Katharine Beutner & Emma Binder

media release: Check out Katharine Beutner’s book Killingly: based on the unsolved real-life disappearance of a Mount Holyoke student in 1897—a haunting novel of intrigue, longing, and terror, perfect for fans of Donna Tartt and Sarah Waters. 

Read Emma Binder’s award-winning story “Robber’s Lake” at the Kenyon Review

Beutner writes fiction and nonfiction and teaches creative writing and literature. An associate professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; previously, she taught at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa and the College of Wooster in Ohio. She edits the the online eco-writing literary journal The Dodge, which is based at Wooster.

Binder is a writer from Wisconsin and a 2023 – 2025 Wallace Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University. They earned their MFA in Fiction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and have received support and fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the Vermont Studio Center, and Writing by Writers. They have received an O. Henry Prize, the Indiana Review Fiction Prize, the Gulf Coast Prize in Fiction, and the Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award. Their work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in The Best Short Stories 2024: The O. Henry Prize Winners, The Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Currently based in Oakland, they are working on a novel and a short story collection.

Since 2011 Shake Rag Alley has provided residencies to award-winning Wisconsin writers, offering time and space to create. In 2025, we’re partnering with Wisconsin People & Ideas, the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission through the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts & Letters, Arts + Literature Laboratory, and the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets to offer the Winter Writers Reading Series. In 2025, we’ll be adding the Swanson Emerging Poet Fellowship with the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets (stay tuned!).

Writers stay in Shake Rag Alley’s historic lodging facilities surrounded by the creative community of Mineral Point. Visiting writers participate in community outreach activities, including readings, workshops, and school visits as part of the Winter Writers Reading Series. 

We are excited to partner with Mineral Point’s independent bookstore for our 2025 reading series. Unless noted, readings will be held at Republic of Letters Books, 151 High St., Mineral Point.