Harris: Julia Burke, De Robertis: Irene Young
From left: Malcolm Harris, Katherine Stewart and Caro De Robertis.
From left: Malcolm Harris, Katherine Stewart and Caro De Robertis.
In a year of federal cuts to arts and humanities funding, the Wisconsin Book Festival is in a fortunate position. The fest was started by the Wisconsin Humanities Council in 2001 but the Madison Public Library and the Madison Public Library Foundation took over administration of the festival in 2013.
That’s good because Wisconsin Humanities is one of the agencies that lost its federal funding in April and is currently struggling to find a new path forward with a combination of private and local funding. Other book fests under the auspices of their state humanities councils, like the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, have had to scramble for new funding. That fest will go on in 2025 thanks to a new partnership with Vanderbilt University.
Conor Moran, director of the Wisconsin Book Festival from 2013-2022 and now the executive director of the Madison Public Library Foundation, says that even before these days of arts funding cuts he was “always very conscious of where the funding was going to come from, and how we're going to do the things that we wanted.”
Moran notes the foundation has “a very diverse funding stream and we don't rely on any one thing.”
He hasn’t seen a decline in private financial support as demand for philanthropic giving increases. “Madisonians have been very generous. They're always very generous, but particularly over the past year or so. I haven't heard from a donor who has had to [choose].”
Moran thinks the return on the investment in the community is important. The festival brings out-of-towners into Madison and people in general into the library, some of whom engage with topical issues during sessions and who spend money downtown, including at local bookstores. Moran says that the 100 or so events the book festival puts on (more than half of which are part of the upcoming Fall Celebration, Oct. 23-26) generates about $660,000 in economic impact “outside of what we spend.”
And nothing succeeds like success. “One of the reasons that [festival director Jane Rotonda) is able to get the authors that she gets is because people show up, people support their library, they support the authors, they buy books, they talk about it to their friends, they bring somebody,” says Moran. “These are special things.”
It’s proven in the slate of authors that Rotonda unveiled at the festival’s launch party on Sept. 11. “Buzzy” was a word Rotonda used several times to describe the lineup, and she’s not wrong.
The festival is not shying away from important and potentially divisive topics. Katherine Stewart will discuss her Money, Lies and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy on Oct. 23; Malcolm Harris will discuss his What’s Left: Three Paths Through Planetary Crisis on Oct. 25; and Caro De Robertis will discuss So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color also on Oct. 25.
Other buzzworthy authors include novelists Laila Lalami (The Dream Hotel), Angela Flournoy (The Wilderness), and Lily King (Heart the Lover), memoirists Geoff Dyer (Homework) and Andre Aciman (Roman Year), work geek Stefan Fatsis (Unabridged), and offbeat nonfiction writer Mary Roach (Replaceable You).
“Block your calendars,” Rotonda advised. Good advice.
Other coverage:
