Event Schedule

Book Launch of new works by authors Fabu, Sherry Lucille, and Catrina J. Sparkman.

About We Eat to Remember: Soul Food Poetry:

We Eat to Remember: Soul Food Poetry is a book about the history, culture and joy connected to the foods Black people eat, why we eat specific foods and also the ways we eat them as well. This book of poetry goes back to our food narratives that started in Africa, continued through the slave experience in America and are vibrant and present today.

About Falling: 

All of his adult life, Jasper Johnson has gotten exactly what he wants, which explains why his beloved benefactor’s request is unexpected and irritating. It’s 1970 and this flashy playboy extraordinaire has the world by its tail; and, what he wants now is more, more, more. In a shocking reversal, his indulgent benefactor pulls him from cavorting across Europe and Africa and instead, ties his future to attaining a college degree—once and for all. No graduation. No funds. No future.

One of Donald Trump’s first actions as President was to sign an executive order to limit Muslim immigration to the United States, a step toward the “complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” he had campaigned on. This extraordinary act of Islamophobia provoked unprecedented opposition: Hollywood movies and mainstream television shows began to feature more Muslim characters in contexts other than terrorism; universities and private businesses included Muslims in their diversity initiatives; and the criminal justice system took hate crimes against Muslims more seriously. Yet Broken argues that, even amid this challenge to institutionalized Islamophobia, diversity initiatives fail on their promise by only focusing on crisis moments.

Presented in partnership with the UW Program in Creative Writing, a reading from the graduating MFA cohort in poetry.

Though podcaster Bodie Kane spends her days researching old Hollywood, and the disenfranchised women spat out by the studio system, she is content to forget her own past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the 1995 murder of a classmate, Thalia Keith. The circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are the subject of intense fascination online, yet Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie. But when Granby invites her back to teach a two-week course, Bodie finds herself inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

In Jesse Lee Kercheval’s sixth collection, I Want to Tell You, her searching, incantatory poems speak directly and forcefully to the reader in a voice that is by turns angry, elegiac, wry, or witty but always sharply alive. Crossing through the bewildering territory of grief, Kercheval argues with god and the universe about the deaths of people she loves. She also writes movingly about the complications of family life and love, the messy puzzle of life itself. 

A remarkable poetry collection from Clint Smith, the #1 New York Times bestselling and National Book Critics Circle award-winning author of How the Word Is Passed.

In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band -- and meeting the man who would become her husband—her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her.

An unsparing, incisive, yet ultimately hopeful look at how we can shed an American obsession with self-reliance that has made us less equal, less healthy, less productive, and less fulfilled

The promise that you can “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” is central to the story of the American dream. It’s the belief that if you work hard and rely on your own resources, you will ultimately succeed. However, time and again we have seen the way this foundational myth, with its emphasis on individual determination, brittle self-sufficiency, and personal accomplishment, does not help us. Instead, as income inequality rises around us, we are left with shame and self-blame for our condition.

For fans of One Italian Summer, Things I Wish I Told My Mother is a book club selection for the ages. A mother and daughter unpack a lifetime's secrets while on vacation in Paris.
 
Every daughter has her own distinctive voice, her inimitable style, and her secrets. 
 
Laurie Ormson is an artist, a collector of experiences. She travels the world with a worn beige duffel bag. 
 
Every mother has her own distinctive voice, her inimitable style, and her secrets. 
 
Laurie’s mother is the famous “Dr. Liz.” An elegant perfectionist. She travels the world with a matched set of suitcases.  
 
When Laurie invites her mother on a trip to Paris and Norway, she sees an unexpected sparkle in her mother’s eyes. So begins Things I Wish I Told My Mother. You will wish this novel never ends. 
 
Laurie and Dr. Liz are the female version of The Odd Couple. 
 

Presented in partnership with the Program in Creative Writing, poetry and fiction from the 2022-23 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellows. 

The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.

Edwin St. Andrew is eighteen years old when he crosses the Atlantic by steamship, exiled from polite society following an ill-conceived diatribe at a dinner party. He enters the forest, spellbound by the beauty of the Canadian wilderness, and suddenly hears the notes of a violin echoing in an airship terminal—an experience that shocks him to his core. 
 
Two centuries later a famous writer named Olive Llewellyn is on a book tour. She’s traveling all over Earth, but her home is the second moon colony, a place of white stone, spired towers, and artificial beauty. Within the text of Olive’s best-selling pandemic novel lies a strange passage: a man plays his violin for change in the echoing corridor of an airship terminal as the trees of a forest rise around him. 
 

There There is a work of fiction. While a novel can help us to better understand culture, history, politics, and identity, no
single piece of literature can bear the burden of representing an entire nation, culture, or people. As Tommy Orange
makes clear through the twelve different “Urban Indian” perspectives that comprise There There, Native Americans are
not a monolith. In the area now known as the United States, there exist 574 federally recognized Native tribes (and many
more unrecognized tribes), with differing languages, traditions, religious and spiritual beliefs, and ways of life.

There There in Wisconsin, an initiative of the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is additionally supported by the UW-Madison Libraries; the Evjue Foundation; the Wisconsin Book Festival; the Anonymous Fund of the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and the Departments of American Indian Studies, History, and English and Creative Writing.

Presented in partnership with the UW Program in Creative Writing & winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. 

Beauty abounds in Jericho Brown’s Pulitzer Prize-winning poetry collection, despite and inside of the evil that pollutes the everyday. A National Book Award finalist, The Tradition questions why and how we’ve become accustomed to terror: in the bedroom, the classroom, the workplace, and the movie theater. From mass shootings to rape to the murder of unarmed people by police, Brown interrupts complacency by locating each emergency in the garden of the body, where living things grow and wither—or survive. In the urgency born of real danger, Brown’s work is at its most innovative. His invention of the duplex—a combination of the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues—is an all-out exhibition of formal skill, and his lyrics move through elegy and memory with a breathless cadence. Jericho Brown is a poet of eros: here he wields this power as never before, touching the very heart of our cultural crisis.

The 2023 undergraduate and graduate creative writing awards ceremony. Presented in partnership with The UW Program in Creative Writing.