Program Details
Some Perennials is a hybrid poetry/artbook and film projection that explores themes of immigration, family, decay, fruition, and language in the work of Nicholas Gulig, Jane Wong, and Diana Khoi Nguyen, three Asian American poets whose previous collaborations lay the groundwork for this next iteration. In doing so, the project suggests a writer’s work is never annual, nor is it ever solely their own. Rather, writing begets writing and art begets art. When a poem ends, when a project is over, Some Perennials argues that all endings turn, in time, into the ground from which another poem, another project grows. Language sprouts again and blossoms. The creative act perpetually recurs.
Location
Park Hall
Downstairs
307 Polk Street
Sauk City, WI 53583
- Video installation
- Inside
Contributors
Nicholas Gulig (he/him), Colin Crowley (he/him)
Instagram: @nickgulig
Nicholas Gulig is a Thai American poet from Wisconsin. He is the author of The Other Altar (Center for Literary Publishing, 2024), winner of both the Colorado Poetry Prize and the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award; Orient (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2018), winner of the CSU Poetry Center Open Book Competition; Book of Lake (CutBank, 2016); and North of Order (YesYes Books, 2015). A recipient of a 2011 Fulbright Fellowship, Gulig has also been awarded the Ruskin Art Club Poetry Award, the Black Warrior Review Poetry Prize, and the Grist’s ProForma Award. Currently, Gulig works as an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater where he founded and co-edits Either/Or magazine. In 2023, he was appointed poet laureate of Wisconsin and received an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship. Recently he completed Welcome Poets with PBS Wisconsin, a documentary film series that examines the life and legacy of the poet Lorine Niedecker through his experiences as a poet also growing up and living in the Midwest.
Colin Crowley is a video producer and photographer with a degree in French from the University of Wisconsin - Eau Claire. He lived for over a decade in Nairobi, Kenya and traveled globally as a communications specialist for an international aid organization before relocating to the Madison area in 2017 where he works as a documentary and television producer. In 2022 he was awarded three Chicago/Midwest Emmys for Directing, Photography, and Editing for his work on the PBS series Around the Farm Table. In 2024 he partnered with Wisconsin poet laureate Nicholas Gulig to produce Welcome Poets, a web series and film exploring the connections between poetry, place, and artistic legacy through the life of the late Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker.