Book Festival: finale

I know you're sad that the Book Festival is wrapping up today, but check out what you have to look forward to this afternoon--National Book Award finalists Reginald Gibbons (poetry) and Aleksandar Hemon (fiction), Oprah's new favorite author, David Wroblewski, plus local favorite Michael Perry. Enjoy!

CJ Hribal, David Wroblewski & Michael Perry: How Ya Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?
Sunday, October 19 | 2:00 - 3:30 PM Venue: Orpheum Theatre: Main
The changing nature of Wisconsin’s rural areas informs many works in this year’s Festival, not least being the award-winning fiction of Milwaukee’s C.J. Hribal, the autobiographical humor/memoir writing of Michael Perry (a native of New Auburn), and Oprah’s latest author, David Wroblewski, who grew up in rural central Wisconsin, not far from the Chequamegon National Forest. This is a homegrown trio with an edge: don’t miss it.

Reginald Gibbons & Todd Boss: Poets from these North Heartlands
Sunday, October 19 | 4:00 - 5:30 PM Wisconsin Studio/Overture

"In the last few years Gibbons has written some of the best poems in America,—big, rich, meticulous, thoughtful canvases, social landscapes with personal and metaphysical shadows. ‘Our hunger feeds on witness' he says, and anyone who reads ‘I had been reading Ancient Greeks' or ‘At a Twenty Four Hour Gas Station' will feel that our world has been exposed and understood in ways free of cliché. Creatures of a Day addresses ‘this incomprehensible country' at our incomprehensible moment and these brilliant and humble poems are as alive with consciousness, as satisfying as anything I know."—Tony Hoagland



"Todd Boss is going to be a poetry all-star. . .He can make any rhyme feel like a concealed weapon." -Sherman Alexie

Increasingly, Boss has been attracting attention, with poems in the Paris Review and The New Yorker and a series in Poetry. His first collection, set in the Midwest, alternately features a childhood Wisconsin farm, the record-breaking storm that destroyed it, and the turbulent marriage that recalls it. Love and wonder mingle in these lines.

Aleksandar Hemon: The Lazarus Project
Sunday, October 19 | 4:00 - 5:30 PM Promenade Hall/Overture As in his earlier works, Aleksandar Hemon continues to mine, in rapturously praised prose, his experiences as a Bosnian-American immigrant. But in The Lazarus Project, his most ambitious, accomplished, and engaging book yet, Hemon has broadened his canvas to encompass the personal and the political, the contemporary and the historical, America and Eastern Europe, in a single unified story.

For complete listings of today's events, check out the Book Festival homepage.