2022 Authors and Artists
In no particular order, the following authors, poets, and artists are part of this year’s featured programming.
Maryfrances Wagner
Author and Poet
Maryfrances Wagner
Maryfrances Wagner is a poet and co-editor of I-70 Review and is a board member and programming chair for The Writers Place. Her newest books are The Silence of Red Glass, The Immigrants’ New Camera, and Solving for X. Her poems have appeared in many literary magazines including New Letters, Birmingham Poetry Review, River Styx, Main Street Rag, Rattle, American Journal of Poetry, Laurel Review, Voices in Italian Americana, and Poetry East as well as anthologies and textbooks. The Missouri Arts Council chose her as Individual Artist of 2020, and she currently serves at Missouri’s 6th Poet Laureate, where her job is to promote poetry throughout the state.
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Ed Wheatley
Author and Filmmaker
Ed Wheatley
Ed Wheatley is an award winning author, film producer, and sports historian. His works have received numerous accolades and awards including Sports Collectors Digest selection as the best book published on baseball in 2017, a 2017 nomination for the Lawrence Ritter Award by the Society for American Baseball Research for the best book in baseball, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s selection as one of the top 25 books of 2020. He has produced two films shown on the PBS network that each received EMMY award nominations, as well as a win in 2020.
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Carolyn Mueller-Kelly
Author
Carolyn Mueller-Kelly
Carolyn Mueller is a zookeeper at the Saint Louis Zoo and the author of Lily: A True Story of Courage and the Joplin Tornado, Missouri Almanac, and Forest Park: A Walk through History. She spends her days training a variety of animals, ranging from a sloth to porcupines, for summer shows at the Emerson Children's Zoo. She has spent the last decade living within two miles of Forest Park and countless hours and miles exploring its bike paths and running trails with her husband and two children.
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Brooks Blevins
Author and Professor
Brooks Blevins
Dr. Brook Blevins is a native of the rural Ozarks of Arkansas. He is the Noel Boyd Professor of Ozarks Studies in the history department at Missouri State University. He is the author or editor of a dozen books, including the recent History of the Ozarks trilogy from the University of Illinois Press and the forthcoming Up South in the Ozarks, a collection of essays that will be published by the University of Arkansas Press later this year.
Amanda E. Doyle
Author
Amanda E. Doyle
Amanda E. Doyle is a writer and zealous St. Louis transplant. She's the author of several books, including 100 Things to Do in St. Louis Before You Die, 100 Things to Do in Missouri Before You Die, To the Top! A Gateway Arch Story, Standing Up for Civil Rights in St. Louis, Missouri Almanac, St. Louis Sound: An Illustrated Timeline, and the upcoming Tower Grove Park: Common Ground and Grateful Shade Since 1872. She seeks out the city's singular charms with her husband and two children.
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Dan and Connie Burkhardt
Authors and Conservationists
Dan and Connie Burkhardt
Dan and Connie Burkhardt live in St. Louis and on their farm near the Missouri River with a herd of 50 cows and several flocks of chickens. Dan Burkhardt has also created two coffee-table books on two very different watersheds—Missouri River Country: 100 Miles of Stories and Scenery from Hermann to the Confluence (2013) and Florida Bay Forever: The Story of Water from the Everglades to the Keys (2013).
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Mon Trice
Author
Mon Trice
Mon Trice was born in East Saint Louis, Illinois and spent most of her childhood there. At an early age she chose books over toys and often made up stories and plays. Mon Trice is a publisher, author of three children’s books, a poet, and co-founder of Focus GSD, a life skills consulting company. She received her BS in Psychology from Southeast Missouri State University and an MBA Degree from Lindenwood University. Mon Trice is a humanitarian at heart, offering her time and energy to such causes as March of Dimes, Jump Rope for Heart, Junior Achievement and Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. Mon Trice now resides in St. Louis, Missouri, and believes children should see themselves reflected in the literature they read.
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Patrick Murphy
Author and TV Personality
Patrick Murphy
Patrick Murphy has spent the past 30 years producing television programs for PBS, both locally and nationally. A five-time Emmy award winner, he has created documentaries, weekly series, and musical variety shows. For the past 22 years he has hosted the St. Louis Speakers series from Powell Hall, interviewing more than 150 of the world's most renowned artists, writers, adventurers, and political leaders. Patrick is the author of Candy Men: The Story of Switzers' Licorice and The Irish in St. Louis: From Shanty to Lace Curtain. He is also a working artist, exhibiting his collection of woodcut prints in galleries throughout the St. Louis region.
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Gary R. Kremer
Author
Gary R. Kremer
Gary R. Kremer is the executive director of the State Historical Society of Missouri, a position he has held since 2004. Prior to that date, he taught history at Lincoln University and William Woods University for thirty years. He also served as the state archivist of Missouri from 1987-1991. He has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books on Missouri history, including, most recently, This Place of Promise: A Historian Reflects on 200 Years of Missouri History.
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Angela Elam
Radio Host
Angela Elam
Angela Elam has been fascinated with hearing stories since she was a child in rural South Carolina, listening to the adults around her talk about their struggles with day-to-day life. Add that to her love of reading and writing, it's no wonder she ended up as an English major and in public radio, first training at Deutsche Welle in Cologne, Germany, and eventually working at WUGA in Athens, Georgia after completing her MFA in playwriting at the University of Georgia. There she collaborated on several projects with the literary journal, The Georgia Review, which served as a precursor to her 25 years of producing the nationally-distributed literary show, New Letters on the Air, for New Letters magazine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where she also taught radio production for the Communication Studies Department.
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Lori Stillman
Author
Lori Stillman
Lori Stillman started writing her story down in the form of a journal at a young age after discovering her love for books and words. After managing a manufacturing company for 22 years, she reinvented herself as a certified personal trainer. Born in rural Missouri, she is a self-proclaimed tomboy and daddy’s girl. Lori is a wife, fur baby momma, and travel enthusiast. Her passion for hearing people’s stories sparked her interest in having her father tell his own. Together she and her father, John Stillman, co-authored Jumping from Helicopters: A Vietnam Memoir, a vivid and moving memoir that unearths fifty years of repressed memories with stunning accuracy and raw details.
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Thomas Eyssell
Author
Thomas Eysell
Thomas Eyssell has been a Professor of Finance and Legal Studies at the University of Missouri St. Louis for over thirty years, and a car guy for nearly fifty. His love of automobiles began with his work as a mechanic in the early 1970s, and continues to this day. He co-authored of They Will Run: The Golden Age of Automobiles in St. Louis with fellow car enthusiast and historian Molly Butterworth. He currently has four 1960s muscle cars in his garage and is always looking to add to the fleet.
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Porcshe Moran Murphy
Author
Porcshe Moran Murphy
Porcshe Moran Murphy is a marketing and communications professional based in central Missouri. She creates digital and print content for global and regional brands, covering topics like food and drink, travel, home design, healthcare technology and business. Porcshe holds a bachelor’s degree in magazine journalism from the University of Missouri. In her free time, she enjoys being at home with her husband and furkids, reading mystery novels, attending arts and culture events, and exploring restaurants, wineries, state parks and museums. She is the coauthor of Missouri Comfort: Recipes and Stories from Favorite Places, coming next Fall.
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Dea Hoover
Author
Dea Hoover
As a veteran tour director, Dea Hoover is accustomed to hearing the familiar mantra, “Are We There Yet?” Thus the name of her full-service tour operation in the city of St. Louis. In 2008, Are We There Yet?, LLC expanded its operations with the acquisition of St. Louis’s first local receptive tour operation Discover St. Louis, LLC, founded in 1975. She is the best-selling author of STL Scavenger: The Ultimate Guide to St. Louis’s Hidden Treasures.
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Dan O'Neill
Author
Dan O'Neill
Born in St. Louis, Dan O'Neill graduated from the same University City High School as Tennessee Williams, Bing Devine, and Nelly. With a journalism degree from the University of Missouri, he has been an award-winning feature writer and columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, MSNBC.com, and numerous publications. Dan is the author of When the Blues Go Marching In: An Illustrated Timeline of St. Louis Blues Hockey and Celebration: The Magic of the Cardinals in the 1980s.
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Steve Wiegenstein
Author
Steve Wiegenstein
Steve Wiegenstein grew up in the eastern Ozarks, which is the setting for his novels and short stories. His story collection Scattered Lights was a finalist for the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction. He is a frequent speaker at libraries and civic groups throughout the state, and he blogs about Ozarks and rural issues at stevewiegenstein.wordpress.com. A longtime teacher at colleges around the state, Steve now lives in Columbia.
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Father Dominic Garramone
Author and TV Personality
Father Dominic Garramone
Father Dominic Garramone, OSB, a monk of Saint Bede Abbey in Peru, Ill., was the host of the PBS cooking show Breaking Bread with Father Dominic from 1999 to 2001, and has written ten cookbooks. He still produces pledge specials for public television. While usually living a secluded life in a rural monastery, he occasionally travels throughout the Midwest giving lively talks (both culinary and inspirational) to civic and religious groups. Breakfast is his favorite meal, regardless of the time of day.
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Mathew Unger
Chef
Mathew Unger
Mathew’s love of food and cooking started at the age of 9 after taking a cooking class from the Sisters of Notre Dame. Mathew received his BA in business from Missouri State University in Springfield, and, after spending a few years as a stockbroker, he decided to turn his passion for food into a career. He’s taught culinary classes, worked in kitchens at local restaurants, and owned and operated his own restaurant, Mathew’s Kitchen. Mathew is currently the Director of Foodservice at Midwest Petroleum, where he oversees Dottie’s, a truckstop diner in Cuba, Missouri, and develops programs for convenience stores throughout Missouri and Illinois. He lives in St. Louis with his wife, Maggie, and their two children. He is the coauthor of the upcoming Missouri Comfort with Porchse Moran Murphy.
Virginia Brackett
Author
Virginia Brackett
Virginia Brackett, PhD helps organize writing workshops for veterans and their families as a member of the Kansas City Veterans Writing Team. She is a board member of the Moral Injury Association and serves on the Great Group Reads committee of the National Women’s Book Association. Brackett’s most recent book, In the Company of Patriots (Sunbury Press, 2019), is a narrative nonfiction study of the effect of the loss of her father to war on her family. Her fiction placed second in the fall 2018 Owl Canyon Hackathon, a competition for which she served as a judge in 2019, and her work was a finalist in the 2019 William Penn Foundation Early Childhood Book Challenge. Her 15 books have received citations from Booklist and the Amelia Bloomer Project (ALA), among others, and she has published dozens of stories, essays, and blog posts for readers from children to adults.
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Cameron Collins
Author
Cameron Collins
Cameron Collins is the author of Distilled History, a St. Louis history and drinking blog that was named the Riverfront Times Best Personal Blog in 2013. His books include St. Louis Brews, Lost Treasures of St. Louis, and Scenes of Historic Wonder. A native of upstate New York, he earned a degree in American History from the University of Dayton and has called St. Louis home since 1995. His unique twist on the history of St. Louis has been featured in presentations at PechaKucha St. Louis, Landmarks Association of St. Louis, and at the Missouri History Museum. A volunteer at the Campbell House Museum, he was awarded the President’s Award from the museum’s Board of Directors in 2015.
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Chris Stuckenschneider
Author
Chris Stuckenschneider
Chris Stuckenschneider, of Washington, is the author of Twist of Fate: The Miracle Colt and His Friends, Patriotic Pals, and My Washington, which she co-authored with photographer Jeanne Miller-Wood. Chris was book editor and a columnist at the Washington Missourian for 22 years and is highly regarded by publishers for her reviews. She is a lifelong literacy advocate and currently reviews books for Neighborhood Reads Bookstore, including overseeing the bookstore’s Bound to Read Blog, which features reviews by a wide variety of readers. Chris serves on the board of the Community Literacy Foundation and coordinates Book Buddy, a literacy project that selects quality children’s books and works with area service groups, businesses and individuals to place these books in school and public libraries. To date, more than 21,000 new, hardcover books have been donated through the project.
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Rick Stromoski
Illustrator
Rick Stromoski
Rick's illustrations and cartoons have appeared in national magazines, advertising, book publishing, children's publications, licensing, newspaper syndication and network television. He has won a bunch of awards. He is a member of the Society of Illustrators, The National Cartoonists Society and the local Costco.
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Nancy Allen
Author and Law Professional
Nancy Allen
Nancy Allen is a New York Times bestselling author and practiced law for fifteen years as Assistant Missouri Attorney General and Assistant Prosecutor in her native Ozarks, trying over thirty jury cases, and served on the faculty of Missouri State University for fifteen years. She is the author of the Ozarks Mystery series (HarperCollins) and the Anonymous Justice series (Grand Central Publishing). With James Patterson, Nancy is co-author of New York Times Bestsellers Juror #3 (2018) and The Jailhouse Lawyer (2021). Nancy is currently working with Patterson on their fourth novel.
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Jessica Horne
Author and Professional Counselor
Jessica Horne
Jessica Horne is a children’s book author and licensed clinical professional counselor born and raised in Kansas City. Jessica has enjoyed writing from an early age, finding delight in poetry and short stories to perform around the city. In 2017, Jessica published her first children’s book, Tia’s Tingles, seeking to combine her admiration for literature and mental health care to support emotional and social wellness for children of all backgrounds. Jessica is also the author of the children’s book Tia’s New Neighbor. She is a proud graduate of Tennessee State University where she obtained a Bachelor's in Psychology and Northwestern University where she received a Master's in Counseling Psychology.
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