The Wisconsin Book Festival returns to Madison for its 25th anniversary edition, running October 15–18 across venues including Central Library, the Discovery Building, and the Overture Center. Hosted by the Madison Public Library and the Madison Public Library Foundation, the festival remains free to attend, both in person and online, with a lineup headlined by Emily St. John Mandel, John Green, and music critic Steven Hyden. Among the wider program, which draws heavily from UW–Madison’s own faculty, alumni, and current students, are two sessions built around African literature: Nigerian literary scholar Ainehi Edoro-Glines on her debut Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think, and Nigerian poet Michael Imossan on his Sillerman Prize–winning collection All That Refuses to Die.

Edoro-Glines appears October 15 at 5:30pm in Central Library’s Lower-Level Program Room, in conversation with Raquel Kennon, to discuss Forest Imaginaries (Columbia University Press, January 2026), her first book. The study argues against reading the forest in African fiction as mere setting or symbol, proposing instead that writers have used it as a laboratory for unmaking and remaking the world — breaking apart familiar literary forms to test alternate structures of knowledge, politics, and power. Edoro-Glines traces that lineage across Chinua Achebe’s evil forest, the cosmic forest of Wọlé Ṣóyíinká’s mythic imagination, Thomas Mofolo’s forest of imperial dreams, Amos Tutuola’s endless fractal forest, and Nnedi Okorafor’s aquatic forest of ecological futures, reading indigenous African ideas about time, space, and storytelling as the engine behind the novel’s aesthetic and philosophical reinvention. Edoro-Glines is the Mellon-Morgridge Assistant Professor of English and African Cultural Studies at UW–Madison and the founder and editor of Brittle Paper; her writing has appeared in PMLA, ELH, The Guardian, and BBC World News.

Imossan appears two days later, on October 17 from 3 to 4pm in the same Central Library room, on a panel titled “Histories & Self-Discovery: Writing the African Diaspora,” alongside poet Kiki Petrosino and moderator Maryhilda Obasiota Ibe, a fellow Nigerian poet and current UW-Madison MFA candidate. The panel pairs Petrosino’s Perfect Italian, the closing volume in her trilogy on heritage and identity, with Imossan’s All That Refuses to Die (University of Nebraska Press, March 2026), winner of the 2024 Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poetry. Imossan’s collection moves through museums and sites of enslavement, asking where Africa was and where it is now: it sits with the Biafran War’s three million dead and its lingering hold on Nigeria, with Congo’s exploitation surviving past King Leopold, and with African bodies still being found in the Sahara and the Atlantic, reading the present through a historical lens that keeps finding the past insufficiently past. Imossan, a current UW–Madison Creative Writing MFA student and two-time PEN International Writers’ Grant recipient, is also the author of the chapbook The Smell of Absence. Free copies of both Perfect Italian and All That Refuses to Die will be distributed to attendees at the session.

Both appearances are part of a broader pattern this year: UW–Madison’s Creative Writing program and wider faculty turn up across at least eight new 2026 titles on the festival’s program, from poetry collections to a memoir and a book on xenotransplantation, underscoring the program’s continued reach, from faculty offices to its small, fully funded MFA cohort.

Full festival details, the complete event schedule, and venue information are available at wisconsinbookfestival.org.