Thanks go out to our wonderful 2012 sponsors!
FCBF official booksellers:
The 2012 Fox Cities Reads is underway! Pick up a copy of Make the Impossible Possible by Bill Strickland at your local library and join in community-wide discussions about the book. The author will visit the Fox Cities April 16-18 during the Fox Cities Book Festival.
Author Biography
(from the author's web site)
Michael Perry is a humorist and author of the bestselling memoirs Population 485: Meeting Your Neighbors One Siren at a Time, Truck: A Love Story and Coop: A Year of Poultry, Pigs and Parenting, as well as the essay collection Off Main Street. Perry has written for Esquire, The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Backpacker, Orion and Salon.com, and is a contributing editor to Men’s Health. He has performed and produced two live audience humor recordings (I Got It From the Cows and Never Stand Behind a Sneezing Cow) and he performs regularly with his band the Long Beds. Perry lives in rural Wisconsin , where he remains active with the local volunteer rescue service. He can be found online at www.sneezingcow.com.
Raised on a small dairy farm, Perry equates his writing career to cleaning calf pens – just keep shoveling, and eventually you’ve got a pile so big, someone will notice. Perry further prepared for the writing life by reading every Louis L’Amour cowboy book he could get his hands on – most of them twice. He then worked for five summers on a real ranch in Wyoming , a career cut short by his fear of horses and an incident in which he almost avoided a charging bull. Based on a series of informal conversations held around the ol’ branding fire, Perry still holds the record for being the only cowboy in all of Wyoming who was simultaneously attending nursing school, from which he graduated in 1987 after giving the commencement address in a hairdo combining mousse spikes on top, a mullet in back, and a moustache up front – otherwise known as the bad hair trifecta. Recently Perry has begun to lose his hair, and although his current classification varies depending on the lighting, he is definitely Bald Man Walking.
Perry has run a forklift, operated a backhoe, driven truck, worked as a proofreader and physical therapy aide and has distinguished himself as a licensed cycle rider by careening into a concrete bridge completely unassisted. He has worked for a surgeon, answered a suicide hotline, picked rock in the rain with an alcoholic transvestite, was a country music roadie in Switzerland , and once worked as a roller-skating Snoopy. He can run a pitchfork, milk a cow in the dark, and say “I don’t understand” in French, Greek and Norwegian. He has never been bucked off a horse, and contends that falling off doesn’t count. He is utterly unable to polka.
Additional Information
- Author's web site - sneezingcow.com
- Perry on Facebook
- Perry on Twitter
- Michael Perry and The Long Beds
Join the Friends of Appleton Public Library and the Fox Cities Book Festival for An Evening of Music and Storytelling. We are hosting a special fundraiser event for the Fox Cities Book Festival, featuring Wisconsin author Michael Perry with his band the Long Beds.
Date: Saturday, April 16
Time: 7:30pm
Location: OuterEdge Stage, 303 N Oneida Street, Downtown Appleton
Ticket Price: $25 (Purchase tickets now)
About Michael Perry and the Long Beds: Perry began writing songs in the early 1990s during long nights when he was struggling to survive on prose (he is the author of four books: Population 485, Truck, Off Main Street, and Coop). With no arts background (he has a nursing degree) he found himself drawn especially to the work of poets and singer/songwriters. (In interviews Perry tends to list his greatest literary influences as Dylan Thomas and Steve Earle – and not necessarily in that order.) “I remember writing late one night and hearing a Kevin Welch song with the line, ‘I whiskey’d up my coffee cup… sittin’ here tryin’ not to call you up,’” says Perry, “and I was floored by the rhythm and the story in that single line…” He began writing songs as a way to break up all-night typing sessions, and eventually he had enough of them that a musician friend invited him to play a coffee shop. “I’m not saying I was nervous, but I ripped out a sixty-minute set list in thirty-two minutes flat,” says Perry. By 2004, he had begun recruiting Long Beds. In 2006, he released his first album, Headwinded. Visit The Long Beds Website at www.sneezingcow.com.
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Big thanks go to Atlas Coffee Mill for hosting monthly meetings for the Fox Cities Book Festival Board! We appreciate your support of the Festival and just can't thank you enough for providing a welcoming meeting space for us to plan and dream.