Watershed Reading Series

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Kelly Kendall

A close-up of Tamara Dean.

Tamara Dean

This is a nice mixed roster of essay and poetry. Toby Altman is visiting from Michigan State University in support of his new book of poetry, Jewel Box. Madison’s own Tamara Dean will be reading from the nature-based essays in her forthcoming collection from the University of Minnesota Press, Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless. Completing the trio is Audrey Gradzewicz, the 2024-2025 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. Prepare for some amazement.

media release: Join us on Saturday, March 15, 2025 at 7:00 PM for our March Watershed Reading featuring Toby Altman, Tamara Dean, and Audrey Gradzewicz. Followed by a short Q&A, the authors will be signing and selling their books.

Toby Altman is the author of Jewel Box (Essay Press, 2025), Discipline Park (Wendy’s Subway, 2023), and Arcadia, Indiana (Plays Inverse, 2017). He has held fellowships from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in the Fine Arts, MacDowell, and the National Endowment for the Arts, where he was a 2021 Poetry Fellow. He currently teaches at Michigan State University, where he is Assistant Professor in the Residential College in the Arts and Humanities (RCAH) and Director of the RCAH Center for Poetry.

Tamara Dean is the author of Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless (forthcoming in April 2025), extraordinary tales of discovery that urge us to experience nature mindfully in our time. She writes fiction and nonfiction, teaches writing, and publishes widely. She’s also the author of The Human-Powered Home: Choosing Muscles over Motors. After fifteen years in Vernon County, Wisconsin, she currently lives in Madison.

Audrey Gradzewicz is the 2024-2025 Ronald Wallace Poetry Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Purdue University and a PhD in English from the Pennsylvania State University, where she focused on the poetics and materiality of medieval and early modern texts. Originally from Buffalo, New York, her work has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Cimarron Review, Smartish Pace, and The Penn Review, among others. She serves as poetry editor for The Baltimore Review. Her life revolves around the whims of her cat, George.