Author Reading

Please note, this event will be held at Arts + Literature Laboratory: 111. S. Livingston St. Suite 100, Madison, Wisconsin 53703.

Presented in partnership with the Aldo Leopold Foundation, in honor of Leopold Week 2025. 

This is a virtual event only. Register and join on Crowdcast here: https://www.crowdcast.io/c/leopold-week2025

Tracking the natural beauty that surrounds us, The Backyard Bird Chronicles maps the passage of time through daily entries, thoughtful questions, and beautiful original sketches. With boundless charm and wit, author Amy Tan charts her foray into birding and the natural wonders of the world.

Join memoir writing coach Sarah White and a community of people who read and write about life for this FREE read-and-share event. Sign up on arrival to read on a first-come, first-served basis, and receive group feedback on your nonfiction/memoir from like-minded people. Readings should be about 5-7 minutes long, true, and yours to tell.  Listeners welcome as well as readers. Contact Sarah White if you have questions: sarah.white@firstpersonprod.com or 608-347-7329.

The 2025 undergraduate and graduate creative writing awards ceremony. Presented in partnership with The UW Program in Creative Writing.

Featured author TBA.

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony’s parents, a huge extended family. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis is now forty with two teenage children. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 follows one woman’s psychic deterioration in the face of rampant misogyny. In a tidy apartment on the outskirts of Seoul, millennial “everywoman” Kim Jiyoung spends her days caring for her infant daughter. But strange symptoms appear: Jiyoung begins to impersonate the voices of other women, dead and alive. As she plunges deeper into this psychosis, her concerned husband sends her to a psychiatrist.

Presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Program in Creative Writing, a reading from the graduating MFA cohort in poetry, including Patrycja Humienik, Maryhilda Ibe, Iqra Khan, Juj E Lepe, Jonny Teklit, and Andrew Chi Keong Yim.

The Dark Mirror is the highly anticipated fifth novel in Samantha Shannon’s New York Times and USA Today bestselling Bone Season series that NPR.org has called “intelligent, inventive, dark, and engrossing.”

Everything is about to change.

Paige Mahoney is outside the Republic of Scion for the first time in more than a decade—but she has no idea how she got to the free world. Half a year has been wiped from her memory.

From the Emmy Award-winning Squid Game to streaming sensations like The Glory and Crash Landing on You, Korean television has emerged onto the global pop culture scene as compelling television—but what exactly makes these shows so irresistibly bingeable? And what can we learn about our societies and ourselves from watching them?

From the critically acclaimed author of Shotgun Lovesongs comes an exquisitely written, small-town story about one couple's hard-won second chance at love, forty years after their divorce.

Charlie and Vivian parted ways after just four years of marriage. Too many problems, too many struggles, even though the love didn't quite die. When Charlie returns to Wisconsin forty years later, he's not sure what he'll find. He is sure of one thing — he must try to reconnect with Vivian to pick up the broken pieces of their past.