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

The author of four novels for young readers, Kurtis Scaletta's most recent novel, Rooting for Rafael Rosales, is about two brave kids who beat the odds: one, a budding environmentalist determined to expose the truth about her father’s employer, a Minneapolis pesticides manufacturer whose products have been linked to colony collapse; the other, a gifted baseball player living in San Pedro de Macoris, the Dominican Republic’s “Cradle of Shortstops.”

Kurtis was born in Louisiana, but moved a lot as a kid. He lived in five states and three foreign countries before he graduated from high school! The most interesting place he lived was Monrovia, Liberia, which inspired his second novel, Mamba Point. Moving made him an avid reader, because books were the friends he could take with him from place to place. He attended the University of North Dakota and the University of Maine before moving to Minneapolis. Kurtis will also be presenting to area schools during his visit to the festival.