Steven Espada Dawson, Nate Marshall, Paul Tran

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James Kreul

Steven Espada Dawson looks to bring ‘poetry and possibility to disenfranchised communities.’

Steven Espada Dawson, who became Madison’s poet laureate in 2024, is celebrating the publication of his first book, Late to the Search Party (Scribner). It’s a personal reckoning that reaches deep into his past. “Dawson’s poetry often deals with his efforts to understand himself, his history, and his family,” wrote Samuel Annis in a 2024 piece about Dawson for Isthmus. “Frequently, one dissolves into the other.” Joining Dawson in this Wisconsin Book Festival-sponsored reading are fellow poets Nate Marshall, assistant professor in the creative writing program, and Paul Tran, assistant professor of English and Asian American studies, both at UW-Madison.

media release: A raw, crystalline debut poetry collection exploring themes of family, addiction, belonging, and loss—a searching elegy of the fissures that have come to define contemporary American life.

The unsettled border between absence and presence haunts this stunning collection, in which poet laureate Steven Espada Dawson contemplates belonging, identity, family, and grief in poems about his own half-immigrant Mexican American family: his dying mother who raised him, his addict brother who has been missing for more than a decade, and his absent father.

Chronicled in four parts, shifting restlessly between childhood memories, the sudden disappearance of his brother, and the inevitable loss of his ailing mother, Late to the Search Party explores what it means to be a family of one—to be orphaned, whether by fate or by circumstance. In language that is both grounded and ethereal, Dawson tallies the losses and looks at what remains: the frustration and anger, the bewilderment and sadness—and the affection and humor that makes itself felt in spite of everything.

A vivid and thoughtful meditation on love and loss, Late to the Search Party is an ode to the families that inspire and confound us all.

Nate Marshall and Paul Tran will also be reading at this event.