25

Mar

Presented in partnership with the UW Program in Creative Writing, a reading from the graduating MFA cohort in poetry. This event will feature the work of Rebecca Bedell, Christopher Greggs, Rebekah Hewitt, Wes Holtermann, Mishka Ligot, and Alexis Sears.

Doors will open for this event at 6:30 PM. The event is free and open to the public. Seating will be by general admission.

08

Apr

Kincaid will deliver a public lecture as part of the Center for the Humanities' "Humanities Without Boundaries" speaker series.  A Small Place is brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua--by the author of Annie John.

"If you go to Antigua as a tourist, this is what you will see. If you come by aeroplane, you will land at the V. C. Bird International Airport. Vere Cornwall (V. C.) Bird is the Prime Minister of Antigua. You may be the sort of tourist who would wonder why a Prime Minister would want an airport named after him--why not a school, why not a hospital, why not some great public monument. You are a tourist and you have not yet seen . . ."

09

Apr

G. Willow Wilson enchanted readers with her debut novel Alif the Unseen (a New York Times Notable Book and a staple of year-end “Best of” lists), has won praise in the world of comics as the co-creator of the celebrated Ms. Marvel, and she was recently tapped to bring her storytelling skills to the Wonder Woman franchise. Wilson’s thrilling new novel, The Bird King, transports readers into the height of the Spanish Inquisition to witness the fantastical journey of Fatima, the only remaining Circassian concubine to the sultan of Granada, and her dearest friend Hassan, the palace mapmaker.

15

Apr

Presented in partnership with the Center for Culture, History, and Environment and the UW-Madison Program in Creative Writing, Brian Teare offers readers a new kind of nature poem—one that both anticipates and contributes to the renewal of public dialogue about environmental ethics and individual responsibility instigated by the UN’s recent report on climate change. Doomstead Days is a lyrical series of experiments in embodied ecological consciousness. Drafted on foot, these site-specific poems document rivers, cities, forests, oil spills, mountains, and apocalyptic visions. They encounter refineries and urban watersheds, megafauna and industrial toxins, each encounter intertwining ordinary life and ongoing environmental crisis. Days pass: war- time days, days of love and sex, sixth extinction days, days of chronic illness, all of them doomstead days. Through these poems, we experience the pleasure and pain of being a body during global climate change.

Doors will open for this event at 6:30 PM. The event is free and open to the public. Seating will be by general admission.

18

Apr

Presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Program in Creative Writing. Solmaz Sharif’s astonishing first book, Look, asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable loss of human lives and also the insidious abuses against our everyday speech. In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discrimination endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.

24

Apr

In this moving new novel from celebrated author Nickolas Butler, a Wisconsin family grapples with the power and limitations of faith when one of their own falls under the influence of a radical church. Lyle Hovde is at the onset of his golden years, living a mostly content life in rural Wisconsin with his wife, Peg, daughter, Shiloh, and six-year old grandson, Isaac. After a troubled adolescence and subsequent estrangement from her parents, Shiloh has finally come home. But while Lyle is thrilled to have his whole family reunited, he’s also uneasy: in Shiloh’s absence, she has become deeply involved with an extremist church, and the devout pastor courting her is convinced Isaac has the spiritual ability to heal the sick.

25

Apr

Presented in partnership with the Program in Creative Writing, poetry and fiction from the 2018-19 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellows.  This event will feature the work of Aria Aber, Chekwube O. Danladi, Natasha Oladokun, Emily Shetler, Lucy Tan, Mary Terrier, and Kate Wisel.

Doors will open for this event at 6:30 PM. The event is free and open to the public. Seating will be by general admission.

29

Apr

Best-selling New York Times author and renowned New Yorker copyeditor—the Comma Queen herself—Mary Norris is again delighting readers with her wit, knowledge, and exploration of language in Greek to Me: Adventures of the Comma Queen. In this new memoir, Norris relates her life-long love of Greece, her quest to learn the language and master the mythology, and her travels through the Greek Isles in search of herself.

30

Apr

Presented in partnership with the Chican@/Latin@ Studies Program. From the celebrated editor of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga charts her own coming-of-age alongside her mother’s decline, and also tells the larger story of the Mexican American diaspora. Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California’s Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherríe Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation.

02

May

The 2019 undergraduate and graduate creative writing awards ceremony. Presented in partnership with The UW Program in Creative Writing.

Doors will open for this event at 6:00 PM. The event is free and open to the public. Seating will be by general admission.

15

May

The Madison Public Library Foundation presents the 2019 Lunch For Libraries. Lunch for Libraries is a ticketed event put on by Madison Public Library Foundation in support of the Wisconsin Book Festival.

To purchase tickets, visit Madison Public Library Foundation's website. If you have questions, please contact Tracy Phillippi at tphillippi@mplfoundation.org or 608.266.6318.

28

May

David Maraniss, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and bestselling author, has been chronicling American life as told through sports figures (Vince Lombardi in When Pride Still Mattered and Clemente), future presidents (Bill Clinton in First in His Class and Barack Obama: The Story), and everyday heroes (They Marched into Sunlight, Rome 1960, and Once in a Great City). With A Good American Family, he turns the lens on his own family to examine the politics of the 1950s McCarthy era. A Good American Family captures a time of fear, paranoia, and injustice—and at the heart is the story of Maraniss’s father. Elliott Maraniss, a World War II veteran who had commanded an all-black company in the Pacific, was spied on by the FBI, named as a communist by an informant, called before the House of Un-American Activities Committee, fired from his newspaper job, and blacklisted for five years. Ultimately, though, this is an optimistic book. Maraniss’s father never lost faith in America, and he was eventually vindicated.