READ-THINK-TALK-LISTEN-GROW
Author Presentations
National Endowment for the Arts Big Read and the Fox Cities Book Festival present an event with the 2024 NEA Big Reads author, Patricia Engel. We encourage you to read the book with your community and join us for this special presentation!
Join us for the NEA Big Read keynote event with the author on Friday, April 5, 2024
6:30 PM: Enjoy opening stories from Latin American Storyteller, Carolina Quiroga
7:00 PM: NEA Big Read Keynote Event with Patricia Engel
View a community art display created with the Trout Museum of Art, and more at this free event!
Friday, April 5, 2024
6:30 PM
Fox Cities Performing Arts Center, Kimberly Clark Theater 400 W. College Avenue Appleton, WI 54911
Book Discussions
Libraries in the Fox Cities will be holding book discussions focusing on the themes of family, home, Colombian Culture and Immigration.
Thursday, February 1, 2024
10:00 AM
Kimberly Public Library 515 W. Kimberly Avenue Kimberly, WI 54136
Tuesday, February 6, 2024
5:00 PM
Appleton Public Library 3000 E College Ave, Appleton, WI 54915
Thursday, March 7, 2024
10:00 AM
Elisha D. Smith Public Library (Menasha Public Library) 440 First Street Menasha, WI 54952
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
10:00 AM
Kaukauna Public Library207 Thilmany Rd #200, Kaukauna, WI 54130
Tuesday, March 19, 2024
TBD
il Bar Coffeehouse & Bistro 100 S Birch St Suite A, Kimberly, WI 54136
Thursday, March 21, 2024
1:00 PM
Kimberly Public Library515 W. Kimberly Avenue Kimberly, WI 54136
Monday, March 25, 2024
10:00 AM
Neenah Public Library240 East Wisconsin Avenue Neenah, WI 54956
Events
Poetry After Dark Featuring Brenda Cárdenas
An Ekphrastic Poetry Workshop
March 21, 2024 at 7:00 pm- 8:45 pm
Elisha D. Smith Public Library
440 First Street Menasha, WI 54952
Registration is required to attend. Please register online or contact the Elisha D. Smith Public Library.
About the Workshop
- Ekphrastic poetry is simply poetry that is inspired by and in conversation with visual art. Scholar Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux in her book Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts speaks of the communitarian sense of collaboration that ekphrasis can be when a poet puts “the ekphrastic power of the word…to the service of connection that here and there, now and then, self and other not be isolated.” With such in mind, we will first discuss various approaches one may take to writing an ekphrastic poem, using examples of poems written by Latinx authors in response to Latinx visual art. Then from images supplied by the workshop facilitator, we will each choose a work of Latinx visual art that inspires, intrigues, puzzles, or moves us. Rather than simply describing the art, we will attempt to write poems that converse with, correspond with, or “riff off” of the art, using various prompts the facilitator has prepared to help us do so. We will work toward creating a third space where the dyad (the poem and art together) is something more or different than its parts—something, perhaps, unexpected!
About Brenda Cárdenas
- Brenda Cárdenas is the author of Trace (Red Hen Press, 2023); Boomerang (Bilingual Press, 2009); and the chapbooks Bread of the Earth / The Last Colors with Roberto Harrison, Achiote Seeds/Semillas de Achiote with Cristina García, Emmy Pérez, and Gabriela Erandi Rico; and From the Tongues of Brick and Stone. She also co-edited Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2017) and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest (MARCH/Abrazo Press, 2001), which won the Chicago Women in Publishing first place award for excellence in editing. Her poems and essays have appeared in an array of anthologies and journals, including Braving the Body; Latinx Poetics: The Art of Poetry; POETRY; TAB: Journal of Poetry and Poetics; Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations; Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment, and Healing; Court Green; Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Anthology, The Wind Shifts: New Latino Poetry, Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems, and many others.
- Brenda Cardenas served as faculty for the 2021 CantoMundo writers’ retreat and as the 2010-2012 Milwaukee Poet Laureate. In 2014, she co-designed and co-taught the inaugural master workshop for Pintura:Palabra: A Project in Ekphrasis sponsored by the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Letras Latinas (Institute for Latino Studies, University of Notre Dame). She currently teaches Creative Writing and U.S. Latinx Literatures at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee where she has won a University of Wisconsin System Outstanding Women of Color in Education Award and the English Department’s Faculty Graduate Teaching Award. She lives in Milwaukee with her husband, the poet Roberto Harrison and their dog Maya.
Past Fox Cities Reads Authors
2023
Josh Malerman, Bird Box
2022
Tommy Orange, There There
Dawn Quigley, Apple in the Middle
Alex Gino, George
2020
Kao Kalia Yang, The Latehomecomer
2019
Dr. Matthew Desmond, Evicted
2018
Ruta Sepetys, Salt To The Sea
2017
Sharon Draper, Stella By Starlight
2016
David Sheff, Beautiful Boy: A Father’s Journey Through His Son’s Addiction
2015
Christina Baker Kline, Orphan Train
2014
R. J. Palacio, Wonder
2013
Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder and The Nature Principle: Human Restoration and the End of Nature-Deficit Disorder
2012
Bill Strickland, Make the Impossible Possible: One Man’s Crusade to Inspire Others to Dream Bigger and Achieve the Extraordinary
2011
Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North and The Devil’s Highway
2010
Lesley Kagen, Whistling in the Dark
2009
Michael Perry, Off Main Street, Population: 485, and Truck
2008
Alice Hoffman, Blackbird House and Green Angel
2007
Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed