Authors On The Ranch

Meet local authors Michelle Schuman from 10:00 AM - NOON and Ann and Alan Votta from NOON - 2:00 PM.

Sunday, April 10, the Friends of the East Manatee Library at Lakewood Ranch will host two local authors. Visit our tent and learn how you can support the future library that is under construction in Lakewood Ranch.

Michelle Schuman was destined to be an environmental activist. She was raised in a small town in eastern Washington state. She met and married her soulmate, all the while engaging in environmental activities all over the West Coast. Her degree in wildlife biology, range management, and soil management served her in so many amazing ways. She studied for her master’s degree in Environmental Policy which served her well when she worked for the state of Alaska. While in graduate school, she worked for a professor who not only encouraged her to write but helped her publish technical papers. Those papers served as the basis for her joy in writing. 

Much of her life was centered in Alaska where she and her engineer husband both had positions in Anchorage. In 1983, she went through the devastation of losing her husband to an accident. After he died, she went all over the world with a camera and backpack to far flung places in New Zealand, South America, and so many others to witness environmental impacts on animals. 

Her experiences against the politics of a very male-dominated culture that is Alaska formed the basis for her memoir The Understory: A Female Environmentalist in the Land of the Midnight Sun which is her second book. She went through her own life changing trauma with a helicopter accident while working in Alaska and while recuperating wrote her first book Jaguar Moon.