Randy Croce
Randy began his documentary career in 1976, photographing Indigenous communities in Montana and Minnesota. He shifted to video in 1983, producing the nationally broadcast documentary, Clouded Land, about White Earth Reservation land claims.Randy worked at the Labor Education Service, University of Minnesota, from 1990 to 2018, as a media/labor history instructor and video producer, making programs in collaboration with unions, as well as immigrant and workers groups. He earned an M.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of Minnesota.Randy’s public TV broadcast shows include If Stone Could Speak about Italian immigrant stonecutters and Who Built Our Capitol? on the workers who constructed the Minnesota statehouse. From 2014 to 2023, he worked on the project team with Tom O’Connell and Anna Kurhajec to produce the historical documentary, The Farmer-Labor Movement: A Minnesota Story.Anna KurhajecAnna chairs the Farmer-Labor Education Committee (FLEC) and works as a Senior Teaching Professor of History at the University of St. Thomas’ Dougherty Family College. Anna’s research examines social movements and radical politics in the 20th and 21st centuries, with particular focus on the Black freedom struggle, the labor movement, and contemporary abolitionist organizing in the United States. She worked with filmmaker Randy Croce and Emeritus FLEC Chair Thomas O’Connell to produce The Farmer-Labor Movement: A Minnesota Story (2023), an historical documentary about the history of the Farmer-Labor movement in Minnesota. Anna earned her PhD in History from the University of Illinois.Larry Long, ‘The American Troubadour’, is giving voice to the unheard
by Adria Carpenter, University of Minnesota LibrariesNot long after his 20th birthday in 1971, Larry Long packed his life into his guitar case and left Minnesota to follow in the footsteps of his role model, Woody Guthrie.He hitchhiked across the country, hopped freight trains, traveled with a fiddle player, and saw America in a way many people don’t. But no matter where he went, working-class people would always open their homes to him.Long didn’t have much money, but he could make music. So before taking off, he wrote ballads on paper bags, in colored pencil with illustrations, and left them pinned to the fridge with a magnet as thank-you’s.”I developed a deep loyalty to working class people because they had very little, but they always had room for one more at their table,” Long said. “I just wanted to give thanks to people, give gratitude for kindness.”In 1979, Long joined the Tractorcade protest, organized by the American Agricultural Movement, where thousands of farmers led a convoy of tractors to the nation’s capitol, demanding higher pay for crops and a voice in agricultural policy decisions.It was then he met Pete Seeger, who inspired him to organize the Mississippi River Revival, a decade-long campaign to clean up the Mississippi river.In 1989, he assembled the first hometown tribute to Woody Guthrie in Okemah, Oklahoma, which has evolved into the annual Woody Guthrie Folk Festival. In 2001 Long sang for Rosa Parks at the 45th Anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycott.Now approaching 74, Long is an accomplished folk musician and singer-songwriter. He’s a Smithsonian Folkways recording artist, recipient of the Pope John XXIII Award and the Spirit of Crazy Horse Award, has performed the world across — including at Madison Square Garden with Joan Baez, Bruce Springsteen, and many others for Pete Seeger’s 90th birthday.Long recently donated his archives of over 150 boxes containing media recordings, performance work, oral histories, letters and correspondence, and more to the University of Minnesota Libraries’ Performing Arts Archives (PAA).His entire collection will be digitized over the next three years thanks to a $300,000 grant from the Council on Library and Information Resources’ Digitizing Hidden Collections: Amplifying Unheard Voices program.”The gold of Larry’s work is that he is working with people,” said Deborah Ultan, curator of the Performing Arts Archive. “It’s the voice of the common family, the immigrant family. It’s about the families and individuals who have struggled to make a life for themselves … It tells a richness of our American history that could otherwise get lost.”

Cory Haala

Cory, serving as moderator, is an assistant professor and Museum Studies Coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. His forthcoming book, When Democrats Won the Heartland: Progressive Populism in the Age of Reagan, 1978-1992 will be published by the University of Illinois Press in 2026. Haala documents how grassroots rural activists, working with national and state Democratic Party leaders, reorganized midwestern politics around “progressive populism.” In addition to oral histories and archival research, Cory is deeply embedded in community engaged projects, and works to help students and community groups document the histories of their communities.

Angela Dawson

Angela Dawson is a fourth-generation farmer, licensed hemp grower, and one of the first—and only—Black women cultivating cannabis in Minnesota. She is the founder of Forty Acre Co-op, the first national Black farmer cooperative focused on cannabis equity, land access, and regenerative agriculture. With over a decade of experience building cooperatives and alternative business models rooted in justice, she also co-founded The Great Rise, a nonprofit building equity into Minnesota’s emerging cannabis economy. Dawson, the first in her family to attend college, was in law school on track to become a corporate attorney when she was called back to her farming roots full time in 2017.

Although her farm is located in Northeast Minnesota, Angela continues to champion sustainable, inclusive solutions for food, medicine, and land sovereignty through training, consulting and advocacy across Minnesota and the country. Her work has been featured in InStyle, Fox News, Mashable, Authority Magazine, and KARE 11.

Dominique Hazzard

Dominique Hazzard is Assistant Professor of African American & African Studies (AA&AS) at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. A scholar of twentieth-century African American history, Hazzard’s work centers on Black food politics in the District of Columbia during the Civil Rights/Black Power period. This work grew in conjunction with Hazzard’s deep involvement with Anacostia Community Museum, the local branch of the Smithsonian Museum, where she played a central role in shaping the award-winning exhibit titled “Food for the People: Eating and Activism in Greater Washington.” As Chief Curator, she conducted over 100 oral histories and carefully mined primary sources. Prior to joining AA&AS, Hazzard taught at Johns Hopkins University and the University of the District Columbia.

Zoe Hollomon

Zoe Hollomon is a multi-racial black, queer, farmer, activist and abolitionist. She is the eldest of 3 siblings and comes from a long line of freedom fighters. Zoe was born in Duluth, MN, but grew up mainly in NY (Buffalo and NYC). She has over 20 years’ experience organizing with grassroots organizations on the East Coast and Midwest, building organizations to influence decision-making in food, farming and environmental related policy. She moved back to MN in 2012 and has since worked advocating and organizing for justice in local, regional and national contexts.

She is a proud co-founder of the Midwest Farmers of Color Collective and in her role as the Executive Director, she leads the organization’s policy work and fundraising & development. She is humbled and amazed by the ingenuity, courage and wisdom of the farmers and cultivators MFCC works with. Zoe is also a co-founder of Rootsprings Farm & Retreat Cooperative in MN, which produces fruit and is a healing retreat space for BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ people and organizations.

Zoe serves on the Transformational Farm Bill Advisory Committee, with other partner organizations fighting for a just transition of our food and agricultural systems. She has served on the Homegrown Minneapolis Food Policy Council and does consulting in Racial Equity in Food Systems. She is also a visual artist and a proud member of the Subversive Sirens, a MN based Synchronized Swimming team committed to black liberation, equity in aquatics, queer visibility, and radical body acceptance. Zoe received her B.S. in Urban & Regional Planning from Cornell University in 2001 and an M.S. from Southern New Hampshire University in Community Economic Development in 2007.

Tracey Deutsch

Tracey Deutsch, moderator, is Associate Professor of History, affiliated with the Departments of American Studies and Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. She supports community engaged projects, researches and writes on food and the politics of food access and has come to see Tracey has led numerous publicly engaged and interdisciplinary initiatives, and has come to believe that honoring everyday caregiving is key to social change and institutional transformation. She served as faculty coordinator of Minnesota Transform, a public engagement initiative dedicated to making universities sites of justice. She is also the author of Building a Housewife’s Paradise: Gender, Politics and American Grocery Stores in the Twentieth Century Government. Currently, she is writing a book about Julia Child and the politics of home cooking in the mid-20th century.

Sarah Smarsh

Sarah Smarsh is a journalist who has reported for the New York Times, Harper’s, the Guardian, and many other publications. A former English professor and grant-writer for social service agencies, Sarah aims for all her work to have a backbone of civic responsibility.

Her first book, Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth, was an instant New York Times bestseller, a finalist for the National Book Award and the Kirkus Prize, the winner of the Chicago Tribune Literary Prize, and a best-books-of-the-year selection by President Barack Obama. Her 2020 book She Come By It Natural: Dolly Parton and the Women Who Lived Her Songs was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a must-read book by TIME Magazine.

Sarah is a regular political commentator in national media and has spoken internationally on poverty, rural issues, and cultural divides at venues ranging from small-town libraries to Sydney Opera House. A former writing professor, Sarah has served as a Shorenstein Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a Pritzker Fellow at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. In 2019, Sarah released a podcast entitled The Homecomers, which focuses on how a national blind spot toward rural and working-class America is driving misleading headlines, broken politics, and dangerous fissures in our social fabric. The podcast showcases stories of people who, as residents or advocates, remain committed to their complex, embattled homes.

Sarah’s most recent book, Bone of the Bone: Essays on America from a Daughter of the Working Class, 2012-2024, was called a “must-read” by the San Francisco Chronicle. She is also at work on a book about the endangered tallgrass prairie ecosystem, which will be published by Scribner in 2026. She lives in rural Kansas.

Sarah Vogel

Sarah Vogel is an attorney, ag advocate, and author of The Farmer’s Lawyer, a memoir about her landmark class action lawsuit, Coleman v. Block. Vogel brought this historic case when she was a young lawyer and single mother, against the federal government, on behalf of 240,000 family farmers facing foreclosure during the 1980s farm crisis. She has spent her legal career as an advocate for family farmers, women, and Native Americans. She is also the first woman in U.S. history to be elected as Commissioner of Agriculture, serving in her home state of North Dakota. Her book The Farmer’s Lawyer, with a foreword by Willie Nelson, was longlisted for the Reading the West award and selected by the Library of Congress to represent North Dakota at the National Book Festival. She lives and writes in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Sonja Trom Eayrs

Sonja Trom Eayrs, author of Dodge County, Incorporated: Big Ag and the Undoing of Rural America, is a farmer’s daughter, rural advocate, and attorney. She is involved in several rural advocacy organizations, including the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, Farm Action, Land Stewardship Project, and Dodge County Concerned Citizens. Trom Eayrs also serves as the business manager for the Trom family farm in Dodge County, Minnesota.

Rissi Palmer

With the breakthrough 2007 single, “Country Girl,” from her self-titled debut country album, made history as the first Black female country artist to ascend the Billboard Hot Country Singles Charts since Dona Mason in 1987. Palmer swiftly captured attention, ranking among iTunes’ Top 5 Best-Selling Country Artists with her digital EP the same year.

Undeterred by the hurdles faced as a Black woman in mainstream country music, Palmer has forged her own path, independently releasing three albums. Among these works are the children’s album, Best Day Ever, the soulful Back Porch Sessions EP (2015), and the critically acclaimed Revival (2019), lauded by Rolling Stone as one of the Top 25 Country-Soul Albums of all time.

Throughout her career, Palmer has always championed underrepresented artists. As the host of Color Me Country Radio with Rissi Palmer on Apple Music, she challenges listeners to reconsider their perceptions and stereotypes surrounding people of color in the country music landscape. She has also established the nonprofit Color Me Country Artist Grant Fund to help support emerging artists of color.

In 2023, Palmer was one of nine artists featured in PBS’s American Masters: In The Making series, spotlighting her influence on American culture. The documentary RISSI PALMER: STILL HERE provided an intimate glimpse into her life on tour, her creative process, and balancing professional endeavors with family life.

Today, Palmer stands as a prominent figure in both Country and Americana music. Her performances have graced illustrious venues such as The White House, The Grand Ole Opry, Lincoln Center, and the Apollo Theater. She has made national TV appearances on ABC News Live, CBS Mornings, CNN, Good Morning America, Entertainment Tonight and PBS NewsHour, while garnering recognition from prestigious publications including Associated Press, Essence, New York Times, Parade, PEOPLE, Rolling Stone, UPROXX, Washington Post, and more.

Notably, Palmer holds the distinction of being one of only eight Black artists to have singles charted in any genre, highlighting her enduring impact on the music industry. Palmer continues to tour across the US and overseas and serves as a correspondent for CMT Hot 20 Countdown. She also holds the esteemed position of Governor at the Recording Academy Nashville. In 2025, the Academy of Country Music recognized Palmer’s influential voice in championing underrepresented voices in Country Music by bestowing upon her the ACM Lift Every Voice Award.

Alyssia Dominguez

Weaving her Mexican American roots into modern country music, singer-songwriter Alyssia Dominguez spins a new twist on the genre. Dominguez, born and raised in Wisconsin, draws inspiration from her grandmother’s musicality from her days in a local Tejano band. The vivid memory continues to fuel Dominguez’s lifelong passion.

Donning a “cowboy couture” look of her own, Dominguez was featured in the Washington Post profile of Mexican fashion designer Manuel Cuevas, highlighting his career pioneering the iconic look for artists like Elvis and Johnny Cash. She appeared alongside other notable Hispanic artists in Nashville.

A regular performer in the Country Music Capital, Dominguez played at CMA Fest in 2024 as part of the Color Me Country Foundation and was included in Apple Music’s Color Me Country Radio Class of 2023. She’s also performed with Nashville’s Song Suffragettes and Virgin’s Young Music City Rooftop Sounds as part of Latin Heritage Month. Back home, she’s recognized for performances at Milwaukee’s iconic Summerfest and Appleton’s Mile of Music.

Dominguez’s music speaks for itself, magnetic and authentic with romanticized themes of adventure and self-exploration. Her first full-length album, Dance With Me, premiered in 2017. Listeners can find the latest from Dominguez with her latest EP, Chasin’ the Wild released May 2024.

Michael B. Whit

Michael B. Whit: The Genre-Bending Force from the Heartland Redefining Country Music – Get ready to witness a musical phenomenon.

Michael B. Whit, the singer, songwriter, and producer from Cahokia, Illinois, is not just making music; he’s creating a movement. A force to be reckoned with, Whit is a powerhouse of talent whose electrifying performances and groundbreaking sound have earned him a recent EMMY® nomination and a prestigious Telly Award, cementing his status as one of the most exciting artists to watch today.

From the football fields of his youth to the nation’s biggest stages, Whit’s journey is one of relentless ambition and extraordinary talent. He has commanded the spotlight at iconic events like the CMA Fest and delivered a stirring rendition of the National Anthem for the St. Louis Cardinals, leaving audiences in awe. His production work has earned him a Stellar Nomination for Producer of the Year, while his own music has repeatedly climbed the Billboard charts, proving his widespread appeal and commercial power.

Whit’s genius lies in his ability to weave a rich tapestry of sound, blending the heart of country with the soul of gospel and the grit of R&B. This unique sonic identity has attracted collaborations with a staggering list of industry titans, including Grammy® winners and nominees like Nathan East, Rissi Palmer, and the gospel trio Virtue. Now, with the new accolades of an EMMY® nomination and a Telly Award win under his belt, Michael B. Whit is an artist at the peak of his powers. His shows are more than just concerts; they are high-energy, soulful experiences that connect with you on a deeper level. Don’t miss the opportunity to see this unstoppable force live—it’s an event you will be talking about long after the final note fades.

Rissi Palmer

With the breakthrough 2007 single, “Country Girl,” from her self-titled debut country album, made history as the first Black female country artist to ascend the Billboard Hot Country Singles Charts since Dona Mason in 1987. Palmer swiftly captured attention, ranking among iTunes’ Top 5 Best-Selling Country Artists with her digital EP the same year.

Undeterred by the hurdles faced as a Black woman in mainstream country music, Palmer has forged her own path, independently releasing three albums. Among these works are the children’s album, Best Day Ever, the soulful Back Porch Sessions EP (2015), and the critically acclaimed Revival (2019), lauded by Rolling Stone as one of the Top 25 Country-Soul Albums of all time.

Throughout her career, Palmer has always championed underrepresented artists. As the host of Color Me Country Radio with Rissi Palmer on Apple Music, she challenges listeners to reconsider their perceptions and stereotypes surrounding people of color in the country music landscape. She has also established the nonprofit Color Me Country Artist Grant Fund to help support emerging artists of color.

In 2023, Palmer was one of nine artists featured in PBS’s American Masters: In The Making series, spotlighting her influence on American culture. The documentary RISSI PALMER: STILL HERE provided an intimate glimpse into her life on tour, her creative process, and balancing professional endeavors with family life.

Today, Palmer stands as a prominent figure in both Country and Americana music. Her performances have graced illustrious venues such as The White House, The Grand Ole Opry, Lincoln Center, and the Apollo Theater. She has made national TV appearances on ABC News Live, CBS Mornings, CNN, Good Morning America, Entertainment Tonight and PBS NewsHour, while garnering recognition from prestigious publications including Associated Press, Essence, New York Times, Parade, PEOPLE, Rolling Stone, UPROXX, Washington Post, and more.

Notably, Palmer holds the distinction of being one of only eight Black artists to have singles charted in any genre, highlighting her enduring impact on the music industry. Palmer continues to tour across the US and overseas and serves as a correspondent for CMT Hot 20 Countdown. She also holds the esteemed position of Governor at the Recording Academy Nashville. In 2025, the Academy of Country Music recognized Palmer’s influential voice in championing underrepresented voices in Country Music by bestowing upon her the ACM Lift Every Voice Award.

Sumanth Gopinath

Sumanth Gopinath is Associate Professor of Music Theory at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. He has written or co-edited books on the ringtone industry (The Ringtone Dialectic: Economy and Cultural Form, 2013), mobile music studies (The Oxford Handbook of Mobile Music Studies, 2014, with Jason Stanyek), and the music of Steve Reich (Rethinking Reich, 2019, with Pwyll Ap Siôn). His research interests include musical minimalism, sound and digital media, and popular music (including country music). He is the leader of the independent Americana band The Gated Community.

Yolanda Williams

Rev. Yolanda Y. Williams, Ph.D., is a performer, educator, scholar, and pastor. Yolanda performed soprano and mezzo-soprano repertoire with Vocalessence, the Rochester Symphony, La Choeur Symphonique de Fribourg, Lundi Sept Heures, Ensemble de Cuivres Jurassien, the Montreux Symphony, and the Israel Philharmonic. Her worldwide performances have been of music from the Classical, Jazz, Blues, and Gospel genres. Dr. Williams teaches music as a cultural artifact through the African American & African Studies at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. Scholarly work on musical styles and genres of the African Diaspora can be found in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore (2005) and the Encyclopedia of African American Music (2010). With the completion of a second master’s degree, Yolanda became a pastor in the United Methodist Church. She was ordained in May 2023 and serves a congregation in Fridley, Minnesota.

Patrick Warfield

Patrick Warfield, moderator, is Professor and Director of the School of Music. Patrick is a musicologist and specialist in American musical culture. His current research focuses on localized musical life during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with a special interest in the American wind band tradition.

Dr. Warfield has presented at conferences in United States, Europe, and Asia. He has delivered keynote addresses at the North American British Music Studies Association and the Frederick Loewe Symposium on American Music. Dr. Warfield was a founding member of the editorial board of “The Journal of Music History Pedagogy,” and is especially interested in the teaching of American popular music, including rock, jazz and the blues. He is also active as a public musicologist having developed programming with bands, orchestras, and operas.