Fox Cities Book Festival: Connecting writers and readers across our diverse communities.

Michael Edmonds is fascinated by eccentric, unusual, and atypical people or events that mainstream history has often overlooked. He’s the author of several books on Wisconsin history, including Taking Flight: A History of Birds and People in the Heart of America; Warriors, Saints and Scoundrels: Brief Portraits of Real People Who Shaped Wisconsin; The Wisconsin Capitol: Stories of a Monument and Its People; and Out of the Northwoods: The Many Lives of Paul Bunyan. He is a 1976 graduate of Harvard University and has taught part-time at the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1986 in addition to his day job at the Wisconsin Historical Society. For more than a decade he wrote the syndicated weekly newspaper column, “Odd Wisconsin,” highlighting bizarre and little-known stories from the state’s past. His work has won national awards from the American Folklore Society and the American Association for State and Local History.