Event Schedule

2000 Blacks probes the complexity of economic and politically motivated migration from Africa, which has been referred to as “African Brain Drain.” In the first sequence of poems, Ajibola Tolase explores Africa’s history and encounters with the Western world, providing poetic insight into the economic instability precipitated by the transatlantic slave trade and exploitation of mineral resources. Moving inward, the second sequence plumbs the poet’s complex relationship with his father, connecting his emotional and then physical absence with the consequences of community disintegration. 

In conversation with Natasha Oladokun.

As the child of a former Hooters waitress and an ex-pro wrestler, Margo Millet's always known she’d have to make it on her own. So she enrolls at her local junior college, even though she can’t imagine how she’ll ever make a living. She’s still figuring things out and never planned to have an affair with her English professor—and while the affair is brief, it isn’t brief enough to keep her from getting pregnant. Despite everyone’s advice, she decides to keep the baby, mostly out of naiveté and a yearning for something bigger.

Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up on her doorstep and asks to move in with her, she agrees in exchange for help with childcare. Then Margo begins to form a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?

Rufi Thorpe’s work has always held up an unflinching mirror to reality. With Margo's Got Money Troubles, Thorpe combines warm humor with raw emotion that feels like a scream in the face of our chronically online late stage capitalist society. It’s a playful and honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative, and an empowering portrait of coming into your own, both online and off.

In conversation with Christi Clancy. 

Presented in partnership with Arts + Literature Laboratory, the Wisconsin Science Festival, and FlakPhoto Projects.

Since 2019, Donald S. Clark has documented the places that have been instrumental in influencing the lives and words of both historic and contemporary nature and environmental writers throughout the United States. While we have always felt their passionate connection to their own environments, no book has ever made this visual connection between writers and their land before—the relationship between prose and place.

Featuring more than 40 of America’s most important writers, the content is as far-reaching as America itself: from sea to shining sea, forest to prairie, and mountain to coastline. Accompanying each gallery of stunning photography is a selected excerpt by the writer about their land. With the increasingly noticeable effects of climate change, the significance of these writers—and their personal connections to the environment—is even more timely.

This unique and compelling story of the land and how it has inspired some of our greatest poets and authors will make a wonderful gift for budding environmentalists, students of nature writing, or anyone interested in conservation.

Hosted by Andy Adams.

Infectiously empathetic, Tits Up: What Sex Workers, Milk Bankers, Plastic Surgeons, Bra Designers, and Witches Tell Us about Breasts will alter your consciousness about breasts. Thornton takes her readers behind the scenes on a journey through five distinct worlds – the strip club, the human milk bank, the plastic surgeon’s operating room, the bra design studio, and finally into the forest for a pagan retreat with body-positive “crones” and “witches.”

Blending sociology, reportage, and personal narrative with unexpected optimism, Thornton connects her revealing case studies to broader concepts of bodily autonomy, gender equality, racial politics, and desire. Along the way, Thornton debunks persistent myths, reveals astounding truths, and unpacks women’s rights in ways that the American feminist movement has historically avoided.

In conversation with Kate Phelps.

Presented in partnership with Arts + Literature Laboratory, the Wisconsin Science Festival, and FlakPhoto Projects.

In Feed the Planet: A Photographic Journey to the World’s Food, acclaimed photographer George Steinmetz documents the global effort that puts food on our tables and transforms the surface of the Earth. Do you know where your food comes from? To find out, Steinmetz spent a decade documenting food production across thirty-six countries on six continents, twenty-seven US states, and five oceans.

In striking aerial images, Steinmetz captures the massive scale of twenty-first-century agriculture that has sculpted 40 percent of the Earth’s surface and depleted the fish in its seas. He takes us to places that most of us never see, although our very lives depend on them. From Kansas wheat fields to a shrimp cocktail’s origins in India to cattle stations in Australia larger than some countries, Steinmetz tracks the foods we eat back to land and sea, field and factory. He explores the farming of staples like wheat and rice, the cultivation of vegetables and fruits, fishing and aquaculture, and meat production, he surveys artisanal farming in diverse cultures, and he penetrates vast agribusinesses that fuel international trade.

In conversation with Michael King.

From the acclaimed author of Netherland (a New York Times Book Review Best Book of the year): the odyssey of two brothers crossing the world in search of an African soccer prodigy who might change their fortunes.

Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the United Kingdom, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Lionel Messi.

Narrated in turn by Mark and his work colleague Lakesha Williams, Godwin is a tale of family and migration as well as an international adventure story that implicates the brothers in the beauty and ugliness of soccer, the perils and promises of international business, and the dark history of transatlantic money-making.

As only he can do, Joseph O’Neill investigates the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism, and the dreaming individual.

An indispensable collection of more than four decades of profound, luminous poetry from acclaimed poet Marie Howe.

Characterized by “a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions” (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane miracles. This essential volume draws from each of Howe’s four previous collections—including What the Living Do (1997), a haunting archive of personal loss, and the National Book Award–longlisted Magdalene (2017), a spiritual and sensual exploration of contemporary womanhood—and contains twenty new poems. Whether speaking in the voice of the goddess Persephone or thinking about aging while walking the dog, Howe is “a light-bearer, an extraordinary poet of our human sorrow and ordinary joy” (Dorianne Laux).

In conversation with Chessy Normile.

Cute, flirty conversation with barista? Thank you, more please! Making eye contact with the attractive person sitting across from you on the train? Thank you, more please! Just feeling yourself from the moment you wake up and spreading that energy all over—thank you, more of that PLEASE!

We already know, dating today can be a total soul-suck. And a big reason for that is because the patriarchy has screwed up how we find love. In Thank You, More Please: A Feminist Guide to Breaking Dumb Dating Rules and Finding Love, Lily Womble, dating coach and founder of Date Brazen, shares a proven guide so readers create a confident and joyful dating life that makes the right relationship inevitable. And the first thing you’ll learn—it’s not you. It’s not the 5 pounds you have yet to lose, it’s not having an extra 20K in your bank account it’s the way we have been conditioned to look for love. 

Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he’s made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the café and pulling off the trick of pretending to be Parisian, it’s getting into fights with your wife because you won’t break character and introduce your very American family to the locals, who can smell you and your perfect city-French from a mile away.

But through cooking what the local grocer tells him to cook, he feels more of this place. A neighbor leads him into the world of winemaking, where he learns not as a pedantic oenophile, but bodily, as a grape picker and winemaker’s apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas he’d held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture.

In conversation with Judith Siers-Poisson.

In a small dorm room at a liberal arts college in Vermont, a young woman settles into the warm blue light of her desk lamp before calling the mother she left behind in northeastern Brazil. Four thousand miles apart and bound by the angular confines of a Skype window, they ask each other a simple question: what’s the news?

Offscreen, little about their lives seems newsworthy. The daughter writes her papers in the library at midnight, eats in the dining hall with the other international students, and raises her hand in class to speak in a language the mother cannot understand. The mother meanwhile preoccupies herself with natural disasters, her increasingly poor health, and the heartbreaking possibility that her daughter might not return to the apartment where they have always lived together. Yet in the blue glow of their computers, the two women develop new rituals of intimacy and caretaking, from drinking whiskey together in the middle of the night to keeping watch as one slides into sleep. As the warm colors of New England autumn fade into an endless winter snow, each realizes that the promise of spring might mean difficult endings rather than hopeful beginnings.

Expanded from a story originally published in The New Yorker, Blue Light Hours paints a powerful portrait of a mother and a daughter coming of age together and apart and explores the profound sacrifices and freedoms that come with leaving a home to make a new one somewhere else.

In conversation with Mandy Moe Pwint Tu.

Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

How the groundbreaking science of circadian rhythms can help you sleep better, feel happier, and improve your overall health.

Your body contains a symphony of tiny timepieces that are synchronized to the sun and subtle signals in your environment. But modern insults like artificial light, contrived time zones, and late-night meals can wreak havoc on your internal clocks. Misaligned circadian rhythms disrupt sleep, reduce productivity, and raise the risk of serious, life-threatening ailments.

Armed with advances in biology and technology, a circadian renaissance is reclaiming those lost rhythms, with profound impacts on our health and well-being. The Inner Clock explores the emerging science and its applications: How could taking a walk in the morning and going to bed at the same time each night keep your body in sync? Why are some doctors prescribing treatments at specific times of day?  And how might a better understanding of our circadian rhythms improve educational outcomes, optimize sports performance, and support the longevity of our planet?

Science journalist Lynne Peeples seeks out the scientists, astronauts, athletes, and patients at the forefront of a growing movement. Along the way, she sleeps in a Cold War-era bunker, chases the midnight sun, spits into test tubes, and wears high-tech light sensors to decipher what makes our internal clocks tick and how we can reset them for the better.

Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

On this imperiled planet, nature’s magic still exists, often in the places we least expect it.

Night Magic is a glorious celebration of the dark! New York Times bestselling nature writer Leigh Ann Henion makes the case for embracing night as a profoundly beautiful part of the world we inhabit—and she invites us to leave our well-lit homes and step outside. It turns out we don’t have to go far to find marvels: We are surrounded by animals that rise with the moon, gigantic moths, and nocturnal blooms that reveal themselves, incrementally, as light fades. In her quest to know night with greater intimacy, Henion travels through forests alight with bioluminescent mushrooms and mountain valleys teeming with migratory salamanders. She ventures into the dark alongside naturalists, biologists, primitive-skills experts, and others who’ve dedicated their lives to cultivating relationships with darkness and the creatures who depend on it.

Every page of this lyrical book feels like an opportunity to ask: How did I not know about this before? For example, we learn that it can take hours, not minutes, for human eyes to reach full night vision capacity. And that there are thousands of firefly species on earth, each with flash patterns as unique as fingerprints—with one million tourists making pilgrimages to witness synchronous fireflies every year. In this age of increasing artificial light, Night Magic is an invitation to focus on the biodiversity that surrounds us. We do not need to stargaze into the distant cosmos or to dive into the depths of oceans to find awe in the dark—when we reclaim night, dazzling wonders can be found in our own backyards.

The first installment in Neal Stephenson’s Bomb Light cycle, Polostan follows the early life of the enigmatic Dawn Rae Bjornberg. Born in the American West to a clan of cowboy anarchists, Dawn is raised in Leningrad after the Russian Revolution by her Russian father, a party line Leninist who re-christens her Aurora. She spends her early years in Russia but then grows up as a teenager in Montana, before being drawn into gunrunning and revolution in the streets of Washington, D.C., during the depths of the Great Depression. When a surprising revelation about her past puts her in the crosshairs of U.S. authorities, Dawn returns to Russia, where she is groomed as a spy by the organization that later becomes the KGB.

Set against the turbulent decades of the early twentieth century, Polostan is an inventive, richly detailed, and deeply entertaining historical epic, and the start of a captivating new series from Neal Stephenson.

Growing up in the 1960s in the suburbs of Chicago, Meg Kissinger’s family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. Whether they were spending summer days on the shores of Lake Michigan, barreling down the ski slopes, or navigating the trials of their Catholic school, the Kissingers always knew how to live large and play hard.

But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding—a heavily medicated mother hospitalized for anxiety and depression, a manic father prone to violence, and children in the throes of bipolar disorder and depression, two of whom would take their own lives. Through it all, the Kissingers faced the world with their signature dark humor and the unspoken family rule: never talk about it.

While You Were Out begins as the personal story of one family’s struggles then opens outward, as Kissinger details how childhood tragedy catalyzed a journalism career focused on exposing our country’s flawed mental health care. Combining the intimacy of memoir with the rigor of investigative reporting, the book explores the consequences of shame, the havoc of botched public policy, and the hope offered by new treatment strategies.

Powerful, candid and filled with surprising humor, this is the story of one family’s love and resilience in face of great loss.

In conversation with Kathleen Bartzen Culver.

A gifted young knight named Collum arrives at Camelot to compete for a spot on the Round Table, only to find that he’s too late. The king died two weeks ago at the Battle of Camlann, leaving no heir, and only a handful of the knights of the Round Table survive.

They aren’t the heroes of legend, like Lancelot or Gawain. They’re the oddballs of the Round Table, from the edges of the stories, like Sir Palomides, the Saracen Knight, and Sir Dagonet, Arthur’s fool, who was knighted as a joke. They’re joined by Nimue, who was Merlin’s apprentice until she turned on him and buried him under a hill. Together this ragtag fellowship will set out to rebuild Camelot in a world that has lost its balance.

The first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium, The Bright Sword is steeped in tradition, full of duels and quests, battles and tournaments, magic swords and Fisher Kings. It also sheds a fresh light on Arthur’s Britain, a diverse, complex nation struggling to come to terms with its bloody history. The Bright Sword is a story about imperfect men and women, full of strength and pain, who are looking for a way to reforge a broken land in spite of being broken themselves.

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

Presented in partnership with Forward Theater Company.

Join the Wisconsin Book Festival and Forward Theater Company for a kickoff event previewing the world premiere of Forward Theater’s Murder Girl! This event will feature playwright Heidi Armbruster talking with Joanne Berg, owner of Mystery To Me bookstore, about crafting an original screenplay and Forward Theater actors performing a snippet or two from the show. Get ready for Friday night fish fry with a side of hilarious whodunit!

It’s close to 5:00 PM, and the crew at Marty’s Supper Club in the woods of Wisconsin have big fish to fry. Twins Eric and LeeAnn are trying to keep their family business afloat, but a little thing called murder may get in the way. Open your holiday season with this home-grown, world-premiere comedy about found family, old fashioneds, and where to stow the roadkill. For more about Murder Girl tickets, visit www.forwardtheater.com.

Presented in partnership with the Children’s Theater of Madison. Please note this event will be held at the Overture Center Capitol Theater. 

The event is free and open to the public but pre-registration is required. When the registration hits maximum theater capacity we will close pre-registration. 

You must bring a printed or digital copy of your submission form receipt to the event for entry.

At the event, seating will be by general admission. Doors will open at 4:15 p.m. If you do not arrive 15 minutes prior to the start of the event, your seat will be released to the public.

Pre-signed copies of Hot Mess 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 line or personalizations at the event. Copies of Awesome Friendly Kid and Diary of a Wimpy Kid books will also be available for purchase at the event.

In Hot Mess, book 19 of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series from #1 international bestselling author Jeff Kinney, Greg Heffley is in for a particularly awkward summer with his whole family.

When the Heffleys agree to spend summer break with both Mom’s and Dad’s relatives at the same time, they have to figure out how to be in two places at once. With Greg caught in the middle, can the Heffleys pull off the ultimate scheme? Or will their vacation turn into a hilarious hot mess?

This side splittingly relatable summer story is the funniest Wimpy Kid book yet! The Hot Mess Show is sure to be just as fun and entertaining. Jeff will be serving up laughs and celebrating the latest Wimpy Kid book, while satisfying your craving for family fun!