For those of you in Madison on May 3rd, Monsters of Poetry is holding a reading at the Dragonfly Lounge on 401 E. Washington Avenue at 7:30pm.  Readers include former fellows Michael Sheehan, Lauren Shapiro, and Kyle McCord.  Check it out here.

Join us TONIGHT at 7:00pm in room L160 of the Chazen Museum's Elvehjem Building (800 University Ave, Madison) for a reading and Q&A with Ayana Mathis, reading from her novel The Twelve Tribes of Hattie.

The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is a New York Times best-selling novel and a 2012 Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection, about which Marilynne Robinson writes, "The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is a vibrant and compassionate portrait of a family hardened and scattered by circumstance and yet deeply a family. Its language is elegant in its purity and rigor. The characters are full of life, mingled thing that it is, and dignified by the writer's judicious tenderness towards them. This first novel is a work of rare maturity."

In her New York Times review, Michiko Kakutani similarly writes, "Ms. Mathis has a gift for imbuing her characters' stories with an epic dimension that recalls Toni Morrison's writing, and her sense of time and place and family will remind some of Louise Erdrich, but her elastic voice is thoroughly her own—both lyrical and unsparing, meditative and visceral, and capable of giving the reader nearly complete access to her characters' minds and hearts."

Don't miss this reading! To learn more about the event, visit our Facebook page!  To learn more about Ayana, here is a Q&A with her. 

Colony Collapse Press is running a novella competition! This is a great new (relatively) small press with UW alum Adam Fell, current MFA Zac Fulton, MFA alums Barrett Swanson and Meghan O'Gieblyn, former fellow Christopher Mohar are among their brave and lovely editorial staff.

The book they published this year by former fellow Michael Sheehan, Proposals for the Recovery of the Apparently Drowned, is gorgeous!

Spring was here just in time for the 2nd annual Madison Review (undergrad run literary magazine) versus the Devil's Lake (MFA run literary magazine) kickball game! The Madison Review won by an outstanding margin, but we'll just say it was 13-12 to make Devil's Lake feel better!

Former fellow Colleen Robertson Abel's new chapbook, Housewifery, is out and guaranteed amazing! Check it out here.

 

UW alum Kathrin Koehler has had four poems published recently: "Sea Change” in Strange Horizons, “the art of domesticity” in Together, Apart of Stone Telling, & “Woman of Wood” and “Submersion – stückweise” in Goblin Fruit.

Former fellow Colleen Robertson Abel will be the 2013-2014 Beebe Teaching Fellow at Warren Wilson College. Congratulations, Colleen!

Former fellow Michael Sheehan with be back as part of the line up for the May 3 Monsters of Poetry reading at Dragonfly Lounge! For more information check out the event page.

The wonderful Little Magazine Collection at UW-Madison Special Collections in Memorial Library has its own Facebook page! Like it and check it out here!

Congratulations to former Djerassi Playwriting Fellow Martin Zimmerman whose play The Solid Sand Below has been selected by the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center as one of the plays to be developed at the 2013 National Playwrights Conference!