Meet the Authors
We're very excited to welcome the following authors to the 2021 Chippewa Valley Book Festival. Peruse the authors here and then hop over to the 2021 schedule of events to learn more about where and when you can meet them.
There's a whole separate group of authors visiting the children around the Chippewa Valleys through our Authors in the Schools program. Click here to learn more about these authors.
Brian Freeman
BRIAN FREEMAN is a New York Times bestselling author of more than twenty thrillers, including the Duluth-based Jonathan Stride series and multiple popular stand-alone novels. In 2019, he was selected by the Robert Ludlum estate to take over Ludlum’s iconic Jason Bourne series, and his novel The Bourne Evolution was named one of the best mysteries and thrillers of 2020 by Kirkus Reviews. Since 2005, Freeman has sold books in 46 countries and 23 languages. He has also won the Thriller Award for Best Hardcover Novel and been a two-time Edgar Award finalist.
Dasha Kelly Hamilton
DASHA KELLY HAMILTON is currently the Poet Laureate for the state of Wisconsin. She is a writer, performance artist, and creative change agent, applying the creative process to facilitate dialogues around human and social wellness. She is also the author of two novels, three poetry collections, four spoken word albums and one collection of personal vignettes. She has taught at colleges, conferences, and classrooms and curated fellowships for emerging leaders. An Arts Envoy for the U.S. Embassy, Hamilton has facilitated community building initiatives in Botswana, Toronto, Mauritius, and Beirut. Her touring production, Makin’ Cake (with a stop at Pablo Center at the Confluence in February), uniquely engages communities in a forward dialogue on race, class, and equity. Hamilton is a national Rubinger Fellow and Poet Laureate for the City of Milwaukee.
Madeline Miller
Madeline Miller’s first novel and New York Times bestseller, The Song of Achilles, was awarded the 2012 Orange Prize for Fiction. Her second novel, Circe, also a New York Times bestseller, won the Indies Choice Best Adult Fiction of the Year Award as well as being shortlisted for the 2019 Women’s Prize for Fiction.
With unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and page-turning suspense, Circe is a triumph of storytelling, an intoxicating epic of family rivalry, palace intrigue, love and loss, as well as a celebration of indomitable female strength in a man's world. Circe is currently being adapted for television series by HBO Max.
Kate Moore
KATE MOORE is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Radium Girls, which won the 2017 Goodreads Choice Award for Best History, was voted U.S. librarians’ favorite nonfiction book of 2017, and was named a Notable Nonfiction Book of 2018 by the American Library Association. A British writer based in London, Moore writes across a variety of genres and has had multiple titles on the Sunday Times bestseller list.
Her passion as a writer is to help people to have a voice, especially those silenced through injustice. With every book, she hopes to take readers on a visceral journey so that they too can experience the extraordinary lives of others.
Lila Quintero Weaver
LILA QUINTERO WEAVER is the author-illustrator of the graphic novel Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White, which details her family’s 1961 immigration from Argentina to the racially torn American South. As a documentarian of the immigrant experience, Weaver has lectured at college campuses across the United States and exhibited original art at numerous institutions, including Whitman College, the University of Richmond, Levine Museum of the New South, The Ohio State University’s Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, and The Rosa Parks Museum.
Kao Kalia Yang
KAO KALIA YANG is the award-winning author of three memoirs: The Latehomecomer, The Song Poet, and Somewhere in the Unknown World. She’s the contributor and co-editor of the groundbreaking collection, What God is Honored Here?: Writings on Miscarriage and Infant Loss By and For Native Women and Women of Color. She is also the author of the children’s books: A Map Into the World, The Shared Room, The Most Beautiful Thing, and Yang Warriors. Yang works from Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Yang’s work has been recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Chautauqua Prize, the PEN America Literary Awards, the Daytons Literary Peace Prize, as Notable Books by the American Library Association, Kirkus Best Books of the Year, the Heartland Booksellers Award, and garnered four Minnesota Book Awards.
