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.
Credit: Priyanca Rao
Sarah Kain Gutowski
McIntosh Memorial Library
205 South Rock Avenue, Viroqua, Wisconsin
(608) 637-7151 Ext. 8
