Wisconsin Book Festival

The Wisconsin Book Festival, presented by Madison Public Library in partnership with Madison Public Library Foundation, presents free, public author events that celebrate books and spark conversations. Each year, the festival creates a robust schedule of accomplished and new writers whose fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books appeal to all ages of readers. The festival presents stand-alone events throughout the year with a culminating celebration each fall.

Schedule of Events:

We Read Youth Voices Writing Contest: Authors Reception
2024 WE READ Youth Voices Winners
Diya Dhawal
Grace Huang
Nora Moran
Ash Gartler
9:30 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
Central Library
 
Children's Area on the Lower Level
In celebration of the 2024 We Read Youth Voices Anthology, we invite the featured authors and their families to join us for donuts and coffee, reveal the published book, and hear a special question and answer session from our grand prize winner and runners-up.

Read the inspiration behind these young writers' submissions:

Grace Huang: As someone who faced many language and racial barriers in their childhood, every small act of kindness I encountered has left a profound impact on me. This story is one of those experiences that has inspired me over the years and will continue doing so.

Nora Moran: I wrote this story because I was thinking about how small acts of kindness have a domino effect and we don't know how it can spread and how much of an impact it has on the world.

Ash Gartler: I was inspired to create this story to illustrate both the cruelty and beauty of humanity, and to bring awareness to a topic that is deeply important to me from a unique perspective.

Frostbite
Nicola Twilley
10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302
Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

How often do we open the fridge or peer into the freezer with the expectation that we'll find something fresh and ready to eat? It's an everyday act—but just a century ago, eating food that had been refrigerated was cause for both fear and excitement. The introduction of artificial refrigeration overturned millennia of dietary history, launching a new chapter in human nutrition. We could now overcome not just rot, but seasonality and geography. Tomatoes in January? Avocados in Shanghai? All possible.

In Frostbite, New Yorker contributor and cohost of the award-winning podcast Gastropod Nicola Twilley takes readers on a tour of the cold chain from farm to fridge, visiting off-the-beaten-path landmarks such as Missouri's subterranean cheese caves, the banana-ripening rooms of New York City, and the vast refrigerated tanks that store the nation's orange juice reserves. Today, nearly three-quarters of everything on the average American plate is processed, shipped, stored, and sold under refrigeration. It's impossible to make sense of our food system without understanding the all-but-invisible network of thermal control that underpins it. Twilley's eye-opening book is the first to reveal the transformative impact refrigeration has had on our health and our guts; our farms, tables, kitchens, and cities; global economics and politics; and even our environment.

Lola
Karla Arenas Valenti
10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Central Library
 
Lower-Level Program Room
A simmering tale of magic, adventure, and the extraordinary bond between a brother and sister who'd journey to the ends of the Earth to save each other. From the acclaimed author of Lotería comes a heartfelt story rooted in Mexican magical realism.

Ten-year-old Lola has always been touched by magic. In her Mexico City home, built around a towering tree, she is accustomed to enchanted blooms that change with the seasons, a sandbox that spits out mysterious treasures, and mischievous chaneques that scuttle about unseen by all but her. Magic has always been a part of her life, but now she must embrace the extraordinary as never before.

Ever since The Thing That Happened, Lola's brother Alex has been sick. As his condition worsens, something begins eating away at the tree, causing its leaves and blossoms to crumble like ash. The two are related, Lola is sure of it, but how? Seeking a cure, she visits a grocery store oracle who bids her to follow the chaneques down one of their secret passages... into a hidden world.

Here in Floresta, a land of myths and monsters and marvels untold, lies the key to healing her brother. But the kingdom's young queen stands in the way. Lola must use her wits and face her deepest fears if there's any hope of saving Alex in time.

Get excited for Karla's event for LOLA with this reader's guide and pre-event activities.

Spooky Lakes
Geo Rutherford
10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

Dive into the most mysterious waters around the world (if you dare) in Spooky Lakes, an illustrated nonfiction book from artist and educator Geo Rutherford.

Some of Earth's strangest—and creepiest—wonders lie deep below the surface. There's Lake Natron, a Tanzanian lake so briny that its waters can mummify any creature that touches its surface; Lake Maracaibo, a Venezuelan tidal bay where a constantly brewing storm sends an average of 28 lightning bolts per second into the water; and at the bottom of Lake Superior, the crew of the USS Kamloops—which mysteriously disappeared in 1921—remains somehow almost perfectly preserved to this day.

From Geo Rutherford—the creator of the hit series Spooky Lake Month (over 65 million likes!)—comes this thrilling nonfiction book that plumbs the depths of 25 unusual lakes around the world. Readers will learn not only about the science of hydrology, but why understanding the natural world is crucial to protecting it from pollution and climate change. Backed by extensive research and packed with all-new content—including eerie and eye-popping watercolor illustrations in full color—Spooky Lakes takes readers on an adventure through weird and wild waters.
 
We Were The Universe
Kimberly King Parsons
Chelsea Bieker
10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301

A young mother, in denial after the death of her sister, navigates the dizzying landscapes of desire, guilt, and grief in this darkly comic, highly anticipated debut novel from Kimberly King Parsons, author of the story collection, Black Light (longlisted for the National Book Award).

The trip was supposed to be fun. When Kit's best friend gets dumped by his boyfriend, he begs her to ditch her family responsibilities for an idyllic weekend in the Montana mountains. They'll soak in hot springs, then sneak a vape into a dive bar and drink too much, like old times. Instead, their getaway only reminds Kit of everything she's lost lately: her wildness, her independence, and—most heartbreaking of all—her sister, Julie, who died a few years ago.

When she returns to the Dallas suburbs, Kit tries to settle into her routine—long afternoons spent caring for her irrepressible daughter, going on therapist-advised dates with her concerned husband, and reluctantly taking her mother's phone calls. But in the secret recesses of Kit's mind, she's reminiscing about the band she used to be in—and how they'd go out to the desert after shows and drop acid. She's imagining an impossible threesome with her kid's pretty gymnastics teacher and the cool playground mom. Keyed into everything that might distract from her surfacing pain, Kit spirals. As her already thin boundaries between reality and fantasy blur, she begins to wonder: Is Julie really gone?

Neon bright in its insight, both devastating and laugh-out-loud funny, We Were the Universe is an ambitious, inventive novel from a revelatory new voice in American fiction—a fearless exploration of sisterhood, motherhood, friendship, marriage, psychedelics, and the many strange, transcendent shapes love can take

Madwoman
Chelsea Bieker
Kimberly King Parsons
12 p.m. - 1 p.m.
Central Library
 
Lower-Level Program Room
"The rare kind of book that lives in your bones," this novel tells a gripping story of motherhood and motherloss and the brutal, mighty things women do to keep themselves and each other alive, marking Chelsea Bieker as a major fiction talent.

Clove has gone to extremes to keep her past a secret. Thanks to her lies, she's landed the life of her dreams, complete with a safe husband and two adoring children who will never know the terror that was routine in her own childhood. If her buried anxiety threatens to breach the surface, Clove (if that is really her name) focuses on finding the right supplement, the right gratitude meditation.

But when she receives a letter from a women's prison in California, her past comes screeching into the present, entangling her in a dangerous game with memory and the people she thought she had outrun. As we race between her precarious present-day life in Portland, Oregon and her childhood in a Waikiki high-rise with her mother and father, Clove is forced to finally unravel the defining day of her life. How did she survive that day, and what will it take to end the cycle of violence? Will the truth undo her, or could it ultimately save her?

In conversation with Kimberly King Parsons.

Safe
Mark Daley
12 p.m. - 1 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302

What does it take to keep a child safe?

As a long-time strategist and activist fighting for better outcomes for foster children, Mark Daley thought he knew the answer. But when Ethan and Logan, an adorable infant and a precocious toddler, entered their lives, Mark and his husband Jason quickly realized they were not remotely prepared for the uncertainty and complication of foster parenting.

Every day seven hundred children enter the foster care system in the United States, and thousands more live on the brink. Safe offers a deeply personal and "riveting" window into what happens when the universal longing for family crashes up against the unique madness and bureaucracy of a child protection system that often fails to consider the needs of the most vulnerable parties of all—the children themselves.

Daley takes us on a roller-coaster ride as he and Jason grapple with Ethan and Logan's potential reunification with their biological family, learn brutal lessons about sacrifice, acceptance, and healing, and face the honest, heartbreaking, and sometimes hilarious challenges of becoming a parent at the intersection of intergenerational trauma, inadequate social support, and systemic issues of prejudice.

The Morningside
Téa Obreht
12 p.m. - 1 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301

After being expelled from their ancestral home in a not-so-distant-future, Silvia and her mother finally settle at The Morningside, a crumbling luxury tower in a place called Island City where Silvia's aunt Ena serves as the superintendent. Sil feels unmoored in her new life because her mother has been so diligently secretive about their family's past, and because the once-vibrant city she lives in is now half-underwater. She knows almost nothing about the place where she was born and spent her early years, nor does she fully understand why she and her mother had to leave. But in Ena there is an opening: a person willing to give the young girl glimpses into the folktales of her demolished homeland, a place of natural beauty and communal spirit that is lacking in Sil's lonely and impoverished reality.

The Morningside is at once a sweeping tale of mothers and daughters, a haunting and atmospheric look at a world affected by climate change, and an enchanting folktale of the future. Like its predecessors, Obreht's latest examines the way people thrive in their imagination (what she calls "the necessity of a space between the real and the possible"), and considers how myths shape our families, and our perceptions of the world.

Turning to Stone
Marcia Bjornerud
12 p.m. - 1 p.m.
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium

Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

Earth is vibrantly alive and full of wisdom for those who learn to listen.

Earth has been reinventing itself for more than four billion years, keeping a record of its experiments in the form of rocks. Yet most of us live our lives on the planet with no idea of its extraordinary history, unable to interpret the language of the rocks that surround us. Geologist Marcia Bjornerud believes that our lives can be enriched by understanding our heritage on this old and creative planet. Contrary to their reputation, rocks have eventful lives–and they intersect with our own in surprising ways. In Turning to Stone, Bjornerud reveals how rocks are the hidden infrastructure that keep the planet functioning, from sandstone aquifers purifying the water we drink to basalt formations slowly regulating global climate.

Bjornerud's life as a geologist has coincided with an extraordinary period of discovery in the geosciences. From an insular girlhood in rural Wisconsin, she found her way to an unlikely career studying mountains in remote parts of the world and witnessed the emergence of a new understanding of the Earth as an animate system of rock, air, water and life. We are all, most fundamentally, Earthlings and we can find existential meaning and enduring wisdom in stone.

The City in Glass
Nghi Vo
1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Central Library, Lower-Level Program Room

A demon. An angel. A city.

The demon Vitrine—immortal, powerful, and capricious—loves the dazzling city of Azril. She has mothered, married, and maddened the city and its people for generations, and built it into a place of joy and desire, revelry and riot.

And then the angels come, and the city falls.

Vitrine is left with nothing but memories and a book containing the names of those she has lost—and an angel, now bound by her mad, grief-stricken curse to haunt the city he burned.

She mourns her dead and rages against the angel she longs to destroy. Made to be each other's devastation, angel and demon are destined for eternal battle. Instead, they find themselves locked in a devouring fascination that will change them both forever.

Together, they unearth the past of the lost city and begin to shape its future. But when war threatens Azril and everything they have built, Vitrine and her angel must decide whether they will let the city fall again.

The City in Glass is both a brilliantly constructed history and an epic love story, of death and resurrection, memory and transformation, redemption and desire strong enough to reduce a world to ashes and remake it anew.

The Indian Card, Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz
1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302

Who is Indian enough?

To be Native American is to live in a world of contradictions. At the same time that the number of people in the US who claim Native identity has exploded—increasing 85 percent in just ten years—the number of people formally enrolled in Tribes has not. While the federal government recognizes Tribal sovereignty, being a member of a Tribe requires navigating blood quantum laws and rolls that the federal government created with the intention of wiping out Native people altogether. Over two million Native people are tribally enrolled, yet there are Native people who will never be. Native people who, for a variety of reasons ranging from displacement to disconnection, cannot be card-carrying members of their Tribe.

In The Indian Card, Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz grapples with these contradictions. Through in-depth interviews, she shares the stories of people caught in the mire of identity-formation, trying to define themselves outside of bureaucratic processes. With archival research, she pieces together the history of blood quantum and tribal rolls and federal government intrusion on Native identity-making. Reckoning with her own identity—the story of her enrollment and the enrollment of her children—she investigates the cultural, racial, and political dynamics of today's Tribal identity policing. With this intimate perspective of the ongoing fight for Native sovereignty, The Indian Card sheds light on what it looks like to find a deeper sense of belonging.

The Insect Epiphany
Barrett Klein
Heather Swan
1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

Insects surround us. They fuel life on Earth through their roles as pollinators, predators, and prey, but rarely do we consider the outsize influence they have had on our culture and civilization. Their anatomy and habits inform how we live, work, create art, and innovate. Featuring nearly 250 color images—from ancient etchings to avant-garde art, from bug-based meals to haute couture—The Insect Epiphany proves that our world would look very different without insects, not just because they are crucial to ecosystems, but because they have shaped and inspired so many aspects of what makes us human.

Hosted by Heather Swan.

Women's Hotel
Daniel M. Lavery
1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301
The Beidermeier might be several rungs lower on the ladder than the real-life Barbizon, but its residents manage to occupy one another nonetheless. There's Katherine, the first-floor manager, lightly cynical and more than lightly suggestible. There's Lucianne, a work-shy party girl caught between the love of comfort and an instinctive bridling at convention, Kitty the sponger, Ruth the failed hairdresser, and Pauline the typesetter. And there's Stephen, the daytime elevator operator and part-time Cooper Union student.

The residents give up breakfast, juggle competing jobs at rival presses, abandon their children, get laid off from the telephone company, attempt to retrain as stenographers, all with the shared awareness that their days as an institution are numbered, and they'd better make the most of it while it lasts.

Presented in partnership with Wisconsin Public Radio, and in conversation with WPR "BETA" host and producer, Doug Gordon.

Attack From Within
Barbara McQuade
David Maraniss
3 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302

American society is more polarized than ever before. We are strategically being pushed apart by disinformation—the deliberate spreading of lies disguised as truth—and it comes at us from all sides: opportunists on the far right, Russian misinformed social media influencers, among others. It's endangering our democracy and causing havoc in our electoral system, schools, hospitals, workplaces, and in our Capitol. Advances in technology including rapid developments in artificial intelligence threaten to make the problems even worse by amplifying false claims and manufacturing credibility.

In Attack from Within: How Disinformation is Sabotaging America, legal scholar and analyst Barbara McQuade, shows us how to identify the ways disinformation is seeping into all facets of our society and how we can fight against it.

Disinformation is designed to evoke a strong emotional response to push us toward more extreme views, unable to find common ground with others. The false claims that led to the breathtaking attack on our Capitol in 2021 may have been only a dress rehearsal. Attack from Within shows us how to prevent it from happening again, thus preserving our country's hard-won democracy.

Copies of Attack From Within will be distributed for free to all attendees courtesy of the Wisconsin Book Festival.

Forest of Noise
Mosab Abu Toha
3 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301

Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed his house and neighborhood, he and his family fled for their safety.

Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct, and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid; here are lyrics about the poet's wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather's oranges, his daughter's joy in eating them.

Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving under siege, Forest of Noise is an urgent, extraordinary, and arrestingly whimsical book. Searing and beautiful, it brings us indelible art in a time of war.

Malas
Marcela Fuentes
3 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Central Library, Lower-Level Program Room

In 1951, a mysterious old woman confronts Pilar Aguirre in the small border town of La Cienega, Texas. The old woman is sure Pilar stole her husband and, in a heated outburst, lays a curse on Pilar and her family.

More than forty years later, Lulu Muñoz is dodging chaos at every turn: her troubled father's moods, his rules, her secret life as singer in a punk band, but most of all her upcoming quinceañera. When her beloved grandmother passes away, Lulu finds herself drawn to the glamorous stranger who crashed the funeral and who lives alone and shunned on the edge of town.

Their unexpected kinship picks at the secrets of Lulu's family's past. As the quinceañera looms—and we move between these two strong, irascible female voices—one woman must make peace with the past, and one girl pushes to embrace her future.

Rich with cinematic details—from dusty rodeos to the excitement of a Selena concert and the comfort of conjunto ballads played at family gatherings—this memorable debut is a love letter to the Tejano culture and community that sustain both of these women as they discover what family means.

Writing the More-Than-Human World: A Reading and Conversation with Heather Swan and Catherine Jagoe
Jagoe/Swan Event Graphic
Catherine Jagoe
Heather Swan
3 p.m. - 4 p.m.
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

At a time when some scientists claim we are experiencing an insect apocalypse, Catherine Jagoe and Heather Swan use two different genres to call attention to these marvelous and crucial beings. Swan's Where the Grass Still Sings is a nonfiction and art book about the vital role of insects and those working to save them around the globe; Jagoe's Prayer to the God of Small Things is a book of ecopoetry that features a range of tiny Wisconsin insects but also larger beings including birds, trees, and muskrats.

Writing about the nexus between the human and more-than-human world in this time of climate change and species loss, the two will read from their new books and discuss issues such as the dismal history of human treatment of insects; the "problem" of anthropomorphizing animals; writing in response to or in conjunction with art and photography; acknowledging complicity and its complications; paying attention as a practice of interconnection; and how to cultivate wonder and hope at a time of unparalleled ecological destruction.

Beyond the Big Lie
Bill Adair
4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302

Bill Adair knows a lie when he hears one. Since 2008, the site he founded, PolitiFact, has been the go-to spot for media members and political observers alike to seek the truth in an increasingly deceitful world. Since the site's launching, politics' tenuous relationship with the truth has only gotten weaker—and weirder.

In this groundbreaking book, Adair reveals how politicians lie and why. Relying on dozens of candid interviews with politicians, political operatives, and experts in misinformation, Adair reveals the patterns of lying, why Republicans do it more, and the consequences for our democracy. He goes behind the scenes to describe several episodes that reveal the motivations and tactics of the nation's political liars, show the impact they have on people's lives, and demonstrate how the problem began before Donald Trump and will continue after he's gone. Adair examines how Republicans have tried to change the landscape to allow their lying by intimidating the news media, people in academia and government, and tech companies.

An award-winning journalist and pioneer in political fact-checking, Adair is uniquely able to tell this story. With humor and insight, this remarkable book unpacks the sad state of our politics, but also, provides solutions to put an end to American political deceit once and for all.

In conversation with Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Editor Greg Borowski.

Extra! Extra! Eat All About It!
Jane Conway and Randi Julia Ramsden
4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium
Fifty retro recipes—and the history behind them—to inspire and delight home cooks everywhere.

A blend of cookbook and bite-size history, Extra! Extra! Eat All About It! offers a unique glimpse into the Midwestern culinary landscape between 1870 and 1930. Fifty recipes selected from Wisconsin newspapers are served alongside brief essays that dig into the history behind the food trends of the time. In lively prose, historians Jane Conway and Randi Julia Ramsden reveal how coconuts and oysters made their way to 1800s Wisconsin, how the state came to lead the nation in commercial pea canning, how bakers gauged the temperatures of their wood burning stoves, and how our predecessors really did slip on banana peels, among other flavorful facts.

In addition to capturing quirky food fashions, like breakfast parties and paper-bag cooking, the recipes provide insights into regional cooking traditions. Each original recipe appears alongside the authors' updated, easy-to-follow version. Mouthwatering modern photographs showcase the revived dishes for the first time in their long history, and newspaper clippings, ads, and illustrations give the book a charming vintage look.

Featuring a variety of recipes, ranging from trendy (Barbecued Ham with Bananas) and tempting (Pickled Walnuts) to traditional (Pumpernickel) and tantalizing (Apple de Luxe), Extra! Extra! Eat All About It! will satisfy the appetites of history lovers and home chefs alike.

Float Up, Sing Down
Laird Hunt
Beth Nguyen
4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301

Float Up, Sing Down is the story of a single day in one of Hunt's most beloved and enduring landscapes. The residents of this rural town have their routines, their preferences, their joys, grudges, and regrets. The old-timers savor past triumphs, cast back to lives circumscribed and defined by the World Wars, wonder what might have been. Youngsters covet cars, karate moves, kissing; they writhe in the first blushes of love or pain or independence. Gossip is paramount. Lives are entwined. Retired sheriffs climb corn bins and muse on lost love, French teachers throw firecrackers out of barn windows, and teenagers borrow motorcycles to ride the back roads.

As the book unfolds these lives echo and glance off one another with elegance and warmth, a tenderness born of strength. In the tradition of Willa Cather, Sherwood Anderson, Elizabeth Strout, and Edward P. Jones, this is a symphony of souls, a masterful portrait of both loneliness and community.

STILL: The Art of Noticing
Mary Jo Hoffman
4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Arts + Literature Laboratory

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

Every day since January 1, 2012, Mary Jo Hoffman has made a photograph of found nature. That's nearly 4,400 consecutive days—not a single day missed. Over more than a decade of STILL—the title Hoffman gave to the project—this daily ritual cracked open profound revelations about the importance of place, the passing of time, the connectedness of all things, and the trajectory of her own life. STILL: The Art of Noticing traces this incredible undertaking, sharing a selection of breathtaking photographs from Hoffman's enormous archive, accompanied by perceptive, deeply felt, and oftentimes humorous essays illuminating the insights gained through this daily creative practice.

Organized into six sections, STILL features 275 of Hoffman's favorite photographs from the first decade of the project. Through her lens, the seemingly ordinary objects of daily life burst with new unexpected forms, colors, and possibilities. Mushrooms, leaves, stones, shells, seed pods, insects—all vibrate with magic under close inspection. Sunflowers have a windswept drama, and a closeup of the soft, red-furred ear of a dead coyote—technically roadkill—is peace embodied.

Too Good To Miss Poetry Reading: Extraordinary Poets With Wisconsin Ties
Cynthia Marie Hoffman
Alison Thumel
J.L. Conrad
4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Central Library,Lower-Level Program Room

Join the Wisconsin Book Festival for an evening of moving poetry by extraordinary poets with Wisconsin Ties: Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Alison Thumel, and J.L. Conrad.

Hoffman's Exploding Head is a memoir in prose poems about the author's lifelong journey with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). But the diagnosis is not named in the poems themselves; instead, the poet plunges readers directly into the vivid, visceral experience of obsession and compulsion, emphasizing struggles that some readers may not immediately recognize as symptoms of OCD (car accidents, knives, a terrifying angel figure, counting and drawing patterns on windows, etc.), but for those with the disorder, or those with loved ones living with OCD, they will feel all too familiar.

In the debut collection Architect, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths.

With their time machines, piñatas, medications, zebras, unsettlement, and imagined lives, these poems in Conrad's The World in Which explore some of the deep strangeness—and beauty provoked by the appearance of the incongruous—that Conrad perceives in the world(s) around and beyond us.

Hosted by Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Program Coordinator Sean Bishop.

2000 Blacks
Ajibola Tolase
Natasha Oladokun
6 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Central Library, Lower-Level Program Room
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.

Margo's Got Money Troubles
Rufi Thorpe
Christina Clancy
6 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301

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.

Nature's Writers: Mentored by the Land
Donald Clark
Andy Adams
6 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Arts + Literature Laboratory
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.

**** Up
Sarah Thornton
6 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302

Infectiously empathetic, **** 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.

Feed the Planet
George Steinmetz
7:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Arts + Literature Laboratory
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.

Godwin
Joseph O'Neill
Steven Wright
7:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301
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.

New And Selected Poems
Marie Howe
Chessy Normile
7:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Central Library, Lower-Level Program Room

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).

Thank You, More Please
Lily Womble
7:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Central Library,  Community Room 302
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-****. 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.