Event Schedule

This event will be held at UW South Madison Partnership (2238 S Park St.)

Presented in partnership with Lake City Books. This event is free and open to the public but does require pre-registration. RSVP link and more details here. 

Just as Evicted uses Milwaukee to discuss America’s eviction crisis, Professor Bernadette Atuahene uses Detroit to reveal another under reported national phenomenon: predatory governance, where public officials raise public dollars through racist policies.

When Professor Bernadette Atuahene moved to Detroit, she planned to study the city’s squatting phenomenon. What she accidentally found was too urgent to ignore. Her neighbors, many of whom had owned their homes for decades, were losing them to property tax foreclosure, leaving once bustling Black neighborhoods blighted with vacant homes.

Through years of dogged investigation and research, Atuahene uncovered a system of predatory governance, where public officials raise public dollars through laws and processes that produce or sustain racial inequity — a nationwide practice in no way limited to Detroit.

In this powerful work of scholarship and storytelling, Atuahene shows how predatory governance invites complicity from well-meaning people, eviscerates communities, and widens the racial wealth gap. By following the lives of two Detroit grandfathers, one Black and the other white, and their grandchildren, Atuahene tells a riveting tale about racist policies, how they take root, why they flourish, and who profits.

If all children could just get an education, the logic goes, they would have the same opportunities later in life. But this historical tour de force makes it clear that the opposite is true: The U.S. school system has played an instrumental role in creating and upholding racial hierarchies, preparing children to expect unequal treatment throughout their lives.

In Original Sins, Ewing demonstrates that our schools were designed to propagate the idea of white intellectual superiority, to “civilize” Native students and to prepare Black students for menial labor. Education was not an afterthought for the Founding Fathers; it was envisioned by Thomas Jefferson as an institution that would fortify the country’s racial hierarchy. Ewing argues that these dynamics persist in a curriculum that continues to minimize the horrors of American history. The most insidious aspects of this system fall below the radar in the forms of standardized testing, academic tracking, disciplinary policies, and uneven access to resources.

By demonstrating that it’s in the DNA of American schools to serve as an effective and underacknowledged mechanism maintaining inequality in this country today, Ewing makes the case that we need a profound reevaluation of what schools are supposed to do, and for whom. This book will change the way people understand the place we send our children for eight hours a day.

Ewing will be in conversation with Kai Pyle, UW-Madison Assistant Professor of Gender & Women's Studies.

Copies of Original Sins will be distributed for free to attendees courtesy of the Wisconsin Book Festival.

The Dark Mirror is the highly anticipated fifth novel in Samantha Shannon’s New York Times and USA Today bestselling Bone Season series that NPR.org has called “intelligent, inventive, dark, and engrossing.”

Everything is about to change.

Paige Mahoney is outside the Republic of Scion for the first time in more than a decade—but she has no idea how she got to the free world. Half a year has been wiped from her memory.

Her journey back to the revolution soon takes her to Venice, where the Domino Programme has uncovered evidence of a secret Scion plan. Before Paige can return to London, she must help the network unravel the sinister Operation Ventriloquist, which threatens to bring Europe to its knees in weeks.

And it soon becomes clear that the one person who could recover her memories—Arcturus Mesarthim—might also hold the key to thwarting Scion, allowing the revolution to strike an unprecedented blow.

In conversation with LaShawn M. Wanak. 

Presented in partnership with the Aldo Leopold Foundation, in honor of Leopold Week 2025. 

This is a virtual event only. Register and join on Crowdcast here: https://www.crowdcast.io/c/leopold-week2025

Tracking the natural beauty that surrounds us, The Backyard Bird Chronicles maps the passage of time through daily entries, thoughtful questions, and beautiful original sketches. With boundless charm and wit, author Amy Tan charts her foray into birding and the natural wonders of the world.

In 2016, Amy Tan grew overwhelmed by the state of the world: Hatred and misinformation became a daily presence on social media, and the country felt more divisive than ever. In search of peace, Tan turned toward the natural world just beyond her window and, specifically, the birds visiting her yard. But what began as an attempt to find solace turned into something far greater—an opportunity to savor quiet moments during a volatile time, connect to nature in a meaningful way, and imagine the intricate lives of the birds she admired.

Presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Program in Creative Writing, a reading from the graduating MFA cohort in poetry, including Patrycja Humienik, Maryhilda Ibe, Iqra Khan, juj e. lepe, Jonny Teklit, and Andrew Chi Keong Yim.

Timely and thought-provoking, Nancy Reddy unpacks and debunks the bad ideas that have for too long defined what it means to be a "good" mom.

When Nancy Reddy had her first child, she found herself suddenly confronted with the ideal of a perfect mother—a woman who was constantly available, endlessly patient, and immediately invested in her child to the exclusion of all else. Reddy had been raised by a single working mother, considered herself a feminist, and was well on her way to a PhD. Why did doing motherhood "right" feel so wrong?

For answers, Reddy turned to the mid-20th century social scientists and psychologists whose work still forms the basis of so much of what we believe about parenting. It seems ludicrous to imagine modern moms taking advice from midcentury researchers. Yet, their bad ideas about so-called “good” motherhood have seeped so pervasively into our cultural norms. In The Good Mother Myth, Reddy debunks the flawed lab studies, sloppy research, and straightforward misogyny of researchers from Harry Harlow, who claimed to have discovered love by observing monkeys in his lab, to the famous Dr. Spock, whose bestselling parenting guide included just one (1!) illustration of a father interacting with his child.

This timely and thought-provoking book will make you laugh, cry, and want to scream (sometimes all at once). Blending history of science, cultural criticism, and memoir, The Good Mother Myth pulls back the curtain on the flawed social science behind our contemporary understanding of what makes a good mom.

In conversation with Jessica Calarco.

A funny, fiercely intelligent, and moving collection exploring marriage, friendship, fame, and artistic ambition—including a story that revisits the main character from Curtis Sittenfeld’s iconic novel Prep—from the New York Times bestselling author of Eligible and Romantic Comedy.

In her second story collection, Sittenfeld shows why she’s as beloved for her short fiction as she is for her novels. In these dazzling stories, she conjures up characters so real that they seem like old friends, laying bare the moments when their long held beliefs are overturned.

In “The Patron Saints of Middle Age,” a woman visits two friends she hasn’t seen since her divorce. In “A for Alone,” a married middle-aged artist embarks on a creative project intended to disprove the so-called Mike Pence Rule, which suggests that women and men can’t spend time alone without lusting after each other. And in “Lost but Not Forgotten,” Sittenfeld gives readers of her novel Prep a window into the world of her beloved character Lee Fiora, decades later, when Lee attends an alumni reunion at her boarding school.

Hilarious, thought-provoking, and full of tenderness for her characters, Sittenfeld’s stories peel back layer after layer of our inner lives, keeping us riveted to the page with her utterly distinctive voice.

In conversation with Susanna Daniel.

Hayslett and Boyd's event will be a school visit only. 

Fair housing advocate, civil rights champion, and civic leader Vel Phillips spent her life breaking barriers and fighting for justice for all people. As the first Black woman on the Milwaukee Common Council, Wisconsin’s first Black judge, and the first Black woman to win statewide office when she was elected secretary of state of Wisconsin, Phillips left a lasting legacy that has inspired generations.

Valiant Vel depicts Phillips’s captivating story—from her childhood experiences facing racial discrimination, to achieving her dream of becoming a lawyer, to her long career in politics. Phillips led a campaign for fair housing in Milwaukee, marching with the NAACP Youth Council and others in the face of violent opposition. In 1968, Phillips’s persistence paid off when the Milwaukee Common Council passed a fair housing ordinance.

Beautifully illustrated with historic photographs and original artwork by Milwaukee artist Aaron Boyd, Valiant Vel makes an excellent addition to young readers’ bookshelves at school and at home. With an afterword by Phillips’s son, a glossary of terms, and sources for further research, this book provides a thorough look at an activist who dedicated her life to making the world a better place.

Please note, this event will be held at Arts + Literature Laboratory: 111. S. Livingston St. Suite 100, Madison, Wisconsin 53703.

Discover the real truth behind the original fake news with this in-depth history of beloved humor publication, The Onion. In 1988, a band of University of Wisconsin–Madison undergrads and dropouts began publishing a free weekly newspaper with no editorial stance other than “You Are Dumb.” Just wanting to make a few bucks, they wound up becoming the bedrock of modern satire over the course of twenty years, changing the way we consume both our comedy and our news. The Onion served as a hilarious and brutally perceptive satire of the absurdity and horrors of late twentieth-century American life and grew into a global phenomenon. 

Now, for the first time, the full history of the publication is told by one of its original staffers, author and historian Christine Wenc. Through dozens of interviews, Wenc charts The Onion’s rise, its position as one of the first online humor sites, and the way it influenced television programs like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Funny Because It’s True peels back the layers to reveal how a group of young misfits from flyover country unintentionally created a cultural phenomenon. 

In conversation with Steve Paulson.

Baptiste's appearance is a school-visit only.

Presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Odyssey Junior Project.

A new classic for Black and Brown children.

ANYTHING and EVERYTHING is possible!

Perhaps you want to become an artist, or a scientist, or maybe even president. Even when–especially when–the path is hard, Dear YOU: Dream BIG!.

A personal, poetic, and uplifting affirmation from Caribbean-born author Baptiste Paul encouraging today’s Black youth to reject those who wish to silence them, exclude them, and reject their talents with one powerful refrain.

A powerful, lyrical anthem of Black pride celebrating Black creativity, leadership, and innovation that’s perfect for fans of All Because You Matter, I Am Every Good Thing, and I Am Enough.

Presented in partnership with A Room of One's Own Bookstore.

In this inspiring self-help handbook, a trans activist dares us to be the change we want to see—both out in the world, and amongst our closest connections.

Lifelong activist and educator Dean Spade dares us to decide that our interpersonal actions are not separate from our politics of liberation and resistance. Many activist projects and resistance groups fall apart because people treat each other poorly, trying desperately to live out the cultural myths about dating and relationships that we are fed from an early age.

How do we divest from the idea that one romantic partner will be the solution to all our problems? How do we bring our best thinking about freedom and justice into step with our desires for healing and connection?  

Love in a F*cked-Up World is a resounding call to action and a practical manifesto for how to combat cultural scripts and take our relationships into our own hands, preparing us for the work of changing the world. 

In conversation with A Room of One's Own Bookstore's Fawzy Taylor.

Marshall’s event will be a school visit only.

Award-winning writer, rapper, educator, editor and UW-Madison English professor Nate Marshall will visit two Madison Metropolitan School District high schools in partnership with the Wisconsin Book Festival. He will spend the afternoon discussing poetry as performance and workshopping writing poems with students. Nate will also do a talk back, sampling some new material for his forthcoming poetry collection. 
 

Presented in partnership with UW-Madison Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies Conney Project on Jewish Arts.

Heavyweight: A Family Story of the Holocaust, Empire, and Memory is an analog inkwash comic about situating family Holocaust history in the context of ongoing colonialism, resisting trauma narratives that excuse the violences of the present, and figuring out whether the ghosts you’ve invented to keep you company are really the ghosts you need. 

About Victory Parade: One of a group of women working as welders in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Rose Arensberg has fallen in love with a disabled veteran while awaiting the return of her husband, Sam, a soldier in the American army serving in Europe. As we follow the bittersweet, heartbreaking stories of Rose and her fellow Rosie-the-Riveters, we’re immersed in the day-to-day challenges of life on the home front as seen through the eyes of these resilient women, as well as through the eyes of Eleanor, Rose’s impressionable young daughter, and Ruth, the German Jewish refugee Rose has taken into their home.

Ruth’s desperate attempt to exorcise the nightmare of growing up in pre-war Nazi Germany takes her into the world of professional women wrestlers—with devastating consequences. And Sam’s encounters with the horrors of a liberated concentration camp follow him home to Brooklyn in the form of terrifying flashbacks that will leave him scarred forever.

Victory Parade paints a deeply affecting portrait of how individuals and civilizations process mass trauma. Magnificently drawn by Leela Corman, it’s an Expressionist journey through the battlefields of the human heart and the mass graves of genocide.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman’s psychic deterioration in the face of rampant misogyny. In a tidy apartment on the outskirts of Seoul, millennial “everywoman” Kim Jiyoung spends her days caring for her infant daughter. But strange symptoms appear: Jiyoung begins to impersonate the voices of other women, dead and alive. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, her concerned husband sends her to a psychiatrist. Jiyoung narrates her story to this doctor—from her birth to parents who expected a son to elementary school teachers who policed girls’ outfits to male coworkers who installed hidden cameras in women’s restrooms. But can her psychiatrist cure her, or even discover what truly ails her? 

Great World Texts, 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.

In conversation with Dr. Eunsil Oh.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis is now forty with two teenage children. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at work an Irishman comes to the door asking for Eilis by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony’s child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis’s doorstep. It is what Eilis does—and what she refuses to do—in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín’s novel so riveting and suspenseful.

Pre-signed copies of Long Island will be distributed for free to attendees courtesy of the Wisconsin Book Festival and the Madison Public Library Foundation. There will not be a signing or personalizations. 

Presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Program in Creative Writing, poetry and fiction from the 2024-25 Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Fellows. This event will feature the work of Adams Adeosun, Jackie Chalghin, Rickey Fayne, Audrey Gradzewicz, Michael Kaplan, and Winniebell Xinyu Zong.

Madison Public Library Foundation's 2025 Lunch for Libraries event will feature Abraham Verghese, M.D. He will appear live at Monona Terrace to discuss his latest novel, The Covenant of Water. Join us for this annual fundraiser on April 29th at 12:00 p.m. 

Lunch for Libraries is a paid and ticketed event. You can purchase a ticket here.

An instant New York Times bestseller and an Oprah’s Book Club Pick, The Covenant of Water has sold more than two million copies worldwide. Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, the novel follows three generations of a Christian family in Kerala, South India, that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning. 

As the novel opens, a twelve-year-old girl is sent by boat to her wedding, where she meets her husband for the first time. She joins a prosperous household and becomes known as Big Ammachi, the matriarch of an extraordinary family that will endure hardship, celebrate triumph, and witness unthinkable changes over the coming decades. An exquisite modern classic, The Covenant of Water is an unforgettable and stunning epic of love, faith, and medicine.

Lunch for Libraries proceeds fuel year-round author programming of the Wisconsin Book Festival, presented by Madison Public Library in partnership with Madison Public Library Foundation. 

In conversation with Rebecca Makkai.

A sweeping and trenchant exploration of the history of Native American boarding schools in the U.S., and the legacy of abuse wrought by systemic attempts to use education as a tool through which to destroy Native culture.

From the mid-19th century to the late 1930s, tens of thousands of Native children were pulled from their families to attend boarding schools that claimed to help create opportunity for these children to pursue professions outside their communities and otherwise “assimilate” into American life. In reality, these boarding schools—sponsored by the US Government but often run by various religious orders with little to no regulation—were an insidious attempt to destroy tribes, break up families, and stamp out the traditions of generations of Native people.  Children were beaten for speaking their native languages, forced to complete menial tasks in terrible conditions, and utterly deprived of love and affection.

Ojibwe journalist Mary Pember’s mother was forced to attend one of these institutions—a seminary in Wisconsin, and the impacts of her experience have cast a pall over Mary’s own childhood, and her relationship with her mother. Highlighting both her mother’s experience and the experiences of countless other students at such schools, their families, and their children, Medicine River paints a stark portrait of communities still reckoning with the legacy of acculturation that has affected generations of Native communities. Through searing interviews and assiduous historical reporting, Pember traces the evolution and continued rebirth of a culture whose country has been seemingly intent upon destroying it.

The 2025 undergraduate and graduate creative writing awards ceremony. Presented in partnership with The UW Program in Creative Writing.

Featured author TBA.

A raw, crystalline debut poetry collection exploring themes of family, addiction, belonging, and loss—a searching elegy of the fissures that have come to define contemporary American life.

The unsettled border between absence and presence haunts this stunning collection, in which poet laureate Steven Espada Dawson contemplates belonging, identity, family, and grief in poems about his own half-immigrant Mexican American family: his dying mother who raised him, his addict brother who has been missing for more than a decade, and his absent father.

Chronicled in four parts, shifting restlessly between childhood memories, the sudden disappearance of his brother, and the inevitable loss of his ailing mother, Late to the Search Party explores what it means to be a family of one—to be orphaned, whether by fate or by circumstance. In language that is both grounded and ethereal, Dawson tallies the losses and looks at what remains: the frustration and anger, the bewilderment and sadness—and the affection and humor that makes itself felt in spite of everything.

A vivid and thoughtful meditation on love and loss, Late to the Search Party is an ode to the families that inspire and confound us all.

Nate Marshall and Paul Tran will also be reading at this event. 
 

Presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.

In an era of algorithm, assertion, silo, and induced distraction, Jane Hirshfield’s poems bring a much-needed awakening response, actively countering narrowness. The Asking takes its title from the close of one of its thirty-one new poems: “don’t despair of this falling world, not yet / didn’t it give you the asking.” Interrogating language and life, pondering beauty amid bewilderment and transcendence amid transience, Hirshfield offers a signature investigation of the conditions, contradictions, uncertainties, and astonishments that shape our existence. A leading advocate for the biosphere and the alliance of science and imagination, she brings to both inner and outer quandaries an abiding compass: the choice to embrace what is, to face with courage, curiosity, and a sense of kinship whatever comes.

In poems that consider the smallest ant and the vastness of time, hunger and bounty, physics, war, and love in myriad forms, this collection—drawing from nine previous books and five decades of writing—brings the insights and slant-lights that come to us only through poetry’s arc, delve, and tact; through a vision both close and sweeping; through music-inflected thought and recombinant leap.

With its quietly magnifying brushwork and numinous clarities, The Asking expands our awareness of both breakage’s grief and the possibility for repair.

Yetunde awakens aboard a slave ship en route to the United States with the spirit of her dead sister as her only companion. Desperate to survive the hell that awaits her at their destination, Yetunde finds help in an unexpected form—the Devil himself. The Devil, seeking a way to reenter the pearly gates of heaven, decides to prove himself to an indifferent God by protecting Yetunde and granting her a piece of his supernatural power. In return, Yetunde makes an incredible sacrifice.
 
Their bargain extends far beyond Yetunde’s mortal lifespan. Over the next 175 years, the Devil visits Yetunde’s descendants in their darkest hour of need: Lucille, a conjure woman; Asa, who passes for white; Louis and Virgil, who risk becoming a twentieth-century Cain and Abel; Cassandra, who speaks to the dead; James, who struggles to make sense of the past while fighting to keep his family together; and many others. The Devil offers each of them his own version of salvation, all the while wondering: can he save himself, too?
 
Steeped in the spiritual traditions and oral history of the Black diaspora, The Devil Three Times is a baptism by fire and water, heralding a new voice in American fiction.

Dr. Kendi's appearance is a school-visit only.

Published 100 years after his birth, Malcolm Lives! is a ground-breaking narrative biography of one of the most influential Americans of all time.

Dr. Kendi expertly crafts a propulsive telling of Malcolm X’s life—from birth to death. He provides context for both Malcolm’s choices—and those around him—not just painting an intimate picture of a famous figure, but of the social and political landscape of America during the civil rights movement.

Ultimately, Malcolm's true legacy is a journey toward anti-racism. Just like history, Malcolm lives.

With short, evocative chapters, exclusive archival documents, photographs from the Malcolm X Collection at the NYPL Schomburg Center, and extensive backmatter, this is a thoughtful and accessible, must-read for all Americans.