In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with AJ Romriell on his debut memoir Wolf Act (University of Wisconsin Press, 2025).

Wolf Act is a “memoir in essays,” and these essays take on a variety of forms. The work is divided into three different Acts, and each act is made up of chapters that are both interlinked but can also stand on their own as well. While the majority of the prose is narrative nonfiction, there are a number of chapters that include lengthy lists, definition entries like you would find in a dictionary, as well as passages that mirror a kind of Mormon liturgy and educational upbringing.

As the title suggests, wolves are a central metaphor throughout the work, and Romriell seamlessly weaves in references to wolves from mythology, fables, fairy tales, and religious beliefs as a way of processing his exit from the Mormon faith and his intentional turn towards self-love and joy.

AJ Romriell is a storyteller, photographer, and educator. His memoir Wolf Act is about his experience growing up queer and neurodivergent in the Mormon religion; it earned first prize in the Utah Original Writing Competition and was a finalist for the Writers’ League of Texas Manuscript Contest. He is a 2025 Pushcart nominee, and his essays, stories, and poems have been featured in Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Brevity, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. He has been the recipient of the Vandewater Prize in Poetry, the Kenneth W. Brewer Creative Writing Award, and the Ralph Jennings Smith Creative Writing Endowment, and his work has been shortlisted for Ploughshares’ Emerging Writer’s Contest, CRAFT’s Hybrid Writing Contest, and the Black Warrior Review and New Ohio Review contests for creative nonfiction.

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie chats with Wisconsin Poet Laureate Brenda Cárdenas about her new position and the exciting plans she has in the works during her service.

Brenda Cárdenas was born and raised in Milwaukee and has also lived in Beaver Dam, Appleton, Menasha, and Fond du Lac. She obtained her undergraduate degree at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and a Masters of Fine Arts (MFA) degree in Creative Writing (Poetry) at the University of Michigan. She recently retired from a 35-year career teaching Creative Writing to students at every level from seventh graders to doctoral candidates. From 2007 to 2024 she taught Creative Writing and U. S. Latino/x Literatures at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee.

A former City of Milwaukee poet laureate, Cárdenas has authored two full-length books: Trace (Red Hen Press) and Boomerang (Bilingual Press). She has also authored or co-authored three chapbooks: Bread of the Earth/The Last Colors, Achiote Seeds/Semillas de Achiote, and From the Tongues of Brick and Stone. Her three-year term as Wisconsin Poet Laureate began on January 15, 2025 and runs through December 31, 2027.

Brenda will be doing many events and workshops throughout the state during her Poet Laureate term. You can see a full list by visiting her website here.

Tana Elias has more than three decades of experience at the Madison Public Library. After one year in the role, she’s “just settling in” to the position as Director of the MPL.

Elias sits down with Madison Book Beat host David Ahrens for a conversation about the history, funding, services and evolution of the Madison Public Library system, which has nine libraries in the city, operates the mobile Dreambus service, and is now building an “Imagination Center” on the north side.

Elias and Ahrens also take up the changing role of libraries in the digital age. Contrary to the notion of a library dealing in books only, today’s Madison Public Libraries function as a community hub and resource — giving everything from seeds to art to yes, digital and physical books to the community.

They also discuss the threat of losing federal funding, and the significant milestone for MPL coming up this year: 150 years of service.

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie chats with author Christine Wenc about her new book Funny Because It’s True: How The Onion Created Modern American News Satire.

In 1988, a band of University of Wisconsin–Madison undergrads and dropouts began publishing a free weekly newspaper with no editorial stance other than “You Are Dumb.” Just wanting to make a few bucks, they wound up becoming the bedrock of modern satire over the course of twenty years, changing the way we consume both our comedy and our news. The Onion served as a hilarious and brutally perceptive satire of the absurdity and horrors of late twentieth-century American life and grew into a global phenomenon. Now, for the first time, the full history of the publication is told by one of its original staffers, author and historian Christine Wenc. Through dozens of interviews, Wenc charts The Onion’s rise, its position as one of the first online humor sites, and the way it influenced television programs like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. Funny Because It’s True reveals how a group of young misfits from flyover country unintentionally created a cultural phenomenon.

Christine Wenc was a member of The Onion’s original staff from 1988 to 1990 as a UW–Madison undergrad. She has played central roles in highly regarded public history projects for Harvard University Libraries, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the National Library of Medicine, and has received writing grants from the Awesome Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She is also trained in midwestern prairie ecosystem restoration and likes to spend time helping to revitalize one of the rarest, most diverse, most beautiful, and most ecologically beneficial landscapes on the planet. She grew up in rural Spring Green, Wisconsin.

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with Steven Duong on his debut poetry collection At the End of the World There is A Pond (Norton 2025).

"Tell all the truth but tell it slant." Taking Emily Dickinson's dictum as a guiding principle, poet Steven Duong delivers a collection startlingly clear, formally innovative, and consistently funny. At the End of the World There is a Pond is divided into four sections–The Jumpers, The Swimmers, The Sinkers, The Floaters--and throughout each Duong explores themes of addiction, mental health, climate change, diaspora, and popular culture.

from "Anatomy":

“there’s no / point in writing nature poems anymore, / not unless you drown the verses in smoke / & oil & organophosphates–the Anthropocene / demands a new syntax”

Steven Duong is a writer from San Diego. His poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Guernica, and the Yale Review, among other publications, and his short fiction is featured in Catapult, The Drift, and The Best American Short Stories 2024.The recipient of fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is currently a creative writing fellow in poetry at Emory University. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie chats with author Theresa Okokon about her debut memoir in essays, Who I Always Was.

When Theresa Okokon was nine, her father traveled to his hometown in Nigeria to attend his mother’s funeral…and never returned. His mysterious death shattered Theresa as her family’s world unraveled. Now a storyteller and television cohost, Okokon sets out to explore the ripple effects of that profound loss and the way heartache shapes our sense of self and of the world—for the rest of our lives.

Using her grief and her father’s death as a backdrop, Okokon delves deeply into intrinsic themes of Blackness, African spirituality, family, abandonment, belonging, and the seemingly endless, unrequited romantic pursuits of a Black woman who came of age as a Black girl in Wisconsin suburbs where she was—in many ways—always an anomaly.

Theresa Okokon is a Pushcart Prize-nominated essayist. A Wisconsinite living in New England, she is a writer, a storyteller, and the cohost of Stories from the Stage. In addition to writing and performing her own stories, Theresa also teaches storytelling and writing workshops and classes, coaches other tellers, hosts story slams, and frequently emcees events for nonprofits. She is an alum of both the Memoir Incubator and Essay Incubator programs at GrubStreet.

As 2024 draws to a close, David Ahrens reflects on his bountiful year of reading. He's joined by Chali Pittman, Andrew Thomas, and callers throughout the hour to share their recommendations.

New York Times bestseller James by Percival Everett is a clear favorite. It's a re-imagining of Huckleberry Finn from a distinctly different point of view. That's not the only retelling worth reading — Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver reimagines David Copperfield as well.

Also recommended by David: The Lucky Ones, a memoir by Madison's own Sara Chowdhary, recounts a personal experience of anti-Muslim violence in India (Chowdhary was just interviewed by Madison BookBeat). Meanwhile, caller Gil recommends Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century by Joya Chatterji, recently interviewed on World View.

David recommends a slate of books by Irish authors, including Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, and Long Island by Colm Tóibín. Plus, the beautifully-written Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe —which has now been turned into a TV series.

As for nonfiction, Chali recommends Sing Like Fish: How Sound Rules Life Under Water by Amorina Kingdon. In the political sphere, Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America by Josephine Riesman gives insight into the rise of Donald Trump. And Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein begs not to be confused with Naomi Wolf. David recommends Reds: The Tragedy of American Communism by Maurice Isserman and Andrew recommends At the Vanguard of Vinyl by Darren Miller

In more fiction, Gil recommends Northwoods by Daniel Mason, Jade recommends Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange, and David recommends Intermezzo by Sally Rooney.

Zara Chowdhary sits down with David Ahrens to talk about her exquisite memoir The Lucky Ones (Penguin, 2024).

In 2002, Zara Chowdhary was sixteen years old and living with her family in Ahmedabad, India, when a train fire claimed the lives of sixty Hindu passengers — and upended the lives of millions of Muslims.

Instead of taking her school exams that week, Zara is put under a three-month siege, with her family and thousands of others fearing for their lives as Hindu neighbors and friends transform overnight into bloodthirsty mobs, hunting and massacring their fellow citizens.

The chief minister of the state at the time, Narendra Modi, was later accused of fomenting the massacre. Now, he is India’s prime minister.

Chowdhary’s The Lucky Ones entwines lost histories across a subcontinent, as it prods open a family’s secrets, and gazes unflinchingly back at a country rushing to move past the biggest pogrom in its modern history. Somehow, it also reflects the joy of two young sisters living their lives by resisting the bleakness of their home life and the dangerous world outside.

It is a warning to the world by a young survivor, to democracies and to homes that won’t listen to their daughters. It is an ode to the rebellion of a young woman who insists she will belong to her land, family, and faith on her own terms.

About the guest:

Zara Chowdhary is a writer and lecturer at UW-Madison. She has an MFA in creative writing and environment from Iowa State University and a master’s in writing for performance from the University of Leeds. She has previously written for documentary television, advertising, and film. You can find more at zarachowdhary.com or follow her on Instagram @zarachowdhary.