Writers from the Badger state are all over this year’s Wisconsin Book Festival, which runs Oct. 17-20 at the Madison Central Library and other downtown venues.
“The profile of Wisconsin authors at this year’s festival is a little bit different than in previous years,” says Conor Moran, now in his seventh year as director of the event. “We have Wisconsin writers presented in every genre.”
Memoir fans will be moved by Joshua Mezrich, an associate professor of surgery in the division of multi-organ transplantation at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. Mezrich’s When Death Becomes Life: Notes from a Transplant Surgeon is an intimate and engaging story. Madison-based essayist Krista Eastman’s The Painted Forest is a short and thoughtful collection of place-based essays set in such locales as Sauk County and the Wisconsin Dells.
In The Ideas That Made America: A Brief History, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, a professor of history at UW-Madison, traces the intellectual history of ideas that have driven such movements as transcendentalism, conservatism and postmodernism. Steve Hannah, former managing editor of the Milwaukee Journal and longtime CEO of The Onion, offers a more light-hearted history in the Wisconsin-centric Dairylandia: Dispatches from a State of Mind.
And J Tyler Friedman, associate curator of contemporary art at the Museum of Wisconsin Art in West Bend, has compiled Among the Wonders of the Dells, a nostalgic photographic history of the state’s most economically significant tourist destination.
Additionally, two of Madison’s most renowned children’s book authors, former Isthmus editor Dean Robbins and Caldecott Medal winner Kevin Henkes, will make appearances at separate events. Oneida Nation member Louis V. Clark III (Two Shoes) and Madison’s poet laureate Oscar Mireles top a strong poetry lineup that includes five contributors to the massive collection, Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice.
“What makes Madison so different from other cities I visit is the amount of diversity in writers and readers,” Mireles says. “The festival provides the perfect opportunity to meet new writers from the area.”
Local writers also will participate in panels. A pair of Madison novelists, Susan Gloss (The Curiosities) and Kelly Harms (The Overdue Life of Amy Byler), will lead a discussion titled “What the Bleep Is Women’s Fiction?” and two of the country’s foremost experts on food politics — Jennifer Gaddis and Monica White, both from UW-Madison — will discuss the transformative power of food in communities. Additionally, Milwaukee food and drink journalist Kristine Hansen will celebrate the state’s artisan cheese scene by sharing details from her Wisconsin Cheese Cookbook.
High-profile authors from further afield include Orange Prize winner Téa Obrecht, author of Inland, a New York Times bestselling novel about the lawless wild west of the late 1890s, and Marie Arana, a National Book Award finalist for her kaleidoscopic cultural analysis Silver, Sword & Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story (see article, page 19).
Adam Rippon, Olympic figure skating bronze medalist and the first openly gay U.S. male athlete to win a Winter Olympics medal, will read from his Andy Cohen-like memoir Beautiful on the Outside, and three of the four authors of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics — former chair of the Democratic National Committee Donna Brazile; former CEO of the DNC Minyon Moore; and political strategist Yolanda Caraway — will discuss the dearth of books about the lives of black women in U.S. politics.
Moran says the Wisconsin Book Festival attracts visitors from more than 100 communities around the state: “This is not just a 53703 event.”
Some standout events at the 2019 Wisconsin Book Festival
• Chicago poet and author Kevin Coval and New Orleans painter and muralist Langston Allston teamed up for Everything Must Go: The Life and Death of an American City, a captivating illustrated collection of poems in the spirit of a graphic novel that tells the story of the city’s Wicker Park neighborhood prior to gentrification in the 1990s. They will join Brooklyn poets Shira Erlichman (Odes to Lithium) and Angel Nafis (BlackGirl Mansion) in a joint reading that kicks off the festival on Oct. 17 at 7 p.m. at A Room of One’s Own.
• Talk about perfect timing. Journalist Tom Mueller, author of Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, will appear at Central Library on Oct. 18, at 7:30 p.m., in the midst of a presidential impeachment debate triggered by a whistleblower. Mueller’s sweeping 600-page history chronicles the rise of whistleblowing and explains why it is “the citizenry’s best defense against government gone bad.”
• Adhering to the motto “Something gay every day,” former missionary turned GLAAD Award-winning journalist Samantha Allen set out to chronicle LGBTQ life in states that went Republican in the 2016 presidential election (including Indiana, Utah, Tennessee and Texas). The result is captured in Real Queer America: LGBT Stories from Red States. Allen, who began transitioning from male to female in 2012, will share her stories from the road at Central Library on Oct. 20 at noon. Best line of the book: “The last time I was in Texas, I was on my way to get a vagina.”
• Amanda Yates Garcia’s mother initiated her into the Earth-centered Wiccan practice of witchcraft when she was only 13. But she didn’t become a so-called professional witch until after she descended into the underworlds of poverty and sex work. She emerged empowered from her bizarre journey, and wrote Initiated: Memoir of a Witch. Witching hour is 9 p.m. on Oct. 18 at Central Library.
• A post-apocalyptic saga set in motion by a monstrous deluge in Nebraska, After the Flood takes place in the year 2130 in an unrecognizable United States of America — a country ravaged by floodwaters that first wiped out coastal cities and then the heartland. Debut novelist Kassandra Montag, who will speak at Central Library on Oct. 19 at 3 p.m., eloquently tells the story from the perspective of Myra, a stubbornly independent mother whose eldest daughter, Row, was stolen from her. Myra embarks on a voyage to the Arctic Circle with her 7-year-old daughter, Pearl, in tow to rescue Row.
