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German writer Julia Wolf has arrived for a three-month stay at Edenfred, a beautiful creative arts residency in the Madison Highlands funded by the Terry Family Foundation—see Events!

     The Hessen-Wisconsin Writers are a group of poets, playwrights, essayists, short story writers, novelists, and journalists from Wisconsin and its sister state of Hesse, Germany. The group was formed on June 16th, 2004 following an exchange of ideas with Dirk Huelstrunk, a touring German performance poet and representative of the Verband Hessischer Schriftsteller (www.vs-hessen.de), or Association of Hessian Writers, at a meeting hosted in Madison, Wisconsin by the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters (www.wisconsinacademy.org). The group hopes to encourage a broad-based exchange, including sending groups of Wisconsin poets and writers to Hessen (current opportunity! see Events) and reciprocal visits to Wisconsin by Hessian writers and poets, posting writers' work on this site, and matching writers from both states to foster social and cultural communication.

Wisconsin's Sister State Partnership with Hessen, Germany

     Hessen is a beautiful state in central Germany, home to the Rhine River Valley, the elegant and historic capital city of Wiesbaden, vineyards, and a thriving educational, cultural and commercial sector, including the city of Frankfurt, regarded by many as the banking center for the entire European Union.

     Hessen is one of Wisconsin's oldest sister-state partners, dating to 1976. In the first decades of the match, Wisconsin Deparment of Public Instruction (DPI) and Hessisches Kultusministerium matched 50 "sister schools" on both sides of the Atlantic, hosted two-week teacher seminars every other year, and sent student delegations for academic study on its Hessen Wisconsin High School Student Exchange Program. Wisconsin DPI, Wisconsin Deparment of Commerce and the Wisconsin Counties Association have collaborated to help staff "Hessentag", a regional summer festival in Hessen, attended by 700,000 people, by assisting an annual high school student group to staff Wisconsin's sister state booth.

     Occasional trade, governmental and gubernatorial groups have visited, and Hessen sent an impressive cultural delegation to Wisconsin's Sesqucentennial Celebration in 1998. The Wisconsin Hessen Society in Wisconsin maintains ties with Hessen from the Badger State; on the German side, a similar group is called Hessicher Freundschafts-verein. On both sides, the partnership has a distinct grassroots and people-to-people orientation and welcomes initiatives and exchanges by its citizens.