I’ve lived in Wisconsin for almost 20 years. During those years I’ve been part of local writing groups (Looking at you, Judy, Mary, Jesse Lee, Catherine, Judy, Heather, and Kaia!), writer partnerships (DK, what would I do without our Tuesday mornings?), writing retreats (BJ Hollars, thank you for always welcoming me!), and have benefited from great teachers and mentors who have helped me understand writing more deeply (Deb Brandt, Brad Hughes, Marty Nystrand), as well as PhD students who have pushed my thinking about writing (Drs. Elisabeth Miller, Maggie Black, Chris Castillo, Antonio Byrd, Elisa Findlay, Calley Marotta, Greg Bartley, Asmahan Sandokhi, Sandra Descourtis, Gabrielle Kelenyi, Tim Cavnar!), and undergrads who are writing their truths in brave and often bilingual ways (students of Latinx Literacies, Fall 2021, you all blew me away). Not to mention some kickass writing studies colleagues whose big imaginations and hearts expand my own—Eileen Lagman! Emily Machado!
All this writing love has been nurtured by a humming, thrumming, vibing literary community. My writing life has grown from hanging with the UW creative writing program people, from the Wisconsin Book Festival, from a strong library network, from my local indie bookstore, from the Greater Madison Writing Project (the pandemic write-ins saved me), from a wicked active poet laureate (thank you, Angie Trudell Vasquez!), and of course from the Arts and Literature Laboratory.
Writing in Wisconsin is also greatly aided by our shitty weather, which 9 months of the year is very conducive to reading in the bath.
WHICH IS ALL TO SAY—while I am often writing about non-Wisconsin elsewheres (Colombia, Brazil, Latvia, Massachusetts, geographies and people of my heart!), I am a Wisconsin Writer. Capital Ws. And I couldn’t be prouder to have won the Wisconsin Writer’s Kay W. Levin Award for short creative nonfiction for the essay I published this past year in Guernica, “Someone Else’s Language.” It is about Latvia. But also about Wisconsin.
Come out May 20th 6 pm to the Art Lit Lab to hear all the winners read from their work. I can’t wait.