First Wednesday | The Laureate Reading Series

Wednesday | February 4
7 PM | Blue Heron Coffeehouse
Free & Open to the Public

FIRST WEDNESDAY (not the usual First Tuesday, because of a scheduling conflict), the Laureate Reading Series will present DELVING FOR ELVES: AN ENCANTATORY READING BY MICHAEL WM. DOYLE, poet, historian, raconteur. 7pm, February 4th, Blue Heron Coffeehouse.
The reading will be followed by a Q&A, then an Open Mic. This event is open to the public and free of charge. Come hear Michael Doyle cast spells in verse to enchant the disenchanted!
Doyle’s books include Buffalo Mirage! 23 Short Poems from the Life and Michael Wm. Doyle, a Colorful Life. In addition, he served as editor and contributor to the books Wisconsin Images: Wisconsin Artists Working in the Arts; Alma on the Mississippi: 1848-1932; and Imagine Nation:
The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Doyle grew up in Winona during the 1960s and ‘70s. While still attending high school, he was a
member of a grassroots preservation organization that successfully rescued the Winona County
Courthouse from demolition.  After graduation, he helped organize the Alma Historical Society
and served as its first director, during which time he led the effort to research and successfully
nominate 134 buildings in that community to the National Register of Historic Places.  Doyle
later served as the founding director of the Buffalo County Historical Society. As part of that
position he worked with the Winona County Historical Society on a National Endowment for the
Humanities grant-funded oral and visual history project called Working on the River: The Upper
Mississippi River in the 20 th Century. In 2020, he was appointed to the Winona Heritage
Preservation.
Doyle earned his Bachelor’s from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Master’s and
Doctoral degrees in U.S. history from Cornell University. From 1996 through 2019 he served as
director of Ball State University’s Public History Program and established the Oral History
Workshop. Under the auspices of the latter initiative, he and his students videorecorded
hundreds of long-form interviews that are archived for streaming on the BSU Libraries’ Digital
Media Repository. They include series on African American alumni and U.S. military veterans
whose service spanned the end of WWII through the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2022, he
completed 20 interviews for the Famine Foods Co-op / Bluff Country Co-op Oral History Project
that are streamable from Winona State University’s OpenRiver digital collection.
Doyle has also curated exhibitions at the Minnesota and Wisconsin Historical Societies and Ball
State University. His most recent one, Minnesconsin: Dick Lano’s Photography of the Winona
Area in the 1970s, will be on display this spring through 2027 at the Winona County History
Center.
Michael Doyle and his wife, Eleanor Johnson, returned to Winona in 2000 after they retired.

Ken McCullough is a member of the River Arts Alliance. To learn more about the benefits of membership, please visit: riverartsalliance.org/membership/.