Katie Berry/Smoketree Photography
Cherene Sherrard, Sally Mead Hands-Bascom Professor of English at UW-Madison.
With 16 virtual events spotlighting 27 authors and poets over three days, this year’s Wisconsin Book Festival is smaller than the fall celebration that usually takes place throughout downtown Madison. But there are still plenty of online viewing options, including ones with Wisconsin ties.
UW-Madison MFA alums
Emma Straub, a 2008 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s MFA program and the daughter of horror writer Peter Straub, will open this year’s three-day Wisconsin Book Festival celebration. In May, Riverhead Books published her fourth novel, All Adults Here, an instant New York Times bestseller about adult siblings, aging parents, high school boyfriends, middle school mean girls, the lifelong effects of birth order, and other things that follow people into adulthood. (Oct. 15 at 4 p.m.)
Meanwhile, Lucy Tan — who received her MFA from UW-Madison in 2016 and whose first novel, What We Were Promised, was named a “Best Book of 2018” by The Washington Post — will interview Kelli Jo Ford, whose debut novel, Crooked Hallelujah, tells the story of Justine, a mixed-blood Cherokee woman, and her daughter, Reney. The pair migrate from Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country to what they hope will be a more stable life in Texas during the oil bust of the 1980s. Ford is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. (Oct. 17 at 5:30 p.m.)
Local poets
A pair of poets who both teach at UW-Madison — Cherene Sherrard and Heather Swan — will read from their latest collections (Grimoire and A Kinship with Ash, respectively) and talk about ways in which poetry can be a healing voice in the midst of institutional racism and environmental violence. Crowdcast viewers will have an opportunity to participate in this conversation, which is being billed as “Writing into Inhospitable Space.” (Oct. 16 at 5:30 p.m.)
Local connection
In The King of Confidence: A Tale of Utopian Dreamers, Frontiers Schemers, True Believers, False Prophets, and the Murder of an American Monarch, international bestselling author Miles Harvey tells the strange tale of James Strang. A charismatic young lawyer who vanished from rural New York in the 1840s and resurfaced in Burlington, Wis., Strang eventually made his way to Beaver Island in the northernmost reaches of Lake Michigan, where he declared himself a divine king. (Oct. 15 at 5:30 p.m.)
For more Wisconsin Book Festival coverage, visit here.
