Watershed Reading: Toast

Five poets responded to the exhibition Toast by Alaura Seidl. Toast is an installation and video-based work reconciling the tension between private confrontations and public spectacles, contemplating both what people do spontaneously and what people perform consciously. The exhibition, screened in its final form, was born of a lifetime of intimate encounters and one night of filming with community members. Alaura negotiated with memories while investigating accountability for social dilemmas, celebrating queer identity and cleansing the palate.

Alaura Seidl

Alaura Seidl is a queer+feminist educator, writer, and socially engaged artist based in Madison, WI. Alaura is the director of the ArtWrite Collective.

Joey Belonger

Joey Belonger is a genderqueer poet, digital artist, and upcoming MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers' Workshop. They are the recipient of the Hicks Prize in Poetry, the Tichenor Prize, and the Bertrand A. Goldgar London Fellowship. Recent poems have appeared in Tropos. They currently coach students with cognitive differences here in Madison.

Marcelle Richards

Marcelle Richards is a local writer, artist, shamanic practitioner, and nature enthusiast. They are happiest on the open road, under canopies of trees, and beneath wide starry skies. The love of their life is a bull terrier named Claire.

Megan Milks

Megan Milks is the author of Kill Marguerite and Other Stories, winner of the 2015 Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award in Fiction and a Lambda Literary Award finalist; as well as three chapbooks, most recently The Feels. They are Fiction Editor at The Account and previously edited The &NOW Awards 3: The Best Innovative Writing, 2011-2013 and Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives.

Araceli Esparza

Araceli Esparza is a Chicana Poeta from the heartland. MFA graduate from Hamline University, with strong migrant farmer roots, she recently co-edited a poetry anthology with Flying Ketchup Press, The Very Edge Poems, and was a part of the statewide anthology Hope Is The Thing: Wisconsinites on Perseverance in a Pandemic published by the Wisconsin Historical Society. She was named Wisconsin's Most Influential Latina in 2018. Her recently released animated short that accompanies Araceli’s children’s poetry, won special recognition by the Milwaukee Press Club. Her work has been published in over 10 anthologies and several journals, and forthcoming Journal of Latina Critical Feminism. Araceli founded and runs the podcast and movement Midwest Mujeres. She is a speaker and builds bridges to donors and audiences to create a positive impact on marginalized communities.

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Arts + Literature Laboratory is located at 111 S. Livingston Street #100, Madison, Wisconsin, 53703.

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