Leonard first came in 1990, as keynote speaker for the first University of Wisconsin–Madison Writers’ Institute. Leonard was famous by then, having landed on the cover of Newsweek around the 1985 publication of his novel “Glitz.”
The institute was produced by the UW–Madison Division of Continuing Studies. They had no budget for speakers. But “Get Shorty” had just been published, and Leonard was headed from his Detroit-area home to the west coast to promote it.
“I’ll put you on my book tour,” Leonard told UW writing instructor Christine DeSmet. They need only pay expenses. “He was so kind,” DeSmet told me, years later.