The Oshkosh Public Library will celebrate a decades of UW-Oshkosh’s Humans of Oshkosh projects and stories this Wednesday, as the program’s founder discusses student storytellers and the subjects they’ve covered over the last 10 years.
The public event takes place from 6-8 p.m., Wednesday, April 30., under the dome at the Oshkosh Public Library. More than a dozen of the student storytellers will be on hand.
Several copies of the Humans of Oshkosh books will be on display and available for purchase.
Since 2014, UW Oshkosh students in instructor Grace Lim’s UWO Telling Stories for Fun, Profit and World Peace class have produced more than 4,000 stories on the Humans of Oshkosh Facebook page.
The stories collected by student storytellers highlight the people from the Oshkosh community who’ve generously shared experiences with love 
and war, hope and despair, life and death, and everything in between.
2025 focus on libraries
This academic year, Humans of Oshkosh (HOO) is, you might say, library-centric.
UW-Oshkosh students partnered with Oshkosh Public Library to help celebrate its 125th anniversary.
The class has also developed stories to advocate for and advance a revived Polk Library, a cornerstone of the UWO campus. A $137.5 million revitalized library, called Polk Learning Commons, was part of Gov. Tony Evers 2025-27 state capital budget projects. The proposal is now in the hands of the State Legislature’s Joint Committee on Finance for potential approval.
Lim’s students produced a campy horror story video as a clever metaphor to escalate the urgency for Polk’s replacement.
The Humans of Oshkosh photo/story exhibit will showcase some of the most popular HOO stories in the past decade, including those discovered in and around the Oshkosh Public Library.
Getting out and talking to people
“Ten years ago, Humans of Oshkosh was just a crazy idea to get my students, mostly sophomores from all disciplines, to understand the power of stories, and how they connect us as a humans,” Lim said. “I wanted my students to see a wider, deeper, diverse community. I wanted them to talk to people of all shapes, colors and sizes, people they normally wouldn’t talk to if not for this class, so I shooed them out of the classroom and into the wilds of Oshkosh and beyond, ‘Go, go, talk to people, and not just your friends.’ And they did. I can’t convey how proud I am of these students, and of the people of our community, who’ve shared their stories with us.”
Each semester, the student storytellers would focus on a subset of the humans in our community that included teachers, first responders, veterans, those who are living in recovery, those who are unhoused or impacted by COVID-19.
Humans of Oshkosh has partnered with community organizations including United Way of Oshkosh; Oshkosh Public School District; Winnebago County Drug and Alcohol Coalition and UWO.
Over the past decade, nine Humans of Oshkosh books have been produced. The most recent was the 2023 Campus COVID Stories, which highlighted the collective trauma, loss and resilience during and the global pandemic. Students from three semesters interviewed more than 100 campus people and transcribed more than 2 million words. The project’s oral stories can be found in the University Archives.
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