Verse Wisconsin’s special issue on Belief debuts at the Wisconsin Book Festival. To celebrate, editors Sarah Busse and Wendy Vardaman will present a poetry reading featuring six award-winning Wisconsin contributors to the issue.

Verse Wisconsin
Thursday, September 30 | 7:30 - 9:00 PM
Avol's Bookstore, 315 West Gorham St., Madison

Karl Elder's tenth collection of verse is The Houdini Monologues from Word of Mouth Books, the imprint of his magazine, Seems. His ninth collection, Gilgamesh at the Bellagio, recently won publication in The National Poetry Review Award Book Series.

Fabu is Madison's third Poet Laureate. Her poetry has appeared in Callaloo, PMS (Poems, Memoirs and Stories), Southern Women's Review, Black Books Bulletin, The Wisconsin Academy Review, UMOJA magazine, Rosebud Magazine, The Madison Times, The Capital City Hues and Verse Wisconsin.

Susan Firer is a former Poet Laureate of Milwaukee, and the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including the Milwaukee County Artist Fellowship, a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship, the Lorine Niedecker Award, and in 2009 the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee Distinguished Alumnus Award. Her most recent book is Milwaukee Does Strange Things to People: New & Selected Poems 1997-2007.

Max Garland is the author of two books of poetry, The Postal Confessions, winner of the Juniper Prize for Poetry, and Hunger Wide as Heaven, which won the Cleveland State Poetry Center Open Competition in 2006. His poems and stories have appeared in Poetry, Georgia Review, New England Review, Best American Short Stories, and other journals and anthologies.

Derrick Harriell is a 2009 Pushcart Nominee whose poems have appeared in various literary journals and anthologies, including The Cream City Review, Reverie, the Lamplighter Review, and is forthcoming in Main Street Rag. Cotton (Aquarius Press-Willow Books) is his first collection of poems.

John Koethe is the author of eight books of poetry, including Domes, which received the Frank O’Hara Award in 1973, Falling Water, which received the Kingsley Tufts Award in 1998, and most recently North Point North: New and Selected Poems, Sally's Hair, and Ninety-Fifth Street.