The UWM Libraries are presenting a live reading online by Wisconsin Poet Laureate Margaret Rozga and UW-Milwaukee Professor Mauricio Kilwein Guevara on Tuesday, April 28 at 1 p.m.
The public is invited to this special event celebrating National Poetry Month and may access it here. A recording of the reading will be available on the Libraries website after the event.
About the poets:
Margaret “Peggy” Rozga is the Wisconsin Poet Laureate for 2019-2020. A native of Milwaukee, Rozga is a poet, playwright and emerita professor of English at UWM at Waukesha where she taught creative writing, composition, and multicultural literature. She received the University of Wisconsin Colleges and University of Wisconsin Extension Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Achievement in 2007.
Rozga’s poems draw on her experiences and interests as an educator, avid reader and researcher, parent, and advocate for social and racial justice. Her first book, 200 Nights and One Day (Benu Press, 2009), began as a play, March On Milwaukee: A Memoir of the Open Housing Protests, that was produced three times. The book was awarded a bronze medal in poetry in the 2009 Independent Publishers Book Awards and named an outstanding achievement in poetry for 2009 by the Wisconsin Library Association. Rozga’s second collection, Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad (Benu Press 2012), features poems responding to her Army Reservist son’s deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan. Her most recent book, Pestiferous Questions: A Life in Poems (Lit Fest Press 2017), looks at issues of women’s roles, western expansion, and race as they are woven through the life of politically active and well-connected Jessie Benton Fremont (1824-1902).
In addition to her own books, Rozga has served as an editor for three poetry chapbook anthology projects, most recently Where I Want to Live: Poems for Fair and Affordable Housing (Little Bird Press 2018), a project of the 50th anniversary commemoration of Milwaukee’s fair housing marches.
Mauricio Kilwein Guevara is poet, novelist, playwright, essayist, translator, performer, activist, and educator born in Belencito, Colombia and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 2002 he was the first person of Latinx heritage elected as President of the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. He was instrumental in diversifying the organization’s event programming, its membership, and its Board of Directors.
Kilwein Guevara has won national and international awards for his writing, including the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition (Postmortem, 1992) and an International Latino Book Award (POEMA, 2010). His writing has been published in England, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Argentina, Spain, and China. Across genres, he is known for a seriocomic writing style that investigates the overlapping of voices, experiences, and tensions that complicate immigrant life in the United States and throughout the global Latin American diaspora.
He is a professor of English and the Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at UWM.