UPCOMING EVENTS

UPCOMING EVENTS


At Milwaukee Area Technical College, VIDA CROSS is the Committee Chairperson for Creative Writing in the Colleges’ English Department.  Author of the book Bronzeville at Night: 1949,  Vida Cross serves on the Board for the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commision: first as a liaison for the Wisconsin Center for the Book and now, as an at-large member. In 2019 and in  2018, Vida Cross was a Pushcart nominee.  She is a Cave Canem Fellow/Graduate who holds a MFA in Writing and a MFA in Filmmaking from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a MA in English from Iowa State University and a BA in both English-writing and History from Knox College. Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies including MilwaukeeNoir (Akashic Noir), The Creativity and Constraint Anthology, A Civil Rights Retrospective, Tabula Poetica, Transitions Magazine, and the Cave Canem Anthology XII: Poems 2008-2009.  Vida Cross’ work has also appeared in several journals and magazines: The Literary Review, Reed Magazine,  The Journal of Film and Video and more.

Vida Cross & Michael Walsh
Caxton Club
Alumni Room, Old Main
Saturday, October 5th, 2024, 4-5 p.m.

An independent scholar, creative writing instructor and writer, MICHAEL WALSH received his B.A. in Creative Writing from Knox College and his M.F.A. in Creative and Professional Writing from the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities. He’s the editor of Queer Nature, the first ecoqueer poetry anthology. His poetry books include The Dirt Riddles (University of Arkansas Press) and Creep Love (Autumn House Press) as well as two chapbooks, Adam Walking the Garden and Sleepwalks (Red Dragonfly Press). His awards include a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship in Poetry, a Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship, The Miller Williams Prize in Poetry and The Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. After residing in Minneapolis for more than two decades, Michael now lives in a valley among coulees and springs in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin, where his ecoqueer and literary teachings are taking shape. 


JANISSE RAY grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1 near Baxley, Ga. She is the author of six books, both fiction and nonfiction. She is the recipient of the American Book Award and other honors for her memoir, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. Most of her work deals with the human relationship to nature. She earned an MFA from the University of Montana and holds two honorary doctorates, one from LaGrange College in LaGrange, GA and one from Unity College in Unity, ME. In 2016 she was inducted into the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame and in 2019 won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Georgia Writers Association. She lives on an organic farm in Georgia.

Milk Route 2025

Fridays: January 17, January 31, February 14
Location: Bookfellow Room, Seymour Library
Starting at: 4:30 PM

Peter Rabinowitz
Caxton Club
Alumni Room, Old Main
Thursday 16 January, 4-5 p.m.

Photo by Chandra Lynch, Ankh Productions

Friday 7 March
Alumni Room, Old Main
Starting at: 4:00 PM

Donald Revell

Angela Jackson Brown
Caxton Club & Davenport Fiction Announcement
Alumni Room, Old Main
Friday 7 February, 4-5 p.m.

ANGELA JACKSON BROWN is an award-winning writer, poet and playwright who is an Associate Professor in the creative writing program at Indiana University in Bloomington. She also teaches in the graduate program at the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University in Louisville, KY. She is a graduate of Troy University, Auburn University and the Naslund-Mann Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. She has published her short fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry in journals like The Louisville Journal and the Appalachian Review. She is the author of Drinking From a Bitter Cup, House Repairs, When Stars Rain Down and The Light Always Breaks. Her novels have received starred reviews from the Library Journal and glowing reviews from Alabama Public Library, Buzzfeed, Parade Magazine, and Women’s Weekly, just to name a few. When Stars Rain Down was named a finalist for the 2021 David J. Langum, Sr. Prize in American Historical Fiction, longlisted for the Granum Foundation Award, and shortlisted for the 2022 Indiana Authors Award. In October of 2023, Angela’s novel, Homeward, a follow-up to When Stars Rain Down, was published by Harper Muse. In December of 2024, her next novel, Untethered, will be published by Harper Muse. 

MILK ROUTE is the Creative Writing major’s capstone reading series. An homage to Carl Sandburg, who at the age of thirteen left school to get a job driving a milk wagon so that he could assist in supporting his family, Milk Route honors the transitional period in which our senior writing majors may find themselves. While finishing their studies at Knox, they also are beginning their lives as adults, discovering new experiences in jobs, graduate programs and cities of residence. All the while, too, they are still making room to make their art. Students and faculty gather for these formal readings, which offer senior writing majors an opportunity to share from their own work. In conjunction with the capstone portfolio course, participation in Milk Route fulfills the College’s Oral Competency requirement for writing majors.


Carolyn C. and David M. Ellis '38 Distinguished Teaching Professor of Comparative Literature Emeritus, PETER RABINOWITZ is a narrative theorist with a strong interest in music. His interests range broadly, from Proust to hard-boiled fiction, from ragtime to opera, from Chekhov to the nearly forgotten E.D.E.N. Southworth. He is the author of Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and The Politics of Interpretation (1987); co-author (with Michael Smith) of Authorizing Readers: Resistance and Respect in the Teaching of Literature (1998); co-author (with James Phelan, David Herman, Brian Richardson and Robyn Warhol) of Narrative Theory: Core Concepts and Critical Debates (2012); and co-editor (with Phelan) of Understanding Narrative (1994) and A Companion to Narrative Theory (2005). Rabinowitz's academic essays have appeared in a wide variety of books and journals, including PMLA, Critical Inquiry, Black Music Research Journal and 19th-Century Music. Rabinowitz is also co-editor of the Ohio State University Press Series on Theory and Interpretation of Narrative. As a music critic, he writes extensively in non-academic venues as well. He is a contributing editor of Fanfare and was a regular contributor to International Record Review from its first issue to its last.



Janisse Ray
Caxton Club & Davenport Nonfiction Announcement
Alumni Room, Old Main
Friday 21 February, 4-5 p.m.

DONALD REVELL is the author of seventeen collections of poetry, most recently of Canandaigua and White Campion (both Alice James Books), as well as six volumes of translations from the French, including Apollinaire’s Alcools (Wesleyan), Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell, Laforgue’s Last Verses, and Verlaine’s Songs without Words (all Omnidawn). Winner of the PEN USA Translation Award and two-time winner of the PEN USA Award for Poetry, he has also won the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize.

Senior Symposium






SENIOR SYMPOSIUM gives Literature Majors the opportunity to synthesize the skills and information acquired as an English major. The course will have a different theme each year. Recent themes include “Adaptation,” “Irony,” “Noir,” “Homeless in the Waste Land,”  “On the Films of Alfred Hitchcock,” “The Literary Vampire,” “Animal Gothic,” “Visions and Revisions: Three Victorian Novels and Their (Post)modern Reworkings,” “Pulp,” “The Uncanny,” “Trauma and Visuality,” "Bodies on Display," “Hauntology,” "Whiteness in Literature," and “Bodies.” This year our theme is “Play.”

During the first part of the term, students will read and interpret texts much as they would for any upper-level English class. The second part of the term focuses on the Symposium—an opportunity for them to present their ideas to the entire department.  The exact format of the Symposium varies from year to year.  Students in the course not only present their work, but organize, publicize, and run Symposium. At the end of the term, students compose an article-length piece of literary criticism—an extension and revision of their Symposium presentation—which responds to current scholarship and presents an original argument. This year’s theme is tba.


Robin Metz Writer in Residence 
Caxton Club & Davenport Poetry Announcement
Location tba
Friday 2 May, 4-5 p.m.