MATC Matters

Led by an initiative from the English Department and the Creative Writing Committee, the Arts and Sciences Learning Center has agreed to be an institutional sponsor for this year’s Wisconsin Book Festival. The festival platform is a wonderful opportunity to reach out to a broad community of writers and readers, exposing them to the wealth of Creative Writing and Literature courses we offer at MATC.

As sponsors, we will be hosting an evening headline event at the DTEC DOWNTOWN (yeay!) campus for the esteemed novelists, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie from Nigeria and Zakes Mda from South Africa. Daniel Kunene, a respected South African scholar at UW Madison, will also speak. The event will take place on Friday, October 12, at 5 p.m. Following will be a reception for the authors in the second floor foyer. For the reception, we are actively seeking involvement from the local African community, as well as volunteers from the English Department.

Mda and Adichie are both award‑winning fiction writers, penning novels that eloquently and poignantly address the struggles of post‑colonial Africa as they struggle to create a new cultural/political reality while coming to terms with the past. Not only do these authors offer us an opportunity to reach beyond our borders, but they also provide a point of inspiration to MATC’s wealth of immigrant and ethnic students.

The festival runs from October 10‑14, so please consider engaging your classes/students in the readings. More info on the authors and events can be found on the Wisconsin Book Festival Website. The Truax library now has copies of Mda’s and Adichie’s books. Closer to event time, we will be calling for volunteers to help set‑up the hall, as well as staff information tables.

For more information, please contact Guy Thorvaldsen.