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Word Tent: Authors as Activists
We are pleased to welcome the following authors in 2008:
Jim Hightower
Saturday 3:15pm
National radio commentator, writer, public speaker, and author of the forthcoming book, Swim Against The Current: Even A Dead Fish Can Go With The Flow, Jim Hightower has spent three decades battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be - consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses, and just-plainfolks.
Twice elected Texas Agriculture Commissioner, Hightower believes that the true political spectrum is not right to left but top to bottom, and he has become a leading national voice for the 80% of the public who no longer find themselves within shouting distance of the Washington and Wall Street powers at the top.
Hightower is a modern-day Johnny Appleseed, spreading the message of progressive populism all across the American grassroots. He broadcasts daily radio commentaries that are carried in more than 150 commercial and public stations, on the web, on Armed Forces Radio, and on Radio for Peace International. He also does a weekly video blog that is carried on many popular websites. Each month, he publishes a populist political newsletter, "The Hightower Lowdown" which now has more than 135,000 subscribers and is the fastest growing political publication in America. The hardhitting Lowdown has received both the Alternative Press Award and the Independent Press Association Award for best national newsletter.
A popular public speaker who is fiery and funny, he is a populist road warrior who delivers more than 100
speeches a year to all kinds of groups. As political columnist Molly Ivins said, "If Will Rogers and Mother Jones had a baby, Jim Hightower would be that rambunctious child—mad as hell, with a sense of humor."
Anna Lappé
Sunday 1:00pm
Anna Lappé is a Brooklyn-based writer, public speaker, and food activist. She is the co-author of Grub: Ideas for an Urban Organic Kitchen with recipes by Bryant Terry and Hope’s Edge, with her mother Frances Moore Lappé. Lappé can be seen as the host for MSN’s Practical Guide to Healthier Living and The Endless Feast, a 13-part series for public television about the connection between food, farming, and community. Lappé is also the cofounder of the Small Planet Institute and Small Planet Fund, which supports the emergence of living democracy worldwide through popular education and grantmaking.
John Stauber
Saturday 5:30pm
John Stauber founded the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Media & Democracy and its newsmagazine PR Watch in 1993 in Madison, Wisconsin. He has since served as the Center's executive director and has co-authored six books including the 2003 New York Times bestseller Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq. 
He is an investigative writer, public speaker and democracy advocate whose leadership on controversial public issues began in high school when he organized to end the U.S. war in Vietnam and for the first Earth Day. He has begun or worked with many non-profit public interest groups. He is a non-paid advisor to the following organizations:
- Action Coalition for Media Education
- Center for Food Safety
- Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW)
- Liberty Tree Foundation
- Media Education Foundation
- Organic Consumers Association
In collaboration with Sheldon Rampton, he has co-authored six books:
Toxic Sludge Is Good For You! Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry (1995)
Mad Cow U.S.A. (1997)
Trust Us, We're Experts! How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles With Your Future (2001)
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq (2003)
Banana Republicans: How the Right Wing Is Turning America Into a One-Party State (2004)
The Best War Ever: Lies, Damned Lies and the Mess in Iraq (2006)
Bob Wolf
Saturday 1:00pm
Robert Wolf, Free River Press director, is the author and editor of numerous books, including An American Mosaic: Prose and Poetry by Everyday Folk and Jump Start: How to Write from Everyday Life, both published by Oxford University Press, and The Triumph of Technique: The Industrialization of Agriculture and the Destruction of Rural America. A co-founder of Free River Press, Wolf devised the Free River Press writing workshop method during six years of teaching college composition. A former Chicago Tribune columnist, Wolf won the 1994 Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists for the year’s best radio editorial. In addition to leading writing workshops, Wolf directs seminars and regional economic development projects for Free River Press.
Bonnie Koloc
Saturday 4:30pm
Renaissance Woman, Bonnie Koloc is a book and website illustrator, a nationally known singer and visual artist. She has recorded ten albums, including her recently released CD, Timeless. In the 1980s she starred in The Human Comedy, produced off and on Broadway, by Joseph Papp’s Public Theater, earning her the Theatre World Bronze Award for Outstanding New Talent on Broadway and a Drama Critics Award Nomination for best actress in a musical. Bonnie is also an active printmaker, painter, and ceramicist. In the last eleven years she has shown in numerous exhibitions, including the 1999 National Exhibition of the Los Angeles Printmaking Society. For the past decade she has created covers and illustrations for Free River Press books and received two commissions from Oxford University Press.
Our land: Revisited, Restored and Reloved
Sunday 12:00 noon
Join the Too Busy to Play Players for an original work for the Kickapoo Country Fair and CROPP Cooperative in its 20th year. “Why do we love our country?” the Players will be asking and challenging themselves and each other in this collage of drama, verse, music and musings. How is it that we choose to feed ourselves? And what about the rest of the world? What does a food crisis have to do with the Kickapoo Valley? If you like to think, laugh and cry all at the same time, then the Players are for you. Join us and get into it.
The 'Too Busy To Play' Players are a group of busy people from Gays Mills, Soldier's Grove, Ferryville, Viroqua and LaFarge, WI who have been putting on community plays for the past ten years. Their repertoire includes plays by Stoppard, Brecht, Durrematt, Feydeau, Shue, Ives and several original works called 'The Mama Trauma Dramas".
Poetic Pens of Wisconsin
Saturday 11:30am
Local and regional poets of Wisconsin gather to share their poetic work. In the spirit of the bards of old, please come to lend an ear to the impressions, fears, loves, and healing energy of heart, mind, and body as these poets bare their souls in chance that the link that binds us all might be revealed. Each voice unique in style and complexity offers a glimpse into the experiences that have rendered our human interpretations and perspectives into a collective whole. Poetry, the sound of the universe coming together.
Fabu, a gifted poet, is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin- Madison with one Masters of Arts in African Languages and Literature and another Masters of Art in Afro-American Studies. She serves the Madison community as a literary artist (poet and storyteller) and educator. As a literary artist, she creates and shares poetry reflecting her life spent in Memphis, Tennessee, Nairobi, Kenya and Madison, Wisconsin. She is multicultural in perspective and encourages writing in many languages. Her poetry has appeared in Callaloo, Black Books Bulletin, The Wisconsin Academy Review, UMOJA magazine, Rosebud Magazine, The Madison Times, and The Capital City Hues. She is also a monthly columnist for The Capital Times and The Capital City Hues newspaper. She has a published chapbook, "In Our Own Tongues." Fabu is self-employed as a private consultant in Literary Arts, Education and African American culture. Fabu is the third Madison Poet Laureate and will serve until January 21, 2011.
E.P. Schultz, poet, musician, novelist, and freelance writer, lives in Viroqua, WI. He hosts a monthly poetry reading featuring local poets in an attempt to bring art and community closer together. He conducts poetry workshops with emphasis on reading. His work has appeared in Chronogram, Heartlands, The Iconoclast, Sierra Nevada College Review, Blue Collar Review, The Aurorean, The Storyteller, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal, and others. His chapbooks include: Misprints and Legends, Desert Poems, A Coffee-Shop Reading Series, A Play On Words, and Third Floor Window. His poem Were You The Winter? won honorable mention in the Mississippi Valley Poetry Contest, May, 2008.
Prudence Tippins likes to think of her poetry as a tapestry of twenty-first century American women's experiences, capturing the everyday nuances that make their lives unique. Her background as a teacher trainer and educational researcher has led her to many different regions of the country and the world, as her interests in spirituality and psychology have led her to various regions of the mind and heart. She collaborated on the book, Paths to Partnership, about graduate students working collaboratively with underserved communities, published in 1998 by Rowman & Littlefield; and wrote the 1994 Henry Holt book, Two of Us Make a World, with her sister Sherill. She's currently writing a monthly advice column for the Kickapoo Free Press.
Bruce Dethlefsen has published two poetry chapbooks. He won the Council for Wisconsin Writer's Posner Award honorable mention for 'Something Near the Dance Floor' in 2003. Bruce is a retired public library director and will have a full length book of poems out this fall with Fireweed Press.