This 2-part event starts at 3:00 p.m. on Tuesday, April 29 with a writing and art workshop. One artistic form can inspire another, creating profound connections, sometimes in fun and unexpected ways. In this spirit, Wisconsin’s new poet laureate, Brenda Cárdenas will lead a workshop that melds poetry and visual art. Join us to learn about various approaches poets take to ekphrasis, and then, using prompts to guide you, create a poem in conversation with a work of visual art that inspires, intrigues, puzzles, or moves you. REGISTER HERE
Later in the evening, from 6:30 – 8:00 p.m., Cárdenas will give a poetry reading of her original work and will be joined by those workshop participants willing to share their new poems. The community is invited to attend this public performance. Registration is not required to attend the performance.
Current Wisconsin Poet Laureate Brenda Cárdenas has authored Trace (Red Hen Press, 2023), winner of the 2023 Society of Midland Authors Award for Poetry and silver winner of Foreword Review’s Indie Poetry Prize; Boomerang (Bilingual Press); and three chapbooks. Her poems and essays have also appeared in many literary journals and anthologies, and she co-edited the anthologies Resist Much/Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance and Between the Heart and the Land: Latina Poets in the Midwest. Cárdenas is Professor Emerita of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and currently serves on the Board of Directors of Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee where she lives with her husband, the poet Roberto Harrison, and their dog Maya.