"The Wisconsin Farm They Built: Tales of Family & Fortitude" | Author Event with Corey Geiger

The Wisconsin Farm They Built: Tales of Family & Fortitude, by Corey Geiger, begins when Elmer Pritzl was thrown into adulthood at the tender age of sixteen after his mother Anna was killed by a train. A clever and crafty fellow, Elmer quickly found work at the local foundry. Promoted to foreman by age eighteen, he began supervising men double and even triple his age during the depths of the Great Depression. However, that professional career track ended abruptly five years later when Elmer fell in love with a farmer’s daughter, Julia Burich. Six months after their wedding, Julia’s father passed away, and with no living male relatives left in her life, Julia’s mother, Anna Burich, asked, “Elmer, will you run my farm?” So, Elmer, born a city boy, transformed his life and began a love affair with a Wisconsin family farm. Join Corey at Manitowoc Public Library on Thursday, March 13, at 6 PM in the Balkansky Community Room for a discussion of this award-winning novel. He pairs his rural roots and lively storytelling talents to capture generational local tales that have been described to him as "conversation starters for families . . . [that] often spark memories among grandparents and parents . . . leading to wonderful conversations within the entire family.”

International agricultural journalist and economist, Corey Geiger, is known to friends as the “Dancing Dairyman.” He has danced his way onto Steve Harvey’s Family Feud television show, Texas Two-Stepped on the colored shavings during the Supreme Champion ceremonies in front of a crowd of 4,500 at World Dairy Expo, and competed at the Fred Astaire Cross Country Dance Competition national finals, where he and his wife, Krista Knigge, won top amateur couple honors in their division. In 1995, this University of Wisconsin–Madison graduate joined the Hoard’s Dairyman editorial team and its publishing footprint dating back to 1870. In 2013, Geiger was tapped as the publication’s fifth lead editor. Five years later, he spearheaded the effort that brought Hoard’s Dairyman China to the marketplace, joining its English, Japanese and Spanish editions. Geiger was elected the sixty-fifth president of Holstein USA in 2019. He was co-editor of World Dairy Expo’s fiftieth anniversary book, We Need a Show, and served as fundraising co-chair for the Farm Wisconsin Discovery Center. He has spoken in Canada, China, Mexico, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore and over twenty U.S. states. He remains true to his farming roots, managing the cropland and facility maintenance on his family’s farm that dates back to 1867.

The Wisconsin Farm They Built: Tales of Family and Fortitude have won three prestigious book competitions: The Next Generation Indie Book Awards (the world’s largest book awards program for independent publishers and self-published authors), The Independent Publisher Book Awards (which won a Gold Medal as the first-place entry in the Great Lakes History Category) and The 18th Annual National Indie Excellence Awards in the Midwest Regional Non-Fiction Category.