Presented in partnership with the University of Wisconsin Program in Creative Writing, this edition of Wisconsin Wednesdays features UW Alumnae Elizabeth Ames Staudt for her new novel, The Other's Gold and Meg Wade for her new poetry collection, Slick Like Dark.

About The Other's Gold: An insightful and sparkling novel that opens on a college campus and follows the friendship of four women across life-defining turning points. Assigned to the same suite during their freshman year at Quincy-Hawthorn College, Lainey, Ji Sun, Alice, and Margaret quickly become inseparable. The leafy green campus they move through together, the idyllic window seat they share in their suite, and the passion and ferocity that school and independence awakens in them ignites an all-encompassing love with one another. But they soon find their bonds–forged in joy, and fused by fear–must weather threats that originate from beyond the dark forests of their childhoods, and come at them from institutions, from one another, and ultimately, from within themselves. The Other’s Gold follows the four friends as each makes a terrible mistake, moving from their wild college days to their more feral days as new parents. With one part devoted to each mistake–the Accident, the Accusation, the Kiss, and the Bite–this complex yet compulsively readable debut interrogates the way that growing up forces our friendships to evolve as the women discover what they and their loved ones are capable of, and capable of forgiving. A joyful, big-hearted book that perfectly evokes the bittersweet experience of falling in love with friendship, the experiences of Lainey, Ji Sun, Alice, and Margaret are at once achingly familiar and yet shine with a brilliance and depth all their own.

About Slick Like Dark: Fueled by questions of faith and desire, and steeped in the Southern Gothic, Meg Wade’s Slick Like Dark is a haunting examination of the Southern body and one woman’s survival in it. These poems burn in their intensity. With a menacing wink they trace a hard line through trauma’s wreckage and ask God who is to blame. They take us to the dark corners of honky-tonks and spin us wide around the room. Through the lyric, Wade gives us a voice piercingly honest and desperate for what’s real.

The Other's Gold & Slick Like Dark