Too Good To Miss Poetry Reading: Extraordinary Poets With Wisconsin Ties
Join the Wisconsin Book Festival for an evening of moving poetry by extraordinary poets with Wisconsin Ties: Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Alison Thumel, and J.L. Conrad.
Hoffman's Exploding Head is a memoir in prose poems about the author’s lifelong journey with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). But the diagnosis is not named in the poems themselves; instead, the poet plunges readers directly into the vivid, visceral experience of obsession and compulsion, emphasizing struggles that some readers may not immediately recognize as symptoms of OCD (car accidents, knives, a terrifying angel figure, counting and drawing patterns on windows, etc.), but for those with the disorder, or those with loved ones living with OCD, they will feel all too familiar.
In the debut collection Architect, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths.
With their time machines, piñatas, medications, zebras, unsettlement, and imagined lives, these poems in Conrad's The World in Which explore some of the deep strangeness—and beauty provoked by the appearance of the incongruous—that Conrad perceives in the world(s) around and beyond us.
Hosted by Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing Program Coordinator Sean Bishop.
Cynthia Marie Hoffman
Cynthia Marie Hoffman is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Exploding Head, as well as Call Me When You Want to Talk about the Tombstones, Paper Doll Fetus, and Sightseer, all from Persea Books. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Wisconsin Arts Board. Essays in TIME, The Sun, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. Poems in Electric Literature, The Believer, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere. Cynthia lives in Madison, WI.
Alison Thumel
Alison Thumel’s poems have appeared in Poetry, the Adroit Journal, New England Review, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she completed her MFA. Her first poetry collection, Architect, won the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize.
J.L. Conrad
J.L. Conrad is the author of the full-length poetry collections A World in Which (Terrapin Books) and A Cartography of Birds (Louisiana State University Press), as well as the chapbooks Recovery, winner of the 2022 Robert Phillips Chapbook Prize (Texas Review Press), and Not If But When (Salt Hill). Her poems have appeared in Pleiades, Sugar House Review, Jellyfish, Beloit Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. Her chapbook This Natal House is forthcoming from Harbor Editions in 2025. Conrad earned an MFA in creative writing from American University and a PhD in English from UW–Madison. She currently lives in Madison.