Event Schedule

When Mike Leckrone retired as director of bands at the University of Wisconsin in 2019, he had served in that role for an astonishing fifty years. A brilliant showman, he became known for aerial entries and sequined outfits. He created the Fifth Quarter celebration that follows all home football games, removed barriers for women to march in the band, and established regular appearances at Camp Randall by special-needs high school musicians. Above all, Leckrone has always sought joy in life—which, along with his sixty-year love affair with his late wife, UW “band mom” Phyllis Leckrone, was perhaps the secret to his remarkable career. A consummate musician, as both a trumpeter and an arranger, Leckrone remains an outstanding raconteur—a talent beautifully on display in his long-awaited memoir. 

This book is the next best thing to sitting down with this master storyteller. Coauthor Doug Moe captures the joys of performing—whether at Camp Randall, in the Kohl Center, or along the Rose Bowl Parade route. Reading Leckrone’s story, one comes to understand the mix of discipline, showmanship, work ethic, warmth, toughness, wit, and musical skill that make him a Wisconsin treasure. Even for people who know Leckrone, Moments of Happiness details the stories behind the highlights and the unglamorous work that made his accomplishments possible. It both cements his legend and offers unprecedented insights into a career that will never be equaled.

Filled with bold, expressive drawings, French Girl is a graphic memoir told in seventeen connected stories of childhood, girlhood, sisterhood, and motherhood. A slightly surreal real—a broken back, front yard mausoleums, Napoleon, Bourbon, war, and breasts—is intercut with the fantastic—a dream of flight, a guardian wolf, a menacing Jack Frost on a frozen lake—as this technicolor work takes us from an Emperor’s bed in Fontainebleau to a hypnotic Florida with citrus groves full of thorns and rockets blasting off for the moon. French Girl vividly, viscerally unsnarls the love and pain that passes between generations of women as it leads the reader, as if in a fairy tale, into the forest, through dark depths and into light.

After losing his mom, a struggling thirteen-year-old boy in northern Wisconsin rediscovers the love of baking he once shared with her and decides to audition for the world-famous Marvelous Midwest Kids Baking Championship television show in Chicago. Jack is sure that his new sense of purpose will help him stay out of trouble, so he throws himself into learning the finer points of sprinkles and scones—and hopefully even mending his broken relationship with his dad.

This event is part of Banned Books Week 2024 and presented in partnership with Beyond the Page

Part memoir, part manifesto, the inspiring story of a Louisiana librarian advocating for inclusivity on the front lines of our vicious culture wars.

One of the things small town librarian Amanda Jones values most about books is how they can affirm a young person's sense of self. So in 2022, when she caught wind of a local public hearing that would discuss “book content,” she knew what was at stake. Schools and libraries nationwide have been bombarded by demands for books with LGTBQ+ references, discussions of racism, and more to be purged from the shelves. Amanda would be damned if her community were to ban stories representing minority groups. She spoke out that night at the meeting. Days later, she woke up to a nightmare that is still ongoing.

Amanda Jones has been called a groomer, a pedo, and a porn-pusher; she has faced death threats and attacks from strangers and friends alike. Her decision to support a collection of books with diverse perspectives made her a target for extremists using book banning campaigns-funded by dark money organizations and advanced by hard right politicians-in a crusade to make America more white, straight, and "Christian." But Amanda Jones wouldn't give up without a fight: she sued her harassers for defamation and urged others to join her in the resistance.

Mapping the book banning crisis occurring all across the nation, That Librarian: The Fight Against Book Banning in America draws the battle lines in the war against equity and inclusion, calling book lovers everywhere to rise in defense of our readers.

Celebrate the freedom to read in the Dane County public libraries! Find the full list of events here.

Presented in partnership with Go Big Read.

Growing up as a paralyzed girl during the 90s and early 2000s, Rebekah Taussig only saw disability depicted as something monstrous (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), inspirational (Helen Keller), or angelic (Forrest Gump). None of this felt right; and as she got older, she longed for more stories that allowed disability to be complex and ordinary, uncomfortable and fine, painful and fulfilling.

Writing about the rhythms and textures of what it means to live in a body that doesn’t fit, Rebekah reflects on everything from the complications of kindness and charity, living both independently and dependently, experiencing intimacy, and how the pervasiveness of ableism in our everyday media directly translates to everyday life.

Disability affects all of us, directly or indirectly, at one point or another. By exploring this truth in poignant and lyrical essays, Taussig illustrates the need for more stories and more voices to understand the diversity of humanity. Sitting Pretty challenges us as a society to be patient and vigilant, practical and imaginative, kind and relentless, as we set to work to write an entirely different story.

Wisconsin People & Ideas, the Wisconsin Academy’s magazine of contemporary Wisconsin thought and culture, presents a Wisconsin Book Festival reading featuring the winners of the statewide 2024 Fiction & Poetry Contests. 

2024 Fiction and Poetry Contest Winners

Fiction:

1st place: “Mending Ruth” – Bob Wake, Cambridge

2nd Place: “Baby Teeth” – C.E. Perry, Madison

3rd Place: “Complications from a Fall” – Linda Falkenstein, Madison

Poetry:

1st place: “Al-Eashiq” – Diya Abbas, Madison

2nd Place: “grand(father) sheds his grudges” – Han Raschka, Madison

3rd Place: “Bodies of Water” – Lisa Vihos, Sheboygan