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 published, award-winning bilingual Chicana poeta. Her work has appeared in multiple anthologies and journals, and her voice can be heard in the Wisconsin Life archives. She is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee and a graduate of the MFA program at Hamline University.

Born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin, Araceli is the daughter of migrant farmworkers from Guanajuato, Mexico. A lineage that continues to ground her work in resilience, labor, and story.

Today, she is planting seeds as a social justice speaker, survivor, and founder of Midwest Mujeres, a Latina mentoring and storytelling collective where women transform their lived experiences into voice, healing, and power.

In her words: “To me, being a Chicana poeta means to catch fire—to bring forth something from labor and sweat, to have enough when there’s not a lot.”

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

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