In her book Suddenly Diverse: How School Districts Manage Race and Inequality, which was published in 2020, Erica Turner offers a look at two school districts in Wisconsin who are responding to rapidly changing demographics at their schools. Though each district is located in a community with differing values (working class and conservative verses affluent and liberal), Erica finds that the policies districts adopted did not have the positive impact that they intended. She joins host Nate Carlin to discuss the book. the racism she witnesses in her research, and the complex issues facing public schools.

Erica will be in presenting Suddenly Diverse with the Wisconsin Book Festival on Saturday, October 21st at 10:30am at Central Library. 

Erica O. Turner is an associate professor in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and an affiliate in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis.

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On today’s show, guest host and criminal defense lawyer Jessa Nicholson Goetz invites her trial partner Aaron Nelson to discuss the recent erosion of public trust in the justice system. Aaron tells us that in his experience, “it seems that there is a large section of the public that perhaps still trusts the criminal justice system, except for how it applies to them.” Together they break down what a case looks like and how the system is and isn’t working.

Jessa and Aaron make up two-thirds of the Wisconsin Elite Defense Group.

Atty. Jessa Nicholson Goetz is the founding partner of Nicholson Goetz & Otis, S.C., and is widely regarded as one of the most skilled sensitive crimes defense attorneys in the State of Wisconsin. While Nicholson handles all types of state criminal charges, her focus has been on defending individuals accused of what can be the most controversial and serious crimes in our justice system.

Atty. Aaron Nelson is the Principal and Founder of Nelson Defense Group in Hudson, Wisconsin, Attorney Nelson has dedicated his career to defending humans against the ever-increasing and encroaching power of the government. He has the esteemed distinction of holding the most Hanson Awards ever given by the Wisconsin Association of Criminal Defense Attorneys.

Photo by Tingey Injury Law Firm on Unsplash

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This Saturday and Sunday Arts + Literature Laboratory (ALL) in Madison is hosting the fourth annual Midwest Video Poetry Festival. ALL is collaborating with Woodland Pattern to also bring the festival to Milwaukee. We kick off today’s show with a two artists participating in Night 1: Poet Dana Maya and video artist Aaron Granat.  

Then we talk with ALL’s Managing Director Genia Daniels about what to expect at the video poetry festival.  Midwest Video Poetry Festival will kick-off with the Night 1 screening on Saturday, October 14th at 7pm. Night 2 will be on Sunday at the same time.

The Racist Bone by Cornelius Eady was played during this program with permission. That video poem will be featured on Night 1. We also played some of Aaron Granat’s work, which can been seen here. 

 

Dana Maya is a poet, essayist, editor, and teacher. She was born and lives in the Mexican diaspora. She descends from a line of single Mexican mothers and has a background in Chicanx, Queer, & Race Studies. She has taught literature and writing at UT Austin and Madison College, as well as at public schools and community organizations. Dana collaborates with artists on multimedia projects, often for social change, facilitates ekphrastic poetry happenings, & is a member of the Spontaneous Writing Booth Collective. Her poems and essays have garnered awards & appear in anthologies, journals, buses, stages, museums, memorial sites, & other public spaces. 

Aaron Granat is a video artist, cinematographer, editor, and teacher of media production. Spanning live, multi-media performance, documentary, screen dance, experimental, and dramatic narrative, his work has been exhibited in museums, film festivals across the world, music venues large and small, planetariums, and billboards in city centers. Unbound by traditional forms and structures, Aaron seeks the interdisciplinary merging of practices, aestheticizing the creative process and the phenomena of reality in thought-provoking ways.

 

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In May, Ian Brown became the new City of Madison Forester. Which led us to ask, what does it mean to be an urban forester? Well in Madison, the Forestry section of the Streets Division provides tree planting, pruning, and maintenance for nearly 100,000 trees. Ian joins A Public Affair host Douglas Haynes to talk about street trees, Emerald Ash Borer, and what makes Madison a unique community for trees.

Ian Brown comes to Madison Streets Division’s Urban Forestry section after 17 years of public urban forestry experience. Most recently he served as as a Forestry District Manager for the City of Milwaukee for 7 years.

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According to Brown University’s Watson Institute Cost of War project, between September 11th, 2001 and September 2021 more than 430 thousand civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen have died in the US’s post 9/11 wars.  In his latest book, Norman Solomon argues that 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan shifted America’s foreign policy. He says we are now at a perpetual state of war of which the U.S. public is largely unaware.

Norman joins Esty Dinur to discuss War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine. They discuss the civilian toll of war, the role of the media in hiding the war, and the attitude surrounding war.

Norman Solomon is an American journalist, media critic, author and activist. His previous books include the widely praised War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death. A full-length documentary film, narrated by Sean Penn, was based on the book.

Solomon is the founder of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is IPA’s executive director and the coordinator of its ExposeFacts program. He is co-founder and national director of the online organization RootsAction.org, which now has upwards of 1.3 million online supporters.

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In José Olivarez’s latest book Promises of Gold, asks what does it mean to be men who are not afraid of love, be it romantic or platonic. The book, which was longlisted for the 2023 Nation Book Award, offers a peak into the José’s experience as the son of Mexican immigrants. He joins A Public Affair to read some  of him poems and share the process of writing a book of poetry during the height of the pandemic.

José will be reading in Madison at Central on Saturday, October 21st at 1:30pm. 

José Olivarez’s debut book of poems, Citizen Illegal, was a finalist for the PEN/ Jean Stein Award and a winner of the 2018 Chicago Review of Books Poetry Prize. It was named a top book of 2018 by The Adroit Journal, NPR, and the New York Public Library. Along with Felicia Chavez and Willie Perdomo, he co-edited the poetry anthology, The BreakBeat Poets Vol. 4: LatiNEXT. He is the co-host of the poetry podcast, The Poetry Gods.

 

 

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The Wisconsin Book Festival brings authors to Madison all year long, but their big event happens in October every years. The four-day long Fall Celebration will bring more than 50 to town from October 19th through October 22nd. On today’s A Public Affair, host Nate Carlin talks with 4 poets who will be in Madison for the celebration!

First, we talk to Taylor Byas about her book I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. She will reading on October 20th at 3pm at Central Library. Second, we talk with Leslie Sainz, the author of Have You Been Long Enough At Table. Leslie is followed by Alisha Dietzman who wrote Sweet Movie. They will be doing a joint reading at October 20th at 9 p.m. at Central Library. Lastly, Erin Marie Lynch joins us to talk about her book Removal Acts. She will be at Arts + Literature Laboratory on October 21st at 6 p.m.

Taylor Byas is the author of I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times. She is a Black Chicago native currently living in Cincinnati, Ohio. She is the 1st place winner of the 2020 Poetry Super Highway, the 2020 Frontier Poetry Award for New Poets Contests, and the 2021 Adrienne Rich Poetry Prize. She is the author of the chapbooks Bloodwarm and Shutter.

Leslie Sainz is the author of the debut poetry collection Have You Been Long Enough at Table. The daughter of Cuban exiles, she is the recipient of a 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, the Yale Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, Narrative, and elsewhere. Leslie is the managing editor of the New England Review.

Alisha Dietzman is the author of Sweet Movie. Her chapbook Slow Motion Something For No Reason was the 2021 editors’ choice selection for the Tomaž Šalamun Prize. Her poetry has appeared in  Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

Erin Marie Lynch is the author of Removal Acts. Her writing appears in Poetry, New England Review, DIAGRAM, Narrative, Best New Poets, and other publications. She has received awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, Indigenous Nations Poets, and the Hugo House. Currently, she is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California, as well as an associate editor at Air/Light magazine.

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Dr. Brian Williams says “we do not just have a gun violence problem in the United States. We have many gun violence problems.” As a trauma surgeon, he’s seen those problems up close: suicides, intimate partner violence, homicides, unintentional shootings, and mass shootings. He asked himself, “How do I stop the flow of gun violence victims to the hospital? How do I work to eliminate healthcare injustice so that people can be healthy and thrive in their communities? I could not do that in the hospital. By the time they get there. It’s too late.” Which is why he decided to run to represent Texas in Congress.

Dr. Brian Williams joins Ali Muldrow on A Public Affair to talk about his new book The Bodies Keep Coming: Dispatches from a Black Trauma Surgeon on Racism, Violence, and How We Heal.

Dr. Brian H. Williams is an Air Force Academy graduate, a Harvard-trained surgeon, a former congressional health policy advisor, and a nationally recognized leader at the intersection of public policy and structural racism, gun violence, and health equity. He has treated gun violence victims for more than two decades. Williams has served as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Fellow at the National Academy of Medicine and as a professor of trauma and acute care surgery at the University of Chicago School of Medicine. He is the host of the podcast, Race, Violence & Medicine.

Image by Paul Brennan from Pixabay

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According to the Prison Policy Initiative, 35,000 people are currently incarcerated in Wisconsin. The new season of Human Powered podcast asks “how can the humanities positively impact the people who are impacted by the justice system?” From poetry worships to history classes, from news papers to story telling, the podcast gives listeners an inside look on power of the humanities.

Co-host Adam Carr and Creative Director Jessica Becker join A Public Affair to talk about the podcast and share some clips from the first three episodes.

You can listen wherever you get podcasts, or for those who aren’t regular podcast listeners, you can access the show on the web. 

Human Powered is created by Wisconsin Humanities and Field Noise Soundworks. It is hosted by Adam Carr and Dasha Kelly Hamilton. It’s produced by Craig Eley, Jen Rubin, and Jade Iseri-Ramos. Voices heard in the clips played today include: Dasha Kelly Hamilton, Dan Vaughn, Kevin Mullen, Mark Español, Robert Taliaferro, and Shannon Ross.

Adam Carr is a storyteller, artist, filmmaker, radio producer, urban explorer, community organizer and historian. He is also a lifelong Milwaukeean and works at the intersection of community and communication. He helped organize events to acknowledge the 50th anniversary of the open housing marches in Milwaukee and is the author of “Explore MKE: Your Neighborhood, Our City,” a children’s book made in collaboration with third graders. He works for the Milwaukee Parks Foundation as the Director of Strategic Partnerships.

Jessica Becker works as the Director of Digital Communications for Wisconsin Humanities. She has spent her career with Wisconsin Humanities creating and managing statewide programs that celebrate the state’s people and stories. She holds a Masters in Museum Education and lives in Madison with her husband and daughters.

Soundcloud image: Adam and Dasha in the studio recording Human Powered

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On today’s show, long time WORT supporter and former operations coordinator Norman Stockwell drops in to talk about recent pieces featured in The Progressive Magazine. Norm is the publisher of the magazine, and WORT donors can receive a 12 month subscription by donating $45 or more.

Image by Igor Ovsyannykov from Pixabay

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