This week in Milwaukee: Anna Clark at Marquette on the lead water crisis, archivist Laura Rose Wagner at UWM, plus MLK celebrations at MLK Library. Next week: Tim Johnston!

What's going on this week?

Monday, January 21, 9 am to 5 pm at the Milwaukee Public Library Martin Luther King Branch, 310 W Locust St

While we don't have special Martin Luther King Jr. Day programming, the nearby Martin Luther King Library has a full day of activities. Per the library, it's a "celebration filled with poetry, music, dance, crafts, games and community services. Programming for the celebration is funded by the Milwaukee Public Library Foundation." More information here.

Wednesday, January 23, 5:00 pm, at Weasler Auditorium, Marquette University, 1506 W Wisconsin Ave:
Anna Clark, author of The Poisoned City: Flint's Water and the American Urban Tragedy

Marquette Forum presents award-winning journalist Anna Clark, who has covered the Flint, Michigan water scandal from its beginnings, for a talk about her account of the crisis. Register for this event here.

This event is cosponsored by Marquette University College of Arts and Sciences, and the College of Engineering, the Center for the Advancement of the Humanities, Friends and Alumni of Marquette English, and the Office of Student Development.

When the people of Flint, Michigan, turned on their faucets in April 2014, the water pouring out was poisoned with lead and other toxins. In the first full-length account of this epic failure, Clark recounts the gripping story of Flint’s poisoned water, the people who caused it, and those who suffered from it. It is a chronicle of one town, but also a story of neglect of infrastructure and the erosion of democratic decision-making. Cities like Flint are set up to fail, and for the people who live and work in them, the consequences may be mortal.

Detroit-based Anna Clark is a journalist whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Columbia Journalism Review. She edited A Detroit Anthology, a Michigan Notable Book, and was a Fulbright fellow in Kenya and a Knight-Wallace journalism fellow at the University of Michigan. The Poisoned City was named a Notable Book of 2018 by The Washington Post.

In addition to her talk at 5 pm, there is an open-to-the-public question-and-answer program with Clark at Sensenbrenner Hall at 2 pm. More information here.

Friday, January 25, 2:30 pm, at American Geographic Society Library, Golda Meir Library, 2311 E Hartford Ave:
Laura Rose Wagner, author of Hold Tight, Don’t Let Go: A Novel of Haiti

The LACUSL speaker series presents a special afternoon event in two parts, featuring author Laura Rose Wagner, archivist for the Radio Haiti project at the David M. Rubenstein Library at Duke University. Cosponsored by UWM Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the department of French, Italian, and Comparative Literature, Digital Humanities Lab, UWM Libraries, Master of Arts in Language, Literature, and Translation, and Boswell Book Company.

Part one of this event, at 2:30 pm, is titled “Bringing Memory Home: The Digital Repatriation of the Archive of Radio Haïti-Inter" and focuses on a discussion about Radio Haiti, the archive and digitization project, and the challenges of keeping memory alive. From the early 1970s until 2003, Haiti's first independent radio station broadcast investigative reporting and critical analysis in Haitian Creole. Since 2014, the Rubenstein Library at Duke University, where Wagner is an archivist, has been digitizing the audio archive of Radio Haiti.

Part two of this event, at 3:45 pm, features conversation and readings with Laura Rose Wagner from Hold Tight, Don't Let Go, her young adult novel about a girl's journey out of the rubble of the 2010 earthquake in Port-au-Prince.

And don't forget about Monday, January 28, 7:00 pm, at Boswell:
Tim Johnston, author of The Current

Author of the bestselling novel Descent comes to Boswell with The Current, a tour de force literary thriller about the indelible impact of a crime on the lives of innocent people in small Minnesota town. This book goes on sales on Tuesday, January 22 (tomorrow).

In the dead of winter, outside a small Minnesota town, state troopers pull two young women and their car from the icy Black Root River. One is found downriver, drowned, while the other is found at the scene, half frozen but alive. What happened was no accident, and news of the crime awakens the community’s memories of another young woman who lost her life in the same river ten years earlier, whose killer may still live among them.

A starred recommendation from Kirkus Reviews calls The Current, “deceptively thick yet brutally delicate as winter ice itself… An apt title that functions as a beautiful metaphor for all the secrets and emotions roiling beneath the surface of every human life.” And just in from Elfrieda Abba at the Star Tribune: "Pick up Tim Johnston’s suspenseful novel The Current and you risk finding yourself glued to your chair, eyes to the pages, no thought of attending to daily obligations."

Our Mystery Book Club will be meeting at a special time of 6 pm, where they will discuss Johnston's previous novel Descent. If you'd like to join them, we just request that you have already read Descent. 

Tim Johnston is author of Descent, Irish Girl, winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize, and the YA novel Never So Green. Tim’s stories have appeared in New England Review, The Iowa Review, and Narrative Magazine, and he’s won the O. Henry Prize. He holds degrees from the University of Iowa and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.