Alexandra Lange: Mark Wickens /
A montage of authors appearing at the Book Fest.
Clockwise from left: Alexandra Lange, Pete Souza, Cody Keenan, Laird Hunt, Lydia Conklin and Deshawn McKinney.
The Wisconsin Book Festival launched 20 years ago, a year after the 9/11 attacks in what was in some ways a very different world. There was no such thing as an iPhone. There was no such thing as a Kindle. Major publishers regularly sent authors on book tours that frequently stopped in Madison at bookstores like Canterbury or Borders.
In the early years the Book Fest kicked off with the “Friday Night Festival of Fiction,” a celebrity-studded but chummy evening of readings at the Orpheum Theater with a party afterwards in the theater’s bar/lobby. In the fest’s inaugural year those big names were Lorrie Moore, Charles Baxter, Dave Eggers, Paul Auster and Jane Hamilton — while impressive, it’s an entirely white lineup.
Greater diversity and focus are elements the festival has been concentrating on for the last decade, during the tenure of the fest’s third director, Conor Moran.
“Who we see coming to events has changed, based on who we give the microphone to,” says Moran. The fest has worked hard to diversify its schedule; Moran estimates the audience last year was “around 35 percent non-white and close to 50/50 male/female.”
Publishing has also changed since the book fest’s beginnings, Moran notes, with major houses more willing to publish non-white authors and put them at the head of their lists. “Twenty years ago, a white man would have been on the cover of every [publisher’s] catalog,” Moran says. He mentions Nerd by Maya Phillips, published by Simon and Schuster, as a book that might not have been published back then, or received much publicity. Phillips will discuss her book, essays that deal with race, religion and more through the big pop culture fandoms, on Oct. 14.
Other changes include a tighter focus on the Central Library as a venue. While there are always a few other venues (this year, the Discovery Center and the Wisconsin Historical Society Auditorium), when the Madison Public Library Foundation took over the festival from the Wisconsin Humanities Council in 2013, it wanted to foster a greater sense of community around the then-new library building. “The Central Library really comes alive as that hub,” says Moran.
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the 2020 fall celebration to go virtual, with three days of appearances via Crowdcast. Last year’s in-person appearances were one-day only, with two days of virtual events. This year the fest has returned to four days of in-person appearances, and not all of them will be recorded.
“We’re looking for as many ways to capture as many events as we can,” says Moran, but notes that recording “is a whole extra level of expertise” and that livestreaming is not something the festival has been able to do. He’s aiming to have 75 percent of the events recorded for later replay. Which is good; the festival reaches a wide audience that way.
“But there is some magic to being in the room,” says Moran.
Who we're saving the date for:
father forgive me
Oct. 13, Central Library, 7 p.m.
Deshawn McKinney is a rising voice on the poetry scene. He was a member of the First Wave hip-hop arts community at UW-Madison and earned a bachelor’s degree in creative writing before heading overseas to earn two master's degrees. I purchased father forgive me on a recommendation from Milwaukee poet Karl “Oye” Iglesias and was not disappointed. McKinney handles difficult situations and conversations with grace, love and compassion — and a mastery of language. Fatherhood in an urban setting with poverty and strife is a difficult challenge. McKinney approaches the topic with an unflinching eye for detail. This chapbook should be added to your fall reading list.
—Oscar Mireles, former poet laureate of Madison
Rainbow Rainbow
Oct. 14, Central Library, 6 p.m.
Years ago I worked at Naiad Press, then the oldest and largest publisher of lesbian literature in the world. It was an amazing education. Naiad published 24 books a year — mysteries, romances, erotica, and even westerns and poetry. They nearly all featured morally decent protagonists and happy endings, which was a corrective to the days of sensationalized depictions of predatory lesbians. I longed for more complex stories, more morally ambiguous characters, more humor, and more nuanced sexualities and relationships. There are more options now, of course, but still it’s hard to think of any other writer who provides more of what I longed for then (and now) than Lydia Conklin. Conklin got their master of fine arts degree at UW-Madison and clearly absorbed great storytelling and writing skills during their time there, but it’s their sharp curiosity and generous heart that make the stories in Rainbow Rainbow worth the wait.
—Rita Mae Reese, co-director, Arts + Literature Lab
Meet Me by the Fountain
Oct. 15, Central Library, noon
If there’s any further evidence needed that the 1990s are alive and well in the zeitgeist, Alexandra Lange and her new book, Meet Me by the Fountain, appearing on close to a dozen podcasts would fit the bill. I worked in a mall in the ’90s — Waldenbooks, represent — and can’t get enough of this microhistory of indoor shopping centers, even if my mall didn’t have a fountain to meet by. The book discusses topics as light as why cardinal directions show up in so many mall names, and as weighty as the relationship between malls and the “white flight” of the 1950s and 1960s. I’m looking forward to Lange giving Wisconsin Book Fest attendees her perspective on the current state and future fate of the shopping mall, pretzel stand and all.
—Kyle Nabilcy, Isthmus contributor
Zorrie
Oct. 15, Central Library, 4:30 p.m.
Zorrie is a slim, quiet, and beautifully true novel set in the Midwest. Zorrie Underwood is 17, has suffered great loss and is homeless in Depression-era America. Her humble plan is to be of use. She briefly finds contentment at an Illinois factory painting radium illuminant on watches. But Indiana, her birthplace, calls her back. There, she finds work in a small farm community, finding deep solace in the land and people. As the years pass, Zorrie notes, “She had not felt the tilt and the whirl of the seasons the way she did on her own farm.” Hunt’s loyalty to his characters’ authenticity and cultural milieu is masterful, and his prose, exquisite — his unadorned sentences casting spells. Hunt is right up there with the likes of Marilynne Robinson — he deserves our attention.
—Guy Thorvaldsen, former English instructor, Madison College, and Isthmus contributor
Grace and The West Wing and Beyond
Oct. 16, Central Library, 1:30 p.m.
My two passions in life are politics and writing, not necessarily in that order. Barack Obama combined both at a high level. That’s why I’m excited to hear Cody Keenan talk about his book, Grace: President Obama and Ten Days in the Battle for America. Keenan was Obama’s chief speechwriter. It had to be a daunting assignment to cobble sentences for a man who could write circles around most other scribblers. Keenan’s book covers 10 days in the summer of 2015 when he and Obama crafted a series of speeches designed to keep the country together amid tumultuous events including a white supremacist shooting, a controversy over the Confederate flag, and the fate of marriage equality and Obamacare.
Politics is mostly about words and images. And so I’m equally interested in the other half of this session, hearing from Pete Souza about his book, The West Wing and Beyond: What I Saw Inside the Presidency. Souza was the chief White House photographer throughout Obama’s presidency, which gave him almost unequaled access to the president and his team. Souza now lives in Madison.
—Dave Cieslewicz, former Madison mayor and Isthmus contributor
The entire schedule is searchable at wisconsinbookfestival.org.
