Oloizia includes UW alumni and faculty on his podcast celebrating Wisconsin writers. Gopal Shah

Wisconsin is renowned for many homegrown industries — dairy, cranberries, brats, beer — but rarely as fertile ground for writers. Jeff Oloizia ’07 is trying to change that with his new podcast, Writing Forward, on which he sits down with authors, poets, journalists, and essayists whose work is rooted in the Badger state.

Each episode of Writing Forward opens with an invitation for the guest to share a piece of writing that, to them, “evokes Wisconsin in some memorable way.” Oloizia then facilitates a discussion about his guest’s work, their connection to Wisconsin, and what it means to be a writer in or of this place.

Featured UW writers have included UW–Whitewater literature professor and essayist Barrett Swanson MFA’10, Still True author and UW Division of the Arts writer Maggie Ginsberg ’97, Hemlock author and essayist Melissa Faliveno ’06, Under Story author Chloe Benjamin MFA’12 (see “The Astonishing Unknowable Universe”), UW creative writing professor and Milk Blood Heat author Dantiel Moniz MFA’18 (see “Writer on the Rise“), and UW creative writing professor and Finna poet Nate Marshall.

In drawing attention to the depth and nuance of Wisconsin’s literary tradition, Oloizia dispels the notion that aspiring writers must leave the state in order to have a promising career.

“I followed the path many writers imagine, toward the places where literary life is supposed to happen,” he says in the show’s introductory episode, “and yet when it came time to start a new chapter, I found myself drawn back to Wisconsin.”

Oloizia is an award-winning writer and editor whose work has been featured in Interview magazine, the Atlantic, the New York Times, and Madison Magazine. He worked in publishing and taught at the University of North Carolina–Wilmington before returning to Madison, where he is a writer and communications professional.

Pig latin infuses Sanders’s poignant storytelling with familial flair.

Zhalarina Sanders ’15, MS’18 knows how to make people listen.

“Ouyay ooday [you do] hear ’em singing?” she asks in her first line on her record Pearls 2. Sanders wastes no time in capturing her audience’s attention, leading with pig latin before launching into verses laden with biblical imagery, extended metaphors, and ancestor veneration.

“It’s heaven in your house and grandma down for Easter weekend,” she continues. “Eshay aysay, ‘Ifay eway ouldcay otnay [She say, ‘If we could not] speak, rolled chitlin in our jaw, and talked that pork into the breeze.’ ”

Sanders, who records under the mononym Zhalarina, is a skilled rapper and master storyteller from Tampa, Florida. Her first two albums, Again (2021) and Perfect (2022), are odes to her hometown, her parents, and mental health. Her most recent records, Pearls and Pearls 2, draw upon her family’s history — and their penchant for pig latin — to process generational adversity.

“[Speaking pig latin] has always been a family thing, and it predates me by at least 60 or 70 years,” Sanders told the Wisconsin Alumni Association. Her grandmother, the daughter of sharecroppers in Adel, Georgia, learned pig latin from a popular Froot Loops commercial and spoke it with friends while working in the fields. Learning the language became a rite of passage in Sanders’s family, and it functions in Pearls 2 as an homage to her strong-willed lineage.

“[It’s] a love letter to the people who created me,” she says.

Sanders is a graduate of First Wave, the UW’s hip-hop and urban arts scholarship program, where she specialized in writing and theater arts while earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in counseling psychology. In 2020, she released her music-video series The Light in partnership with PBS Wisconsin. Sanders portrays both herself and her mother in the series, which tells her queer coming-of-age story and won a regional Emmy award for outstanding achievement in arts and entertainment programming.

“I want to do something that shows my heart,” Sanders says. “If I’m made of anything that’s not skin and bones, it’s probably music.”

Thompson explores the evolution of friendship across space and time.

As undergrads at Hawthorne University, Lily, Ana, and Margot shared everything: clothes, mascara, secrets, lives. Now approaching 30 and strewn across the country, they and their lives couldn’t look more different, and secrets are easier to keep. In her debut novel, Girls Our Age, Phoebe Thompson MFA’24 explores the evolution of friendship across time and space.

To her friends, family, and fiancé, Lily has always been perfect. To Lily, perfection is a standard she must meet at all costs. With her wedding on the horizon and her schedule filling up with people to please, she struggles against old demons to maintain her fragile façade. Across the country, Ana tries desperately to feel at home in the dazzling apartment and private-school teaching job that mark the beginning of her and boyfriend Silas’s life together. Meanwhile, Margot has her sights set on a big promotion when her unchecked ambition leads to a fall from grace that coincides with a personal reckoning. As Lily’s wedding creates occasions for the three friends to reconvene, their disparate lives and the details they’ve kept from each other underscore friction where once there was ease.

According to Thompson, the idea for the novel was born of her own experiences in her 20s reconnecting with college friends at weddings. “We had known each other for so long prior to meeting our significant others, and suddenly we were all spread out and our dynamics were changing,” she says. “Now you all live in different places and have primary partners. Your friends are not your first priority anymore.”

Goodreads listed Girls Our Age among its most-anticipated literary fiction for 2026. Thompson is the founder of the marketing consultancy Extra Cred.

Rizkalla’s vignettes re-create the fragmented nature of childhood memory.

In the tumult of adolescence, a child’s home is often among their few constants. But for 12-year-old Sofia, “home” is as subject to change as her preteen friendships and pubescent feelings. In her debut novel, Hungered, Amanda Rizkalla MFA’23 tells a coming-of-age story set amid economic insecurity, fractured family, and the perpetual pursuit of stability.

For the first 12 years of her life, Sofia’s home was the house she shared with her parents and younger brother, Rafa. After her father’s behavior and betrayal drive her mother to take the children and flee, Sofia’s home is the backseat of their sedan, the library bathrooms where they wash up, the strip-mall parking lots in which they camp overnight, and the stretches of highway they travel in between. Through short, vignette-like chapters, readers witness the innocence of childhood, the familiar frustrations of adolescence, and the trials of homelessness compounded with the racism and classism faced by mother and daughter alike.

“I think the form of the vignette is really conducive to writing through the perspective of a 12-year-old because what makes it into each vignette matters just as much as what is left off the page,” Rizkalla says of the book’s unique format. “I wanted to enact the fractured and episodic nature of memory and attention when people are living through a moment of duress.”

Author Shilpi Somaya Gowda calls Hungered a “heartrending debut” that “never romanticizes hardship, yet finds genuine beauty in small acts of grace and the irrepressible hope of childhood.” Rizkalla was a Kemper-Knapp Fellow at the UW and the 2022–23 Hoffman-Halls Emerging Artist Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing.

Big Chief has been hailed as the “great Native American political novel.”

Mitch Caddo never intended to practice law for the Passage Rouge Nation. But in Jon Hickey ’04’s debut novel, Big Chief, Mitch is the top adviser to sitting Passage Rouge president Mack Beck at the dawn of a heated election, and not even an Ivy League law degree can prepare him for the legal, ethical, and personal battles that lie ahead.

Before they headed up the Passage Rouge tribal government, Mack and Mitch were childhood friends: Mack, the lifelong reservation kid raised in an affluent home by his adoptive parents; Mitch, the mixed-race, white-passing son of a single mother who raised him on and off the “rez” until they were embraced by the Becks. When Mack’s embattled presidency estranges him and Mitch from the Beck family, and as the impending election pushes Mack to abuses of power aimed at undercutting his opponent, Mitch must determine where his loyalties lie — and where, if anywhere, he truly belongs.

“Hickey’s depiction of the reality of reservation life eschews stereotypes and caricatures in favor of complex, multifaceted people,” writes Sarah McEachern for the Los Angeles Review of Books. “Big Chief understands the unique double consciousness of what it means to be Native American.”

Hickey based the fictional Passage Rouge Nation on real Anishinaabe tribes of Minnesota and Wisconsin, particularly the Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, of which he is a member. Big Chief was named a Most Anticipated Book of 2025 by the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times, and it was featured in the 2025 Wisconsin Book Festival.

“We’ve been waiting for the great Native American political novel, and here it is,” writes author David Heska Wanbli Weiden, calling Big Chief a “tremendous debut.”

Packer explores questions of love, devotion, and death through a couple whose long-shared path diverges as they approach the end.

As a devoted husband and caretaker, Eliot can’t imagine leaving Claire’s side during her final days with terminal cancer. But when those final days are upon them, Eliot’s absence is Claire’s only request. In Some Bright Nowhere, Ann Packer explores questions of love, devotion, and death through a couple whose long-shared path diverges as they approach the end.

In a conversation with the New York Times, Packer revealed that, after years of struggling with unfinished projects, she wrote the first draft of Some Bright Nowhere in just four months. She was inspired by an anecdote she’d heard nearly two decades earlier about a woman whose friends provided her end-of-life care when her husband wasn’t up to the task. The book’s title comes from a line in Christian Wiman’s poem “Night’s Thousand Shadows,” which also makes an appearance in Packer’s story.

“Some Bright Nowhere is an exquisite gem of a novel, shot through with luminous prose and profound insight into the human heart,” writes author Tania James. “Trust me: you’ve never read a novel about marriage — about sacrifice and selfishness and soul-mending hope — quite like this one.”

Packer was a 1988–89 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fiction Fellow in the third cohort of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Her 2002 debut novel, The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, takes place, in part, in Madison, and was adapted into a made-for-TV movie in 2005.

Some Bright Nowhere is Packer’s first novel in a decade and was chosen by Oprah’s Book Club in November 2025 as the program’s 120th read.

“This novel will mean something to everyone,” writes the Chicago Review of Books. “Packer beautifully weaves the things we have all gone through in some capacity, the generational patterns that make us who we are.”

Zanes: “He made this strange record right at a point where, career-wise, he could have gone from stardom to superstardom.”

For more than 50 years, Bruce Springsteen has been the people’s rock star. Hit songs like the hopeful “Promised Land” and the anthemic “Born in the U.S.A.” are homages to the working class from one of their own. But it’s Nebraska, the unfiltered, unapologetic, unyielding album recorded in a rented farmhouse on rudimentary equipment, on which Springsteen lays his humanity bare. In Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska, musician and historian Warren Zanes MA’95 breaks down the record and follows the many lives it’s lived since its quiet 1982 debut.

“Nebraska was a recording that was really close to me,” Zanes says. “I would return to it particularly when there was trouble in my life, but it was a recording that I still didn’t understand.”

The follow up to Springsteen’s first number one album (The River) and first top 10 single (“Hungry Heart”), Nebraska was an anomaly. Recorded on convenience-store cassettes, it could not be mixed or mastered, much less played on FM radio. The songs were gray and gritty, with characters who sat in electric chairs instead of Cadillacs and pleaded with state troopers instead of “Sherry darling.” It was released without promotion and to much puzzlement.

“He made this strange record right at a point where, career-wise, he could have gone from stardom to superstardom,” Zanes says. In Deliver Me from Nowhere, Zanes interviews individuals whose lives were touched by Nebraska — from fellow artists who credit it as an inspiration to Springsteen himself — to answer the questions that have haunted the album for more than four decades.

Zanes’s book was adapted into a major motion picture, Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere. It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August and was released in theaters in October.

Benevolent spirits bring magical realism to Fajardo’s story of tracing one’s roots.

Dolores “Dorrie” Moore has always heard voices. It started with the death of her grandmother when Dorrie was a child, and at 35, Dorrie’s accrued a Greek chorus of deceased relatives opining on her life like omniscient narrators. In Anika Fajardo ’97’s The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore, these benevolent spirits guide Dorrie on a journey of self-discovery that brings her closer to her roots — and to the women who raised her.

“Mothers and mother figures are powerful, and that’s where the idea for this novel came from,” Fajardo said at an event at Magers & Quinn Booksellers in Minneapolis. “[It was] born out of the memory of my own grandmother’s voice in my ear.”

It’s a deathbed promise to her mother — her last living relative — that sends Dorrie from Minnesota, the only home she’s ever known, to Colombia, her birthplace, and a land as foreign to her as this new life alone. But since she’s recently laid off, newly single, and without family ties, there are few reasons for Dorrie not to trace her ancestry across the globe — and plenty of familiar voices to accompany her along the way.

“Sometimes we need to tunnel into the past in order to find our way forward,” writes author Lindsay Starck. “Anika Fajardo’s The Many Mothers of Dolores Moore is a vibrant, expansive, warmhearted novel about the places that shape us, the loved ones who never leave us, and all the wrong turns that eventually bring us right back to where we belong.”

Fajardo is the author of Minnesota Book Award finalist Magical Realism for Non-Believers, a memoir of her own experience returning to her birthplace of Colombia and finding family. She’s also written the children’s books Meet Me Halfway and What If a Fish.

Butler’s novel was inspired by a conversation overheard in a Wisconsin bar.

Nickolas Butler ’02 was sitting at a bar in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, when he overheard the exchange — and witnessed the kiss — that inspired his most recent novel.

Butler may not have caught the names of the reunited couple at the bar, but in A Forty Year Kiss, they’re Charlie and Vivian, who married young and gave it four years before filing for divorce. Forty years later, Charlie is still battling old demons when he lands back in Wisconsin, intent on reconnecting with Vivian and righting the wrongs of their youth. Forty years is a lot of time to make up for — but how long is too long for true love, and what would you give up for it?

The romantic Forty Year Kiss is a thematic departure from Butler’s most recent work, 2021’s literary thriller Godspeed. But the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel Shotgun Lovesongs is no stranger to a love story, and the western-Wisconsin writer infuses as much local flavor into this novel as he does sincerity and care for his characters.

“I don’t need to do a lot of research to write a book about Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin,” he told the Chicago Review of Books. “It was going to be a book I could write passionately.”

According to reviewers, Butler’s confidence was not mis- placed: “Its Midwest is weathered and described with affection and restraint; its people are presented whole and in context, the seldom-seen brought into vivid focus, their yearnings and failings intact,” writes New York Times bestselling author Leif Enger. “A Forty Year Kiss has the courage to suggest it’s not too late — for romance, or transcendence, or just to be better.”

Fayne’s novel explores spirituality, sacrifice, and salvation.

Just before the introduction to his debut novel, The Devil Three Times, Rickey Fayne includes a Laurent family tree. To Fayne’s reader, this is a helpful tool for keeping track of the book’s characters across its timeline. To Fayne’s Devil, the family tree is a map to salvation.

The book opens with Yetunde, a young girl on a slave ship bound for the United States who strikes a bargain with the Devil in order to survive what lies ahead of her. For generations to come, the Devil continues to visit Yetunde’s descendants — the Laurent family — offering them his own version of redemption in their darkest moments in pursuit of his own reentry into heaven.

The Devil Three Times is deeply rooted in Fayne’s personal experience as the born-and-raised West Tennesseean draws on Black spiritual traditions and the oral histories of the Black diaspora.

“With a voice and rhythm that zip and twang like our best-loved Black folktales, this epic family saga unfurls with tender precision, illuminating the dark and light of our very human natures to profound effect,” writes Dantiel Moniz MFA’18, UW assistant professor of English and author of Milk Blood Heat.

“This is a page-turning, rollicking novel that is both an intimate family saga and an elegy for the American experience,” writes New York Times bestselling author Nathan Harris. “This is what literature is all about.”

Fayne is a faculty member in the UW’s Department of English.