Join us for a celebration of the late Susan Elbe's poetry and life. Elbe, an award-winning and widely admired Madison poet, died on September 24 of last year. Her writing group, the Lake Effect poets Marilyn Annucci, Robin Chapman, Catherine Jagoe, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Sara Parrell, and Alison Townsend, and friends Ron Czerwien and Thomas Ferrella, will read poems from her books Eden in the Rearview Mirror and The Map of What Happened, 2012 winner of the Backwaters Press Book Prize and the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press; and her chapbooks Light Made from Nothing and Where Good Swimmers Drown, winner of the 2011 Concrete Wolf Chapbook prize.
The 2018 Susan Elbe Memorial Reading
Marilyn Annucci's poems have appeared in various journals and in collaboration with artists in local projects. She is the author of two chapbooks--Waiting Room, which won the 2012 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize, and Luck (Parallel Press, 2000). She teaches in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the UW-Whitewater.
Robin Chapman's poems have appeared recently in The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Hudson Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and online on One Art and Poem-A-Day. She is author of eleven books of poetry, including Panic Season (Tebot Bach 2022), Six True Things (Wisconsin Library Association's Outstanding Book of Poetry Award); the eelgrass meadow (honorable mention for the Council of Wisconsin Writers' Edna Meudt Award); The Dreamer Who Counted the Dead (WLA Outstanding Book of Poetry Award); Abundance (Cider Press Editor's Award); Images of a Complex World: The Art and Poetry of Chaos (World Scientific, with physicist J.C Sprott's fractals and explanations; recipient of the Posner Poetry Award from CWW); and The Only Home We Know (WLA Outstanding Book of Poetry Award). She is recipient of the Helen Howe Poetry Award from Appalachia and residencies from Vermont Studio Center... Read More
Catherine Jagoe is a writer and translator based in Madison. Her poems have been featured on The Writer’s Almanac and Poetry Daily and she is a semi-regular contributor to Wisconsin Public Radio’s Wisconsin Life series. Her previous poetry collections include Bloodroot, News from the North, and Casting Off, as well as three collections of Uruguayan poetry in translation. She is currently completing a memoir in essays. Her new volume of poems about the environment, Praying to the God of Small Things, is due out with Kelsay Books this summer.
Jesse Lee Kercheval is a poet, writer, visual artist and translator. Her most recent poetry collections are I Want to Tell You (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023) and Un pez dorado no te sirve para nada/ A Goldfish Buys You Nothing (Editorial Yaugurú, Uruguay, 2023). Her translations include Love Poems by Idea Vilariño and The Invisible Bridge: Selected Poems of Circe Maia (University of Pittsburgh Press). She is the Zona Gale Professor Emerita of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Sara Parrell’s work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, qarrtsiluni, Wisconsin People and Ideas, Verse Wisconsin, and she co-founded the Bridge Poetry Series at the Chazen Museum of Art. She was awarded first prize in the 2008 Poetry Center of Chicago’s Juried Reading for her manuscript Psalms of New Orleans, and received the Leo Love Poetry Merit Award in 2012 from the Taos Writers’ Conference. Frequent collaborations with artist Thomas Ferrella include Borderland and Hybrid. Sara is faculty at the UW-Madison School of Nursing, and is a mindfulness practice specialist for the Madison Metropolitan School District.
Alison Townsend is the author of two books of poetry, The Blue Dress, selected for the Marie Alexander Prose Poem series at White Pine Press, and Persephone in America, which won the Crab Orchard Open Poetry Competition. A collection of short prose, The Persistence of Rivers: An Essay on Moving Water, won the Jeanne Lieby Nonfiction Prize. Her poetry and essays appear widely, in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Parabola, The Southern Review, and Under the Sun, and have been recognized in Best American Poetry, The Pushcart Prize, and Best American Essays 2020. Her awards include a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Chancellor’s Regional Literary Award (for contributions to the literature of the Upper Midwest), and the 2020 Rattle Poetry Prize. She’s had residencies at Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the Spring Creek... Read More
Thomas Ferrella is a former emergency medicine physician who worked for 30 years as a trauma specialist. Now a Wisconsin-based multimedia artist, Ferrella has exhibited many well-received projects. He has received multiple Wisconsin grants for his public art installations and uses his work to comment and respond to social and environmental causes. His photographic work documenting Chicago murder sites titled NOT FORGOTTEN: Chicago Street Memorials was shown at the Gage Gallery in Chicago and was endorsed by Time as a “…you can’t miss” photographic show for 2016. Last fall he had a solo show in Camaguey, Cuba titled 1 Mundo. This body of work deconstructs the boundaries of sex, race and age and explores a vision for a unified world. Recently he participated in a portal discussion in Milwaukee with genocide survivors in Kigali, Rwanda as part of a Carl Wilken’s Fellowship titled #togetherweremember, using images from his outdoor installation, BLACK HAWK YAHARA:... Read More
Ron Czerwien is the owner of Avol’s Books, LLC. His poems have appeared online and in a number of print journals. Ron serves on the board of The Council for Wisconsin Writers. His chapbook, “a little rain, a little more,” was published in 2018 by Bent Paddle Press.
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Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.
Our galleries are open Tuesday through Friday 10am-5pm and Saturday noon to 5pm, and other programs take place throughout the week. Please check the events calendar and education section for details.