10/12/2026
Wisconsin Book Festival has quite the lineup this year of poetry events, and you will want to attend as many as you can.
From 6-7:30 p.m. at the Central Library's Lower Level Program Room on Oct 16, "Still/Here: Wisconsin Women Poets On Work, Life, And The Long Haul" brings together six Wisconsin women poets for reading and candid conversation about what it means to keep making work, and keep showing up for the literary community, in midlife and beyond.
Followed by a reading, the speakers will discuss the experiences they share: the challenge of sustaining a creative practice while navigating career change, caregiving, personal upheaval, and the particular invisibility that descends on women of a certain age in both general and literary culture. These are writers who have not stepped back. They have organized reading series, founded journals and presses, served as poets laureate, mentored emerging writers, and continued to publish, often while managing circumstances that receive little acknowledgment in the literary world.
The panel is part of a larger ongoing effort by the organizers to build a stronger support network among Wisconsin women writers: an informal community of accountability, conversation, and creative possibility.
