2025 Presenters

Credit: Paulius Musteikis
Maggie Ginsberg
Maggie Ginsberg is a Wisconsin writer, editor, and author. Her debut novel, Still True, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press. It won the Wisconsin Library Association’s 2023 WLA Literary Award
for Fiction and was the honorable mention selection for the 2022 Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award. Maggie is the managing editor at Madison Magazine, where her nonfiction magazine articles have earned numerous honors from the City Regional Magazine Association, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the Milwaukee Press Club.

William Kent Krueger
William Kent Krueger is the author of twenty novels in the New York Times bestselling Cork O’Connor mystery series. His 2013 stand-alone novel Ordinary Grace won the Edgar Award for Best Novel. This Tender Land, a stand-alone novel published in 2019, spent six months among the top ten on the New York Times bestseller list. His work has been translated into more than two dozen foreign languages and optioned by Hollywood.

Brian Reisinger
Brian Reisinger is an award-winning writer and rural-policy expert who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County, Wisconsin. He lives to tell the hidden stories of rural America and has been published by USA Today, Newsweek, Yahoo News, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Wisconsin Life, The Daily Yonder, RealClearPolitics, The Hill, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter, and splits his time between northern California and the family farm. Land Rich, Cash Poor is his first book.

Erica Hannickel
Erica Hannickel is a master gardener, former professor of history, and grant writer. An orchid enthusiast for 20 years, she grows them on baker’s carts and in a miniature cabinet. Orchid Muse: A History of Obsession in Fifteen Flowers chronicles stories of empresses, enslaved people, and naturalists around the world. The book was longlisted for the PEN Literary Science Writing Award, shortlisted for the WLA Nonfiction Award, and won the Council on Botanical and Horticultural Libraries Literature Award.

Credit: Kelly Kendall
Tamara Dean
Tamara Dean is the author of Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless, a collection of essays highlighting extraordinary tales of discovery that urge us to experience nature mindfully. She writes fiction and nonfiction, teaches writing, and publishes widely. She’s also the author of The Human-Powered Home: Choosing Muscles over Motors. After fifteen years in Vernon County, Wisconsin, she currently lives in Madison and returns to the Driftless area often.

Marcy West
Marcy West served as the executive director for the Kickapoo Reserve Management Board in the formative years of 1996–2021. In Protecting Paradise in the Driftless, she takes readers on a tour of the 8,600 acres she came to know and love as the KVR evolved from a proposed dam and lake into a unique local natural resource. She and her husband reside in the Kickapoo Valley and manage their own piece of paradise for pollinators, wildlife, and solitude.

Amy Pease
Amy Pease is an alumna of the University of Wisconsin and the Madison Writer’s Studio. She works as a nurse practitioner, where she is a nationally recognized HIV specialist. She lives with her husband and two children in Wisconsin. Northwoods is her first novel.

Wisconsin Family Theater
Wisconsin Family Theater is a theater company founded by Ian and Elisabeth Baird with the mission to bring professional, family-friendly theater to the people of Wisconsin. The couple studied theater in college before working in the field professionally and have been performing together for fourteen years ever since their first production, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. They live in Viroqua with their dog, two cats, and adorable son, Moses.

Dean Robbins
Children’s author and journalist Dean Robbins has written many nonfiction picture books about real-life heroes, including Two Friends: Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, Margaret and the Moon: How Margaret Hamilton Saved the First Lunar Landing, and You Are a Star, Martin Luther King, Jr. Wisconsin Idols, his essay collection for adults, profiles legendary figures with often surprising connections to the state, from the Beatles to Oprah Winfrey.

Keith Lesmeister
Keith Pilapil Lesmeister is the author of the fiction chapbook Mississippi River Museum and the story collection We Could’ve Been Happy Here. He also serves as series editor for the EastOver Anthology of Rural Stories: Writers of Color. His work appears in American Short Fiction, BOMB, december, Gettysburg Review, New Stories from the Midwest, North American Review, and many others. He’s a founding editor of Cutleaf and a 2023–25 Rural Regenerator Fellow through Springboard for the Arts. He teaches at Northeast Iowa Community College and lives in Decorah, Iowa.

Michael Breininger
Pastor Mike Breininger and his wife, Christy, are parents to sixteen children. He is the president and founder of Southwest Partners, a community development organization, and a founding member of Wisconsin Partners, a statewide associations network. He resides in Richland Center where he is the pastor of New House Richland, a nondenominational church. He has nearly four decades of experience as the administrator of a private school, Eagle School International. He is the co-author of Pulling Together: A Handbook for Community Change.

Tom Mosgaller
Tom Mosgaller has more than thirty years of experience as a leader, teacher, and consultant nationally and internationally to the public, private, and not-for-profit sectors. Tom has led, taught, and coached
community builders in the art of pulling together in places both big and small, urban and rural, locally and internationally. Tom is past president of the American Society for Quality and has served on numerous boards and committees. He is the co-author of Pulling Together: A Handbook for Community
Change and Bending Granite.

Sue Berg
Sue Berg is a Wisconsin native and has tried to incorporate the beauty and authenticity of Midwestern people and rural life in her novels. After retiring from a teaching career that spanned thirty-two years, Sue has written six novels in her Driftless Mystery series, the most recent of which, Driftless Identity, will be published in May of 2025 along with Death at the Dentist, her first book in a new series featuring Sonja Hovland. In addition to writing fiction, Sue enjoys gardening, wool applique needlework, quilting, and camping on the Mississippi River near Prairie du Chien with family and friends.

Breta Lee
The director of a private school and a seasoned educator, Breta Lee brings her rich 28-year teaching experience in both local and international classrooms to her writing. Her book, Dachshund Discoveries: On the Farm, is inspired by her life on the Lee family farm with her daughters and their dachshunds, Cooper and Bear. The farm, a hub for family gatherings and outdoor adventure, serves as the backdrop for her story. Through her book, she aims to foster a love for reading, nature, and the values of hard work and environmental stewardship in young readers.