Join us for our April Watershed reading with poets published in the Through This Door: Wisconsin in Poems anthology. On April 17, 2021 at 7pm, we will feature Terimarie Degree, Jim Landwehr, Ed Werstein, Kathrine Yets, Kimberly Blaeser, Nick Demske, Abayo Animashaun, Esteban Colon, and Roberto Harrison. The reading will be followed by a brief Q&A with the poets. This event will be streamed live on our YouTube channel and on our Facebook page.
April Watershed Reading
Abayomi Animashaun is the author of three poetry collections and editor of three anthologies. A member of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission, he teaches at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and lives in Green Bay, Wisconsin.
Kimberly Blaeser, past Wisconsin Poet Laureate and founding director of In-Na-Po—Indigenous Nations Poets, is a writer, photographer, and scholar. She is the author of six poetry collections, most recently Copper Yearning, the bilingual Résister en dansant/Ikwe-niimi: Dancing Resistance, and the 2024 volume Ancient Light. Blaeser edited Traces in Blood, Bone, and Stone: Contemporary Ojibwe Poetry and wrote the monograph Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition. Her photographs, picto-poems, and ekphrastic pieces have appeared in exhibits such as “Visualizing Sovereignty,” and “No More Stolen Sisters.” An Anishinaabe activist and environmentalist, she is an enrolled member of White Earth Nation. The 2024 Mackey Chair in Creative Writing at Beloit College and a Vassar College Tatlock Fellow, Blaeser is a Professor Emerita at UW–Milwaukee and an MFA faculty member for Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Her accolades include... Read More
A transplant from the South Chicagoland area, Esteban Colon was the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Kenosha, Wisconsin. He is the author of Things I Learned the Hard Way and has been published in many journals and anthologies. He continues writing more because of the current state of our world, than despite it.
Terimarie Degree grew up with both parents serving in the US Navy and has lived everywhere from California to the Aleutian Islands of Alaska. Her work has been published in literary journals and anthologies including Where I Want to Live (2018), Secret Words Volume 4 (2019), On Environment (2019) and Reflections (2020).
Nick Demske lives in Racine and works as a children's librarian at the Racine Public Library. He is the current chair of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. He is also currently the President of the Wisconsin Center for the Book and the Director and Curator of the BONK! Arts and Culture series, which he helped co-found in 2008.
Roberto Harrison, who is also a visual artist, served as 2017-2019 Milwaukee Poet Laureate. He has published six books of poetry, including Bridge of the World (2017) and Yaviza (2017) and served as a co-editor for the Resist Much/Obey Little anthology.
Jim Landwehr has published five poetry collections, most recently Thoughts From a Line at the DMV and Genetically Speaking. He served as 2018-2019 poet laureate for the Village of Wales, Wisconsin. During his term, he solicited and received over 50 autographed books of poetry for donation to Kettle Moraine High School.
Ed Werstein, Milwaukee, is the East Region VP of the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets (WFOP) and represents the WFOP on the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. In 2018 he edited the anthology, Bards Against Hunger: Wisconsin Edition, which raised money for local food pantries and shelters. His recent chapbook is Benediction & Baseball (Fireweed Press).
Margaret Rozga, 2019-2020 Wisconsin Poet Laureate, initiated the project that grew into this anthology in workshops throughout Wisconsin and served as co-editor in bringing Through This Door to publication. Her fifth book of poems, Holding My Selves Together, is scheduled for publication in May 2021 by Cornerstone Press.
Angela (Angie) Trudell Vasquez is a 2nd and 3rd generation Mexican-American writer, editor, publisher, and the former Poet Laureate of Madison, Wisconsin (2020-2024). She holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Finishing Line Press published her collections, In Light, Always Light, in May 2019, and My People Redux, in January 2022. In 2021, she attended the Macondo Writers Workshop started by Sandra Cisneros, and became a fellow, also known as a Macondista. In 2020 she published and co-edited a poetry anthology of Wisconsin poets, Through This Door, through her small press Art Night Books.
Portrait by Nicole Taylor
Kathrine Yets, a winner of the Wisconsin Writers Association’s Jade Ring Award, is the author the chapbook So I Can Write (2019). Her new collection, The Animal Within, is forthcoming from Unsolicited Press. Her poems and reviews of poetry collections have appeared in many journals.
The Watershed Reading Series is supported in part with additional funds from the Endres Mfg. Company Foundation, The Evjue Foundation, Inc., charitable arm of The Capital Times, the W. Jerome Frautschi Foundation, and the Pleasant T. Rowland Foundation.
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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.