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Former Wisconsin Poet Laureate Nicholas Gulig presents a lyrical reflection on his return to Wisconsin adjoined to the literary echoes of Fort Atkinson’s famed 20th century poet Lorine Niedecker (1903–1970). Welcome Poets, a limited digital series of six documentary shorts, connects the shared and divergent landscapes, personal histories and poetry of both writers — exploring themes of place and displacement, nature and culture, alienation and belonging.
Across the series, Gulig retraces the terrain of his childhood and coming of age as a Thai American growing up in Eau Claire, his education and career taking him out of state and abroad to Southeast Asia and ultimately back to Wisconsin — landing in Fort Atkinson. His story accompanies Niedecker’s biography and poetry in a layered conversation, her words etched in the geographies where Gulig is reestablishing home.
Niedecker lived her entire life in Wisconsin, writing and publishing in relative obscurity until shortly before her death in 1970. Today her reputation within 20th century American poetry grows in prominence. Her legacy is celebrated, preserved, and studied in her hometown of Fort Atkinson through the careful work of the Hoard Historical Museum and the Friends of Lorine Niedecker, across selected university archives, and by scholarly researchers. Yet many Wisconsinites remain unfamiliar with her work.
Welcome Poets introduces Niedecker to new audiences, situating her life and labor alongside Gulig’s in a meditation on place, inheritance and the power of poetry to forge community.
“What is poetry if not an act of alter-making, of paying tribute to the people and the places that have held us.”
Nicholas Gulig, Welcome Poets
FEATURED POETS
Nicholas Gulig
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 to Bangkok, Thailand, 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 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.
Lorine Niedecker
Lorine Niedecker (1903–1970) lived most of her life on Blackhawk Island, a flood-prone stretch of marshland near Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, whose landscapes shaped the clarity and concision of her poetry. Often working a range of jobs to survive — as a library assistant, proofreader and hospital cleaner — she wrote in spare hours, crafting poems that balanced the immediacy of folk speech with the precision of modernist experiment. Her lifelong correspondence with poet Louis Zukofsky linked her to the Objectivist poets, yet her work remained singular — marked by brevity, musicality, and deep attention to objects and place.
Though she published only a handful of books during her lifetime, including New Goose (1946), My Friend Tree (1961), North Central (1968), and T&G: The Collected Poems, 1936–1966 (1969), Niedecker earned the admiration of William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Basil Bunting, who praised her as “the most interesting woman poet America has yet produced.” Her later, long poems such as “Lake Superior,” “Wintergreen Ridge” and “Paean to Place,” brought together local history, natural observation, and political and social concerns of global weight. Once little known beyond small presses, her reputation has steadily grown, and she is now recognized as one of Wisconsin’s — and the United States’ — most vital 20th century poets.
Credits
Writing and Narration
Nicholas Gulig
Producer
Colin Crowley
Editor
Zack Whitford
Videographers
Colin Crowley
James Donovan
Ethan Freel
Zack Whitford
Additional Aerial Photography
Riley Hartnett
Executive Producer
Trevor Keller
Director of Production
Christine Sloan-Miller
Project Manager
Samantha Nash
Archival Research
and Clearance
Clara Wolfe
Audio Post Production
Andrew LaValley
Captioning
Catie Pfeifer
Voice of Lorine Niedecker
Sigrid Peterson
Original Music
Joe Westerlund & Trever Hagen
Riley Hartnett
Michael Rossetto
Sled Napkin
Jacy Catlin
The Nunnery
Archival Images and Footage
Hoard Historical Museum
Yale Collection of American Literature
Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Collection
Encyclopedia Britannica Films
American Documentary Films
Whitlfea
Motion Array
Shutterstock
Additional Archival Content
Nicholas Gulig
Riley Hartnett
Drew Christopherson
Kristen Harberg
Bill Hogseth
Michael Huggins
Jacy Catlin
Marketing and Promotion
Mike Divine
Alyssa Beno
Video Promotion
Samuel Ewert
Heather Reese
Community Engagement
Melissa Perry
Website
Norman Yuson Cuaño
Chester Lee
Sigrid Peterson
Tim Schneider
Permissions
Bob Arnold, Literary Executor for the Estate of Lorine Niedecker
Special Thanks
Ann Engelman
Merrilee Lee
Dana Bertelsen
Drew Christopherson
Ken and Cathy Gans
Jenny Penberthy
Caryl Pagel
Megan O’Gieblyn
Barrett Swanson
Riley Hartnett
Adam Fell
Numfon Gulig
Pieta Gulig
Tonkhoa Daosuk
Toi Gulig
Andrew Rodgers
Jerod Santek
Nickolas & Regina Bulter
Ryan Olson
Julie Schoessow
Thomas Meyers
Karl Gartung
Brenda Ćardenas
Penn Sound
Randy Lorentz
Scottie’s Eat-Mor
Dwight Foster Public Library
University of Wisconsin Digital Collections
University of Wisconsin Libraries
Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art
Prelinger Archives
Internet Archives
Wikicommons
Monsters of Poetry
Create Wisconsin
Write On, Door County
Washington Island Literary Festival
Friends of Lorine Niedecker
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