The Wisconsin Book Festival, presented by Madison Public Library in partnership with Madison Public Library Foundation, presents free, public author events that celebrate books and spark conversations. Each year, the festival creates a robust schedule of accomplished and new writers whose fiction, nonfiction, and poetry books appeal to all ages of readers. The festival presents stand-alone events throughout the year with a culminating celebration each fall.

Schedule of Events:

Chasing the Stars
James Lattis
Kelly Tyrrell
Doug Moe
4 p.m. - 5 p.m.
Discovery Building, DeLuca Forum
Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

Explore the remarkable story of Wisconsin astronomers whose curiosity, persistence, and innovation helped us better understand our universe.

Chasing the Stars traces the history of the University of Wisconsin's Washburn Observatory, where some of the world's most cutting-edge astronomical inventions were born. Learn about the earliest Indigenous stargazers, the women who worked as the first human computers, the astronomers who sold time by the stars, the scientists who shrank the Milky Way, and the crucial role Wisconsin astronomers played in the development of modern astrophysics and space astronomy.

This extraordinary book features more than 100 modern and historic photographs that illustrate the people and science behind Wisconsin's astronomical innovations. Designed for lay readers and astronomers alike, Chasing the Stars inspires all of us to look up at the sky in wonder.

Hosted by Doug Moe.

A World Of Hurt
Mindy Mejia
Matt Goldman
4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Central Library, Lower-Level Program Room
Suffering from CIP (Congenital Insensitivity to Pain)—an extremely rare disorder from birth that disenables the perception of pain—Kara Johnson always knew she'd die young and violently. It didn't matter who delivered the final blow, she would deserve it; her years spent running drugs and spreading violence would guarantee it. But death doesn't follow expectation: when her girlfriend Celina sacrifices herself to save Kara's life, Kara is left grieving and adrift, just like her signature dark sketches of half-dead birds. She doesn't know why she's alive until the DEA shows up in her hideout and offers her a choice: go to prison or turn informant to lure out the last of the drug trafficking ring that murdered Celina.

In a direct follow-up to her USA Today bestseller To Catch a Storm, Mindy Mejia delves into survivor's guilt and fleshes out the lives continued by the ones left behind in A World of Hurt. Grounded in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic at the convergence of the Black Lives Matter and Defund the Police protests, A World of Hurt is part of Mejia's Iowa Mysteries series, set in the same universe as To Catch a Storm, yet acts like a standalone focusing wholly on a new unlikely investigative duo.

In conversation with Matt Goldman.

The Volcano Daughters
Volcano Daughters Book Cover
Gina María Balibrera
Jennifer Morales
4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301
A saucy, searingly original debut about two sisters raised in the shadow of El Salvador's brutal dictator, El Gran Pendejo, and their flight from genocide, which takes them from Hollywood to Paris to cannery row, each followed by a chorus of furies, the ghosts of their murdered friends, who aren't yet done telling their stories.

El Salvador, 1923. Graciela grows up on a volcano in a community of indigenous women indentured to coffee plantations owned by the country's wealthiest, until a messenger from the Capital comes to claim her: at nine years old she's been chosen to be an oracle for a rising dictator—a sinister, violent man wedded to the occult. She'll help foresee the future of the country.

In the Capital she meets Consuelo, the sister she's never known, stolen away from their home before Graciela was born. The two are a small fortress within the dictator's regime, but they're no match for El Gran Pendejo's cruelty. Years pass and terror rises as the economy flatlines, and Graciela comes to understand the horrific vision that she's unwittingly helped shape just as genocide strikes the community that raised her. She and Consuelo barely escape, each believing the other to be dead. They run, crossing the globe, reinventing their lives, and ultimately reconnecting at the least likely moment.

Endlessly surprising, vividly imaginative, bursting with lush life, The Volcano Daughters charts, through the stories of these sisters and the ghosts they carry with them, a new history and mythology of El Salvador, fiercely bringing forth voices that have been calling out for generations.

In conversation with Jennifer Morales.

We Had Fun and Nobody Died
We Had Fun Book Cover
Peter Jest
David Luhrssen
4:30 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302

This irreverent biography provides a rare window into the music industry from a promoter's perspective. From a young age, Peter Jest was determined to make a career in live music, and despite naysayers and obstacles, he did just that, bringing national acts to his college campus at UW–Milwaukee, booking thousands of concerts across Wisconsin and the Midwest, and opening Shank Hall, the beloved Milwaukee venue named after a club in the cult film This Is Spinal Tap.

This funny, nostalgia-inducing book details the lasting friendships Jest established over the years with John Prine, Arlo Guthrie, and Milwaukee's own Violent Femmes, among others. It also shines a light into the seldom-seen world of music promotion, as Jest attempts to manage a turbulent band on the road, negotiates with agents, deals with fires (both real and metaphorical), struggles through a pandemic, and takes pleasure in presenting music of all kinds—from world-famous acts to up-and-coming local bands. In addition to photos of celebrated musicians, the book includes concert posters, tickets, and backstage passes documenting decades of rock, folk, and alternative shows that helped put Milwaukee on the live music map.

Copies of We Had Fun and Nobody Died will be distributed for free to all attendees courtesy of the Wisconsin Book Festival.

The Elements of Marie Curie
Marie Curie Book Cover
Dava Sobel
5 p.m. - 6 p.m.
Discovery Building, DeLuca Forum
Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

"Even now, nearly a century after her death, Marie Curie remains the only female scientist most people can name," writes Dava Sobel at the opening of her shining portrait of the sole Nobel laureate decorated in two separate fields of science— Physics in 1903 with her husband Pierre and Chemistry by herself in 1911. And yet, Sobel makes clear, as brilliant as she was in the laboratory, Marie Curie was equally memorable outside it. Grieving Pierre's untimely death in 1906, she took his place as professor of physics at the Sorbonne; devotedly raised two brilliant daughters; drove a van she outfitted with X-ray equipment to the front lines of World War I; befriended Albert Einstein and other luminaries of twentieth-century physics; won support from two US presidents; and inspired generations of young women the world over to pursue science as a way of life.

As Sobel did so memorably in her portrait of Galileo through the prism of his daughter, she approaches Marie Curie from a unique angle, narrating her remarkable life of discovery and fame alongside the women who became her legacy—from France's Marguerite Perey, who discovered the element francium, and Norway's Ellen Gleditsch, to Marie Curie's elder daughter, Irène, winner of the 1935 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. For decades the only woman in the room at international scientific gatherings that probed new theories about the interior of the atom, Marie Curie traveled far and wide, despite constant illness, to share the secrets of radioactivity, a term she coined. Her two triumphant tours of the United States won her admirers for her modesty even as she was mobbed at every stop; her daughters, in Ève's later recollection, "discovered all at once what the retiring woman with whom they had always lived meant to the world."

With the consummate skill that made bestsellers of Longitude and Galileo's Daughter, and the appreciation for women in science at the heart of her most recent The Glass Universe, Dava Sobel has crafted a radiant biography and a masterpiece of storytelling, illuminating the life and enduring influence of one of the most consequential figures of our time.

I Heard There Was a Secret Chord
Daniel Levitin
6 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Discovery Building, DeLuca Forum
Presented in partnership with the Wisconsin Science Festival.

Across cultures, sound and rhythm have been used to ease suffering, promote healing, and calm the mind. In his new book, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine neuroscientist and New York Times best-selling author of This Is Your Brain on Music Daniel J. Levitin explores the curative powers of music, showing us how and why it is one of the most potent therapies today. He brings together, for the first time, the results of numerous studies on music and the brain, demonstrating how music can contribute to the treatment of a host of ailments, from neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's and Alzheimer's, to cognitive injury, depression, and pain.

"How can we scientifically study something as magical, ineffable, and as spiritually moving as music?" Levitin writes. "If we try to pin down the slippery thing that is art, will we demystify it or ruin it?" The interaction of music, mood, health, and the biology of our brain is yielding ever more clues about how it all works. In Levitin's telling, the science of music reinvents and reinvigorates its mystery, power, and beauty. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord will show you what we know, how it can be explained, and how we can harness the potential of music for healing and for help in staving off disease in the first place; for relieving pain; for helping us look forward and reimagine our lives.

Levitin is not your typical scientist―he is also an award-winning musician and composer, and through lively interviews with some of today's most celebrated musicians, from Sting to Kent Nagano and Mari Kodama, he shares their observations as to why music might be an effective therapy, in addition to plumbing scientific case studies, music theory, and music history. The result is a work of dazzling ideas, cutting-edge research, and jubilant celebration. I Heard There Was a Secret Chord highlights the critical role music has played in human biology, illuminating the neuroscience of music and its profound benefits for those both young and old.

"Music can calm our brains, our hearts, our nerves," Levitin writes. "We like music that strikes the sweet spot between novelty and familiarity, simplicity and complexity, and between predictability and surprise. Loving music requires that we be receptive to it, that we make the mental space and time to allow ourselves to give into it, to be won over by it. If our defenses are up it may simply not work. Or it can catch us by surprise, evoking some of our deepest memories or deepest feelings, and in the process, help us through almost anything."

In conversation with Ben Sidran.

Minority Rule
Image
Minority Rule Book Cover
Ari Berman
6 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302
A riveting account of the decades-long effort by reactionary white conservatives to undermine democracy and entrench their power—and the movement to stop them.

The mob that stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, represented an extreme form of the central danger facing American democracy today: a blatant disregard for the will of the majority. But this crisis didn't begin or end with Donald Trump's attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Through voter suppression, election subversion, gerrymandering, dark money, the takeover of the courts, and the whitewashing of history, reactionary white conservatives have strategically entrenched power in the face of a massive demographic and political shift. Ari Berman charts these efforts with sweeping historical research and incisive on-the-ground reporting, chronicling how a wide range of antidemocratic tactics interact with profound structural inequalities in institutions like the Electoral College, the Senate, and the Supreme Court to threaten the survival of representative government in America.

"The will of the people," wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1801, "is the only legitimate foundation of any government." But that foundation is crumbling. Some counter-majoritarian measures were deliberately built into the Constitution, which was designed in part to benefit a small propertied upper class, but they have metastasized to a degree that the Founding Fathers could never have anticipated, undermining the very notion of "a government of the people, by the people, and for the people." Chilling and revelatory, Minority Rule exposes the long history of the conflict between white supremacy and multiracial democracy that has reached a fever pitch today—while also telling the inspiring story of resistance to these regressive efforts.

Presented in partnership with Law Forward and Wisconsin Public Radio, and in conversation with WPR "Wisconsin Today" host, Rob Ferrett.

One of Our Kind
Nicola Yoon
6 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301

Jasmyn and King Williams move their family to the planned Black utopia of Liberty, California hoping to find a community of like-minded people, a place where their growing family can thrive. King settles in at once, embracing the Liberty ethos, including the luxe wellness center at the top of the hill, which proves to be the heart of the community. But Jasmyn struggles to find her place. She expected to find liberals and social justice activists striving for racial equality, but Liberty residents seem more focused on booking spa treatments and ignoring the world's troubles.

Jasmyn's only friends in the community are equally perplexed and frustrated by most residents' outlook. Then Jasmyn discovers a terrible secret about Liberty and its founders. Frustration turns to dread as their loved ones start embracing the Liberty way of life.

Will the truth destroy her world in ways she never could have imagined?

Thrilling with insightful social commentary, One Of Our Kind explores the ways in which freedom is complicated by the presumptions we make about ourselves and each other.

In conversation with Lauren Myracle.

Copies of One Of Our Kind will be distributed for free to all attendees courtesy of the Wisconsin Book Festival.

Still Waters
Matt Goldman
Mindy Mejia
6 p.m. - 7 p.m.
Central Library
 
Lower-Level Program Room
"If you're reading this email, I am dead. I know this will sound strange, but someone has been trying to kill me."

Liv and Gabe Ahlstrom are estranged siblings who haven't seen each other in years, but that's about to change when they receive a rare call from their older brother's wife. "Mack is dead," she says. "He died of a seizure." Five minutes after they hang up, Liv and Gabe each receive a scheduled email from their dead brother, claiming that he was murdered.

The siblings return to their family run resort in the Northwoods of Minnesota to investigate Mack's claims, but Leech Lake has more in store for them than either could imagine. Drawn into a tangled web of lies and betrayal that spans decades, they put their lives on the line to unravel the truth about their brother, their parents, themselves, and the small town in which they grew up. After all, no one can keep a secret in a small town, but someone in Leech Lake is willing to kill for the truth to stay buried.

New York Times bestselling and Emmy award-winning author Matt Goldman returns with a gripping, emotional thrill ride in this compelling story on grief and uncovering the past before it's too late.

In conversation with Mindy Mejia.

Creation Lake
Creation Lake Book Cover
Rachel Kushner
Chloe Benjamin
7:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 301
Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France.

"Sadie Smith" is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader.

Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by "cold bump"—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her "contacts"—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.

In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past.

Just as Sadie is certain she's the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.

Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner's rendition of "noir" is taut and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner's finest achievement yet as a novelist, a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.
 
Defectors
Paola Ramos
7:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Central Library, Community Room 302

An award-winning journalist's deeply reported exploration of how race, identity and political trauma have influenced the rise in far-right sentiment among Latinos, and how this group can shape American politics.

Democrats have historically assumed they can rely on the Latino vote, but recent elections have called that loyalty into question. In fact, despite his vociferous anti-immigrant rhetoric and disastrous border policies, Trump won a higher percentage of the Latino vote in 2020 than he did in 2016. Now, journalist Paola Ramos pulls back the curtain on these voters, traveling around the country to uncover what motivates them to vote for and support issues that seem so at odds with their self-interest.

From coast to coast, cities to rural towns, Defectors introduces readers to underdog GOP candidates, January 6th insurrectionists, Evangelical pastors and culture war crusaders, aiming to identify the influences at the heart of this rightward shift. Through their stories, Ramos shows how tribalism, traditionalism, and political trauma within the Latino community has been weaponized to radicalize and convert voters who, like many of their white counterparts, are fearful of losing their place in American society.

Hampton Heights
Hampton Heights Book Cover
Dan Kois
7:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m.
Central Library, Lower-Level Program Room

From the author of the Washington Post notable novel Vintage Contemporaries, something completely unexpected: a hair-raising and rollicking adventure set on one night in 1987, when six paperboys must confront a slew of monsters as well as their own personal demons in a haunted Midwestern neighborhood.

On a cold winter's evening in 1987, six middle-school paperboys wander an unfamiliar Milwaukee neighborhood, selling newspaper subscriptions, fueled by their manager Kevin's promises of cash bonuses and dinner at Burger King. But the freaks come out at night in Hampton Heights. Funny, thrilling, filthy, and sneakily beautiful, Dan Kois's Hampton Heights captures without sentimentality the dreams and fears of teenage boys in a tender horror-comedy about camaraderie, bravery, vulnerability, and the terrifying prospect of growing up.

Bluff
Danez Smith
9 p.m. - 10 p.m.
Central Library, Community Rooms 301 & 302

Presented in Partnership with the UW-Madison Office of Multicultural Arts Initiative.

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith's powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.

Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to "anti poetica" and "ars america" to implicate poetry's collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America's acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem—part map, part annotation, part visual argument—offers the history of Saint Paul's vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love—those given and made—are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.