Dr. Margaret (Peggy) Rozga

Recently named Wisconsin Poet Laureate Dr. Margaret Rozga is an emeritus professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee Waukesha campus. She creates poetry from her ongoing concern for social justice issues. She volunteered to work on a 1965 voter registration campaign in rural Alabama. She was a participant in Milwaukee’s marches for fair housing and later married civil rights leader, Father James Groppi.

Her book, Two Hundred Nights and One Day (Benu Press 2009), tells the story of the 1967-68 Milwaukee fair housing struggle. This book was awarded a bronze medal in poetry in the 2009 Independent Publishers Book Awards and named an outstanding achievement in poetry for 2009 by the Wisconsin Library Association.  

Dr. Rozga is also the author of Though I Haven’t Been to Baghdad (2012), Justice Freedom Herbs (2015), and Pestiferous Questions: A Life in Poems (2017). She has been awarded a creative writer’s fellowship at the American Antiquarian Society and has been a resident at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology and at the Ragdale Foundation.

As part of the 50th anniversary projects honoring Milwaukee’s fair housing marches, Dr. Rozga served as editor of a poetry chapbook anthology, Where I Want to Live: Poems for Fair and Affordable Housing. She also helped convene a housing task force that supported the successful initiative to close a loophole in Milwaukee County’s fair housing law so that it now covers people with rent assistance vouchers. She promoted the community-wide Book Read Project focused on Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law.