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Skye Smith

Skye Smith has retired from a career in mechanical engineering. In that profession he used CAD to design complex machines. The heightened visualization in...
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Kristi Belcamino

Kristi Belcamino is a USA Today bestselling crime writer, chess fanatic, and newspaper crime reporter. Her gritty, glamorous thrillers—like the Gia Santella and Queen...
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Damone Bester

Damone Bester is a two-time award-winning author whose debut novel Mendel received both a BookFest Award and a Black Excellence Award for Outstanding Fiction....
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Andrew Kantar

Born and raised in Minneapolis, Andy Kantar is the author of a trilogy of Great Lakes shipwreck books written primarily for young adults. His...
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Debra J. Stone

Debra J. Stone is a Jerome Hill Arts Fellow in Literature 2023-25, a Minnesota State Arts Board grant recipient, and The Loft Mirrors and...
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M.E. Bakos

M.E. Bakos has published several short stories in national women’s magazines. Her love of mysteries has led to writing cozies about a house flipper...
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Jessica Litman

Jessica Litman, also known as “The Organized Mama,” is a published author and home organization expert whose work has been featured on Today.com, People.com,...
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Helen Weil

Helen Weil is a poet, writer, and educator from the Chicago suburbs who loves ghost stories and love stories in equal measure. She studied...
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David Breeden

Rev. David Breeden, Ph.D. is a poet, practical theologian, and former Senior Minister of the First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis, a historically Humanist congregation....
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Dralandra Larkins

Dralandra Larkins is a multi-genre writer, three-time award-winning spoken word poet, and the author of Before I Lie. She is a teaching artist at...

Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich is the author of novels, children’s books, short stories, volumes of poetry, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine,…
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Anika Fajardo

Anika Fajardo was born in Colombia and raised in Minnesota. She is the author of a book about that experience, Magical Realism for Non-Believers: A Memoir of Finding Family, which was awarded Best Book (Nonfiction) of 2020 from City Pages and was a finalist for the 2020 Minnesota Book Award. She is the author of…
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Metra Farrari

A UW-Madison school of journalism graduate, Metra Farrari landed her dream job right out of college to become a member of the production team for the final three seasons of The Oprah Winfrey Show. Chicago proved to be fruitful; Farrari picked up a husband, a big-boned (fat) cat, and lifelong friends, but the draw of…
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Jennifer Fernjack

Jennifer Fernjack is an author and keynote speaker. Raised in Cloquet, MN, she currently resides in Spring Park, MN. She received her B.A. degree from the University of Minnesota Duluth and an MBA from the University of St. Thomas. Through a medical scare in 2016, she learned that courage doesn’t need to be the absence…
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Sally Franson

Sally Franson is the author of A Lady’s Guide to Selling Out, named a “New and Notable” by Entertainment Weekly and shortlisted for a Minnesota Book Award. Her short stories, essays, reportage, and humor pieces have appeared in The Guardian, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Best American Travel Writing, PopSugar, The Progressive, Signature Reads, Word Riot, Witness, and…
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Michael Fridgen

Michael Fridgen loves theme parks, Dolly Parton, baking, Christmas, and playing the piano. His guidebook, Dollywood and Beyond, attained the top spot on Amazon’s list of bestselling books about theme parks, as did his World Traveler’s Guide to Disney. A former elementary school teacher, Fridgen began writing full-time after his first novel, Ruth3:5, was named…
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Rafael Frumkin

Rafael Frumkin is the author of the novels The Comedown and Confidence and the short story collection Bugsy. Confidence was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice and one of the Washington Post’s 50 Best Books of 2023. Bugsy was longlisted for the 2024 Story Prize. Frumkin’s writing explores themes of identity, duplicity, and the…
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Annette Gagliardi

Annette Gagliardi is a poet whose work has appeared in literary journals in Canada, England, and the US. Her first full-length poetry collection, titled A Short Supply of Viability, was published through The Poetry Box. Gagliardi notices the intricate details of lives lived around her. She notices the dimensions of nature, time, and the human…
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Peter Geye

Peter Geye is the author of four novels – Northernmost, Safe from the Sea, The Lighthouse Road, which was a World Book Night selection, and Wintering, which won the Minnesota Book Award and was a Midwest Booksellers Choice award winner. He holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and a Ph.D. from Western Michigan…
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Shannon Gibney

Shannon Gibney is a writer, educator, activist, and the author of See No Color, a young adult novel that won the 2016 Minnesota Book Award in Young Peoples’ Literature. Gibney is faculty in English at Minneapolis Community and Technical College, where she teaches critical and creative writing, journalism, and African Diasporic topics. A Bush Artist…
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