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Jennifer Greene is a poet from Arlee. Jennifer was born and raised on the Flathead Reservation and is Salish and Chippewa-Cree. She won the North American Native Authors Poetry Award, and the Greenfield Review Press published her book of poetry entitled What I Keep. Jennifer worked as a newspaper editor and won first place awards from the Native American Journalists Association for feature writing. Jennifer teaches full-time at Salish Kootenai College, teaches for the Missoula Writing Collaborative, works on history projects, and continues to write.
A native of Helena, Greg received his DMA in music composition at the University of Texas in Austin (2007), having received a B.M. in piano performance from the University of Montana (1996), and an M.M. in composition from the University of Arizona (2000). Bolin’s Trio for Bassoon, Oboe and Piano was premiered at the International Double Reed Society convention in Buenos Aires in 2000. His score for Earth Songs, commissioned by the St. Louis-based Metro Theater Company, was performed in November of 2004 by the Nuclear Percussion Ensemble and Michelle Isam. In September of 2005, the Ying Quartet and the Montana-based Cascade Quartet teamed-up to premiere his octet, Missouri River Passacaglia, through a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Music Academy of Showa, Japan premiered Fleisher Pass in December 2005. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Montana Arts Council and the Myrna Loy Center. |
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The Helena Festival of the Book thanks our major sponsors: Myrna Loy Center for Performing and Media Arts And acknowledges major support from: Montana Committee for the Humanities/Montana Center for the Book And many other donors listed on our “Sponsors” page |
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Debra Magpie Earling teaches fiction and Native American studies full time at the University of Montana-Missoula. Her first novel, Perma Red, was published in 2002 and won the Mountains and Plains Booksellers Association Award. She received an MFA from Cornell University. Her publications also include stories in The Last Best Place: A Montana Anthology, Talking Leaves: Contemporary Native American Short Stories, Circle of Women: Anthology of Western Women Writers, Wild Women: Anthology of Women Writers, and Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart.
Fred Haefele received his MFA from the University of Montana in 1981. His essays have appeared in Outside, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, American Heritage, and other publications. He has received literary fellowships from The Fine Arts Work Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Stanford University. He is the author of the motorcycle memoir Rebuilding the Indian (Riverhead Books, 1998, Bison Books, 2005). He has taught creative writing at the University of Montana and at Stanford, where he was a Jones Lecturer. Haefele currently lives in Montana with his wife and two children.
Christopher Howell, a native of the Northwest, was a military journalist during the Vietnam War and later received an MA from Portland State University and an MFA degree from the University of Massachusetts. He has published eight collections of poems, most recently Light’s Ladder (University of Washington Press). His poems, translations, and essays have been frequently and widely published in anthologies and journals, including Antioch Review, Colorado Review, Crazyhorse, Southern Review, Denver Quarterly, Field, Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, Northwest Review and Harper’s. He has received three Pushcart Prizes, two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and fellowships from the Washington Artist Trust, the Oregon Arts Commission, and the Massachusetts Council for the Arts. He has also been awarded the Helen Bullis, Vachel Lindsay, and Vi Gale prizes; the Washington State Governor’s Prize for Literature; the Washington State Book Award; and the Stanley W. Lindberg Award for Editorial Excellence. He teaches at Eastern Washington University, where he is also senior editor for EWU Press.
Jon A. Jackson is a mystery writer and jazz music expert with a passion for great food. Jackson and Greg Patent discuss recipes, food history and ingredients on Montana Public Radio’s “The Food Guys” show every Sunday. Jackson’s most recent novel is No Man’s Dog. Other novels include Badger Games, La Donna Detroit, Hit on the House, Go By Go, and The Blind Pig. He has been writing “Fang Mulheisen” crime novels since the publication of The Diehard in 1977. (Photo by David Balicki)
Ari LeVaux’s food column Flash in the Pan is syndicated in over 20 newspapers around the country. His freelance writing has also appeared in Orion, Outside, Backcountry, Northwest Palate, and other regional and national publications. He works part-time at the University of Montana, Missoula, where he teaches a grantwriting course, and organizes and leads overseas agriculture study trips to far flung places like Bhutan, Cuba, and Brazil.
Kisha Lewellyn Schlegel received the 2005 Richard J. Margolis Award and full fellowship to Blue Mountain Center for her essays about farmers and ranchers in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley. She currently writes a weekly online column called Spade & Spoon, found at www.newwest.net/spadeandspoon.
Joseph R. McGeshick was born at Poplar, Montana, and raised a mile from the Missouri River at Wolf Point on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in northeast Montana. He is of Chippewa/Sioux/Assiniboine ancestry. McGeshick graduated from Wolf Point High School and went on to Montana State University-Bozeman and Washington State University-Pullman. He has taught American Indian Studies and history at the high school, community college and university levels. Many of his poems, short stories and non-fiction pieces have been published in The Big Sky Journal, The Tributary, The New Perspective, The Cimarron Review, phatitude, and The Northwest Journal. His first book, a collection of poems titled The Indian in the Liquor Cabinet and Other Poems, was published in the summer of 2006. His latest book, a collection of short stories titled Never Get Mad At Your Sweetgrass, was published in the summer of 2007. He recently finished two chapters for the History of the Ft. Peck Tribes, due out in 2008. He is currently finishing a novel, titled Sister Girl. McGeshick lives and writes in Montana.
Neil McMahon studied pre-med at Stanford University, and later was a Stegner Fellow there. He is the author of numerous novels, most recently Lone Creek, published in early 2007. He is also a carpenter in Missoula, where his wife coordinates the Montana Festival of the Book.
Maile Meloy Helena-born Maile Meloy was recently listed as one of Granta’s 21 Best Young American Novelists. Her short stories have been published in The New Yorker and The Paris Review. Her first story collection, Half in Love, received the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters , the John C. Zacharis Award from Ploughshares, and the PEN/Malamud Award. Her first novel, Liars and Saints, was shortlisted for England’s 2005 Orange Prize. Both books were New York Times Notable Books. She has also received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She has just released her third book, A Family Daughter. She lives in California.
Greg Patent is an award-winning cookbook author. His cookbook Baking in America won the 2003 James Beard Award for best baking book of the year, and he was similarly honored that same year with a World Gourmand Cookbook Award for best baking book published in the English language. For 13 years, Greg was a regular contributor to Cooking Light magazine. He co-hosts “The Food Guys,” a weekly Montana Public Radio show every Sunday at noon. His articles on food have also appeared in Family Circle, Woman’s Day, Fine Cooking, Saveur, and Gastronomica. Greg’s other cookbooks include A is for Apple, Food Processor Cooking Quick and Easy, and New Frontiers in Western Cooking. His forthcoming cookbook celebrating America’s immigrant baking heritage, A Baker’s Odyssey, will be published this fall by John Wiley and Sons.
M.L. Smoker belongs to the Assiniboine and Sioux tribes of the Fort Peck Reservation in north-eastern Montana. Her family's home is on Tabexa Wakpa (Frog Creek). She holds an MFA from the University of Montana in Missoula, where she was the recipient of the Richard Hugo Fellowship. She is also a graduate of Pepperdine University, and attended UCLA and the University of Colorado, where she was a Battrick Fellow. Her first collection of poems, Another Attempt at Rescue, was published by Hanging Loose Press (hangingloosepress.com) in the spring of 2005. Her poems have also appeared in Shenendoah and South Dakota Review and have been translated for Acoma – an Italian literary journal published by the University of Rome. M.L. Smoker currently resides in Helena, Montana, where she works for the Office of Public Instruction, in the Indian Education Division.
Melanie Rae Thon’s most recent book is the novel Sweet Hearts. She is also the author of Meteors in August and Iona Moon, and the story collections First, Body and Girls in the Grass. She has just completed Heavenly Creatures, a collection of stories. Her work has been included in Best American Short Stories (1995, 1996), three Pushcart Prize Anthologies (2003, 2005, 2007), and The O. Henry Prize Stories (2006). She is also a recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Writer’s Residency from the Lannan Foundation. Her new fiction appears in Five Points; One Story; Pushcart Prize XXXII; The Best Stories of the American West, edited by Marc Jaffe; Montana Women Writers: A Geography of the Heart, edited by Caroline Patterson; Antioch Review; Agni; Conjunctions; StoryQuarterly; and Drumlummon Views (at www.drumlummon.org). Originally from Montana, she now lives in migration between the Pacific Northwest, Arizona, and Salt Lake City, where she teaches at the University of Utah. 
Kim Todd’s first book, Tinkering with Eden, a Natural History of Exotics in America, tells the stories of non-native species and how they arrived in the United States. Tinkering with Eden received the PEN/Jerard Award and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award and was selected as one of Booklist’s Top Ten Science/Technical Books for 2001. Her second book, Chrysalis, Maria Sibylla Merian and the Secrets of Metamorphosis, looks at the life of a pioneering explorer/naturalist who traveled to South America in 1699 to study insect metamorphosis. Her articles and essays have appeared in Orion, Sierra Magazine, California Wild and Grist, among other places. She has taught environmental and nature writing at the University of Montana, the University of California at Santa Cruz extension, and the Environmental Writers Institute. Todd is a senior fellow with the Environmental Leadership Program. She has an MFA in creative nonfiction and an MS in environmental studies, both from the University of Montana, and BA in English from Yale. She lives with her family in Missoula, Montana.
About Greg Bolin, Composer of the Opera, Tome