Ainehi Edoro-Glines, founder and editor of Brittle Paper, will discuss her first book, Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think, at the Wisconsin Book Festival on Thursday, October 15, from 5:30 to 6:30 pm. The event takes place in the Lower-Level Program Room at Madison’s Central Library, where she will be in conversation with Raquel Kennon.

Forest Imaginaries takes on a familiar way of reading forests in fiction, as settings, symbols, or leftovers of a premodern past. Edoro-Glines argues that African novelists have instead treated the forest as a place to experiment with worldbuilding and to imagine new futures. In her reading, the forest is a laboratory for unmaking and remaking the world, where writers break apart familiar forms to test other ways of living, knowing, and holding power. It is also a living structure in which politics, history, myth, violence, technology, magic, and creativity all shape the fictional world.

The book spans indigenous African narratives and contemporary science fiction, tracing a lineage of forest worlds through Chinua Achebe’s evil forest, the cosmic forest of Wole Soyinka’s mythic imagination, Thomas Mofolo’s forest of imperial dreams, Amos Tutuola’s endless fractal forest, and Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic forest of new ecological futures. Along the way, it rethinks African literary history by showing how writers draw on Indigenous ideas about time, space, and storytelling to transform the novel’s aesthetic, political, and philosophical horizons.

Edoro-Glines is a Nigerian literary scholar who specializes in African literature and digital culture. She is a professor of global black studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and her writing has appeared in PMLA, ELH, The Guardian, and BBC World News.

The conversation is part of the festival’s 25th anniversary edition, which runs October 15–18 across venues in Madison and is free to attend. Two days later, on October 17, Nigerian poet Michael Imossan appears on the panel “Histories & Self-Discovery: Writing the African Diaspora.”

Full details and the complete schedule are available at wisconsinbookfestival.org.