Regional Author Showcase

Former long-time ACW board member Christopher Shaw edited Adirondack Life in the eighties and interviewed North Country writers on NCPR’s Northern Voices in the nineties. His book Sacred Monkey River: A Canoe Trip With the Gods came out with WW Norton in 2000, called “a magnificent achievement,” by the Washington Post Book World. He taught writing at Middlebury College for 20 years, retiring in 2018. Since then, he has published The Power Line: A Novel; and The Crazy Wisdom: Memoir of a Friendship, both available in local bookstores. His writing has appeared in The Adirondack Reader, the New York Times and New York Times Book Review; Outside, the New England Review, and many other publications.

Kelsey Francis’s work has appeared in Longleaf Review, Porcupine Literary, Adirondack Life Magazine, The Washington Post, and the “Modern Love” column of The New York Times. Her writing was recently selected for the anthologies Already Gone: 40 Stories of Running Away (Alan Squire Publishing, 2023) and Rooted 2: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction (Outpost19, 2023). She received a 2020 fellowship with The New York Times Teaching Project and earned an MFA in nonfiction from Mountainview MFA at Southern New Hampshire University in 2023.

She lives, teaches, and writes in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York. More of her writing can be found at kelseyfranciswrites.com.

Independent scholar, writer, and speaker Amy Godine started researching and writing about Adirondack social history in 1988, when she moved to Saratoga Springs. Focusing on the under-told stories of marginalized communities, ethnic enclaves, and Adirondackers of little notice in the environmental narrative, Godine celebrates a peopled Adirondacks as diverse, vivid, and dramatic as the wild land itself.Most of her articles may be found in Adirondack Life. Scholarly journals like Prospects: A Journal of American Cultural Studies, New York Folklore, Hudson River Valley Review: A Journal of Regional Cultural Studies, Clinton County Antiquarian, have published her as well. Her fiction has appeared in The Quarterly, Triquarterly, and The North American Review, among other literary journals.For the social action group, John Brown Lives!, Godine wrote and curated the exhibition, Dreaming of Timbuctoo, which opened at the Adirondack Museum and has since beguiled viewers at venues as far-flung as Rutgers, Skidmore, Siena, St. Lawrence, Middlebury Town Hall, the New York State Museum, the Adirondack Correctional Facility in Ray Brook, the Whallonsburg Grange, and the New York State Fair. It is also on permanent display at the John Brown Farm State Historic Site in North Elba.

Dr. Alice Green is the Executive Director of the Center for Law and Justice, a civil rights organization she founded in 1985.  She has a doctorate in criminal justice and 3 master’s degrees – education, social work, and criminology. The Center provides community education on civil and criminal justice, legal guidance and advocacy, crisis intervention, and community planning and organizing around criminal justice, civil rights and civil liberties issues of particular concern to poor communities and those of color.

Betsy Kepes writes from her home-made house in the northwestern Adirondacks. She is the book reviewer for North Country Public Radio and writes for The Adirondack Explorer. Her work is published in anthologies including A Mile in Her Boots and Wild with Child as well as Highlights for Children and Appleseeds magazines. She was chosen for the ACW Anne LaBastille Memorial Writing Residency in 2017. She is a piano teacher, a church musician and a long-distance athlete. She tends her large vegetable gardens while listening to books.

Roger Mitchell is the author of 13 books of poetry, most recently As Water Moves (2023) and Reason’s Dream (2018), has recently published Their Own Society: Prose on Poetry, a collection of reviews and essays and completed a biography of the poet Jean Garrigue. He lives in Jay, New York, with his wife, the fiction writer, Dorian Gossy.

Curt Stager is a scientist, educator, and author whose research deals with climate change and environmental history in Africa, the Adirondacks, and elsewhere around the world. His work has been published in prominent journals including Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, his writings for the public have appeared in periodicals such as National Geographic and The New York Times, and he co-hosted Natural Selections, a weekly science program on North Country Public Radio, for 30 years. Curt is also the author of four books, most recently “Still Waters: The Secret World of Lakes.” He currently teaches natural sciences at Paul Smith’s College, where he holds the Draper-Lussi endowed Chair in Paleoecology and Lake Ecology. In 2013, the Carnegie Case Foundation named him Science Professor of the Year for New York State.

Annie Stoltie is the editor in chief of Adirondack Life magazine, winner of the 2023 International Regional Magazine Association’s Magazine of the Year. In addition to writing more than a hundred articles for Adirondack Life since joining its staff in 2000, her work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Good Housekeeping and Forbes magazines. Stoltie is a judge for the American Society of Magazine Editors’ National Magazine Awards and serves on the board of directors of the International Regional Magazine Association.