Shake Rag Alley will welcome nine writers in residence

Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts will welcome nine writers in residence at the beginning of 2026. Marking the fifteenth year of the Winter Writers Reading Series, this upcoming year will feature Wisconsin writers reading from their work on select Thursday evenings at 6:00. Readings will be held at Republic of Letters Books in Mineral Point. Thursday, January 15, will feature Elizabeth Hendricks and Alison Thumel. 

Elizabeth Hendricks was awarded the Wisconsin People & Ideas Fiction Award. She is from New Berlin and currently a junior at the University of Iowa. An aspiring fantasy author, she works as the web editor for Earthwords Undergraduate Literary Review, the oldest literary magazine on campus. 

Alison Thumel was awarded the Wisconsin People & Ideas Poetry Award. Alison Thumel’s debut poetry collection, Architect, won the 2024 Miller Williams Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2025 Kate Tufts Poetry Award. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she completed her MFA. Her poems have appeared widely, including in Poetry, Ploughshares, and the New England Review. She lives and writes in Wisconsin.

You can see the full schedule to meet authors during the upcoming free Winter Writers Reading Series at ShakeRagAlley.org/writers-reading-series.

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