In her fourth collection, Driftless Area-based poet Nikki Wallschlaeger further proves herself as a singular poet of astonishing emotional depth and formal range. Hold Your Own is a steadfast search for peace, self-acceptance, and pleasure in a world that makes those basic rights an everyday challenge for Black women. It was published in May 2024 by Copper Canyon Press.

Nikki joins host Sara Batkie for a conversation about getting the right rhythm, the joys of working with books every day, and the natural beauty of her home state.

Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured in The Nation, Brick, American Poetry Review, Witness, Kenyon Review, Poetry, and others. She is the author of the full-length collections Waterbaby (Copper Canyon Press, 2021), Houses (Horseless Press 2015), and Crawlspace (Bloof 2017), as well as the graphic book I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (2019) from Bloof Books. She is also the author of an artist book called “Operation USA” through the Baltimore-based book arts group Container, a project acquired by Woodland Pattern Book Center in Milwaukee.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with Richard Sweitzer about his book ODE The Scion of Nerikan. Richard is award-winning author and longtime morning radio host. He received his Master’s of Arts degree in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Richard is the author and publisher of ODE The Scion of Nerikan which was published in 2023. The book is about an immortal monster who is searching for a way to die, and the little girl who gives him reason to live...for a little longer.

Richard created an ODE Bingo card which he hands out at book signings and there is a tiny independent book store near his home that he places these cards in. Some of the boxes on the Bingo card ask the reader if they threw the book, hugged the book. laughed, cried and more.

Richard always wanted to publish his books traditionally, but after three false starts working with literary agents, he decided to publish his own book. The agents he had worked with offered some great advice, but he felt the story was drifting away from the adventure which he created. When Richard is not writing, he hosts a popular morning radio show in central Wisconsin. He has been with this show for more than thirty years.

In this episode, Richard reads from his book, discusses self-publishing, marketing, artificial intelligence, going to school at age thirty, being a radio host and his love of fantasy.

Lisa thanks Richard for his message to the audience: Try something new even if it’s scary. Take that course, make that change. Be afraid and do it anyway.

Richard Scott Larson's debut The Long Hallway (University of Wisconsin Press, April 2024) is a lyrical memoir that expresses a boy’s search for identity while navigating the darkness and isolation of a deeply private inner world.

Growing up queer, closeted, and afraid, Richard Scott Larson found expression for his interior life in horror films, especially John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, Halloween. He developed an intense childhood identification with Michael Myers, Carpenter’s inscrutable masked villain, as well as Michael’s potential victims. In The Long Hallway, Larson scrutinizes this identification, meditating on horror as a metaphor for the torments of the closet.

Richard joins host Sara Batkie for a conversation about the masks we wear, the horrors of suburbia, and finding the right home for your work.

Richard Scott Larson is a queer writer and critic. His debut memoir, The Long Hallway, was published by the University of Wisconsin Press. Born and raised in the suburbs of St. Louis, he studied literature and film criticism at Hunter College and earned his MFA from New York University.

He has received fellowships from MacDowell and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and his work has been supported by residencies from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Paragraph Workspace for Writers, La Porte Peinte, and the Willa Cather Foundation. He’s an active member of the National Book Critics Circle, and his writing has been recognized twice by The Best American Essays.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with Rachel Werner

about her children’s book, Moving and Grooving to Fillmore’s Beat and her cookbook,

Macro Cooking Made Simple.

Rachel is a model, an author, a poet, a book reviewer, the founder of The Little Book

Project, a freelance writer and digital medical consultant, teaching artist, certified holistic

nutritionist, certified yoga instructor and mindfulness practitioner. Rachel has a daughter

named Phoebe and a dog named Butter.

Moving and Grooving to Fillmore’s Beat is a beautiful story about the historical Fillmore

District in San Francisco, CA. It teaches children about the Fillmore District’s creative

legacy and names some of the famous artists at the Fillmore such as Carlos Santana

and Maya Angelou.

Macro Cooking Made Simple has fifty plus recipes for clean eating and healthy living.

Rachel has always had a love-hate relationship with food. Rachel was diagnosed with

an eating disorder at the age of 19. Exploring the creative process of eating was a

complete game changer for Rachel in regard to her health and her career.

In this episode, Rachel shares two of her poems and reads one of her daughter’s

poems.

Lisa thanks Rachel for sharing her many talents, and for always being curious in all

things.

Madison author Beth Nguyen’s latest book Owner of a Lonely Heart (Scribner, July 2023) is a memoir about parenthood, absence, and the condition of being a refugee: the story of Beth’s relationship with her mother.

At the end of the Vietnam War, when Beth Nguyen was eight months old, she and her family fled Saigon for America. Only Beth’s mother stayed—or was left—behind, and they did not meet again until Beth was nineteen. Over the course of her adult life, she and her mother have spent less than twenty-four hours together. It was named a Best Memoir of 2023 by Oprah Daily, and was selected by Time, NPR, and BookPage as a Best Book of 2023.

Beth joins host Sara Batkie ahead of the paperback release for a conversation about the expectations of motherhood, changing her name, and the fallibility of memory.

Beth Nguyen is the author of four books, most recently the memoir Owner of a Lonely Heart, published by Scribner in 2023. Owner of a Lonely Heart was a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick and was named a best book of 2023 by NPR, Time, Oprah Daily, and BookPage. Nguyen’s three previous books, the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner and the novels Short Girls and Pioneer Girl, were published by Viking Penguin. Her awards and honors include a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a PEN/Jerard Award from the PEN American Center, a Bread Loaf fellowship, and best book of the year honors from the Chicago Tribune and Library Journal. Her books have been included in community and university read programs around the country. Nguyen’s work has also appeared in numerous anthologies and publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The New York Times, Literary Hub, Time Magazine, and The Best American Essays.



Nguyen was born in Saigon. When she was a baby, she and her family came to the United States as refugees and were resettled in Michigan, where Nguyen grew up. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and is currently a professor in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with poet Daniel Khalastchi about hist new collection The Story of Your Obstinate Survival (2024, University of Wisconsin Press).

The Story of Your Obstinate Survival is a propulsive collection. It’s very funny, uncannily mundane and starkly surreal. The poems are a collision of juxtapositions and images, each one brimming with a vigor and vitality that demands re-reading, reading aloud, and maybe even setting to music. The lyrical wordplay will stop you in your tracks, either with laughter or with an appreciation for the delightfully weird scenes unfolding before you. The poems speak to an obstinate persistence, to enduring beyond a routinely felt sense of an ending.

Daniel Khalastchi is an Iraqi Jewish American. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, he is the author of four books of poetry—Manoleria (Tupelo Press), Tradition (McSweeney’s), American Parables (University of Wisconsin Press, winner of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry), and The Story of Your Obstinate Survival (University of Wisconsin Press). His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The American Poetry Review, The Believer Logger, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Electric Lit, Granta, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, and Best American Experimental Writing. Daniel has taught advanced writing, literature, and publishing courses at Augustana College, Marquette University, and the University of Iowa, most recently as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He currently lives in Iowa City where he directs the University of Iowa’s Magid Center for Writing. He is the cofounder and managing editor of Rescue Press.

Author photo courtesy of University of Wisconsin Press

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Lisa Malawski talks with Angela Trudell Vasquez, who until recently, was the City of Madison Poet Laureate.

Trudell Vasquez is a poet, writer, performer, and activist. Her most recent chapbook, My People Redux (2022, Finishing Line Press) honors her heritage, contending with generational hardships immigrant families face in making a life in America. The chapbook won first place in the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Chapbook Contest for 2022.

Angie began writing seriously when she was seven years old. Her grandmother purchased a diary for her, and this is where she would write her first few lines. Angie tells us that she learned the power of words make her feel whole, well-fed, and warm.

Lisa discusses Angie’s position as the former Madison Poet Laureate, poetry on the Madison Transit buses, Art Night Books, Angela’s day job as Director of Human Resources for End Domestic Abuse Wisconsin, and her work on her memoir.

Additionally, Lisa jokes with Angie about some things she has learned about her, such as her love for Etta James and why she sometimes wears two different colored tights to a poetry reading.

Cynthia Marie Hoffman’s latest book of prose poetry, Exploding Head (Persea Books, February 2024) is described as an OCD memoir in prose poems.

It chronicles her childhood onset and adult journey through obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), which manifests in fearful obsessions and counting compulsions that impact her relationship to motherhood, religion, and the larger world. It’s been called “Magnificently propulsive and evocative” by Rebecca Morgan Frank. Megan Wildhood said, “I want someone to make a haunted house of these poems.”

She joins newest host, Sara Batkie, for a conversation about mental health, poetry as personal history, and what it’s like to be a working writer in Madison.

In addition to Exploding Head, Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of three previous collections of poetry: Sightseer, Paper Doll Fetus, and Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones. She is the recipient of a Diane Middlebrook Fellowship in Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Wisconsin Arts Board, and a Director’s Guest fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy.

Cynthia has taught creative writing and composition at George Mason University, the University of Wisconsin, and Edgewood College. She works at an electrical engineering firm in Madison, WI, where she lives with her husband and teenage child. You can find more about her at her website, cynthiamariehoffman.com and follow her on Instagram @cynthiamariehoffman.