Celebrate Poetry!

Angie Trudell Vasquez is a 2nd and 3rd generation Mexican-American writer, editor, publisher, and the current poet laureate of Madison, Wisconsin (2020-2024). She holds an MFA in poetry from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Finishing Line Press published her collections, In Light, Always Light, in May 2019, and My People Redux, in January 2022. In 2021, she attended the Macondo Writers Workshop started by Sandra Cisneros, and became a fellow, also known as a Macondista. Her poems have appeared most recently in the Yellow Medecine Review, Sheltering with Poems, In Other Words, Hope is the Thing, and can be found online on Poem-A-Day, The Poetry Foundation's website, and the South Florida Poetry Journal among other places. In 2020 she published and co-edited a poetry anthology of Wisconsin poets, Through This Door, with then current poet laureate of Wisconsin, Margaret Rozga, through her press Art Night Books. In 2021 she was one of the recipients of a Creative Community Champion Award from Arts Wisconsin and the League of Wisconsin Municipalities. Today she is the Chair for the Campaign, and together with her husband will co-host WORT 89.90 FM's show Madison BookBeat once a month interviewing writers and their recent books in 2022. 

Sarah Busse (Sarah Sadie) is the author of Somewhere Piano and Do-It-Yourself Paper Airplanes, co-editor of Echolocations, Poets Map Madison and Local Ground(s)—Midwest Poetics, and founding co-editor of Cowfeather Press. She teaches at the Loft and the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival. She has an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, is currently enrolled in seminary, working toward a Masters of Divinity (MDiv) degree. One of Madison's two Poets Laureate (2012-2015), she is currently at work on a novel and a new collection of poems. She lives with her husband and two children.

Fabu Phillis Carter, is an artist professionally known as Poet Fabu in Madison, Wisconsin. She is a poet, columnist, storyteller, and teaching artist who writes to encourage, inspire and remind.  Selected as the first African American to become a Madison Poet Laureate (2008-2012), she continues to share the Black experience living in the South, the Midwest and in Africa. She served as poetry editor for Umoja Magazine and Madison Magazine. In 2019, she was poetry
editor for the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets annual edition. She currently serves as poetry editor for the Capitol City Hues and is a culture columnist for the Cap Times newspaper. Dr. Fabu Carter has a PhD from the University of Nairobi, the African Women’s Center. She was recently selected as a Commissioner for the Madison Arts Commission. Also in 2021, she is co- hosting Poetry for Life, a telephone poetry session every Thursday with Poet Gary Glazner. In
2022 that has become the in-person Poetry and Arts Café held on the first Tuesday of each month at the UW South Madison Partnership Office.

Fabu is the author of seven books of poetry, Poems, Dreams and Roses, In Our Own Tongue, Journey to Wisconsin:  African American Life in Haiku, Love Poems. Journey to Wisconsin…won an Outstanding Achievement in Poetry award by the Wisconsin Library Association and the last three are on Mary Lou Williams, jazz genius. They are Remember Me: Mary Lou Williams in Poetry, Sacred Mary Lou and a Mary Lou Williams Coloring book. She is a Pushcart nominee in poetry with poems in Rosebud, PMS, Callaloo and the Wisconsin Academy of Science, Arts and Letters. 

Dasha Kelly wields her words and wonder as tools for building inspiration and communities.  An accomplished writer, artist and social entrepreneur, Dasha travels the country as a keynote speaker, teaching artist, workshop facilitator and performance artist. She founded an arts program called Still Waters Collective, which utilizes creative writing and spoken word to shape confidence and leadership with youth across southeastern Wisconsin. Dasha has performed on HBO's Def Poetry Jam, in Opium Magazine's Literary Death Match, at the National Performers Network Conference and with Grammy-nominated Angie Stone, to name a few. Her writings have appeared in anthologies, textbooks, magazines and online. she has been featured as a freelance writer for Upscale, Black Enterprise and Milwaukee magazines.  Dasha's first novel, All Fall Down (Syntax 2003), earned her a position on Written Word Magazine's Top Ten List of Up-and-Coming Writers of the Midwest. A featured story from her collection, Hershey Eats Peanuts (Penmanship Books 2009), was a finalist in the Abbey Hill Literary Awards.  She recently released her second collection, Call It Forth, and her second novel, Almost Crimson, will be published by Curbside Splendor in spring 2015.

Dasha holds an MFA in Creative Writing and a masters' degree in Marketing Communications. She traveled to Botswana as an Arts Envoy for the U.S. Embassy. She served as the fourth writer-in-residence for the prestigious Pfister Hotel. Two years in a row, she was included on OnMilwaukee.com's list of "Top 100 Coolest Milwaukeeans," where she lives with her two daughters and a cat named Shkoobi.

Peggy Rozga is a civil rights activist, poet, playwright, professor emerita, and the author of Though I Haven't Been to Baghdad and 200 Nights and One Day. She served as managing editor of the chapbook anthology Turn Up the Volume: Poems about the States of Wisconsin.  Her essay "Community Inclusive: A Poetics to Move Us Forward" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is included in the Cow Feather Press anthology of prose works from Verse Wisconsin. She has been awarded residencies at the Sitka Center for Arts and Ecology and at the Ragdale Foundation and a fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society.  A sought-after poetry workshop facilitator and speaker on social justice issues, Peggy believes both activism and creative writing involve seeing, being aware beyond the obvious, and both involve the dogged determination to get something right.