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:

Friends of the Madison Public Library Fall Book Sale
Friends of Madison Public Library
5 p.m. - 9 p.m.
Central Library, First Floor (Friends' Store)

Come join the Madison Public Library for its annual Fall Book Sale! Explore an amazing selection of $1 paperbacks, $2 hardbacks, higher-priced treasures, and special collections on topics like Spies & Surveillance, Mathematics, Retirement, the LGBTQ+ Community, Higher Education Reference Texts & Test Prep Guides, and Hobbies & Crafts. Don’t miss your chance to snag gently-used books at unbeatable prices!

Barons
Austin Frerick
5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302

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.

Transforming School Food Politics Around The World
Transforming School Food Politics Cover
Jennifer Gaddis
Dr. Sarah A. Robert
5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301
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.  

Writing Our Lineages: An Asian Memoirist Panel
Image, Asian Memoirist Panel Cover
Tessa Hulls
Margaret Juhae Lee
Zara Chowdhary
5:30 p.m. - 6:30 p.m.
Central Library, Lower-Level Program Room
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
Holding It Together Jacket Cover
Jessica Calarco
7 p.m. - 8 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301

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.

Their Divine Fires
Wendy Chen
7 p.m. - 8 p.m.
Central Library, Lower-Level Program Room

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.

There Are (NO) Stupid Questions...In SciencE
Leah Elson
7 p.m. - 8 p.m.
Central LibrarY, Community Room 302
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.

2024 Charlotte Zolotow Lecture: Meg Medina - The Way In and the Way Out: Writing Picture Books in Contentious Times
Meg Medina
7:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Memorial Union, Tripp Commons

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 required for both in-person and virtual attendance.