Oct
16
6:00 PM18:00
Filtering by: Poetry
Oct
21
7:30 PM19:30
Poetry and Conversation (In Person)
Dorothy Chan and Angie Trudell Vasquez
If you weren’t able to join us for the 2022 Nadine St. Louis Memorial Poetry Conversation event or are interested in watching it again, click below to watch the recording.
This event is being presented in person and is the Nadine St. Louis Memorial Poetry Conversation 2022.
A Poetry Exchange: poems and conversation with national award-winning poet Dorothy Chan (BABE, Revenge of the Asian Woman, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold) and the City of Madison Poet Laureate Angie Trudell Vasquez.
-Moderated by former Wisconsin Poet Laureate, Max Garland
CLICK HERE to buy festival books locally from Dotters Books.
DOROTHY CHAN (she/they) is the author of BABE, Revenge of the Asian Woman, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold, and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets. They were a 2020 and 2014 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship finalist, a 2020 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Bisexual Poetry for Revenge of the Asian Woman, and a 2019 recipient of the Philip Freund Prize in Creative Writing from Cornell University. Their work has appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, and elsewhere. Chan is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire and Co-Founder and Editor in Chief of Honey Literary, a literary arts organization built by women of color.
Learn more about Dorothy Chan at dorothypoetry.com.
ANGIE TRUDELL VASQUEZ is a poet, writer, editor, publisher, and activist. She is the current City of Madison Poet Laureate (2020-2024) and the first Latina to hold the position. Angie received her MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2017. Recently, her poems have appeared in The Slow Down, Yellow Medicine Review, Poem-a-Day, About Place Journal and in several anthologies. She was a Ruth Lilly Fellow while at Drake University. In 2018 she was a finalist for the New Women’s Voices series and her book, In Light, Always Light, her third collection of poetry, was published by Finishing Line Press in May 2019. She guest edited the Spring 2019 edition of the Yellow Medicine Review with Millissa Kingbird. She co-edited a collection of poetry with Margaret Rozga, then 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, entitled Through This Door, that was released in late 2020 through her small press Art Night Books. Finishing Line Press published her fourth collection of poetry, My People Redux, in January 2022. Active nationally too, she has read poems, been a panelist, and presented at Split This Rock and AWP. In the summer of 2021 she became a Macondo Fellow or a Macondista.
Learn more about Angie Trudell Vasquez at angietrudellvasquez.com.
Oct
26
4:00 PM16:00
A Verbal Feast of the Fest, served by ecWIT
ecWIT (Eau Claire Women in Theater)
SORRY, THIS EVENT IS SOLD OUT.
The ecWIT gals are back by popular demand for a reader’s theater performance of adapted excerpts from a sampling of this year’s festival authors. Without costumes or elaborate props, the stripped-down performance is sure to add a whole new dimension to the festival’s characters and stories.
This event is FREE, but a ticket is required.
ecWIT, composed of Debbie Brown, Beverly Olson, Sue Fulkerson, Kathleen Sullivan, Ann Pearson, and Sara Bryan, presents the art form of dramatic reader’s theater, enlivening literature in a variety of genres without sets, costumes, or props. Since the group’s inception in January 2016, they have become a local favorite, having received commissions to perform from Chippewa Valley Learning in Retirement, the Waldemar Ager Association, and the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets, to name a few. 2019 will be the third year that ecWIT has participated in the Chippewa Valley Book Festival, providing a unique experience of adapted excerpts from the works of festival authors.
Oct
25
4:00 PM16:00
Active Voices: Poetry and Social Justice
This event is the Nadine St. Louis Memorial Poetry Conversation 2019.
Two Wisconsin Poets Laureate, Kim Blaeser (2015–2016) and Margaret Rozga (2019–2020) will read from their recent work and engage in dialogue about their poetry, its sources, and the roles they see it enacting in the world. They will welcome questions and comments from the audience.
>> Our book sales committee will have copies of Copper Yearning (Blaeser) and Pestiferous Questions: A Life in Poems (Rozga) available for purchase at this event. Please join us for an autographing session following the presentation.
KIMBERLY BLAESER, writer, photographer, and scholar, is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Apprenticed to Justice and editor of Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry. She served as Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2015-16. Blaeser is Anishinaabe and grew up on the White Earth Reservation. A professor of English and Indigenous Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, Blaeser is also on the faculty for the Institute of American Indian Arts low residency MFA program in Santa Fe. Her fourth collection of poetry, Copper Yearning, will be published in fall 2019.
MARGARET ROZGA, current Wisconsin Poet Laureate, has published four books of poetry, including Pestiferous Questions: A Life in Poem. This book, written with support from the American Antiquarian Society, looks at issues of women’s roles, western expansion, and race as they are woven through the life of politically-active and well-connected Jessie Benton Frémont (1824-1902). Rozga also served as editor of the poetry chapbook anthology Where I Want to Live: Poems for Fair & Affordable Housing, a project for the 50th anniversary of Milwaukee’s fair housing marches. She participated in those marches and helped organize 50th anniversary events.
Oct
23
7:30 PM19:30
Barstow & Grand: Issue #3 Release Reading
This event is co-sponsored by Lazy Monk Brewing and L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library.
Barstow & Grand seeks to fulfill a humble mission—to support the writers of the Chippewa Valley by offering an outlet for their creative writing, and to help them grow and professionalize their craft through the process of submission.
Issue #3 offers as broad and impressive a mix as Issues #1 and #2 did, with novice and professional writers, folks who have lived in the Chippewa Valley their entire lives and those who have joined our community from afar. The release party for Issue #3 will feature readings from the journal, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as commentary from the editors on the publication process and how the journal has grown in its third year. Stop down to hear some incredible writing, pick up an issue, enjoy a locally crafted beer (cash bar), and connect with the Chippewa Valley’s community of writers.
Oct
23
6:00 PM18:00
Revenge of the Asian Woman: A Reading with Dorothy Chan
Dorothy Chan
This event is co-sponsored by L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library.
Join Dorothy Chan, the newest assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire, as she reads from her latest collection of poetry, Revenge of the Asian Woman. Continuing with the themes of food, sexuality, culture, and fetishes developed in her previous collections, the reading will showcase Chan’s latest work as well as her reverence for pop culture, kitsch, and excess.
>> Our book sales committee will have copies of Revenge of the Asian Woman available for purchase at this event. Please join us for an autographing session following the presentation.
DOROTHY CHAN is the author of Revenge of the Asian Woman, Attack of the Fifty-Foot Centerfold, and the chapbook Chinatown Sonnets. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The American Poetry Review, Academy of American Poets, The Cincinnati Review, Diode Poetry Journal, Quarterly West, and elsewhere. She is the Poetry Editor of Hobart and an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Wisconsin–Eau Claire.
Apr
25
7:00 PM19:00
Text and Image – Poemeo/Poem video by Heid E. Erdrich
The Chippewa Valley Book Festival, the Chippewa Valley Writers Guild, and the UW–Eau Claire Department of English present:
HEID E. ERDRICH
Text & Image: Poemeos
Heid will read from her own work and present from her recent anthology. Her poetry is beautiful and complex. She will show brief poetry videos, called “poemeos,” which she has created in collaboration with an all-indigenous team of visual artists, animators, filmmakers, and composers.
The sounds and images weave in and out in a kind of dance that includes her Native heritage, her love of nature and a fair amount of social criticism, some of it subtle and ironic, other times straight-forward.
No Ticket Required. This is a free event. The book festival will have books available to purchase at the event.
HEID E. ERDRICH is author of eight books of poetry including Curator of Ephemera at the New Museum for Archaic Media (2017), winner of the Minnesota Book Awards, and is editor of New Poets of Native Nations (2018). Her work has won numerous awards including a 2018 Native Arts and Cultures Fund National Fellowship. Heid is Ojibwe enrolled at Turtle Mountain. She teaches in the Augsburg University low-residency MFA program. Click here to visit Erdrich’s website for additional information as well as samples of her work.
Oct
20
3:30 PM15:30
Prose and Poetry Alive
ecWIT (Eau Claire Women in Theater)
This event is co-sponsored by the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library.
ecWIT (Eau Claire Women in Theater) is: Debbie Brown, Kathleen Sullivan, Ann Pearson, Sue Fulkerson, Sara Bryan, and Beverly Olsonn—a group of area women with backgrounds in education, theater and performance, who use dramatic reading to share their love of literature. ecWIT’s programs include plays, essays, fiction and poetry presented with interactive characterization without props, sets or costumes. They are proud to be a part of the 2018 Chippewa Valley Book Festival where they will explore a variety of selections from this year’s outstanding authors.
www.facebook.com/eauclairewomenintheater
www.ecwit.weebly.com
Oct
19
4:00 PM16:00
Words without Borders: A Celebration of Poetry in Translation
Jesse Lee Kercheval and Karen Kovacik
This event is the Nadine St. Louis Memorial Poetry Conversation 2018.
Jesse Lee Kercheval and Karen Kovacik, along with a chorus of Eau Claire area poets and lovers of poetry, will read from their recent anthologies and translations of Polish and Uruguayan poets in a celebration of world poetry and a conversation between continents and countries.
>> Our book sales committee will have copies of América Invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets and Scattering the Dark available for purchase at this event. Please join us for an autographing session following the presentation.
JESSE LEE KERCHEVAL's recent translations include The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia and Fable of an Inconsolable Man by Javier Etchevarren. She is the editor of América Invertida: An Anthology of Emerging Uruguayan Poets and Earth, Sky and Water: A Bilingual Anthology of Environmental Poems. In addition, she has authored fourteen books of poetry and prose including The Alice Stories, winner of the Prairie Schooner Fiction Book Prize and the memoir Space, winner of the Alex Award from the American Library Association. She is the Zona Gale Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
KAREN KOVACIK is the author of the poetry collections Metropolis Burning, Beyond the Velvet Curtain, and Nixon and I. Her work as a poet and translator has received numerous honors, including the Charity Randall Citation from the International Poetry Forum, a fellowship in literary translation from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Fulbright Research Grant to Poland. In 2013, White Pine Press published her book-length translation of Agnieszka Kuciak’s Distant Lands: An Anthology of Poets Who Don’t Exist. She is the editor of the anthology of Polish women poets, Scattering the Dark (White Pine, 2016). Professor of English at Indiana University-Purdue University–Indianapolis, she served as Indiana’s Poet Laureate from 2012-2014.
Oct
16
7:00 PM19:00
Barstow & Grand: Issue #2 Release Reading
Barstow & Grand seeks to fulfill a humble mission—to support the writers of the Chippewa Valley by offering an outlet for their creative writing, and to help them grow and professionalize their craft through the process of submission.
Issue #2 offers as broad and impressive a mix as Issue #1 did, with novice and professional writers, folks who have lived in the Chippewa Valley their entire lives and those who have joined our community from afar. The release party for Issue #2 will feature readings from the journal, including fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as commentary from the editors on the publication process and how the journal has grown in its second year. Stop down to hear some incredible writing, pick up an issue, check out the Pablo Center(!), and connect with the Chippewa Valley's community of writers.
