Noreen Olson is a veteran columnist and speaker. She wrote an award-winning general interest column for her local newspaper for 26 years, a monthly column for the Bergen News, and has had numerous articles published elsewhere. While working for the Alberta Speakers Bureau, she published The Kitchen Table Collection, six volumes of a selection of her columns between 1993 and 2000. In 1997, she was the Grand Prize Winner of Canada's Cowboy Poetry Festival Competition and in 2004, her book, The School Bus Doesn't Stop Here Anymore: Life and Times on a Rural Route, made the bestseller list in the Edmonton Journal. Olson's work is included in the The Penguin Anthology of Canadian Humour, and in Margaret Atwood's Barbed Lyres: Canadian Venomous Verse. She was featured twice reading her columns on the CBC and has spoken at hundreds of speaking engagements. Olson and her husband Ralph were active farmers for over 50 years with hay, grain, cattle, and a few chickens; they still live on their beautiful farm near Cremona AB that has been in the family since 1924. They have a couple of cats, three children, and three wonderful grandchildren.