Madison Public Library Celebrates Women's History Month

posted March 1, 2019 – 11:31am

To celebrate Women’s History Month, Madison Public Library will host engaging programs that commemorate the accomplishments, elevate the voices, and explore the stories of women both past and present.

Madison Public Library provides free and equitable access to cultural and educational experiences. The library celebrates ideas, promotes creativity, connects people, and enriches lives, with an emphasis on promoting literacy and equity in library collections, services, and programs.

Events in honor of Women’s History Month include:

Who Matters: Women's History Edition
In commemoration of Women's History Month and to amplify the experiences of women in Madison, Madison Public Library presents Who Matters: Women's History Edition. This is designed to offer a space, physical and digital, for women to speak with each other about work, neighborhoods, family, recreation, education, civic engagement, and their experience of being a woman in these spaces. Conversations will be recorded and photographs taken during a story gathering day on June 15th, and shared through the Living History Project. Registration to participate will start in late March. Central Library

March 4: Memory Cloth Circle members invite children and adults to remember women who inspired them, tell their stories, and stitch with them. The group will provide materials and guidance in embroidery and share their experiences. Registration required. Lakeview Library

March 5: Mosaic scholar and artist, Lillian Sizemore, will reveal the fascinating tale of UW professor emerita Marjorie Kreilick's ten large scale, yet little-known, mosaic murals for Milwaukee's State Office Building. Sizemore will follow Kreilick's artistic journey from Rome to Wisconsin, and discuss what an uncertain future may hold for this significant piece of our state heritage. A mosaic demo is included with the visual presentation. Central Library

March 11: Humans are a varied and divergent bunch with all manner of beliefs, morals, and bodies. Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies. The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted by these violent systems. World-renowned activist and poet Sonya Renee Taylor invites us to reconnect with the radical origins of our minds and bodies and celebrate our collective, enduring strength. Presented in partnership with Madison College Office of Equity and Inclusion. Mitby Theater

March 12: For prize-winning poet Tiana Clark, trees will never be just trees. They will also and always be a row of gallows from which Black bodies once swung. This is an image that she cannot escape, but one that she has learned to lean into as she delves into personal and public histories, explicating memories and muses around race, elegy, family, and faith by making and breaking forms as well as probing mythology, literary history, her own ancestry, and, yes, even Rihanna in “I Can’t Talk About the Trees Without the Blood.” Central Library

March 13: Actor, filmmaker, and activist Amber Tamblyn presents Era of Ignition, a passionate and deeply personal exploration of feminism during divisive times. After a particularly low period fueled by rejection and disillusionment, she grabbed hold of her own destiny and entered into what she calls an Era of Ignition namely, the time of self-reflection that follows in the wake of personal upheaval and leads to a call to action and positive change. In the process of undergoing this metaphysical metamorphosis, she realized that our country was going through an Era of Ignition of its own. Central Library

March 15: This international film night presents Caramel (Sukkar Banat) about a Beirut beauty salon that becomes a treasured meeting place for several generations of women from various walks of life to talk, seek advice and confide in one another. Arabic, French with English subtitles. Alicia Ashman Library

April 4: All are invited take part in a book discussion of The Radium Girls by Kate Moore. Written with a sparkling voice and breakneck pace, The Radium Girls fully illuminates the inspiring young women exposed to the wonder substance of radium, and their awe-inspiring strength in the face of almost impossible circumstances. Their courage and tenacity led to life-changing regulations, research into nuclear bombing, and ultimately saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Lakeview Library

April 4: The Peace and Justice Book Circle invites you to a discussion of The Mother of All Questions by Rebecca Solnit. In a timely follow-up to her national bestseller Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit offers indispensable commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In characteristic style, Solnit mixes humor, keen analysis, and powerful insight in these essays. Everyone is welcome to join the conversation if you are interested in the topic, regardless of whether or not you have read the book. Goodman South Madison Library

April 6: In honor of Womens History Month, Memory Cloth Circle members invite children and adults to remember women who inspired them, tell their stories and stitch with us. The group will provide materials and guidance in embroidery, and share their experiences. Goodman South Madison Library

April 8: Jamaica Kincaid will deliver a public lecture as part of the Center for the Humanities' "Humanities Without Boundaries" speaker series. A Small Place is brilliant look at colonialism and its effects in Antigua--by the author of Annie John. Lyrical, sardonic, and forthright by turns, in a Swiftian mode, A Small Place cannot help but amplify our vision of one small place and all that it signifies. Presented in partnership with the UW-Madison Center for the Humanities and the Wisconsin Union Distinguished Lecture Series. Union South

April 18: Solmaz Sharif’s astonishing first book, Look, asks us to see the ongoing costs of war as the unbearable loss of human lives and also the insidious abuses against our everyday speech. In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discrimination endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter. At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Central Library

A full schedule of events can be found at madisonpubliclibrary.org.

About Madison Public Library
Madison Public Library’s tradition of promoting education, literacy and community involvement has enriched the City of Madison for more than 140 years. Our nine locations throughout the City of Madison welcome over 2 million visits each year. For more information, visit madisonpubliclibrary.org, @madisonpubliclibrary on Facebook, @madisonpubliclibrary on Instagram, or @madisonlibrary on Twitter.