Meet tHE TEAM BEHIND
MITKA’s Secret.

Steven W. Brallier

Steven Brallier, the lead author, is both a collector and teller of stories, a quality he likely developed in his childhood on the western highlands of Kenya. The oral traditions of Luhya storytellers together with the panoply of everyday experience delighted him and his brother and sisters.

After graduating from Cornell in 1975, Steve worked for two years as Director of Public Information at Anderson University. When an opportunity came to become a concert promoter, he became the founding manager of Spring House Productions in Alexandria, Indiana, and, later, for Brallier Productions in Nashville, Tennessee.

In 1987, Steve became an agent for the William Morris Agency, Nashville, a position he held for twelve years. After leaving William Morris, he, for several years, worked as an independent contractor, in several roles within the entertainment industry. Among these roles, he worked in business development with Tangible Vision. Between 2007 and 2009, he served as the executive director for the Gospel Music Foundation. Following this, he worked with 1220 Exhibits in Nashville in various assignments but, principally, as a lead in 1220’s contract with American Express.

Steve retired in 2012 and has been devoting himself to writing, golf, and caring for his mountain cabin in Sewanee, Tennessee. He was nearing the end of his first novel, Then We Will Know, when, in late 2016, he was asked, by Adrienne and Mitka Kalinski, to write Mitka’s story. Since then, Steve has interviewed Mitka, Adrienne, their family, and friends over numerous days—some fifty total—and has accumulated more than 120 hours of audio and video records. He and his co-authors have also studied several thousand documents, photographs, and video—mostly primary sources—that bear witness to the veracity and power of Mitka Kalinski’s story.

Steve was given unfettered and exclusive access to Mitka Kalinski and to seventy years of extensive records and photographs that document this story. From this, a deep mutual love and respect grew between author and subject. This trust, together with an innate skill as a storyteller and the capacity for hard—even dogged work—established Steven as the one to tell the story of Mitka Kalinski.