The Executive Director of the Kansas Book Festival is Tim Bascom, who came to Topeka in 2020 from Waldorf University in northern Iowa, where he was Director of their Creative Writing Program.  Bascom is a native Kansan, who spent growing-up years in Troy, Kansas, and completed his Master of Arts degree in English Literature at the University of Kansas, later completing an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa.  Bascom has led workshops for writers every summer for 15 years at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and he is the author of five books.  His most recent—Climbing Lessons: Stories of Fathers, Sons, and the Bond Between (Light Messages Press, 2020)—is set in Kansas, depicting the stages of a father-son relationship through brief autobiographical tales.