Exmormon Foundation 2017 Conference

In his youth Will Bagley took a raft fourteen hundred miles down the Mississippi River to New Orleans. After graduating from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1971, he farmed in North Carolina, played country music throughout the Rocky Mountain West, and held a journeyman.s card in the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. During the 1980s he managed publications for Evans & Sutherland, the firm usually credited with pioneering computer graphics.

As an independent historian, Bagley has written and edited twenty-five books on overland emigration, railroads, mining, the invention of LexisNexis (the world.s first search engine) and violence in the American West. He has won Best Books awards from the Western History Association, the Denver Public Library, two "Old Joes" from Westerners International, three Western Writers of America Spur Awards, and a Wrangler. In 1997, the Arthur H. Clark Company launched a documentary history, KINGDOM IN THE WEST: The Mormons and the American Frontier, with Mr. Bagley as series editor. Journal of the West called the award- winning series "one of the happiest events in recent Western publishing." He is working on the last of its sixteen volumes, The Whites Want Every Thing: Native Voices from the Mormon West. He has completed two of the three volumes of "Overland West: The Story of the Oregon-California Trails, 1812-1912." The first, So Rugged and Mountainous, was The Atlantic's Editor's Choice in September 2011, which said "such careful archival research yields vivid storytelling, and Bagley's account is fascinating in its details."

Mr. Bagley has appeared in dozens of films and documentaries, including the American Experience's "The Mormons." The Salt Lake Tribune featured more than 220 of his columns and articles from 2000 to 2004. In 2009, he was a Wallace Stegner Centennial Fellow at the University of Utah and the Archibald Hannah Jr. Fellow in American History at Yale University.s Beinecke Library. He was chosen as a fellow of the Utah State Historical Society in 2014.

KATHLEEN KIMBALL MELONAKIS is a retired RN and holds a master's degree in liberal arts and philosophy from Stanford University. In the 1990's the world's largest medical publisher, W.B. Saunders, published her Pocket Reference Guide for Nurses, the first book of its type at that time. After marriage in the Salt Lake City temple in 1975, Kathleen and her husband Brian attended the University of Michigan where they investigated the history of the Mormon church and found it to be inconsistent with the history received from the church. Kathleen's father, Heber C. Kimball IV, (a direct descendant of the original apostle Heber C. Kimball) was born into a fundamentalist polygamy group. Wanting to know the real origins of polygamy, Kathleen began seriously researching Mormon history in 2005. In the course of her research she found many references indicating that some of the early Mormon leaders engaged in counterfeiting money.

She has compiled her findings into a book which is one of the great untold stories on how the church was apparently involved in counterfeiting even from the Vermont period. Secret Combinations: Evidence of Early Mormon Counterfeiting 1800-1847 is available from utlm.org, amazon.com, and mormoncounterfeiting.com.

An article on this topic will be published in John Whitmer Historical Association Journal this fall. Kathleen, Brian and their three daughters live in the San Diego area.

Two and a half years ago PETER AND MARY DANZIG decided to chase a dream and their "Otter Creek" was formed. Since then they have won numerous awards, produced their first album, and thrilled audience with their spellbinding mix of original songs and American roots music. Mary is the 2011 Utah State Fiddle Champion. Peter is the 2011 Utah State Mandolin Champion. In 2010 Peter won The New Songs Showcase at the Walnut Valley Festival in Winfield, KS.

Peter and Mary are are former members of the LDS Church who resigned their membership after Peter was threatened with excommunication for his views on homosexuality and ecclesiastical abuse within the church.

Visit their website at http://www.ottercreekduo.com/.
See Peter's I am an Ex Mormon video on Youtube.
See Mary's I am an Ex Mormon video on Youtube.

D. Pawl is an award winning technology entrepreneur and patent holding inventor. In his new book, Stolen Treasures, available this fall, he uncovers groundbreaking research that led to the creation of a new plausible theory on the origination of Mormonism and Authorship of the Book of Mormon. His research of the biography of Lucy Smith revealed previously overlooked inconsistencies and hidden references to numerous historical religious figures. Using the same skills he has applied to large scale software development, D. Pawl set out to "debug" Mormonism. The result is fascinating new answers that fuse the faith traditions of believers with the many doubts and concerns of skeptics. Every detail was examined and connected. The result is a humane and heartfelt narrative that completely explodes the pat answers promoted by apologists and antagonists while revealing the most likely sources, motivations and connections to what really happened.

SIMON SOUTHERTON, author of Losing a Lost Tribe - Native Americans, DNA, and The Book of Mormon (2004) was a principal research scientist with CSIRO, Australia's National Research Organization, in Canberra, Australia, where he led the forestry molecular breeding research until 2014.

Simon holds a PhD from the University of Sydney in plant science and has published research articles in international journals such as The Plant Journal, Plant Physiology, and New Phytologist. He is a co-founder of Gondwana Genomics, a company delivering the forestry molecular marker technology for the international forest industry. He served an LDS mission to Melbourne in the 1980s, is a former Bishop, and is married with five children.

Simon was excommunicated from the LDS Church in August 2005.