We are excited to reveal the following 2009 Featured Presenters:
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Wisconsin native and former chef Terese Allen writes about the pleasures and benefits of regional foods, seasonal cooking, and culinary folklore. Along with a plethora of articles, Allen has written numerous books on Wisconsin's food traditions, including Wisconsin's Hometown Flavors, Fresh Market Wisconsin, Wisconsin Food Festivals, Cafe Wisconsin Cookbook, and The Ovens of Brittany Cookbook. A food columnist for Madison's Isthmus newspaper and a former contributing editor of Wisconsin Trails magazine, Terese is also food editor for Organic Valley, the country's largest organic farmers' cooperative. She chairs southern Wisconsin's groundbreaking REAP Food Group and is a founding member and past-president of the Culinary History Enthusiasts of Wisconsin (CHEW).
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Will Allen received a B.A. (1971) from the University of Miami. After a brief career in professional basketball and a number of years in corporate marketing at Procter and Gamble, he returned to his roots as a farmer. He has served as the founder and CEO of Growing Power, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, since 1995 and has taught workshops to aspiring urban farmers across the United States and abroad.
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Andrew J. Bacevich is Professor of International Relations and History at Boston University. A graduate of the U. S. Military Academy, he received his Ph. D. in American Diplomatic History from Princeton University. Dr. Bacevich is the author of The Limits of Power: American Exceptionalism (2008). His previous books include American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U. S. Diplomacy (2002), The Imperial Tense: Problems and Prospects of American Empire (2003) (editor), The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005), and The Long War: A New History of US National Security Policy since World War II (2007) (editor). His essays and reviews have appeared in a wide variety of scholarly and general interest publications including The Wilson Quarterly, The National Interest, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Nation, The American Conservative, and The New Republic. His op-eds have appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and USA Today, among other newspapers.
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Lynda Barry has worked as a painter, cartoonist, writer, illustrator, playwright, editor, commentator and teacher and found they are very much alike. She is the inimitable creator behind the syndicated strip Ernie Pook's Comeek featuring the incomparable Marlys and Freddy, as well as the books One! Hundred! Demons!, The! Greatest! of! Marlys!, Cruddy: An Illustrated Novel, Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies!, and her first book for Drawn & Quarterly, 2008’s What It Is. D+Q plans to publish a multivolume hardcover collection of Ernie Pook’s Comeek starting in 2009, as well as a collection of the Nearsighted Monkey.
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Wendell Berry was born in Henry County, Kentucky, in 1934. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Kentucky in 1956 and continued on to complete a master’s degree in 1957. In 1958, he received a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University. Berry has taught at Georgetown College, Stanford University, and New York University. He taught at his alma mater, the University of Kentucky from 1964-77, and again from 1987-93. The author of more than forty books, Wendell Berry has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1962), the Vachel Lindsay Prize from Poetry (1962), a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship (1965), a National Institute of Arts and Letters award for writing (1971), the Emily Clark Balch Prize from The Virginia Quarterly Review (1974), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Jean Stein Award (1987), a Lannan Foundation Award for Non-Fiction (1989), Membership in the Fellowship of Southern Writers (1991), the Ingersoll Foundation’s T. S. Eliot Award (1994), the John Hay Award (1997), the Lyndhurst Prize (1997), the Aitken-Taylor Award for Poetry from The Sewanee Review (1998), and the Cynthia Pratt Laughlin Medal from The Garden Club of America (2008). He lives and works with his wife, Tanya Berry, on their farm in Port Royal, Kentucky.
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Harriet Brown is an assistant professor of magazine journalism at the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She was editor of Wisconsin Trails magazine for 5 years before that. She writes regularly for the New York Times (magazine and science section), Health magazine, and many other national publications. Her commentaries air on the NPR show 51%. Her next book, tentatively titled The Demon in the Bakery, will appear in 2011.
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Paul Buhle was a senior lecturer at Brown University and in retirement has returned to Madison, where he earned a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin. His forty published volumes include a dozen comic art volumes, five biographies, and a book series on the victims of the Hollywood Blacklist.
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Bonnie Jo Campbell's newest work of fiction, American Salvage, is a lush and rowdy collection of stories set in a rural Michigan landscape, where wildlife, jobs, and ways of life are vanishing, and it has just received a starred Booklist review. Her first collection, Women & Other Animals details the lives of extraordinary rural females in rural. It won the Associated Writing Programs short fiction award. Her story, "The Smallest Man in the World", was awarded a Pushcart Prize; and her novel, Q Road, has been named a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers book. Her short fiction has appeared in Southern Review, Kenyon Review, Ontario Review, and Alaska Quarterly Review. Campbell grew up on a small Michigan farm in a house her grandfather built. When she left home for the University of Chicago, her mother rented out her room; she has since hitchhiked across the U.S. and Canada, scaled the Swiss Alps on her bicycle, and traveled with the circus. She has led adventure tours in Russia and Eastern Europe. After earning a master's degree in mathematics, Campbell began writing fiction. She received her M.F.A. in creative writing from Western Michigan University, and now lives in Kalamazoo.
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NPR commentator Beth Finke is an award-winning author, teacher and journalist. She also happens to be blind. Her children's book about Seeing Eye dogs -- Hanni and Beth: Safe & Sound won a Henry Bergh children's book award from the ASPCA and a Maxwell Award for Best Picture Book from the Dog Writers Association of America. Beth's memoir, Long Time, No See was named one of the Chicago Tribune's favorite non-fiction books for 2003. Beth's essays air on the Morning Edition segment of National Public Radio. Her award-winning piece about the 2005 World Champion White Sox gave her some pretty nichey notoriety: she's the only blind woman in America to be honored for sports broadcasting. Beth's work has appeared in Woman's Day, the Chicago Tribune, Dog Fancy, and Bark. She teaches a memoir-writing course for Chicago senior citizens and works part-time moderating a blog about autism for Easter Seals Headquarters in Chicago. She and her husband Mike Knezovich have one grown son, Gus who lives in Watertown, Wisconsin.
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Claudia Guadalupe Martinez grew up in El Paso, Texas. She now lives in Chicago where she works for a non-profit whose mission it is to improve the educational experiences of Chicago's public school children. Her debut novel, The Smell of Old Lady Perfume (Cinco Puntos Press) recently won the Texas Institute of Letters Best Young Adult Book Award. It was also a Chicago Public Library Best of the Best 2008, a "Top Pick" Southwest Books of the Year 2008, Latinidad Best Middle Grade Book of 2008, and Hispanic Magazine 2008 Summer Must Read.
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Jane Hamilton is the author of The Book of Ruth, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for first fiction, and A Map of the World, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and named one of the top ten books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, the Miami Herald, and People. Both The Book of Ruth and A Map of the World have been selections of Oprah's Book Club. Her following work, The Short History of a Prince, was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998, her novel Disobedience was published in 2000, and her last novel When Madeline Was Young was a Washington Post Best Book of 2006. She lives in and writes in an orchard farmhouse in Wisconsin.
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Jonah Lehrer is a Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. Jonah is also the author of the science blog The Frontal Cortex. He graduated from Columbia University and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He has written for The New Yorker, Nature, Seed, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe. He is also a Contributing Editor at Scientific American Mind and National Public Radio's Radio Lab.
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James A. Levine, a Professor of Medicine at the Mayo clinic, is a world-renowned scientist, doctor, and reseracher. For his scientific work, Dr. Levine has regularly appeared on CNN, the BBC, the CBC, and the Discovery Channel, and has been repeatedly featured in major newspapers in the U.S. and around the world. He lives in Oronoco, Minnesota.
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Lorrie Moore is the author of the story collections Birds of America and Self-Help, and the novels A Gate at the Stairs, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital? and Anagrams. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
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Agate Nesaule was born in Latvia, experienced war and camps in Germany, and came to the United States at the age of twelve. As Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, she was instrumental in developing Women’s Studies and received several teaching awards. Writing in English and Latvian, she has published academic articles and literary essays on feminism, women writers, exile, and spiritual and literal returns home. Her memoir A Woman in Amber: Healing the Trauma of War and Exile, (Soho Press, 1995) won an American Book Award. Her novel In Love with Jerzy Kosinski (UW Press, 2009) deals with immigration, the aftermath of war and other extreme experiences, competitive suffering, and forgiveness. She lives, writes, and gardens in Madison.
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Bich Minh Nguyen teaches literature and creative writing at Purdue University. She received the PEN/Jerard Award for Stealing Buddha's Dinner, and has appeared on programs such as The Newshour with Jim Lehrer.
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Ever since spending many childhood hours exploring her community's old Carnegie library, Kim E. Nielsen has loved biography. Now she is professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. Since earning her Ph.D. from the University of Iowa, she has published multiple books and articles, advised several film documentaries, and won numerous academic and teaching awards. Studying history means she gets to read biography and consider it work. Her most recent book is Beyond the Miracle Worker: The Remarkable Life of Anne Sullivan Macy and Her Extraordinary Friendship with Helen Keller (Beacon Press, 2009).
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Harvey Pekar is a comic-book writer and author of the autobiographical American Splendor series, which was adapted into an Academy Award-nominated film. Pekar is also a prolific jazz and book critic. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio.
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Michael Perry is a humorist and author of the bestselling memoirs Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time and Truck: A Love Story, the essay collection Off Main Street, and the upcoming memoir Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting. Perry has written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Backpacker, Orion and Salon.com, and is a contributing editor to Men’s Health. His essays have been heard on NPR’s All Things Considered and he has performed and produced two live audience recordings (I Got It From the Cows and Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow). Perry lives in rural Wisconsin , where he remains active with the local volunteer rescue service.
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As a young man, David Rhodes worked in fields, hospitals, and factories across Iowa. After receiving an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1971, he published The Last Fair Deal Going Down, The Easter House and Rock Island Line. In 1977, a motorcycle accident left him paralyzed from the chest down. Driftless is his first book since. Rhodes lives with his wife, Edna, in rural Wonewoc, Wisconsin.
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Michael Rosen, a community organizer, is a former real estate developer and investor, former CEO of a Wall Street firm, former CEO of a publicly traded company destroyed on September 11, 2001, and a former assistant professor at New York University. He lives in New York, and with his wife, Leslie Gruss, and the "the Rosen family extended".
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Matthew Rothschild is editor of The Progressive magazine and host of Progressive Radio, a weekly public affairs program syndicated nationally. He is author of You Have No Rights: Stories of America in an Age of Repression.
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Wade Rouse is the author of the critically-acclaimed memoirs, America’s Boy and Confessions of A Prep School Mommy Handler. Wade’s work has been featured in the Washington Post, Out, Genre, Entertainment Weekly, OK! Weekly, as well as on WGN and KMOX. Wade’s essays and articles have appeared in numerous regional and national publications and collections. He earned his B.A. in communications (with honors) from Drury University and his master’s from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. His latest book is At Least in the City Someone Would Hear Me Scream.
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Laura Schaefer is the author of The Teashop Girls, a new novel for young readers set in Madison, WI. She got her start as a contributor to the University of Wisconsin's student paper The Daily Cardinal and went on to write regularly for The Princeton Review and Match.com. Laura is the author of Man with Farm Seeks Woman with Tractor (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2005). She lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with her enormous cat Ramona and she can usually be found dancing the lindy hop or working on her second young adult novel.
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Adam Schrager covers politics for KUSA-TV, the NBC affiliate in Denver, Colorado. In more than 15 years in the business, he has won numerous broadcast journalism accolades, including more than a dozen Emmy awards. He teaches an introductory class on broadcast journalism at the University of Denver and has conducted dozens of seminars on the impact of the media on politics. Schrager has a bachelor's degree in history from the University of Michigan and a master's degree in broadcast journalism from Northwestern University where he won the Harrington Award, the Medill School of Journalism's highest honor. He began his career in 1991 with CBS News in London. After working in various capacities for TV stations in LaCrosse, Madison, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he moved to Denver in 1999. The Principled Politician is his first book, and he is currently working on a new book on the state of politics in the West, to be released in 2010.
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David Taylor writes for The Washington Post and Smithsonian, while his features have also appeared in The American Scholar, Outside, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Village Voice. He is the author of Ginseng, the Divine Root (Algonquin, 2006), Success: Stories (fiction winner, Washington Writers' Publishing House, 2008), and Soul of a People (Wiley, 2009). He has written award-winning scripts for television documentaries for The Travel Channel, the Discovery Channel, The Learning Channel, and National Geographic. He is lead writer and co-producer of the Smithsonian Channel television special, also titled Soul of a People, that airs nationally in fall 2009.
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Nick Thompson is currently a senior editor at Wired Magazine, a fellow at the New America Foundation, and a regular contributer to CNN, NBC, and many other TV and radio stations. He is also a contributor to Wired's Epicenter and Danger Room blogs. He is the author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War, to be published in September by Henry Holt.
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Robert Whitaker is the author of three books. His first, Mad in America: Bad Science, Bad Medicine and the Enduring Mistreatment of the Mentally Ill was named by Discover magazine as one of the best science books of 2002, while the American Library Association named it one of the best history books of that year. In 2004, Basic Books published his second book, The Mapmaker’s Wife: A True Tale of Love, Murder and Survival in the Amazon, which was named by the American Library Association as one of the best biographies of that year. The Mapmaker’s Wife was translated into eight foreign languages. In June 2008, Crown published On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice that Remade a Nation. In 2007, he received the Anthony J. Lukas work-in-progress award for this book. The San Francisco Chronicle named it one of the best 50 non-fiction books of 2008. Prior to writing books, Robert Whitaker worked as the science and medical reporter at the Albany Times Union newspaper in New York for a number of years. His journalism articles won several national awards, including a George Polk award for medical writing, and a National Association of Science Writers’ award for best magazine article. A series he co-wrote for The Boston Globe was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1998. He is currently writing Anatomy of an Epidemic: Magic Bullets, Psychiatric Drugs, and the Astonishing Rise of Mental Illness in America. It will be published by Crown in the spring of 2010.
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Michelle Wildgen's first novel, You're Not You (Picador), was named one of People magazine's top ten books of 2006 and is now in development for film with Hillary Swank to star. She is also the editor of Food & Booze: A Tin House Literary Feast, and her work has appeared in, among other places, the New York Times, O the Oprah Magazine, Best Food Writing, Best New American Voices, StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, TriQuarterly, Five Chapters, and in anthologies like Naming the World, Death by Pad Thai, and Dirty Words. She is a senior editor at Tin House literary magazine and lives in Madison. Her second novel, But Not For Long, will be published by Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's Press in October 2009, and in paperback by Picador the following year.