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:

October 12, 2024

2024 Midwest Video Poetry Fest: Night 2
Deshawn McKinney
7 p.m. - 8 p.m.
Arts + Literature Laboratory
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.

October 16, 2024

Friends of UW-Madison Libraries Book Sale
4 p.m. - 8 p.m.
Memorial Library

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.

UW-Madison Go Big Read: Sitting Pretty
Rebekah Taussig
7 p.m. - 8:30 p.m
Union South - Wisconsin Union

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.

October 17, 2024

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.

October 18, 2024

Chasing the Stars
James Lattis
Kelly Tyrrell
Doug Moe
4 p.m. - 5 p.m.
Discovery Building, DeLuca Forum
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.

A World Of Hurt
Mindy Mejia
Matt Goldman
4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Central Library, Lower-Level Program Room
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.

The Volcano Daughters
Volcano Daughters Book Cover
Gina María Balibrera
Jennifer Morales
4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301
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.

In conversation with Jennifer Morales.

We Had Fun and Nobody Died
We Had Fun Book Cover
Peter Jest
David Luhrssen
4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302

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.

The Elements of Marie Curie
Marie Curie Book Cover
Dava Sobel
5 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Discovery Building, DeLuca Forum
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.

I Heard There Was a Secret Chord
Daniel Levitin
6 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Discovery Building, DeLuca Forum
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.

Minority Rule
Image
Minority Rule Book Cover
Ari Berman
6 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302
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 Law Forward and Wisconsin Public Radio, and in conversation with WPR "Wisconsin Today" host, Rob Ferrett.

One of Our Kind
Nicola Yoon
6 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301

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.

In conversation with Lauren Myracle.

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

Still Waters
Matt Goldman
Mindy Mejia
6 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Central Library
 
Lower-Level Program Room
"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.

Creation Lake
Creation Lake Book Cover
Rachel Kushner
Chloe Benjamin
7:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301
Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France.

"Sadie Smith" is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader.

Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by "cold bump"—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her "contacts"—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.

In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past.

Just as Sadie is certain she's the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.

Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner's rendition of "noir" is taut and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner's finest achievement yet as a novelist, a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.
 
Defectors
Paola Ramos
7:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302

An award-winning journalist's deeply reported exploration of how race, identity and political trauma have influenced the rise in far-right sentiment among Latinos, and how this group can shape American politics.

Democrats have historically assumed they can rely on the Latino vote, but recent elections have called that loyalty into question. In fact, despite his vociferous anti-immigrant rhetoric and disastrous border policies, Trump won a higher percentage of the Latino vote in 2020 than he did in 2016. Now, journalist Paola Ramos pulls back the curtain on these voters, traveling around the country to uncover what motivates them to vote for and support issues that seem so at odds with their self-interest.

From coast to coast, cities to rural towns, Defectors introduces readers to underdog GOP candidates, January 6th insurrectionists, Evangelical pastors and culture war crusaders, aiming to identify the influences at the heart of this rightward shift. Through their stories, Ramos shows how tribalism, traditionalism, and political trauma within the Latino community has been weaponized to radicalize and convert voters who, like many of their white counterparts, are fearful of losing their place in American society.

Hampton Heights
Hampton Heights Book Cover
Dan Kois
7:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Central Library, Lower-Level Program Room

From the author of the Washington Post notable novel Vintage Contemporaries, something completely unexpected: a hair-raising and rollicking adventure set on one night in 1987, when six paperboys must confront a slew of monsters as well as their own personal demons in a haunted Midwestern neighborhood.

On a cold winter's evening in 1987, six middle-school paperboys wander an unfamiliar Milwaukee neighborhood, selling newspaper subscriptions, fueled by their manager Kevin's promises of cash bonuses and dinner at Burger King. But the freaks come out at night in Hampton Heights. Funny, thrilling, filthy, and sneakily beautiful, Dan Kois's Hampton Heights captures without sentimentality the dreams and fears of teenage boys in a tender horror-comedy about camaraderie, bravery, vulnerability, and the terrifying prospect of growing up.

Bluff
Danez Smith
9 p.m. - 10 p.m.
Central Library, Community Rooms 301 & 302

Presented in Partnership with the UW-Madison Office of Multicultural Arts Initiative.

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith's powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.

Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to "anti poetica" and "ars america" to implicate poetry's collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America's acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem—part map, part annotation, part visual argument—offers the history of Saint Paul's vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love—those given and made—are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

October 19, 2024

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.

October 20, 2024

A Season for That
Steve Hoffman
Judith Siers-Poisson
10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301

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.

Blue Light Hours
Bruna Dantas Lobato
Mandy Moe Pwint Tu
10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Central Library, Lower-Level Program Room

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.

The Inner Clock
Lynne Peeples
10:30 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302

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.

Night Magic
Leigh Ann Henion
12 p.m. - 1 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302
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.

Polostan
Neal Stephenson
12 p.m. - 1 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301

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.

While You Were Out
Meg Kissinger
12 p.m. - 1 p.m.
Central Library, Lower-Level Program Room

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.

The Bright Sword
Lev Grossman
1:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Rooms 301 & 302

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.

October 29, 2024

Wisconsin People & Ideas 2024 Fiction and Poetry Contest Winners
Bob Wake
C. E. Perry
Linda Falkenstein
Diya Abbas
Han Raschka
Lisa Vihos
7 p.m. - 8 p.m.
Central Library
Community Rooms 301 & 302

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

October 30, 2024

Murder Girl
Heidi Armbruster
7 p.m. - 8 p.m.
Central Library, Community Rooms 301 & 302
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.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Hot Mess **Registration Now Closed**
Jeff Kinney
5 p.m. - Overture Center for the Arts, Capitol Theater

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

Registration for this event has reached maximum theater capacity and is now closed.

If you already registered, 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!

Date: October 12 - 30, 2024

Location: Various Venues

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