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.

Join the Arts + Literature Laboratory for the 5th annual Midwest Video Poetry Fest for live reading and video collaborations followed by a screening of the best new poetry videos from around the world. These films include original poems, experimental works, animation, translations, and more. Filmmakers, poets, and festival organizers will be on hand for a short Q&A after the screening.

The evening's live video poetry collaboration is by Erika Meitner and Michelle Kelley.

This event will be held live at ALL in Madison. Seating is limited.

Join the Arts + Literature Laboratory for the 5th annual Midwest Video Poetry Fest for live reading and video collaborations followed by a screening of the best new poetry videos from around the world. These films include original poems, experimental works, animation, translations, and more. Filmmakers, poets, and festival organizers will be on hand for a short Q&A after the screening.

The evening's live video poetry collaboration is by Deshawn McKinney and Lauden Nute.

This event will be held live at ALL in Madison. Seating is limited.

Book sale dates and times:

• Wednesday, October 16
  • Preview Sale: 4-8 p.m. ($5 entry fee)
• Thursday & Friday, October 17-18
  • Regular Sale: 10:30 a.m.- 7:00 p.m.
• Saturday, October 19
  • $5-a-Bag Sale: 9 a.m. - 1 p.m.
  • All books are FREE: 1-2 p.m.

This semiannual sale is organized by the Friends to help to support public events and lectures, priorities identified by the Dean of Libraries, special purchases and preservation of library materials, and grants for the visiting scholar program. The Friends accepts donations for upcoming sales on a continual basis. The sale is free (except the preview sale) and open to the public. 80 – 100 community volunteers participate in this event that draws students, faculty, and visitors from around the Midwest. Books for the sale are donated by University of Wisconsin faculty, staff, students, and Madison-area residents.

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.

Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

In Barons: Money, Power, and the Corruption of America's Food Industry, agricultural and antitrust expert Frerick tells the stories of seven corporate titans, their rise to power, and the consequences for everyone else. Take Mike McCloskey, Chairman of Fair Oaks Farms. In a few short decades, he went from managing a modest dairy herd to running the Disneyland of agriculture, where school children ride trams through mechanized warehouses filled with tens of thousands of cows that never see the light of day.

Along with McCloskey, readers will meet a secretive German family that took over the global coffee industry in less than a decade, relying on wealth traced back to the Nazis to gobble up countless independent roasters. They will discover how a small grain business transformed itself into an empire bigger than Koch Industries with ample help from taxpayer dollars. And they will learn that in the food business, crime really does pay—especially when you can bribe and then double-cross the
president of Brazil.

In conversation with Will Cushman.

School food programs are about more than just feeding kids. They are a form of community care and a policy tool for advancing education, health, justice, food sovereignty, and sustainability. Transforming School Food Politics around the World illustrates how everyday people from a diverse range of global contexts have successfully challenged and changed programs that fall short of these ideals. Editors Jennifer Gaddis and Sarah A. Robert highlight the importance of global and local struggles to argue that the transformative potential of school food hinges on valuing the gendered labor that goes into caring for, feeding, and educating children.

Through accessible and inspiring essays, Transforming School Food Politics around the World shows politics in action. Chapter contributors include youths, mothers, teachers, farmers, school nutrition workers, academics, lobbyists, policymakers, state employees, nonprofit staff, and social movement activists. Drawing from historical and contemporary research, personal experiences, and collaborations with community partners, they provide readers with innovative strategies that can be used in their own efforts to change school food policy and systems. Ultimately, this volume sets the stage to reimagine school food as part of the infrastructure of daily life, arguing that it can and should be at the vanguard of building a new economy rooted in care for people and the environment.

With appearances and remarks from Representative Francesca Hong and Allison Pfaff Harris.

Additional resources to go along with your reading experience, including a book discussion and activity guide can be found here.  

Presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Center for East Asian Studies.

Join debut memoirists Tessa Hulls, Margaret Juhae Lee, and Zara Chowdhary as they discuss their respective works about unspoken multi-generational family histories unfolding against the backdrop of political unrest, colonialism, and grief.

Feeding Ghosts is an astonishing, deeply moving graphic memoir about three generations of Chinese women, exploring love, grief, exile, and identity.

Starry Field weaves together the stories of Lee’s family against the backdrop of Korea’s tumultuous modern history, with a powerful question at its heart. Can we ever separate ourselves from our family’s past—and if the answer is yes, should we?

The Lucky Ones traces the past of a multigenerational Muslim family to India’s brave but bloody origins, a segregated city’s ancient past, and the lingering hurt causing bloodshed on the streets.

The panel will be moderated by Taymour Soomro.

Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net chronicles the devastating consequences of our DIY society and traces its root causes by drawing together historical, media, and policy analyses and five years of Calarco’s original research. With surveys of 4,000 parents and more than 400 hours of interviews across the socioeconomic, racial, and political spectrum, Calarco illustrates how women have been forced to bear the brunt of our broken system and why no one seems to care.

Despite their effort, women constantly feel guilty for not doing more, and Calarco poignantly shows us how the US weaponizes that guilt and gaslights women into believing that they don’t deserve help. Yet women's labor is the reason we've been getting by without a comprehensive public safety net, while maintaining the illusion that we don't need one.

Weaving together eye-opening research and a revelatory sociological narrative, Holding It Together is a bold call to demand the institutional change that each of us deserves, and a warning about the perils of living without it.

Presented in partnership with Wisconsin Public Radio, and in conversation with WPR "Wisconsin Today" host, Kate Archer Kent. 

Presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Center for East Asian Studies.

A captivating and intimate debut novel interwoven with folktale and myth, Wendy Chen’s Their Divine Fires tells the story of the love affairs of three generations of Chinese women across one hundred years of revolutions both political and personal.  In 1917, at the dawn of the Chinese revolution, Yunhong is growing up in the southern china countryside and falls deeply in love with the son of a wealthy landlord despite her brother’s objections. On the night of her wedding, her brother destroys the marriage, irrevocably changing the shape of Yunhong’s family to come: her daughter, Yuexin, will never know her father. Haunted by a history that she does not understand, Yuexin passes on those memories to her daughters Hongxing and Yonghong, who come of age in the years following Mao’s death, battling the push and pull of political forces as they forge their own paths. Each generation guards its secrets, leaving Emily, great-granddaughter of Yunhong and living in contemporary America, to piece together what actually happened between her mother and her aunt, and the weight of their shared ancestry.

Drawing on the lives of her great-grandmother and her great-uncles—both of whom fought on the side of the Communists—as well as her mother’s experiences during the Cultural Revolution, Wendy Chen infuses this gorgeous debut with a passion that will transport the reader back to powerful moments in history while bringing us close to the women who persisted despite the forces all around them. Both brilliant and haunting, it’s a story about what our ancestors will, and won’t, tell us. 

In conversation with Eliot Chen.

Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

There Are (No) Stupid Questions … in Science was born from Elson’s popular web series, 60 Seconds of Science, wherein her avid followers, from all around the world, suggest topics to be explained within sixty seconds. 

In the vein of Astrophysics for People in a Hurry by Neil DeGrasse Tyson and The Complete Manual of Things That Might Kill You: A Guide to Self Diagnosis for Hypochondriacs by Jen Bilik, There Are (No) Stupid Questions … in Science provides easy-to-understand and delightfully cheeky explanations for scientific and medical quandaries, and is appropriate for everyone from those with no prior scientific knowledge to colleagues in the scientific field.

In conversation with Andrew Hanus.

Presented in partnership with the Cooperative Children's Book Center.

Established in 1998, the lecture was named to honor Charlotte Zolotow, a distinguished children's book editor for 38 years with Harper Junior Books, and author of more than 65 picture books, including such classic works as Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present (Harper, 1962) and William's Doll (Harper, 1972). Ms. Zolotow attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison on a writing scholarship from 1933-36 where she studied with Professor Helen C. White. The Cooperative Children's Book Center, a library of the School of Education of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, administers the event which each year brings a distinguished children's book author or illustrator to the campus to deliver a free public lecture.

Registration is requested to facilitate seating and space needs. 

Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

Explore the remarkable story of Wisconsin astronomers whose curiosity, persistence, and innovation helped us better understand our universe.

Chasing the Stars traces the history of the University of Wisconsin’s Washburn Observatory, where some of the world’s most cutting-edge astronomical inventions were born. Learn about the earliest Indigenous stargazers, the women who worked as the first human computers, the astronomers who sold time by the stars, the scientists who shrank the Milky Way, and the crucial role Wisconsin astronomers played in the development of modern astrophysics and space astronomy.

This extraordinary book features more than 100 modern and historic photographs that illustrate the people and science behind Wisconsin’s astronomical innovations. Designed for lay readers and astronomers alike, Chasing the Stars inspires all of us to look up at the sky in wonder.

Hosted by Doug Moe. 

Suffering from CIP (Congenital Insensitivity to Pain)—an extremely rare disorder from birth that disenables the perception of pain—Kara Johnson always knew she’d die young and violently. It didn’t matter who delivered the final blow, she would deserve it; her years spent running drugs and spreading violence would guarantee it. But death doesn’t follow expectation: when her girlfriend Celina sacrifices herself to save Kara’s life, Kara is left grieving and adrift, just like her signature dark sketches of half-dead birds. She doesn’t know why she’s alive until the DEA shows up in her hideout and offers her a choice: go to prison or turn informant to lure out the last of the drug trafficking ring that murdered Celina.

In a direct follow-up to her USA Today bestseller To Catch a Storm, Mindy Mejia delves into survivor’s guilt and fleshes out the lives continued by the ones left behind in A World of Hurt. Grounded in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic at the convergence of the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police protests, A World of Hurt is part of Mejia’s Iowa Mysteries series, set in the same universe as To Catch a Storm, yet acts like a standalone focusing wholly on a new unlikely investigative duo.

In conversation with Matt Goldman.

A saucy, searingly original debut about two sisters raised in the shadow of El Salvador’s brutal dictator, El Gran Pendejo, and their flight from genocide, which takes them from Hollywood to Paris to cannery row, each followed by a chorus of furies, the ghosts of their murdered friends, who aren’t yet done telling their stories.

El Salvador, 1923. Graciela grows up on a volcano in a community of indigenous women indentured to coffee plantations owned by the country’s wealthiest, until a messenger from the Capital comes to claim her: at nine years old she’s been chosen to be an oracle for a rising dictator—a sinister, violent man wedded to the occult. She’ll help foresee the future of the country.

In the Capital she meets Consuelo, the sister she’s never known, stolen away from their home before Graciela was born. The two are a small fortress within the dictator’s regime, but they’re no match for El Gran Pendejo’s cruelty. Years pass and terror rises as the economy flatlines, and Graciela comes to understand the horrific vision that she’s unwittingly helped shape just as genocide strikes the community that raised her. She and Consuelo barely escape, each believing the other to be dead. They run, crossing the globe, reinventing their lives, and ultimately reconnecting at the least likely moment.

Endlessly surprising, vividly imaginative, bursting with lush life, The Volcano Daughters charts, through the stories of these sisters and the ghosts they carry with them, a new history and mythology of El Salvador, fiercely bringing forth voices that have been calling out for generations.

This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter’s perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus at UW–Milwaukee, booking thousands of concerts across Wisconsin and the Midwest, and opening Shank Hall, the beloved Milwaukee venue named after a club in the cult film This Is Spinal Tap.

This funny, nostalgia-inducing book details the lasting friendships Jest established over the years with John Prine, Arlo Guthrie, and Milwaukee’s own Violent Femmes, among others. It also shines a light into the seldom-seen world of music promotion, as Jest attempts to manage a turbulent band on the road, negotiates with agents, deals with fires (both real and metaphorical), struggles through a pandemic, and takes pleasure in presenting music of all kinds—from world-famous acts to up-and-coming local bands. In addition to photos of celebrated musicians, the book includes concert posters, tickets, and backstage passes documenting decades of rock, folk, and alternative shows that helped put Milwaukee on the live music map.

Copies of We Had Fun and Nobody Died will be distributed for free to all attendees courtesy of the Wisconsin Book Festival. 

Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

“Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can name,” writes Dava Sobel at the opening of her shining portrait of the sole Nobel laureate decorated in two separate fields of science— Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre and Chemistry by herself in 1911. And yet, Sobel makes clear, as brilliant as she was in the laboratory, Marie Curie was equally memorable outside it. Grieving Pierre’s untimely death in 1906, she took his place as professor of physics at the Sorbonne; devotedly raised two brilliant daughters; drove a van she outfitted with X-ray equipment to the front lines of World War I; befriended Albert Einstein and other luminaries of twentieth-century physics; won support from two US presidents; and inspired generations of young women the world over to pursue science as a way of life.

As Sobel did so memorably in her portrait of Galileo through the prism of his daughter, she approaches Marie Curie from a unique angle, narrating her remarkable life of discovery and fame alongside the women who became her legacy—from France’s Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium, and Norway’s Ellen Gleditsch, to Marie Curie’s elder daughter, Irène, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For decades the only woman in the room at international scientific gatherings that probed new theories about the interior of the atom, Marie Curie traveled far and wide, despite constant illness, to share the secrets of radioactivity, a term she coined. Her two triumphant tours of the United States won her admirers for her modesty even as she was mobbed at every stop; her daughters, in Ève’s later recollection, “discovered all at once what the retiring woman with whom they had always lived meant to the world.”

With the consummate skill that made bestsellers of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter, and the appreciation for women in science at the heart of her most recent The Glass Universe, Dava Sobel has crafted a radiant biography and a masterpiece of storytelling, illuminating the life and enduring influence of one of the most consequential figures of our time.

Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

Across cultures, sound and rhythm have been used to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind. In his new book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel J. Levitin explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain.

“How can we scientifically study something as magical, ineffable, and as spiritually moving as music?” Levitin writes. “If we try to pin down the slippery thing that is art, will we demystify it or ruin it?” The interaction of music, mood, health, and the biology of our brain is yielding ever more clues about how it all works. In Levitin’s telling, the science of music reinvents and reinvigorates its mystery, power, and beauty. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord will show you what we know, how it can be explained, and how we can harness the potential of music for healing and for help in staving off disease in the first place; for relieving pain; for helping us look forward and reimagine our lives.

Levitin is not your typical scientist―he is also an award-winning musician and composer, and through lively interviews with some of today’s most celebrated musicians, from Sting to Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama, he shares their observations as to why music might be an effective therapy, in addition to plumbing scientific case studies, music theory, and music history. The result is a work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and jubilant celebration. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord highlights the critical role music has played in human biology, illuminating the neuroscience of music and its profound benefits for those both young and old.

“Music can calm our brains, our hearts, our nerves,” Levitin writes. “We like music that strikes the sweet spot between novelty and familiarity, simplicity and complexity, and between predictability and surprise. Loving music requires that we be receptive to it, that we make the mental space and time to allow ourselves to give into it, to be won over by it. If our defenses are up it may simply not work. Or it can catch us by surprise, evoking some of our deepest memories or deepest feelings, and in the process, help us through almost anything.”

In conversation with Ben Sidran.

A riveting account of the decades-long effort by reactionary white conservatives to undermine democracy and entrench their power—and the movement to stop them.

The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, represented an extreme form of the central danger facing American democracy today: a blatant disregard for the will of the majority. But this crisis didn’t begin or end with Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Through voter suppression, election subversion, gerrymandering, dark money, the takeover of the courts, and the whitewashing of history, reactionary white conservatives have strategically entrenched power in the face of a massive demographic and political shift. Ari Berman charts these efforts with sweeping historical research and incisive on-the-ground reporting, chronicling how a wide range of antidemocratic tactics interact with profound structural inequalities in institutions like the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court to threaten the survival of representative government in America.

“The will of the people,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1801, “is the only legitimate foundation of any government.” But that foundation is crumbling. Some counter-majoritarian measures were deliberately built into the Constitution, which was designed in part to benefit a small propertied upper class, but they have metastasized to a degree that the Founding Fathers could never have anticipated, undermining the very notion of “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Chilling and revelatory, Minority Rule exposes the long history of the conflict between white supremacy and multiracial democracy that has reached a fever pitch today—while also telling the inspiring story of resistance to these regressive efforts.

Presented in partnership with Wisconsin Public Radio, and in conversation with WPR "Wisconsin Today" host, Rob Ferrett.

Jasmyn and King Williams move their family to the planned Black utopia of Liberty, California hoping to find a community of like-minded people, a place where their growing family can thrive. King settles in at once, embracing the Liberty ethos, including the luxe wellness center at the top of the hill, which proves to be the heart of the community. But Jasmyn struggles to find her place. She expected to find liberals and social justice activists striving for racial equality, but Liberty residents seem more focused on booking spa treatments and ignoring the world’s troubles. 

Jasmyn’s only friends in the community are equally perplexed and frustrated by most residents' outlook. Then Jasmyn discovers a terrible secret about Liberty and its founders. Frustration turns to dread as their loved ones start embracing the Liberty way of life. 

Will the truth destroy her world in ways she never could have imagined?

Thrilling with insightful social commentary, One Of Our Kind explores the ways in which freedom is complicated by the presumptions we make about ourselves and each other.

Copies of One Of Our Kind will be distributed for free to all attendees courtesy of the Wisconsin Book Festival. 

"If you’re reading this email, I am dead. I know this will sound strange, but someone has been trying to kill me."

Liv and Gabe Ahlstrom are estranged siblings who haven’t seen each other in years, but that’s about to change when they receive a rare call from their older brother’s wife. “Mack is dead,” she says. “He died of a seizure.” Five minutes after they hang up, Liv and Gabe each receive a scheduled email from their dead brother, claiming that he was murdered.

The siblings return to their family run resort in the Northwoods of Minnesota to investigate Mack's claims, but Leech Lake has more in store for them than either could imagine. Drawn into a tangled web of lies and betrayal that spans decades, they put their lives on the line to unravel the truth about their brother, their parents, themselves, and the small town in which they grew up. After all, no one can keep a secret in a small town, but someone in Leech Lake is willing to kill for the truth to stay buried.

New York Times bestselling and Emmy award-winning author Matt Goldman returns with a gripping, emotional thrill ride in this compelling story on grief and uncovering the past before it’s too late.

In conversation with Mindy Mejia.