Ms. Wisel is a fiction fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her fiction, nonfiction and poetry have appeared or will appear in Gulf Coast, New Ohio Review, Tin House online and on the Boston subway as winner of the “Poetry on the T” contest.
From learning to read at 18 years old, to working as a researcher at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Dr. Shawn Anthony Robinson is working to make our community a better place for people with reading difficulties.
Noted: Hawley, a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, holds a master of fine arts degree from UW-Madison.
The Midwest doesn’t get much film representation. We’ve got Fargo (1996), 2004’s Dawn of the Dead remake, and my favorite of 2017, The Bye Bye Man. Wisconsinite Michael M. McGuire, who attended UW-Madison, adds another Midwestern entry with his first feature film, Aquarians. Shot in various locations throughout Marinette County and Menominee County, the movie succeeds at portraying the harsh Midwestern winter as the desolate, isolated wasteland that it is.
Noted: List includes “What We Were Promised” by Lucy Tan, who earned her master’s of fine arts degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Over the past two decades, historians and librarians have been archiving zines in the desire to expand our understanding of the medium, in spaces like the Main Zine Collection in Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Library, San Francisco Public Library’s Little Maga/Zine Collection, the Library Workers Zine Collection at the iSchool Library at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and many more.
Noted: Vying with Stockhausen for busiest Badger at the movies this year was Carrie Coon. The actress who got her start on stages at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and in Madison-area theater played small but key roles in three movies in theaters this year, also very different: “Widows,” the sci-fi thriller “Kin” and “Avengers: Infinity War” (as one of Thanos’ minions).
It’s not often that folks in Madison pay attention to the happenings in Stevens Point, but this past month was different. Just 109.5 miles north of Madison, the leaders of the University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point made seismic waves that registered an 8.2 on the higher education Richter Scale. The aftershocks were surely felt on the Madison campus.
Noted: List includes The Soft Life by Bridget Talone. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Granta, The New Yorker, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of the 2016 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Poetry Fellowship at University of Wisconsin–Madison and is the founding editor of The Atlas Review.
Students in the University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism students release “Fearless” edition of Curb Magazine.
He arrived at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from Iowa in the 1970s to learn how to write fiction. He did, but it took a while. Just last year a New York publisher brought out Duncan’s first collection of short stories.
The artists call it “the glory hole.” It’s one of three furnaces essential for glassmaking, used to reheat glass while a piece is being worked on. On this late November day, inside the Glass Lab on North Frances Street, the glory hole is burning at 2,150 degrees Fahrenheit. The door is open and the inside glows a molten orange. Helen Lee, assistant professor of UW-Madison’s art glass program, stands next to it, holding a blowpipe with a partially-made goblet at the end of it.
“This book covers the big issues that drove the decade,” said Levitan. “Civil rights, urban renewal, the growth of the University of Wisconsin, the efforts to build a civic auditorium [Monona Terrace], and the student anti-war protests.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Jim Leary was nominated for a second Grammy.
An orchestra comprised of University of Wisconsin Madison School of Medicine and Public Health faculty, staff and students performed their inaugural concert Sunday evening.
After 50 years, UW Marching Band Director Mike Leckrone led the band for the last time at Camp Randall Stadium on Saturday. As he prepares to retire, so does the band’s seamstress. Lois Levenhagen has kept the band looking sharp since 1991.
Back in a 4k digital restoration, “The War at Home” returns this week to the Gene Siskel Film Center. The legitimate question: What can a nearly 40-year-old documentary, covering a decade (1963-73) of anti-war turbulence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, offer anyone contending with the societal casualties of 2018?
When Warrington Colescott died on Sept. 10, staff at the Chazen Museum of Art knew they had to do something. The 97-year-old teacher, satirist and printmaker was a giant, not only at UW-Madison but nationally.
UW-Madison Journalism School graduate explains the success of “Manitowoc Minute.”
Known for extravagant antics, including riding an elephant and a camel onto the field, Leckrone will retire at the end of the 2018-19 academic year, which also marks his 50th year leading the band.
Nostalgia has laced much of Leckrone’s last football season: In the back of his mind and in his assistants’ and students’ minds is a ticking clock, counting down the days, the rehearsals, the games he has left.
“Every event, someone will say, ‘This is the last time you’re going to do that,'” Leckrone said.
Emcee Argyle Wade, interim dean of students, left the audience with groan-laced grins after showcasing his recently acquired dad jokes.
Noted: Desmond is a professor of sociology at Princeton University. He received his Ph.D. in 2010 from University of Wisconsin-Madison and has studied poverty in America, city life, housing insecurity, public policy, racial inequality and ethnography. (“Evicted” was the 2016-17 Go Big Read selection.)
A group of students from UW-Madison will perform more than 50 musical theatre numbers in their newest show, Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now!
The Cooperative Children’s Book Center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison examines thousands of books for kids and teens published each year, and in 2015, it found that about 14 percent of American kids’ titles were about people who weren’t white.
Noted: But fear not. The pianist will be Christopher Taylor, professor of piano at UW-Madison. Taylor, who is also a mathematician, has gained a reputation as one of America’s leading pianists by conquering some of the most complicated music on the planet.
2018 has been a year of looking back and lightening the load for Ben Sidran. He and his wife Judy were the instigators of The Madison Reunion on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, a celebration of the city’s pivotal role in the 1960s culture and social justice movements … He donated his archives to the UW-Madison Libraries, including almost 100 boxes of recordings, letters and photographs.
Quoted: Jeff Smith, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison whose research focuses on the use of music in film, predicts that “Bohemian Rhapsody” will give a boost to Queen’s recordings. It wouldn’t even be the first time a film has been a boon for the band.
The artist Warrington Colescott came to UW-Madison for a one-year appointment in 1949 — and stayed for 37 years, helping to build one of the nation’s foremost art department printing programs and an international reputation of his own.
An art piece installed in front of Memorial Library invites passersby on Library Mall to interact with it. The piece, created by UW-Madison graduate student Matthew Vivirito, was constructed Thursday morning.
Noted: After receiving a bachelor’s in fine arts from UW-Madison in 2011, Pino launched Veteran Print Project to encourage dialogue among veterans, artists and the general public. Now the printmaker is curating and coordinating In Good Company: An Exposition of Emerging Veteran Artists, a citywide showcase for veteran artists.
Noted: “Back to School:” Rodney Dangerfield plays Thornton Meloni, a wealthy businessman who heads to college as an adult in the 1986 comedy “Back to School.” Meloni attends Grand Lakes University, but the school is a stand-in for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where many of the scenes were filmed.
The Afro-Latina musician and star of “Love & Hip Hop: Miami” discussed colorism, identity and her experience in the entertainment industry in a discussion Thursday evening at Memorial Union.
In July, I accompanied Freund, of the University of Hartford, and two geoscientists, Harry Jol, from the University of Wisconsin, and Philip Reeder, from Duquesne University, to find Matilda’s final resting place.
Noted: The project started after Lundberg read William Fulton’s 1997 book The Reluctant Metropolis: The Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles. The book details the early city’s critical need to seek water in other regions. “That opened my eyes to this huge re-engineering of water,” says Lundberg, who is studying at UW’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies while also pursuing a law degree. “I was fascinated by these gigantic systems that allow us to live and profit in these ways, but without seeing the infrastructure that make them happen.”
As UW Arboretum heads into the fall burn season, we rediscovered a piece sent to Isthmus by Thomas J. Straka, a forestry professor at Clemson University in South Carolina. While studying forestry at UW-Madison, Straka spent much time at the Arboretum and he wants our readers to know about the Arb’s role in the Oscar-winning documentary, The Vanishing Prairie (available at Amazon.com).
The women bonded as MFA students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, sharing stories about sexist treatment they’d witnessed or experienced.
The War at Home: This is a 4k restoration of a 1979 documentary about Vietnam War protests at the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus. Directed by Glenn Silber.
Honoring 30 Madison groups and individuals, including several from UW–Madison.
If you ever wanted a chance to meet and chat with amazing historical figures like Maya Angelou, Duke Ellington, Walt Whitman, Sojourner Truth, Mahalia Jackson, Walt Whitman, Frida Kahlo, and Frederick Douglass, you will get your opportunity at the UW-Madison Odyssey Project’s 4th annual “Night of the Living Humanities” fundraiser this Thursday, Oct. 25, 5-7 p.m. at The University Club.
A new organization on the UW-Madison campus is connecting people in costume with chances to put a smile on a kid’s face.
Wisconsin might seem an unlikely place for a publishing house that specializes in LGBTQ literature. But over the last three decades, the UW Press has become known as a national leader in publishing some of the finest — and most diverse — titles from LGBTQ authors.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison recently received a grant to digitize recordings of scripts, correspondences and notes the prolific screenwriter recorded in the 1960s on a now defunct piece of technology, the dictabelt.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison recently received a grant to digitize recordings of scripts, correspondences and notes the prolific screenwriter recorded in the 1960s on a now defunct piece of technology, the dictabelt.
Dan Egan, author of “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes” will speak at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on Oct. 16.
Noted: At the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where Lorraine studied painting and sculpture and acted in plays, she single-handedly integrated a women’s dorm. Early in her writing life, she was mentored by both W. E. B. Du Bois and Langston Hughes. And yet next to nothing is broadly known about her life, beyond the facts that she was black and a woman and, maybe, that she was a communist and queer.
“This is the type of learning that will light a fire in you. You learn more from the burning in your throat than all the time spent in limbo.”
Those words help kick off “Hip Hop U,” a documentary detailing the rise of hip hop in a college academic setting that is now available on the Wisconsin Public Television website. Hip Hop U, which premiered two weeks ago, tells the story of a one-of-a-kind academic program offered at the University of Wisconsin.
Each year the University of Wisconsin-Madison picks a common book for the entire campus to read and discuss called the Go Big Read program. The book for the 2018-2019 school year is “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes” by Dan Egan, a Milwaukee Journal reporter and senior water policy fellow at UW-Milwaukee.
With more student DJs than hours of airtime to give them, WSUM?—?the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s radio station?—?started an online-only livestream earlier this year. Called FreeFlow, it abides by looser rules than the station’s federally regulated FM stream.
Alexander Shashko, a lecturer in the Afro-American Studies department at UW-Madison, spoke to students about misogyny and hypermasculinity in hip-hop at a Men Against Sexual Assault meeting Wednesday evening.
Decades-old murals depicting Paul Bunyan and various associated folktales officially returned to the Memorial Union at the University of Wisconsin on Friday.
Noted: Among the dozens of authors scheduled to appear are several notable Wisconsin writers. They include journalist Stu Levitan, whose comprehensive narrative history, Madison in the Sixties, will be published in November; Madison Magazine columnist John Roach, whose second book of essays is titled While I Have Your Attention; and UW-Madison literature instructor Heather Swan, who wrote Where Honeybees Thrive: Stories from the Field, a book about the honeybee population that won the 2018 Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award.
He’s a renowned bassist with a wondrous resume in jazz, classical and rock; venerated UW-Madison professor; healer of racial injustice. Richard Davis has filled many vital roles in his 88 years. They’ll all be celebrated Oct. 11 at Overture’s Capitol Theater at a multimedia event titled Passing the Bass: A Global Tribute to Richard Davis.
Noted: Artists from the Art Department featured in cover story.
After 50 years as the UW band director, Leckrone looks back on the defining moments of his music career.
Cook in 1990 helped found the UW–Madison Writers’ Institute, a campus seminar that gained a national reputation and continues today.
The University of Wisconsin’s Badger Band performed at Lambeau Field for the last time under band director Mike Leckrone Sunday afternoon. After 50 years of leading the band, he’s retiring.
Noted: Coon didn’t shed her outdoorsy impulses while earning her master’s in acting at the University of Wisconsin–Madison or while apprenticing and acting for four years at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wisconsin. The current artistic director of the theater, Brenda DeVita, recalls that Coon could often be found lying on her back in the woods “just taking in the trees,” or swimming in the Wisconsin River. Onstage, Coon was “like a gazelle,” DeVita says. “She has an energy that fits the outdoors, that fits the space.”
WRAP began at UW–Madison in 1940 to foster creativity in rural areas. Now part of Continuing Studies, WRAP partners with the nonprofit Wisconsin Regional Artists Association (WRAA) to showcase artists in rural and urban areas statewide.
Ms. Coyne’s references to writers will be the focus of an exhibition in 2021 at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. Amy Gilman, director of the Chazen, finds the sculptures “evocative in the way that great literature stays with you,” she said. “Petah’s work exposes private things without being explicit, these deep wells of memory and meaning and relationship.”
