Madison BookBeat

Today on the show, incoming host Ella Saph speaks with the first-place winners in the 2024 Wisconsin People & Ideas Writing Contest. Cambridge writer Bob Wake took home the gold for his poem "Mending Ruth," and Madison poet Diya Abbas took home the prize for their poem “Al-Eashiq." Both will present at a reading next week at the Wisconsin Book Festival, which will feature all the winners of th...

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie speaks with festival director Jane Rotunda and author Jessica Calarco about her book  Holding It Together , ahead of Calarco’s appearance at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Thursday, October 17th. Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net  chronicles the devastating consequences of our DIY society and traces its root causes by d...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with E.M. Tran on her debut novel, Daughters of the New Year (2022, Hanover Square Press). Daughters of the New Year is a novel about the three Trung sisters and their mother. It’s also a novel about Vietnam and its long history of colonization at the hands of the Chinese, Japanese, and French. We catch glimpses of civil war and Ameri...

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie speaks with author  Jennifer Kabat  about her memoir  The Eighth Moon  from Milkweed Editions, ahead of Kabat’s appearance at A Room of One’s Own on  Tuesday, September 10th . A rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populi...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with Kathleen Paris about her book Gentle Comforts For Women Grieving the Loss of a Beloved Life Companion. As an author, educator, and management consultant, Paris has assisted organizations over the past thirty years to plan for new realities and improve their systems and organizational climate. She currently holds the title of Disti...

In this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie speaks with Milwaukee-based author  Katharine Beutner  about her Edna Ferber Award-winning novel,  Killingly , which is out now in paperback from  Soho Crime . Massachusetts, 1897: Bertha Mellish, “the most peculiar, quiet, reserved girl” at Mount Holyoke College, is missing. As a search team dredges the pond where Bertha might have drowned, he...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with  Henry Wise  on his debut novel,  Holy City  (2024, Grove Atlantic Press). Holy City is a novel that grabs your attention by the opening sentence and propels you into a world of crime, guilt, unrealized desire, and vanquished hopes and dreams. The narrative shuttles between Richmond, Virginia–the eponymous Holy City–and the rural...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with Robin and Joan Rolfs about their book Hearthstone: America’s Electrical National Treasure. Joan and Rob have been enthralled with Hearthstone since the 1970’s when they moved to the Fox Cities. Joan developed a successful Interior Design program at Fox Valley Technical College in 1971. In 1986, Joan was contacted by a member of Th...

In her fourth collection, Driftless Area-based poet  Nikki Wallschlaeger  further proves herself as a singular poet of astonishing emotional depth and formal range.  Hold Your Own  is a steadfast search for peace, self-acceptance, and pleasure in a world that makes those basic rights an everyday challenge for Black women. It was published in May 2024 by  Copper Canyon Press . Nikki joins host Sara...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with Richard Sweitze r about his book ODE The Scion of Nerikan. Richard is award-winning author and longtime morning radio host. He received his Master’s of Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Richard is the author and publisher of ODE The Scion of Nerikan which was published in 2023. The book is...

Richard Scott Larson's debut The Long Hallway (University of Wisconsin Press, April 2024) is a lyrical memoir that expresses a boy’s search for identity while navigating the darkness and isolation of a deeply private inner world.  Growing up queer, closeted, and afraid, Richard Scott Larson found expression for his interior life in horror films, especially John Carpenter’s 1978 classic,  Halloween...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Priti Srivastava about their novel The Nagini Anarchy , self-published in 2023. Priti Srivastava lives in Madison, Wisconsin with their best friends working to create inclusive spaces so that one day everyone will feel as though they belong. When Priti isn’t working or doing chores, they enjoy playing video games, making their fr...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with Rachel Werner about her children’s book, Moving and Grooving to Fillmore’s Beat and her cookbook, Macro Cooking Made Simple. Rachel is a model, an author, a poet, a book reviewer, the founder of The Little Book Project, a freelance writer and digital medical consultant, teaching artist, certified holistic nutritionist, certified y...

Madison author Beth Nguyen’s latest book  Owner of a Lonely Heart  (Scribner, July 2023) is a memoir about parenthood, absence, and the condition of being a refugee: the story of Beth’s relationship with her mother. At the end of the Vietnam War, when Beth Nguyen was eight months old, she and her family fled Saigon for America. Only Beth’s mother stayed—or was left—behind, and they did not meet ag...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with poet Daniel Khalastchi about hist new collection The Story of Your Obstinate Survival (2024, University of Wisconsin Press). The Story of Your Obstinate Survival is a propulsive collection. It’s very funny, uncannily mundane and starkly surreal. The poems are a collision of juxtapositions and images, each one brimming with a vigo...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with Angela Trudell Vasquez, who until recently, was the City of Madison Poet Laureate. Trudell Vasquez is a poet, writer, performer, and activist. Her most recent chapbook, My People Redux  (2022, Finishing Line Press) honors her heritage, contending with generational hardships immigrant families face in making a life in America. The...

Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s latest book of prose poetry,  Exploding Head  (Persea Books, February 2024) is described as an OCD memoir in prose poems. It chronicles her childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world. It’s been called “...

How do you make change at organizations that resemble hard granite, and aren’t designed to bend? Only by patiently and persistently nudging them forward day-by-day, one improvement at a time, according to the authors of  Bending Granite: 30+ true stories of leading change  (Acta Publications, 2022). It’s a compilation of stories from leaders, mostly in and around Madison, writing about the organiz...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with local Madison author Ann Garvin. Ann Garvin became an author at age fifty. She has now written five books. Ann Garvin is a nurse, a professor, and USA Today Bestselling Author. She thinks everything is funny and a little bit sad. Ann writes stories about women with a good sense of humor who do too much in a world that asks too muc...

Hallie Linden yearns to write for the New York Times. At the moment, she’s stuck at a daily newspaper in tiny Green Meadow, Indiana, a town known for its amusement park and nothing else. It’s 1989, and juicy reporting jobs are hard to find. She resolves to work hard, win a few awards, and then welcome the job offers. In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host David Ahrens speaks with Cynthia Simmo...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with journalists Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin for a conversation on their book Among the Braves: Hope, Struggle, and Exile in the Battle for Hong Kong and the Future of Global Democracy (2023, Hachette Books) . Among the Braves is a narrative history of the 2019 pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong told through the eyes of fo...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with prolific author Jacquelyn Mitchard. Mitchard is now a frequent lecturer and professor of fiction and creative nonfiction at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpellier. She once worked as a journalist at several Wisconsin newspapers, including the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and the Capital Times, where her husband also worked...

For more than a decade, Greg Mickells led the Madison Public Library. He's responsible for a significant transformation of the Madison library system. His tenure as Director took him to three continents, and to the White House in 2016, when Madison Public Library was recognized with a National Medal for Museum and Library Service. Additional awards received under Mickells' leadership include a Wis...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Peter Coviello on his book of essays  Is There God After Prince? Dispatches from an Age of Last Thing s (2023, University of Chicago Press). Exuberant, effusive, rye, and incisive, this collection of essays analyze a wide range of cultural objects in order to shore up some modicum of consolation against an intractable sense of im...

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with local poet Shoshauna Shy. Shoshauna Shy has been involved in local poetry and literary events for decades. She founded the Poetry Jumps Off the Shelf program in 2004, a project with the mission of placing poetry in public places where it isn't expected. She's previously worked for the Wisconsin Humanities Council, where she helped...