Featured Speakers

James Prosek, fisherman, painter, essayist, activist, and our keynote speaker, is the author of The Complete Angler: A Connecticut Yankee Follows in the Footsteps of Walton, Fly Fishing along the 41^st Parallel:  From Connecticut to Mongolia and Home Again, and Trout: An Illustrated History among other nonfiction works.  The New York Times proclaimed him to be the “Audobon of the fishing world,” and he collaborated on the Emmy and George Foster Peabody Award-winning film adaptation of The Complete  Angler, which aired on ESPN.

Julia Kasdorf, poet, biographer, and life-long Pennsylvanian, won the Agnes Lynch Starett Poetry Prize in 1991 for Sleeping Preacher.  Her works explore the relationships between her Mennonite heritage and her subsequent life experiences and include such titles as Eve’s Striptease, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, and Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish-American. Currently, Kasdorf directs the Master of Fine Arts Program in creative writing at Pennsylvania State University.