The Madison Community

The Program in Creative Writing believes that an awareness of one's literary community is essential to any creative writer. Listed below are just a few of the organizations in and around Madison that help to make our community so vibrant.

The Wisconsin Book Festival is a free, five-day program of public events that takes place every October in downtown Madison. It is the state's largest literary festival, drawing thousands of attendees annually. Since its inception in 2002, Festival has been a showcase for literary talent from across the country. As a special project of the Wisconsin Humanities Council, the Festival works to fulfill the WHC’s mission: Community through Conversation. Recent readers and workshop leaders at the Wisconsin Book Festival have included Grace Paley, Tim O’Brien, Edwidge Danticat, Isabel Allende, Michael Chabon, TC Boyle, Judy Blume, Wendell Berry, Michael Perry, Lorrie Moore, Lynda Barry and Harvey Pekar.

The Writers in Prisons Project is a collective of educators, writers, performers, scholars, and community members in Wisconsin committed to making a space for thoughtful self-expression and literary engagement in one of the state's most under-served areas: our prisons. In partnership with correctional facilities, the Project offers voluntary classes in literature, memoir, poetry and spoken word, and African American studies for inmates. These classes are not accredited, but all facilitators are highly skilled volunteers who believe that making space for this kind of engagement and education can help to reduce recidivism, improve literacy, and increase the joint humanity of everyone involved with the program, incarcerated or not.

Monsters of Poetry is a contemporary poetry & fiction reading series in Madison. It is given body at The Project Lodge, 817 E Johnson St, & given blood & brain & loin & heart & spine by its readers & audiences. For information about reading for or collaborating with the series, please contact its curators.

The FELIX Reading Series is dedicated to providing an audience for new writing and is especially devoted to showcasing the work of writers and editors involved with small or independent literary presses. The series is named after Felix Pollak, a poet and longtime UW-Madison librarian with a special love for and dedication to small literary magazines. The FELIX reading series is currently curated by Ph.D. candidates from the Department of English. Past readers for FELIX have included Kara Candito, Carla Harryman, Matt Hart, Brenda Hillman, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Joyelle McSweeney, Philip Metres, Cole Swenson, and Matvei Yankelevich.

The Program in Creative Writing is supported by the Jay C. and Ruth Halls Creative Writing Program Fund; the Dorothy D. Bailey Fund; the August Derleth Fund; the Carl Djerassi Distinguished Playwriting Fellowship Fund, the Carl Djerassi and Diane Middlebrook Fiction and Poetry Fellowship Fund; the Anastasia C. ("Tess") Hoffmann Fund; the Cy Howard Memorial Scholarship Fund; the James C. McCreight Fiction Fellowship Fund; the David and Jean Milofsky Fund; the Chris O'Malley Fiction Prize Fund; the Felix Pollak Poetry Prize Fund; the Martha Meier Renk Graduate Fellowship in Poetry Fund; the Carol Houck Smith Fiction Fellowship Fund; the Peter Straub Fund; the Eudora Welty Fiction Prize Fund; the Phyllis Smart Young Poetry Prize Fund, and the Friends of Creative Writing. Campus creative writing prizes are further sponsored by the Charles M. Hart, Jr. Writers of Promise Awards Fund; the George B. Hill Fund; and the Therese Muller Trust.