The 1619 Project’s lyrical picture book in verse chronicles the consequences of slavery and the history of Black resistance in the United States, thoughtfully rendered by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones and Newbery honor-winning author Renée Watson.


A young student receives a family tree assignment in school, but she can only trace back three generations. Grandma gathers the whole family, and the student learns that 400 years ago, in 1619, their ancestors were stolen and brought to America by white slave traders.
But before that, they had a home, a land, a language. She learns how the people said to be born on the water survived.

 
And the people planted dreams and hope,
willed themselves to keep
living, living.
 
And the people learned new words
for love
for friend
for family

for joy
for grow
for home.
 
With powerful verse and striking illustrations by Nikkolas Smith, Born on the Water provides a pathway for readers of all ages to reflect on the origins of American identity.

I am facilitating an end of the year/beginning of the next year reflective journaling class so we can take a moment to sit with what we learned last year, what we are ready to let go of, and what we are hoping for in 2026. This is a free class and you can just show up if you want to join us!

From the award-winning author of Herc, an enrapturing feminist tale that brilliantly reimagines the story of Aphrodite and how she transformed herself from a lowly outsider to the darling goddess of love, for readers of Madeline Miller and Jennifer Saint.

Aphrodite saw the gods on Mount Olympus and decided she wanted a piece of what they had. Only problem is, she’s not a goddess, just a lowly being who's supposed to remain in a distant cave, keeping the threads of Fate woven neatly. But Aphrodite’s never let anyone tell her what to do…

Weaving herself a web of lies and careful deceptions, she convinces everyone she’s the goddess of love and that her rightful place is among the Olympians, who lord it over everyone else at the top of the world, but under the stifling rule of Zeus. For the first time, she has the best of everything, as well as friends, peers, even loved ones. Only, being a goddess isn’t quite like she thought. Those who oppose Zeus tend to disappear, or worse. And one day, Aphrodite decides she’s had enough…death of her…

Christina Wilke-Burbach, PhD, is a Spiritual/Transpersonal Psychologist, Anthropologist, Death Witch, Death Doula, Deathwalker, Psychopomp, Psychic, Poisoner, Occultist, Cemeterian, and works full-time in the Deathcare Industry. She is a High Priestess with The New York City Wiccan Family Temple, an ordained minister, and a Reiki Master Teacher.

Her specialty is working with the dead. She works exclusively with chthonic and Underworld Deities. Her ministry and craft focus on death and dying, guiding souls to the otherworld, facilitating communication and messages between the dead and the living as a medium, leading seances, paranormal investigations and clearings, facilitating death rites and funerals, helping people with their death wishes and death plans, placing the dead in their final resting space, writing obituaries, funeral flower arrangements and designing gardens for the dead.

I’m Sarah Torfin, a transplant from the heart of central Appalachia. Although my profession is geology, my heart is deeply rooted in music. I was classically trained on violin using the Suzuki Teaching Method, where I was taught to trust my ear for music before I learned how to ever read a page of sheet music. I have always found peace in being able to convey the emotions of a piece of music on my violin (or fiddle), and occasionally add a little Appalachian twang when it feels as though a piece needs it! Through my music, I hope to bring everyone a sliver of peace that I always had growing up in the Shenandoah and New River Valleys.

https://torfinviolin.godaddysites.com

G. Anthony is a healing writer, author of Nobody’s Words, and poet whose work opens space for truth and transformation. As a healing guide, he leads workshops, books, and retreats that explore the intersection of creativity and emotion, where writing becomes a bridge between our inner wounds and wholeness.

Writers Circle at WordHaven BookHouse offers local writers a comfortable place to share and develop their work, receive feedback and guidance, encourage and support other writers, and discuss all aspects of the writing process. Open to all forms of writing and all experience levels. Free to attend.

Writers Circle will meet at WordHaven the first Tuesday of each month, from 6-8pm. The circle will be led by published author and award-winning book designer, Erika Block, owner of Gray House Publishing.

Stonewall Honor Book * A Time Magazine Best YA Book of All Time

"A book for warriors, divas, artists, queens, individuals, activists, trend setters, and anyone searching for the courage to be themselves.”—Mackenzi Lee, New York Times bestselling author of The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue

It’s 1989 in New York City, and for three teens, the world is changing.

Reza is an Iranian boy who has just moved to the city with his mother to live with his stepfather and stepbrother. He’s terrified that someone will guess the truth he can barely acknowledge about himself. Reza knows he’s gay, but all he knows of gay life are the media’s images of men dying of AIDS.

Judy is an aspiring fashion designer who worships her uncle Stephen, a gay man with AIDS who devotes his time to activism as a member of ACT UP. Judy has never imagined finding romance...until she falls for Reza and they start dating.

Art is Judy’s best friend, their school’s only out and proud teen. He’ll never be who his conservative parents want him to be, so he rebels by documenting the AIDS crisis through his photographs.

As Reza and Art grow closer, Reza struggles to find a way out of his deception that won’t break Judy’s heart—and destroy the most meaningful friendship he’s ever known.

This is a bighearted, sprawling epic about friendship and love and the revolutionary act of living life to the fullest in the face of impossible odds.

A starry-eyed Midwestern DJ spins on-air personas that unravel her identity and moral fabric in the male-dominated world of 1980s radio.

All Eva LaVette wants is a great career and a perfect marriage. Can she have both?
​A '70s girl in an '80s world, Eva finds her life upended on a frigid Wisconsin night when she discovers a passion for radio. It’s a feeling that ignites her soul, but conflicts with her husband’s traditional values. Fearless and a bit naive, Eva adopts on-air facades that both mask and reveal her deepest desires. As she navigates the trials of format changes, overnight shifts, sexist vibes, and the fear of being fired, she grapples with the consequences of her choices. Radio plays both a true love and a bad boyfriend; Eva is seduced time and again.

RADIO STARR is a captivating tale of identity, ambition and self-discovery framed by the music of the times just as radio is making a transformative shift from analogue to digital. For fans of Daisy Jones & The Six, The People We Keep, The Griffin Sisters Greatest Hits, Firefly Lane, and WKRP in Cincinnati, this novel is a backstage pass to the power of tuning in to one’s own frequency.

Lisa Lehmann is a former radio announcer and musician who now channels her creative energy into writing and photography. She studied literary writing at UW-Madison. Her first book, LAKE MICHIGAN: The Wisconsin Shore, showcases her nature photography and was a National Indy Excellence Award Finalist. Before hanging up her headphones, she worked on the air at ten radio stations, doing everything from reporting the news to copywriting, audience research, and stints as a morning show sidekick. She would give anything to relive her days in small-town radio.

Lisa lives in beautiful Wisconsin with her husband, two tiny dogs and a giant cat. She spends her time reading, cooking, native plant gardening and enjoying the outdoors. RADIO STARR is her first novel. 

A retired serial killer’s quiet life is upended by an unexpected visitor. To protect her secret, there’s only one option left—what’s another murder? From bestselling author Samantha Downing.

Lottie Jones thought her crimes were behind her.

Decades earlier, she changed her identity and tucked herself away in a small town. Her most exciting nights are the weekly bingo games at the local church and gossiping with her friends.

When investigative journalist Plum Dixon shows up on her doorstep asking questions about Lottie’s past and specifically her involvement with numerous unsolved cases, well, Lottie just can’t have that.

But getting away with murder is hard enough when you’re young. And when Lottie receives another annoying knock on the door, she realizes this crime might just be the death of her…

Lisa Vihos is a poet and novelist who has worn many hats: daughter, mother, arts educator, grants manager, and the first poet laureate of Sheboygan from 2020 to 2025. She looks forward to new adventures in story and song in the time to come. 

Writers Circle at WordHaven BookHouse offers local writers a comfortable place to share and develop their work, receive feedback and guidance, encourage and support other writers, and discuss all aspects of the writing process. Open to all forms of writing and all experience levels. Free to attend.

Writers Circle will meet at WordHaven the first Tuesday of each month, from 6-8pm. The circle will be led by published author and award-winning book designer, Erika Block, owner of Gray House Publishing.

rom New York Times bestselling and Hugo Award-winning author T. Kingfisher comes Hemlock & Silver, a dark reimagining of “Snow White” steeped in poison, intrigue, and treason of the most magical kind

Healer Anja regularly drinks poison.

Not to die, but to save— seeking cures for those everyone else has given up on.

But a summons from the King interrupts her quiet, herb-obsessed life. His daughter, Snow, is dying, and he hopes Anja’s unorthodox methods can save her.

Aided by a taciturn guard, a narcissistic cat, and a passion for the scientific method, Anja rushes to treat Snow, but nothing seems to work. That is, until she finds a secret world, hidden inside a magic mirror. This dark realm may hold the key to what is making Snow sick.

Or it might be the thing that kills them all.

Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is “a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century” (Time).

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time • One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.”

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing—the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit—that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as “the kind of writer who made people—young people especially—want to write.” George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be “the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.”

More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.

James R. Gapinski (they/them) is the author of three chapbooks and the novella Edge of the Known Bus Line (winner of the Etchings Press Novella Prize, named to Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2018, and finalist for the 2019 Montaigne Medal). The Museum of Future Mistakes (winner of the BOA Short Fiction Prize) is their first full-length short story collection. James lives in Portland, Oregon with their wife and cats. Learn more about the author at https://jamesrgapinski.com

Writers Circle at WordHaven BookHouse offers local writers a comfortable place to share and develop their work, receive feedback and guidance, encourage and support other writers, and discuss all aspects of the writing process. Open to all forms of writing and all experience levels. Free to attend.

Writers Circle will meet at WordHaven the first Tuesday of each month, from 6-8pm. The circle will be led by published author and award-winning book designer, Erika Block, owner of Gray House Publishing.

Michael Angeli is an American writer and television producer, best known for his award-nominated work on television series including Monk and the remake of Battlestar Galactica, a show for which he was also a co-executive producer. Angeli was co-executive producer on Black Sails, a pirate adventure drama that premiered on the Starz Network in January 2014. As a journalist, he wrote for Esquire, The New York Times, and several other publications. During his time as contributing editor & writer for Esquire, he employed his outstanding writing skills and interviewed high-profile celebrities including Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Joaquin Phoenix, River Phoenix, Michael J. Fox and more. Angeli is currently in pre-production on The Confessions of Al McGuire, a biopic with Anthony Hemingway.

Charles P. Ries is an award-winning poet and author of the memoir Can Boys Fly. He is both the lyricist and voice for the art band Charles P. Ries & the Minktronics. After college, Ries lived in London and North Africa where he studied the mystical teachings of Islam called Sufism. In 1989, he worked with the Dalai Lama on a program that brought American religious leaders and psychotherapists together for a weeklong dialogue. It was during this same week that the Dalai Lama was awarded his Nobel Peace Prize. Ries has done extensive work with men’s groups and worked with a Jungian psychotherapist for over five years during which time he recorded five hundred dreams and learned to find the meanings in small things.

Practice reading and using tarot spreads! You may bring your own decks and books. If you don’t have a deck to use, one can be provided.

Hosted by Amanda Bergemann from COLORFLOW

Jodie Mortag, a true Wisconsinite, having labored numerous summers in the mozzarella factory, received her MFA from Wichita State University. Mortag is an associate professor of writing at Lakeland University where she teaches fiction, nonfiction, and screenwriting; organizes and hosts the annual Great Lakes Writers Festival, and serves as editor for the literary magazine Seems. Her work appears in Ruminate, North Dakota Quarterly, Counterclock, Fourteen Hills, Barnstorm, Stoneboat, Fractions, and Metal Scratches. Her short story “Nightcrawlers” was awarded first prize in Mikrokosmos’ 2024 fiction contest. She lives with her family just outside the Kettle Moraine State Forest.