Our Rogers Park Library event was a success, thanks to our neighbors who showed up and engaged with us the last Saturday of May 2025. Now we’re headed to Sulzer Regional Library at 4455 N. Lincoln Avenue on July 10, 2025 to celebrate the publication of Dawn Tefft’s debut collection Once Upon a Riot (Match Factory Editions, 2025) with special guests Brenda Cárdenas and Roberto Harrison. The event starts at 5:30 PM, and it’s free and open to the public. Cárdenas, Harrison, and Tefft will read their poetry, and a Q&A with the poets and attendees will follow. There’ll be time to mingle, get signed copies of books, snag some freebies and learn more about our press. 

Once Upon a Riot was the first manuscript that came through the Match Factory Editions transom, and we took its beauty and urgency as a sign that our publishing adventure came at the right moment in time. At the event, Dawn will talk about how and why she came to write this collection. 

Current Wisconsin Poet Laureate Brenda Cárdenas is the author of two full-length books: Trace (Red Hen Press, 2023) and Boomerang (Bilingual Press, 2009) and several chapbooks, and she was Dawn’s professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.  

Milwaukee Poet Laureate (2017-2019) Roberto Harrison is the author of Os (subpress, 2006), Counter Daemons (Litmus Press, 2006), bicycle (Noemi Press, 2015), culebra (Green Lantern Press, 2016), Bridge of the World (Litmus Press, 2017), Yaviza (Atelos, 2017), as well as many chapbooks. 

All three are some of the most interesting poets and human beings you’ll ever have the pleasure to encounter. Their curiosity and talents have taken them to the realms of labor organizing, choral music, and abstract algebra. You’ll want to hear about it!