Alisha Gaddis Named 2026 Fall Festival Parade Grand Marshal
A West Side Native Comes Home
Talk about coming home in style. Evansville native Alisha Gaddis, who once walked the Fall Festival pageant stage and has since performed on stages around the world, will serve as Grand Marshal of the 105th West Side Nut Club Fall Festival Parade.
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Alisha Gaddis's Impressive Résumé
Alisha is a West Side native and a proud graduate of F.J. Reitz High School. These days, her résumé is something else. She's an Emmy-winning actress, a multi-Grammy and Latin Grammy-winning performer, a bestselling author, a producer and a keynote speaker. Her work has taken her to Broadway and the Sydney Opera House, and has shown up on PBS, Netflix, NBCUniversal, HGTV, Magnolia and Freeform. Alisha has also created and stars in the Emmy-winning PBS series Lishy Lou and Lucky Too and has written 10 books. Here in Southern Indiana, she was inducted into the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation Hall of Fame in 2022.
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The Fall Festival parade is the big finish at the end of a week of big fun down on Franklin Street. This year’s festival runs October 5 through 10 and will once again feature more than 130 food booths run by local nonprofits, school groups and churches. You'll also find carnival rides, live entertainment and plenty of competitions. More than 200,000 people head to the West Side every year, which makes it one of the largest street festivals in the country.
And there's bragging-rights news, too. For the fourth year in a row, USA TODAY has named it the Best Fall Festival in America.
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