Unless indicated in the program description, all events are free, unticketed, and open to the public on a first-come first serve basis.
Click here for a printable schedule grid of this year's events.
You can also find a downloadable PDF of the
2009 Wisconsin Book Festival Printed Guide here.
Wednesday, October 7 | 5:00 - 9:00 PM
Venue: Memorial Library
Friends of the UW-Madison Libraries
A benefit for UW-Madison Libraries, the largest used book sale in Wisconsin includes books on almost any subject. Proceeds support the library collections, lecture series, and visiting scholar program.
Category(s):
Book Sales
Wednesday, October 7 | 5:30 - 7:00 PM
Venue: Chazen Museum of Art, Rm. L-140
Presented by University of Wisconsin Press
Presenter(s):
Barbara Manger,
Janine Smith,
Lewis Koch
See gorgeous visuals from two glorious artist’s monographs, and learn about how they came together. Presented by author/designer team Barbara Manger and Janine Smith,
Mary Nohl: Inside & Outside celebrates the life and work of one of Wisconsin's most celebrated "outsider artists." Known for her weirdly beautiful folk art on display outside her Milwaukee home, Mary Nohl was a true Wisconsin original and epitomized the courage it takes to follow your own vision. With
Touchless Automatic Wonder, Madison’s own Lewis Koch anthologizes twenty-five years of photographic work on the subject of 'found text.' Koch will address the transition from a web project to book form, as well as details of sequencing and unique design.
Category(s):
Art & Visual, Memoir & Biography, Wisconsin Ties
Wednesday, October 7 | 5:30 - 7:00 PM
Venue: Africana Restaurant
Presenter(s):
Karin Wolf, Jackie Martindale
The winners of the 2009 Bus Lines competition (sponsored by The Madison Arts Commission and City of Madison-Metro Transit) along with the winners of Poetry Out Loud (sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation, and Wisconsin Arts Board) will share their original poetry and recite the work of famous poets. Appetizers are served during the reception and attendees are invited to purchase dinner after the reception and reading.
Category(s):
Poetry, Wisconsin Ties, Youth & Kids
Wednesday, October 7 | 5:30 - 7:00 PM
Venue: Wisconsin Studio/Overture
Presenter(s):
Amelia Klem Osterud,
James A. Levine
An event featuring two wildly diverse books: James A. Levine’s novel
The Blue Notebook, a story about a fifteen-year-old girl sold into sexual slavery in Mumbai, and
The Tattooed Lady: A History by Amelia Klem Osterud, on women who made sideshow livings by displaying their bodies onstage in an era when even a bit of ankle was considered scandalous. This promises to spark a provocative conversation about women who, by choice or not, do work that puts them on the fringe of society -- and about the economic forces that foster such "work."
Bookseller: University Book Store
Category(s):
Fiction, International, Society & Politics, Work
Wednesday, October 7 | 5:30 - 7:00 PM
Venue: Avol's Bookstore
Presenter(s):
Erinn Batykefer
Poet Erinn Batykefer’s debut collection unflinchingly addresses themes of adolescence, eating disorders, and other challenges with an eye for the complexity of experience and the transformative power of art.
Category(s):
Poetry, Wisconsin Ties
Wednesday, October 7 | 6:00 - 7:30 PM
Venue: A Room of One's Own Feminist Bookstore
Presenter(s):
Katie Krueger
For most Americans, taught from an early age "Don't Talk to Strangers," building relationships requires a great deal of courage. Krueger's book examines the cultural wisdom gained by her time spent with the people of Senegal, West Africa.
Give with Gratitude tells a compelling story of the lessons Krueger learned when listening to the Senegalese, and asks the readers to imagine how things would change if they had the courage to incorporated these lessons into their own lives.
Bookseller: A Room of One's Own
Category(s):
International, Memoir & Biography, Wisconsin Ties
Wednesday, October 7 | 6:30 - 7:30 PM
Venue: Sun Prairie Public Library
Presented by the Sun Prairie Public Library
Dane, Wisconsin authors, Dr. Arthur and Ursula Rathburn, present their
latest book,
No More Tears Left Behind. Faced with being
"transported" by the Nazis because they were Jews, Eva and Martin
Deutschkron chose to disappear into the underground in 1942. For the
remainder of the war, they worked and lived in the Berlin area right
under the nose of the dreaded Gestapo. This story of a Madison resident
is one that must be read and retold again and again.
Category(s):
Memoir & Biography, Wisconsin Ties
Wednesday, October 7 | 7:30 - 9:00 PM
Venue: Memorial Union Theater
Presented by the CCBC
Presenter(s):
Gregory Maguire
Known for his eloquent, intelligent, and witty lectures about children’s books, Gregory Maguire has written nineteen novels for children and seven novels for adults, including
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, which was adapted for the stage and became a hit Broadway musical. Presented by the Cooperative Children's Book Center, this annual lecture brings a distinguished children's book author or illustrator to deliver a free public lecture as an honor to Charlotte Zolotow, a distinguished children's book editor who attended UW-Madison on a writing scholarship from 1933-36. Maguire’s talk is aimed at adults, based on his writing for children and teens.
Bookseller: A Room of One's Own
Category(s):
Fiction, Writing & Publishing, Youth & Kids
Wednesday, October 7 | 8:00 - 9:30 PM
Venue: Wisconsin Studio/Overture
Presenter(s):
David McGlynn,
Valerie Laken
In Dream House, the riveting debut novel by Pushcart Prize-winning author Valerie Laken (of Milwaukee), a young couple invests all they have in a fixer-upper house with a dark past: a murder occurred there many years ago, and it brings together the fraught subjects of class, race, and family bonds. The excellent stories in David McGlynn’s debut collection,
The End of the Straight and Narrow, explore the inner lives of the zealous: a born-again father battling a massive house fire, an aging male virgin being drawn into unsettling relationships, and in the five linked stories that make up the collection’s second half, a woman blinded suddenly while giving birth.
Bookseller: University Book Store
Category(s):
Fiction, Wisconsin Ties
Wednesday, October 7 | 8:00 - 9:30 PM
Venue: Avol's Bookstore
Presented by University of Wisconsin Press
Presenter(s):
Mark Kraushaar,
Angela Sorby
Winner of the 2009 Brittingham Prize in Poetry,
Bird Skin Coat is brimming with startling moments of beauty found within a rusty and decayed landscape. With wild lyrical images of ascent and descent--doves and dives, sparrows and slugs, attics and cellars--this collection reflects Sorby’s keen eye for blending images. Poet Laura Kasischke declared, "She brings to each detail a luminous intensity, made that much more startling by its casual subjects--fender-benders, motherhood, the Midwest. Sorby’s is an important voice, speaking to the most important subjects without fear or pretense."
Winner of the 2009 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry,
Falling Brick Kills Local Man is a daring and inventive collection of narrative poems rich with thoughtful and precise language. Mark Kraushaar writes about what moves him, whether that is the war in Iraq or the notion of synchronicity. Peter Stitt remarks, "Generally triggered by something as deceptively simple as a small newspaper item, an overheard remark, or an incident observed in a bus station, Mark Kraushaar’s meditative/narrative poems illuminate moments of surreal reality by telling little stories of heartbreakingly human intent. I love these poems and am proud to have given several of them their first publication in the pages of
The Gettysburg Review."
Category(s):
Poetry, Wisconsin Ties
