Join us on Saturday, April 18, 2026 at 6:30pm for our April Watershed Reading. Readers are Michael Walsh, Heather Swan, and Laleh Ahmad. This reading celebrates not only National Poetry Month but Earth Day, with a deep engagement between language and the more-than-human world.
April Watershed Reading
Michael Walsh is the author of The Dirt Riddles, which received the Miller Williams Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry, as well as Creep Love, a 2022 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Poetry. Most recently Autumn House Press published Queer Nature, the first ecoqueer American poetry anthology and a 2023 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Anthologies. Living in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, Michael is developing Queer Nature teachings and workshops.
Heather Swan is a poet and nonfiction writer, author of Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection, Where Honeybees Thrive, A Kinship with Ash, and Dandelion. Her work can be found in journals such as The Sun, Aeon, Emergence Magazine, Catapult, Poet Lore, and Terrain. She teaches at UW Madison.
Laleh is a multi-disciplinary reader and writer from Karachi, Pakistan. She is currently a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison researching urban floodscapes, the quest for control over water in Karachi, and which ghosts are haunting her now. You can find their writing at Muhajir, Edge Effects & like a field.
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Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.
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