Michael Wallace knows Bigfoot intimately. His father was Ray Wallace, the man whose practical jokes around California logging sites contributed to Sasquatch lore and led to a fan base for the mythical furry creature with the large feet (the feet were carved by a fellow logger). The Bigfoot hoaxer wasn’t fully revealed until after his death. Michael knows the details of his father’s fantastical tricks and how he performed them, along with fears of being shot while wearing the black-furred suit.

Cheryl Landes will be reading “The Wildest Town in Oregon,” a chapter from her latest book, Those Wild Northwest Days (Second Edition), a collection of 25 offbeat and true stories about people and places in the Pacific Northwest from the late 1800s through the early 1920s. The book was originally published in 2006 and has been updated with new information and photos.

   Linda Eddleston will be reading from her latest writing project, titled “Play on Words,” demonstrating how challenging the English language can be when words have different meanings.  She will take us on absurd and humorous word adventures. 

Linda is a retired elementary/special education teacher. She has published two books, My Three Friends  and Just Call Me Frank: A Story of a Hobo.  

Jan Bono will be reading from her 19th book, Two Cozies for Christmas. These “cozy mysteries” were originally written as Hallmark-type Christmas movie scripts. In “Presence Under the Christmas Tree,” a rather inept but comical sleuth tries to figure out who left the photo of a bare-chested man among her gifts from the staff party. The man’s face is obscured, but could he be “the handsome hunk” she’d asked the mall Santa to bring her?

Peter Adams Young will be reading from Another Death at Gettysburg, the second in his Contemporary Battlefield Mystery series, modern-day whodunits located in and around historic Civil War battlefields. During a reenactment of Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, a participant is shot and killed with live ammunition, most certainly not an accident. Mike Davis, a reenactor and professor of US history, investigates the murder.

Dawn Shipman is a Longview author who spent many years writing for inspirational and equestrian magazines before turning to novel writing. The first book in her Young Adult Fantasy trilogy, The Lost Stones of Argonia, came out in 2021. She’s currently working on the prequel.

James Dott will be reading from his new poetry collection, Touch Wood (Watershed Press.) The poems form a lyric field guide to trees. The short life and tragic death of David Douglas, early botanist who cataloged Northwest trees, threads through the work, offering elegies, narratives, and meditations on our tangled histories.

Tami J. Whitmore will be sharing from her latest book, The Year Around: A 1930’s Diary. After purchasing rural property in 2020, she found a diary left in a tote in a storage shed. It belonged to Ione Merritt, who was born in 1909, in the tiny town of Farmington, straddling the Washington and Idaho border.

Craig Werner writes fiction and non-fiction as well as poetry. As a former (frustrated) musician, he finds that those times when he is most introspective and immersed in stories is when stories are accompanied by music.  At WordFest, Craig will discuss song writing as story-telling. He says, “As authors, we immerse ourselves in our stories and in our characters. We research locations, historical events, and people, then weave those elements

Emmett Wheatfall is an Oregon Poet Laureate nominee, and recipient of the prestigious Oregon Poetry Association Patricia Ruth Banta Award. His poetry has been published in his several books, as well as collections and anthologies. His collection, As Clean as a Bone, was a 2019 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist and a da Vinci Eye award finalist. Emmett has keynoted two Oregon Poetry Association’s Conferences, and in 2020, Corban University produced a 9-part documentary highlighting Emmett’s early life and poetry. You can find him at https://www.poet-emmettwheatfall.com

Zac (Sunflower) Oberg is a poet from Athens, Ohio, now based in Portland. His poems move between tenderness and philosophical inquiry, humor and tragedy, employing big words and simple truths. His work often touches on “the quiet work of becoming and how we choose each other, lose each other, and insist on loving anyway.” Recently featured at Poetry Street PNW, Zac is an avid attendee of open mics across Portland every night of the week. More information at www.zacoberg.com

Jim MacLeod is retired from the computer industry and the author of seven e-books in the Harry & Company Mystery series. A long-time fan of Ogden Nash humor, he dabbles in limericks for the sheer joy of creating whimsical wordplay. For him, “they’re the mental equivalent of snacking.”

Crime writer Tom Larsen will be reading an excerpt from his article, “Women Fight Back,” part of Women Who Murder, which is the sixth volume in the series, Best New True Crime Stories from Mango Publishing. Tom’s article tells the story of two Mexican women who fought back against their abusers. Femicide, the act of killing someone simply because they are female, has only recently been codified in the Mexican constitution and enforcement has been sporadic at best. This is a tale of two women who were forced into violent reactions by the society that failed them.

Kamil Khan who writes and performs as “Khancept” is an immigrant to the US from Pakistan who utilizes the spoken word, hip hop, and poetry platforms to give voice to the struggles of indigenous peoples around the world. At WordFest, he will perform a series of poems, including “Filastin Erased,” highlighting the life, resilience, outrage, betrayal, and solitude amid what he calls “the deliberate erasure of the Palestinian people.”