Heartland Fall Forum kicked off this week with booksellers from the Great Lakes and Midwest regions descending on downtown Milwaukee. The opening reception featured five authors in a round-robin style panel led by GLIBA executive coordinator February Spikener and MIBA operations manager Grace Hagen.
Emi Watanabe Cohen, author of Golemcrafters (Levine Querido, November 12, 2025), spoke about wanting to confront the "pain of worrying whether or not you're authentic" by creating adventurous biracial Japanese characters who make up a new language using the Hebrew alphabet in order to cover up their trouble learning the others. Alice Austen, author of 33 Place Brugmann (Grove, March 11, 2025), expressed excitement in researching the lives of those residing in a Beaux Arts apartment in Brussels as a way to access their comical and tragic stories during Nazi occupation.
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| L.-r.: Denise Williams, Nickolas Butler, Ada Calhoun, Alice Austen, Emi Watanabe Cohen, Grace Hagen (not pictured: February Spikener) | |
Known for her nonfiction, Ada Calhoun described her first novel, Crush (Viking, February 25, 2025), as a thematic sequel to two of her earlier books, Why We Can't Sleep and Also a Poet. Nickolas Butler recounted the real-life interaction he witnessed in a bar that inspired him to write the love story A Forty Year Kiss (Sourcebooks, February 4, 2025). And Denise Williams, author of Just Our Luck (Berkley, March 25, 2025), summarized her approach to writing romance by saying, "I believe in luck, and love stories are all about luck."
The common thread among their remarks were the authors' deep gratitude for the passion and hard work that indie booksellers bring to their stores in supporting authors like them. --Dave Wheeler