, and Handsome, was also a national best seller and a Midwest Booksellers’ Choice Award Honor Book for Fiction. He and his wife Robin live in Minnesota.
John Hildebrand
John Hildebrand is the author of five nonfiction books: the award-winning Mapping the Farm: The Chronicle of a Family, Reading the River: A Voyage Down the Yukon, and two collections of essays: A Northern Front: New and Selected Essays and The Heart of Things: a Midwestern Almanac. His latest book, Long Way Round: Through the Heartland by River, will be released at the festival. His articles and essays have appeared in Harper’s, Audubon, Outside Magazine, Sports Illustrated, GEO, Manoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing, and The Missouri Review. Since his retirement from the English Department, he occasionally teaches at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.
B.J. Hollars
B.J. Hollars is the author of several books, including his latest, Midwestern Strange: Hunting Monsters, Martians and the Weird in Flyover Country. Hollars is the recipient of the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Nonfiction, the Anne B. and James B. McMillan Prize, the The Wisconsin Writers Awards’s Norbert Blei/August Derleth Nonfiction Book Award, and the Society of Midland Authors Award. He is the founder and executive director of the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild and an associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire. He lives a simple existence with his wife, their children, and their dog.
Anna Lee Huber
Anna Lee Huber, winner of the 2018 Daphne du Maurier Award, is author of the national best-selling Lady Darby Mysteries, the Verity Kent Mysteries, and the Gothic Myths series, as well as the forthcoming anthology The Deadly Hours. She is a summa cum laude graduate of Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she majored in music and minored in psychology.
Kelly Jensen
Kelly Jensen is a former teen librarian who worked in several public libraries before pursuing a full-time career in writing and editing. Her current position is with Book Riot, where she focuses on talking about young adult literature in all of its manifestations. Her books include Here We Are: Feminism for The Real World and (Don’t) Call Me Crazy: 33 Voices Start the Conversation about Mental Health, a collection of art, essays, and words to launch a powerful and important conversation about mental health. It was named a best book of 2018 by the Washington Post and earned a Schneider Family Book Award Honor.
Rebecca Makkai
Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novel The Great Believers, one of The New York Times’ top ten books for 2018, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence from the American Library Association, the Stonewall Award, and the Chicago Review of Books Award, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a pick for the New York Public Library’s 2018 Best Books. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and a short story collection, Music for Wartime. Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.
rebeccamakkai.com | Twitter: @rebeccamakkai | Instagram: @rebeccamakkai
Mindy Mejia
Mindy Mejia’s internationally-acclaimed heartland noir novels have been translated into over twenty languages. She’s the author of The Dragon Keeper and Everything You Want Me to Be, which was a People’s Best New Books Pick and listed in The Wall Street Journal’s Best New Mysteries. Her latest novel, Leave No Trace, was nominated for the Barry Award and was a finalist for the 2019 Minnesota Book Award for Genre Fiction. A graduate of the Hamline University MFA program, she lives and works in the Twin Cities.
mindymejia.com | Facebook: @mejiawrites | Twitter: @mejiawrites
Neel Patel
Neel Patel is an author and screenwriter who grew up in Champaign, Illinois. His writing has appeared in ELLE India, on Buzzfeed, and other publications. His first book, If You See Me, Don’t Say Hi, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick and an NPR Best Book of 2018. He lives in Los Angeles, where he is developing a television series and writing a novel.
Carolyn Porter
Carolyn Porter is an award-winning graphic designer and type designer based in White Bear Lake, Minnesota. She graduated with a BA in Graphic Design from University of Wisconsin–Stout, which is where she was exposed to typography and the design of letterforms. Her first font, P22 Marcel Script, has garnered four international honors, including the prestigious Certificate for Typographic Excellence from the New York Type Director’s Club. Her nonfiction book, Marcel’s Letters: A Font and the Search for One Man’s Fate, was a finalist for the Minnesota Book Award, a Paris Book Festival winner, and won gold medals from Independent Publisher Book Awards and the Military Writer’s Society of America.
Margaret Rozga
Margaret Rozga, current Wisconsin Poet Laureate, has published four books of poetry, including Pestiferous Questions: A Life in Poem. This book, written with support from the American Antiquarian Society, looks at issues of women’s roles, western expansion, and race as they are woven through the life of politically-active and well-connected Jessie Benton Frémont (1824-1902). Rozga also served as editor of the poetry chapbook anthology Where I Want to Live: Poems for Fair & Affordable Housing, a project for the 50th anniversary of Milwaukee’s fair housing marches. She participated in those marches and helped organize 50th anniversary events.
Tanya Lee Stone
Tanya Lee Stone is passionate about telling the unsung true stories of people who have been left out of our histories. Her work has earned an NAACP Image Award, Robert F. Sibert Medal, Bank Street Award, and many other honors including NPR Best Books, Boston Globe-Horn Book, Publishers Weekly Best Books, Washington Post's Best New Reads, Smithsonian Magazine Best Books, Chicago Public Library Best Books, and multiple state awards. Stone is on the faculty of Champlain College and frequently travels as a guest speaker.
Interested in adding your name to this list next year?
We're currently accepting applications for the 2020 Chippewa Valley Book Festival.
