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Featured Speakers
Anita Diamant
Anita Diamant is the author of eleven books. Her first novel, The Red Tent, published in 1997, won the 2001 Booksense Book of the Year Award. A word-of-mouth bestseller in the US, it has been published in more than 25 countries. Her other novels include Good Harbor, The Last Days of Dogtown, and most recently, Day after Night, which is set in 1945 in Palestine and tells the story of four women – young Jewish survivors of the Holocaust.
Anita Diamant has written six non-fiction guides to contemporary Jewish life including The New Jewish Wedding and How to Raise a Jewish Child. An award-winning journalist, her articles have appeared in many publications including The Boston Globe and Parenting.
Diamant lives in the Boston area and is a founder and the president of Mayyim Hayyim: Living Waters Community Mikveh, a 21st century interpretation of the ritual bath, a place for exploring ancient traditions and enriching Jewish life. http://www.mayyimhayyim.org
Naomi Shihab Nye
Naomi Shihab Nye was born in 1952, in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother. During her high school years, she lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio, Texas, where she later received her B.A. in English and world religions from Trinity University.
Nye is the author of numerous books of poems, including You and Yours (BOA Editions, 2005), which received the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, as well as 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002), a collection of new and selected poems about the Middle East, Fuel (1998), Red Suitcase (1994), and Hugging the Jukebox (1982).
Nye gives voice to her experience as an Arab-American through poems about heritage and peace that overflow with a humanitarian spirit. About her work, the poet William Stafford has said, "her poems combine transcendent liveliness and sparkle along with warmth and human insight. She is a champion of the literature of encouragement and heart. Reading her work enhances life."
Nye has received awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, the Carity Randall Prize, the International Poetry Forum, as well as four Pushcart Prizes. She has been a Lannan Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Witter Bynner Fellow. In 1988 she received The Academy of American Poets' Lavan Award, selected by W. S. Merwin.
Her poems and short stories have appeared in various journals and reviews throughout North America, Europe, and the Middle and Far East. She has traveled to the Middle East and Asia for the United States Information Agency three times, promoting international goodwill through the arts.
She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas. She was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2010.
Brandon Mull
Brandon Mull is best known as the author of the Fablehaven fantasy series, which is a New York Times' bestseller. Mull has also written The Candy Shop War. He is writing a new 3-book series called "The Beyonders". The first was published in March, 2011. He also is writing a sequel to The Candy Shop War, titled The Arcadeland Catastrophe to release in the second half of 2011.
Brandon has worked as a comedian, a filing clerk, a patio installer, a movie promoter, a copywriter, and briefly as a chicken stacker. He lives in Highland, Utah, with his wife, Mary, and their four children.
Margaret Coel
Margaret Coel is the New York Times best-selling author of 17 novels including the acclaimed Wind River mystery series set among the Arapahos on Wyoming's Wind River Reservation and featuring Jesuit priest Father John O'Malley and Arapaho attorney Vicky Holden. The latest is The Spider's Web (Sept. 2010) The Spirit Woman received the Willa Cather Award for Best Novel of the West and was a finalist for the Western Writers of America's Spur Award for Best Novel.
Along with the Wind River mystery series, Margaret Coel is the author of five non-fiction books, including the award-winning Chief Left Hand, published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Her articles on the West have appeared in the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, American Heritage of Invention & Technology, Creativity!, and many other publications.
Dennis Palumbo
Formerly a Hollywood screenwriter (My Favorite Year; Welcome Back, Kotter, etc.), Dennis Palumbo is now a licensed psychotherapist and author of Writing From the Inside Out (John Wiley). His work helping writers has been profiled in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, GQ and other publications, as well as on CNN, NPR and PBS. He also blogs regularly for the Huffington Post.
His mystery fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, The Strand, Written By and elsewhere, and is collected in From Crime to Crime (Tallfellow Press). His crime novel, Mirror Image (Poisoned Pen Press), is the first in a new series featuring psychologist Daniel Rinaldi, a trauma expert who consults with the Pittsburgh Police. The sequel, Fever Dream, is on sale now.
David Romtvedt
David Romtvedt was born in Portland, Oregon and raised in southern Arizona. He returned to the Pacific Northwest to attend Reed College, graduating in 1972 with a BA in American Studies. He received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and was a graduate fellow in Folklore and Ethnomusicology at the University of Texas at Austin. He has worked as a carpenter, tree planter, truck driver, book store clerk, assembly line operative, letter carrier, college professor, blueberry picker, musician, and ranch hand.
His most recent book of poetry is Some Church, published by Milkweed Editions in fall 2005. He is also the author of Windmill: Essays from Four Mile Ranch, two books of fiction, Crossing Wyoming and Free and Compulsory for All, and several books of poetry, including Certainty, How Many Horses, Moon, and the National Poetry Series selection, A Flower Whose Name I Do Not Know. He has edited two anthologies, Deep West and Wyoming Fence Lines. A recipient of two NEA fellowships, the Pushcart Prize, and the Wyoming Governor’s Arts Award, Romtvedt served from 2003 to 2011 as the poet laureate of Wyoming.
With the Fireants, Romtvedt performs creole dance music of the Americas and has released three recordings, It’s Hot (About Three Weeks a Year), Bury my Clothes, and Ants on Ice. The Fireants have performed throughout the Rocky Mountain states as well as at the Encuentro de Dos Tradiciones in Mexico City and Ciudad Altamirano, Mexico.
Romtvedt has served as manager of the Centrum Foundation’s International Folk Dance and Music Festival and Festival of American Fiddle Tunes. He has been a staff musician at the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop and at the Sierra Swing Festival. He recently completed a series of radio programs on traditional musics of the American Southwest for Wyoming and Montana National Public Radio.
Alyson Hagy
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Alyson Hagy was raised on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She is the author of three previous collections of short fiction and two novels, Keeneland, Snow, Ashes, and Ghosts of Wyoming. She lives and teaches in Laramie, Wyoming. Her new novel, Boleto, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in May 2012
Craig Johnson
New York Times Bestselling author Craig Johnson has received high praise for his Sheriff Walt Longmire novels which have received a superfecta of starred reviews from Kirkus, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, and Library Journal. The seven books have garnered awards such as the Wyoming Historical Association’s Book of the Year, the Western Writer’s of America Spur Award as well as the Mountains and Plains book of the year.
Johnson’s novels have been translated into numerous languages and have won the Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur/Bibliobs, and the Le Prix 813.
The books are now being produced as a television series this year entitled Longmire for the A&E Network starring Robert Taylor, Lou Diamond Phillips and Katee Sackoff. Warner Horizon is the studio and Golden Globe and Emmy Award-winning Greer Shephard and Michael Robin (The Shephard/Robin Company) are executive producing alongside writers John Coveny and Hunt Baldwin.
