by Cherise Fung, CEAS project assistant
At the end of 2024, CEAS sat down with Jane Rotonda, the current Wisconsin Book Festival (WBF) director, to reflect on the festival’s partnership with the Center so far and her hopes for further collaboration in the new year. Rotonda, who succeeded Conor Moran as festival director in Winter 2023, has been instrumental in sustaining the relationship between CEAS and the WBF.
The Center for East Asian Studies-Wisconsin Book Festival (CEAS-WBF) partnership grew out of the pandemic era when many organizations across all sectors were forced to rethink the ways programming could happen. Like many other organizations, CEAS had to adapt quickly to this new and uncharted landscape. The seeds for a partnership were planted when CEAS Associate Director David Fields, learned that the WBF was already hosting events online that were reaching a large audience. Fields was put into contact with Moran, then festival director, through the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s (DPI) libraries team.
At the time, Chinese author Yanke Liang’s Dream of Ding Village had been chosen by the UW-Madison’s Center for the Humanities for its 2020-2021 Great World Texts Series. As a result, a collaborative event with the WBF on the novel was already underway. CEAS jumped on board to promote the event, and thus paved the way for working together later that year on another book event, The Land of Big Numbers conversation with author Te-Ping Chen. This would become the first CEAS-funded event as part of this partnership.
Since then, CEAS and the WBF have collaborated on multiple events to bring East Asian authors and topics to readers in Madison. Both parties have found the partnership to be mutually beneficial, with each bringing key resources to the table to achieve this common goal. CEAS, which was established in 1962 as the East Asian Studies program, has developed more than sixty years of research and teaching on China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, and Taiwan at the UW-Madison. The WBF has been a community mainstay for a little over two decades, bringing people in the city together through a shared love of literature and their writers. Founded in 2001 by the Wisconsin Humanities Council, the festival is now managed by the Madison Public Library and Madison Public Library Foundation.
Having completed her undergraduate degree in Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Rotonda is no stranger to the city of Madison. Since graduating in 2010, she has repeatedly found herself drawn back to the city in between stints across the country and world. Shortly after her most recent return stateside in February 2023, she came across the festival director position and as the saying goes, “the rest is history.”
In hindsight, the foci of her career on community building, public dialogue, and reading made the WBF a logical next step. Rotonda is especially fond of what she calls “interstitial moments of connections” at the Madison Public Library, where WBF events are usually held. She explained that while virtual events are crucial for increased accessibility, there is something special about the way in-person events can bring fellow readers together in the same space and foster unexpected and charming human-to-human interactions. Although these interactions can occur at any of the singular events that the festival hosts year round, they are especially primed to take place at the annual Fall Celebration, which hosts events over four consecutive days. Rotonda noted that it is not unusual for readers and authors alike to bump into each other on the stairs or around the coffee cart and share related anecdotes and experiences.
In our conversation, Rotonda stressed the centrality of partnerships, such as the one with CEAS, to the success of the WBF in cultivating this warm environment. The festival regularly partners with a host of organizations across town, from departments at UW-Madison to nonprofits and small businesses. As Rotonda sees it, the theme across this range of community partnerships is a desire to serve and integrate as much of the Madison community as possible in the work of the festival as well as the work of these various local organizations.
The very first partnership event organized under Rotonda’s leadership serves as a prime example of the results of this type of resource pooling. Author and artist Craig Thompson spoke on his new 10-book graphic memoir series, Ginseng Roots, in October 2023. The series offered a host of unexpected and insightful connections between the Badger State and China.
Thompson’s discussion of his artistic process on the final installment of the series–which situates the author’s experience cultivating ginseng in Wisconsin during his youth within the context of the global ginseng trade–was augmented by the insights of Will Hsu, president of the Wisconsin-based Hsu’s Ginseng Enterprises. CEAS suggested Hsu as the best interlocutor for the event considering his personal connection with Thompson as well as his background as a UW Madison alum and his identity as the son of first-generation Taiwanese immigrants who established the ginseng trade in Wausau, Wisconsin.
The rest of the partnership events that have followed since then have resulted in similarly lively conversations spanning a range of genres–including memoirs, graphic novels, fiction, and non-fiction–and East Asian countries. November 2023 saw award-winning journalists Shibani Mahtani and Timothy McLaughlin presenting their narrative historical account of the Hong Kong pro-democracy movement, Among the Braves. Fall 2024 events featured writers Tessa Hulls and Margaret Juhae Lee as part of a panel on finding solace and sisterhood in memoir, as well as a book talk by Wendy Chen on her novel, Their Divine Fires. Hulls’s Feeding Ghosts turns her grandmother’s story in Shanghai into a graphic memoir spanning three generations of Chinese women; Lee’s Starry Field is based on her grandfather’s experience under Japanese-occupied Korea. Chen’s debut novel is a semi-autobiographical work about a family experiencing wartime upheaval in 20th century China.
Rotonda has continued to work with CEAS to keep an eye out for books that might be a good fit for a partnership event. Either party can initiate a pitch. Of the six author events that have emerged so far from this collaborative effort, two have been pitched by CEAS and the rest have come from the WBF. Once a title is accepted, Rotonda works on the event schedule and CEAS handles the promotion. CEAS and the WBF also work together to find a moderator, often someone on campus. For instance, CEAS faculty helped identify UW Madison’s Chinese literature PhD student Eliot Chen to be a conversation partner for the Wendy Chen event. While the WBF is a well-oiled machine with event templates and structures in place, Rotonda stresses the importance of leaving room for flexibility so that tweaks can be made to center the “who” and “how” of the specific communities that a given partnership event is serving.
Fields and Rotonda have been delighted to witness how the CEAS and WBF communities have been able to forge connections with each other through books and authors as the beating heart of programming. Such connections might not have been possible otherwise without this ongoing partnership.
This year, Rotonda hopes to deepen these connections by building on this partnership endeavor, keeping the conversation open, and adjusting shared goals to better meet the demands of the moment. She also notes how there has been positive growth in terms of community interest in East Asian topics since she began attending WBF events as a college student, a trend that she wishes to continue developing in line with the library’s mission to promote inclusion.
As she says, “there’s always more work to be done and more ways to continue to feature authors, books, and genres that draw new and different audiences, new perspectives and backgrounds into our community.”
The next CEAS-WBF partnership event is scheduled for February 19, 2025, and will feature Grace Jung’s K-Drama School. Jung is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in Korean Studies at UW-Madison.