Jean Feraca
Wisconsin's best-known voice

Featured Speaker, Saturday, Oct. 4, EPAC
"Family, Love and Loss: Hearing Voices in the Heartland"

Wisconsin Public Radio’s distinguished senior broadcaster and producer and host of “Here on Earth: Radio Without Borders,” Feraca is also a poet of rare degree and the author of a family memoir destined to redefine the genre. “I Hear Voices: A Memoir of Love, Death and the Radio,” is a tale stuffed with poignant love, loss, hope and redemption. No one who reads Feraca’s book will ever think about “family” the same way again. The autobiography, published in September 2007, earned Feraca 2008’s Kingery/Derleth Booklength Nonfiction Award, which is presented by the Council for Wisconsin Writers. Feraca began her “on-air” career with Wisconsin Public Radio in 1990, when she first hosted and co-produced the award-winning, Ideas Network show, “Conversations with Jean Feraca.” She began her new program, “Here on Earth,” in 2003. Feraca joined WPR in 1983 as humanities producer, after a leaving a National Public Radio affiliate, WGUC-FM, to become a freelance arts, humanities, and general assignment reporter with NPR’s “Morning Edition” and “All Things Considered.” In 1996, her “Conversations with Jean Feraca” won the National Telemedia Council’s Distinguished Media Award. Named “one of the most promising poets of her generation” in 1975 by the Nation magazine, Feraca has published two collections of her poetry, “South from Rome: Il Mezzogiorno” (which was written with the help of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts) and “Crossing the Great Divide” (which was published with the help of a Wisconsin Arts Board Fellowship and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize). In 1996, Feraca was named the lead poet in a major public series commissioned by the Dane (Wisconsin) County Cultural Affairs office. Feraca earned her bachelors of arts degree in English from Manhattanville College, New York, with honors work in dramatic literature completed at Harvard University. She earned her masters of arts degree in English language and literature from the University of Michigan and has completed work toward her doctorate at the University of Kentucky. She did graduate work in drama at the University of California at Berkley and studied studio art at Columbia University. A New York native, Feraca has lived in Italy and has traveled extensively in Europe, the Mediterranean, Mexico, Canada, the Caribbean, and the Amazon. She is the mother of two sons and now lives in Madison.

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