Tataboline “Ta” Enos is the Founder and CEO of the Pennsylvania Wilds Center for Entrepreneurship, a nonprofit that works with state and local partners to help to revitalize a quarter of Pennsylvania through intentional place-based tourism and outdoor recreation development, with a major focus on stewardship and growing rural small businesses.

Ta’s two decades of work in the PA Wilds have helped uplift the region’s tremendous public lands and grow the area’s tourism industry into a $2 billion economy that supports hundreds of rural small businesses and makers. In 2025, Ta released an award-winning memoir through PA-based publisher Sunbury Press about her journey titled Proudly Made: A Story of Reinvention in the Big Woods and Small Towns of the Pennsylvania Wilds, which captures the rise of the PA Wilds movement and how one of America’s most rural regions – and its leader – reinvented themselves through grit, creativity and community.

A fourth generation native of the Pennsylvania Wilds, Ta believes in helping rural communities, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs connect their work to larger systems to thrive in ways that honor both tradition and innovation. Ta’s work is grounded in resilience and sustainability and guided by creative, practical, collaborative approaches rooted in place. Ta aims to create lasting impact by showing what’s possible when people believe in where they’re from and invest in it together.

Ta’s work has been featured in interviews with C-SPAN, The Daily Yonder, Brookings Institute, Aspen Institute Community Strategies Group, and many other outlets, highlighting its growing national relevance as a model for rural place-based development.

Ta has a bachelor’s degree in Journalism and Public Communications from the University of Alaska Anchorage. Prior to moving home to rural Pennsylvania in 2006, she spent ten years as an award-winning news reporter and editor in Alaska, writing for the Anchorage Daily News, Anchorage Press, Dutch Harbor Fisherman, Bristol Bay Times, Frontiersman and other publications.

Ta’s memoir, Proudly Made, earned a Silver Book Award in 2025 from the Nonfiction Authors Association, who called it “exceptional” and “very much worth the read.” It is also nominated for the Library of Congress’ 2025 “Great Reads from Great Places” program through the Pennsylvania Center for the Book. It was a finalist for the Independent Authors Network’s Book of the Year Award and is on the longlist for Book of the Year through the Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia. Ta was incredibly honored to be recognized in 2025 with a Governor’s “power of one” Keystone Award, which spotlight how a single person’s commitment to service can ripple outward and create lasting change.