Jeff Oloizia was our guest on Book Beat with John Quinlan discussing his new weekly WI Literary Podcast "Writing Forward," which debuted on May 6th. We learned about the purpose of the cutting edge podcast, and about the man behind it.

The Brookfield native and 2007 UW alum left Wisconsin post-graduation, not necessarily expecting to return, settling into "an itinerant existence" in exotic places like Japan, San Francisco and New York as a journalist, and eventually earning a professorship as part of graduate studies in Wilmington, North Carolina. (This included a stint as an editor at the New York Times.)

As reported in this week's Cap Times, he once thought he had leave Madison to live a life of literature. “It felt important to leave and go to the places where I thought writers were,” Oloizia said. After more than a dozen years interviewing famous people in these exotic locales, he returned home to Madison in 2020 to write extraordinary stories about the Wisconsin everyman as a prolific contributor to publications like Madison Magazine.

And this week, he creates a literary podcast interviewing Wisconsin authors walking a similar path back to their own roots here. A fascinating show about a fascinating guy. New editions of "Writing Forward" are available each week wherever podcasts are available. For more on Jeff, his podcast, and the overall scope of his work, visit his website at www.jeffoloizia.com .

Photo courtesy of Jeff Oloizia