Born in Duluth, Minnesota, Marty Essen developed a love of animals at an early age. When he was eight years old, his first "pet," a black widow spider, gave birth to hundreds of babies, which promptly crawled onto his hands when he opened the jar to feed them. He prudently traded his spiders for a horned toad.Marty's dream of an animal-oriented career became sidetracked at the age of 13, when he volunteered to answer request lines at a radio station. That position led to a job as a radio announcer, which in turn led him to become the owner of a Minneapolis-based talent management agency.In 1990, Gig Magazine contracted Marty for his first professional writing work--a series of feature articles on the music business.Eventually Marty moved to Montana to launch an independent local telephone company. In 2001, while being interviewed for a story about his telephone company, Marty mentioned to the reporter that he was heading to the Amazon rainforest. The reporter invited him to write a story about his adventures.Marty's Amazon story ran as a feature article in two Montana newspapers. The Amazon story, and a second story about a trip to Australia, were so well received that he decided to expand his travels to all seven continents.While traveling the world, in search of rare and interesting wildlife, Marty was stung by one of the world's most venomous insects, bitten by a poisonous snake, surrounded by wolves, attacked by a hippo--and had the time of his life. He chronicled his unique adventures in his first book, Cool Creatures, Hot Planet: Exploring the Seven Continents.Cool Creatures, Hot Planet won three first-place awards for travel/essay writing: the 2007 Benjamin Franklin Award, the 2007 National Indie Excellence Book Award, and the Best Books 2006 Book Award. It also won bronze metals in the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Awards and the IPPY Awards. Additionally, Cool Creatures, Hot Planet won first place in the Animals category at the 2009 Green Book Festival in Los Angeles, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune named it a Top-10 Green Book. In 2014, the new Kindle version of Cool Creatures, Hot Planet became an Amazon #1 Best Seller for Wildlife.In late 2007, Marty Essen began presenting Around the World in 90 Minutes at colleges, museums, and nature centers across the United States. Based on his book, Marty's high-energy multi-media show takes audiences on an unforgettable worldwide adventure, packed with rare and interesting wildlife. It's the type of show where the audience has fun laughing at the stories, oohing and aahing at the photos, and then, when it's all done, they realize just how much they've learned.In November 2008, Marty Essen became APCA's (the Association for the Promotion of Campus Activities) #1 Booked College Speaker, and since then he has spent a total of 50 months at the #1 position. In 2011, Campus Activities Magazine named Marty a "Hot Speaker" pick for 2011. Currently, Around the World in 90 Minutes is the 2nd most-popular slide-show of all-time (behind Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth"), a position it will likely hold for years to come!