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Helena Festival of the Book 2008
Guest Authors

Ellen Baumler and J.M. Cooper, co-authors of Dark Spaces: Montana’s Historic Penitentiary at Deer Lodge, both work on staff at the Montana Historical Society. Baumler is author or co-author of numerous historic books including Beyond Spirit Tailings: Montana’s Mysteries, Ghosts, and Haunted Places; Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan; Lost Places, Hidden Treasures: Rare Photographs of Helena Montana, and many other books.
J. M. Cooper has been photographing the western Montana landscape over the last thirty years, trying to document areas and structures that are rapidly disappearing. Cooper received a grant from the Jerry Metcalf Foundation to help him produce a thirty-image series of photographs of the Archie Bray Foundation grounds. He has created numerous flabbergastingly profound projects during his fruitful career.

Julie Cajune is a member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, and a statewide leader in Indian education. She has helped develop curriculum programs and materials for schools on and around the Flathead Reservation, and has served as an advisor and curriculum consultant on many cultural, literary and educational projects. A highly sought-after presenter, she is a board member of the Montana-Wyoming Indian Education Association and Humanities Montana.

Hipólito Rafael Chacón, author of The Original Man: The Life and Work of Montana Architect A.J. Gibson, is Professor of Art History and Criticism and Interim Chair of the Department of Art at The University of Montana-Missoula. He is a specialist on renaissance and baroque art and has taken students on study trips to Bolivia, Chicago, Florence, Rome, and Peru. His current research interests lie in American architectural history, historic preservation, and Montana history, including the history of its visual arts. He is the 2007 recipient of the Dorothy Ogg Award for Individual Contributions to Historic Preservation. In addition to his publication on Gibson, he has recently written a Federal Report on the paintings in the historic lodges at Glacier National Park and "Palimpsest," a critical essay for the Newberry Library in Chicago on the exhibition Open and Closed that focused on the tense dialogue between contemporary art and the library and archives in the post-modern era.

Fred Haefele’s 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), and most recently published an essay in Salon.com. Haefele has taught creative writing at the University of Montana and at Stanford, where he was a Jones Lecturer. He lives in Helena with his wife, writer Caroline Patterson, and two children.

Michel Hogue is a doctoral student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He is working on a study of the northern Great Plains. He is a contributing author to The Borderlands of the American and Canadian West.

Krys Holmes is author of Montana: Stories of the Land, (Montana Historical Society, 2008) a comprehensive history of Montana that has been adopted as the history textbook for Montana’s 7-8 graders. She wrote the interpretive text for the First Peoples Buffalo Jump State Park visitor’s center, has edited books on a wide variety of topics, has had several short stories, poems, and essays published in literary publications, and currently writes book reviews for Montana Magazine. She is also the publicist for the Myrna Loy Center in Helena.

Kirby Larson is author of Hattie Big Sky, a young adult historical novel, which is a 2007 Newbery Honor Award and Montana Book Award winner, as well as a Junior Library Guild selection, a Borders Original Voices title, a Barnes & Noble Teen Discover title, a School Library Journal Best Book, a Book Links Lasting Connections, and Humanities Montana’s One Book Montana 2008 selection.

Dr. Richard Littlebear was born in Lame Deer, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. He earned a masters of education from Montana State University, and a Ph.D. from Boston College. He is currently president of Dull Knife Tribal College and writes and speaks extensively on Native American tribal languages and the importance of passing on living languages as part of education and culture. Despite his seeming successes in the world of white man's education, Dr. Littlebear learned to read and write the Cheyenne language, mainly on his own, and he considers that his greatest academic achievement.

Joseph Marshall III was born and raised on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He was raised in a traditional native household by his maternal grandparents, and his first language is Lakota. In that environment he also learned the ancient tradition of oral storytelling. He is one of the founders of Sinte Gleska University (1971) on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation. He has written numerous books, including Hundred in the Hand, based on the Fetterman Battle of 1866, and The Long Knives are Crying, the second novel in Marshall’s acclaimed Lakota Western series.

Rusty Morrison's the true keeps calm biding its story won the 2008 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and the 2007 Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize, selected by Peter Gizzi. This manuscript also won the 2007 Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, selected by Susan Howe. Rusty Morrison's first poetry collection, Whethering, won the Colorado Prize for Poetry (Center for Literary Publishing 2004), selected by Forrest Gander. She won the 2008 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry from Cutbank Literary Magazine, which is published by the University of Montana. The judge was Michele Glazer. She is a contributing editor for Poetry Flash, as well as co-publisher and co-editor of Omnidawn.

Greg Pape's books include Border Crossings, Black Branches, Storm Pattern, and Sunflower Facing the Sun. His poems have been published in The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, Poetry, Colorado Review, Missouri Review, and numerous other publications. The recipient of the Richard Hugo Memorial Poetry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and the Edwin Ford Piper Poetry Award, he teaches in the writing program at the University of Montana and in the brief-residency program at Spalding University. He lives with his family in the Bitterroot Valley. Greg is currently serving as Montana's second Poet Laureate.

Tony Rees is author of Arc of the Medicine Line: Mapping the World’s Longest Undefended Border Across the Western Plains, published by Vancouver’s Douglas & McIntyre in September, 2007 and in the US by the University of Nebraska Press in March, 2008. It received the 2007 McWilliams Prize for Popular History from the Manitoba Historical Society.

Russell Rowland was born and raised in Montana, where his grandparents were pioneer ranchers in the southeast corner of the state. He has an MA in Creative Writing from Boston University, and has been published in numerous publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Big Sky Journal, and several anthologies. His first novel, In Open Spaces, made the Chronicle's bestseller list, and was named among the Best of the West 2002 by The Salt Lake City Tribune. The sequel, The Watershed Years, has been named a finalist for the High Plains Book Award, which will be named in October. Russell teaches at MSU-Billings, as well as online with Gotham Writing Workshops. He is also the fiction editor for two online publications, The Smoking Poet (http://thesmokingpoet.tripod.com/summer2008/) and Stone's Throw, (stonesthrowmagazine.com)

Caleb Shields is co-author of The History of the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, Montana, 1800-2000. He has had a long and active life in tribal affairs at both the local and national level. He was first elected to the Fort Peck Tribal Executive Board in 1975 and served twenty-four consecutive years before retiring from politics in late 1999. He served as tribal chairman for his last three terms. Shields is an enrolled Sioux of the Fort Peck Tribes and is the grandson of the last chief of the Fort Kipp Community, Chief Andrew Red Boy Shields.

Susanna Sonnenberg was born in London in 1965 and grew up in New York. Her essays have appeared in Elle, O, the Oprah Magazine and Parenting, among other magazines. She lives in Missoula with her husband and two sons.

Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs is co-author of The Lewis and Clark Companion: An Encyclopedic Guide to the Voyage of Discovery. She lectures nationally about her experiences and observations on the Lewis and Clark Trail which she first followed in 1976 with her father, bestselling author Stephen Ambrose. She works with conservation and citizens groups to preserve and protect the trail and adjoining wilderness areas.
She holds two degrees in History from the University of Montana and currently writes local history and serves on the Boards of the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center Foundation, the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation, Montana Preservation Alliance, Friends of Montana PBS and the American Prairie Foundation. Stephenie lives in Helena, Montana with her husband John.

Todd Wilkinson is a journalist whose stories have appeared in a number of prominent newspapers and magazines, including The Wall Street Journal, US News & World Report, Christian Science Monitor, and Audubon, among dozens of others. Author of several books on Montana land, wildlife, and conservation issues including Watching Yellowstone And Grand Teton Wildlife: The Best Places to Look From Roads and Trails.