On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie speaks with festival director Jane Rotunda and author Jessica Calarco about her book Holding It Together, ahead of Calarco’s appearance at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Thursday, October 17th.

Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net chronicles the devastating consequences of our DIY society and traces its root causes by drawing together historical, media, and policy analyses and five years of Calarco’s original research. With surveys of 4,000 parents and more than 400 hours of interviews across the socioeconomic, racial, and political spectrum, Calarco illustrates how women have been forced to bear the brunt of our broken system and why no one seems to care.

Jessica Calarco is a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. An expert on families, schools, and inequalities, and a mom of two, she is the author of multiple award-winning books and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, and Inside Higher Ed, as well as appeared on CNN, CNBC, NPR, and the BBC to discuss her research.

Learn more about Jessica’s book and what this year’s Book Festival has in store, and don’t forget to check out the full calendar of events here!

In this edition of Madison Book Beat, host Andrew Thomas speaks with E.M. Tran on her debut novel, Daughters of the New Year (2022, Hanover Square Press).

Daughters of the New Year is a novel about the three Trung sisters and their mother. It’s also a novel about Vietnam and its long history of colonization at the hands of the Chinese, Japanese, and French. We catch glimpses of civil war and America’s devastating war in Vietnam. It’s a novel about diaspora and remembering an increasingly distant and fading homeland. It’s also a novel about New Orleans and the US South and how immigrant communities navigate their everyday lives.

E. M. Tran writes fiction and creative nonfiction. Her stories, essays, and reviews can be found in such places as the Georgia Review, Literary Hub, Joyland Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Harvard Review Online, and more. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Mississippi and a PhD in English & Creative Writing from Ohio University. Born and raised in New Orleans, she returned and currently lives there with her family. She was born in the year of the Earth Snake. Currently, she is at work on her sophomore novel and also publishes a weekly newsletter about the show Gilmore Girls.

Photo courtesy of E.M. Tran

On this edition of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie speaks with author Jennifer Kabat about her memoir The Eighth Moon from Milkweed Editions, ahead of Kabat’s appearance at A Room of One’s Own on Tuesday, September 10th.

A rebellion, guns, and murder. When Jennifer Kabat moves to the Catskills, she has no idea it was the site of the Anti-Rent War, an early episode of American rural populism. As she forges friendships with her new neighbors and explores the countryside on logging roads and rutted lanes—finding meadows dotted with milkweed in bloom, saffron salamanders, a blood moon rising over Munsee, Oneida, and Mohawk land—she slowly learns of the 1840s uprising, when poor tenant farmers fought to redistribute their landlords’ vast estates. In the farmers’ socialist dreams, she discovers connections to her parents’ collectivist values, as well as to our current moment. Threaded with historical documents, the natural world, and the work of writers like Adrienne Rich and Elizabeth Hardwick, Kabat weaves a capacious memoir, where the past comes alive in the present.

Jennifer Kabat’s diptych The Eighth Moon and Nightshining are being published by Milkweed Editions in 2024 and 2025. She’s been awarded a Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for her criticism, and the books were supported by grants from the Silvers Foundation and NYFA. Her essays and criticism have appeared in 4 Columns, Frieze, Granta, The White Review, BOMB, Harper’s, The Believer, and McSweeney’s as well as Best American Essays. She lives in rural New York, serves in her local fire department and teaches in the Design Research MA program at SVA.