Watershed Reading: Our Relationship with Power

Join us for our next poetry reading featuring Madison's new poet laureate, Oscar Mireles, along with Matthew Guenette and Cherene Sherrard, accompanied by our the exhibition Our Relationship with Power by Jenie Gao. Gao explores and questions how power works, challenges the notion of power as a great force, and reveales how it builds in small ways. Her work shows how our understanding of power will determine whether our relationship with it will turn for the better or worse. Each artwork in this show illustrates a different relationship between subjects and the sum that their parts create.

Oscar Mireles

Oscar Mireles is the first Latino Poet Laureate (2016-18) of the City of Madison. He is the editor of three anthologies titled I Didn't Know There Were Latinos in Wisconsin in which the last edition featured 40 Latino writers. He published a chapbook titled Second Generation in 1985. He has read poetry at the Detroit Institute of Art, Chicago Cultural Center and The Loft in Minneapolis. He has been the Executive Director of Omega School for the past 22 years, which provides GED preparation for young adults in Dane County.

Matthew Guenette

Matthew Guenette is the author of Doom Scroll (2023), Vasectomania (2017), American Busboy (2011), and Sudden Anthem (2008). He lives in Madison, WI, with his wife, their two kids, and a twenty-pound cat named Butternut.

Cherene Sherrard

Cherene Sherrard was born in Los Angeles. A Cave Canem Graduate Fellow, she is the author of the forthcoming Grimoire, to be published by Autumn House Press in September, 2020; Vixen (Autumn House Press); a chapbook entitled Mistress Reclining, winner of New Women’s Voices Award; and a biography of Harlem Renaissance writer Dorothy West. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Los Angeles Review, Crab Orchard Review, Prairie Schooner, Tidal Basin Review, and Obsidian III. She is the recipient of a Wisconsin Arts Board Grant in poetry, a National Endowment for the Humanities Award and Resident fellowship from the Ragdale foundation. She currently lives in Madison, Wisconsin, where she is a professor in the English department at UW-Madison.

PLAN YOUR VISIT

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.

CALENDAR

Watershed Reading: Our Relationship with Power

Oscar Mireles

Matthew Guenette

Cherene Sherrard

PLAN YOUR VISIT

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