RC alum Alyson Foster will read from her debut novel, God is an Astronaut. Set in the immediate future of civilian space tourism, the novel unfolds through the emails of one woman whose marriage is crumbling beneath her.
Lolita Hernandez will read from her new story collection, Making Callaloo in Detroit, in the Keene.
October’s theme is Horror/ The Weird. Readers include Zell Fellows Dan Hornsby and Rose Miller with guests, Literati booksellers and Zell Writers’ program alum, Russ Brakefield and John Ganiard.
Stephen Schottenfeld will read from his debut novel, Bluff City Pawn. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his stories have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Iowa Review, New England Review, and other journals. Stephen received special mention in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies. Schottenfeld teaches English at the University of Rochester.
Local indie press Short Flight/Long Drive‘s Marry, F*ck, Kill, (Cuddle) Tour features five writers:
Chloe Caldwell is the author of the forthcoming novella, Women, (SF/LD Books, October 2014) and the essay collection Legs Get led Astray (Future Tense Books, April 2012). Chloe’s work has appeared in Salon.com, The Rumpus, Thought Catalog, Nylon, The Nervous Breakdown, xoJane, The Frisky, The Sun Magazine, SMITH, Jewcy, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Freerange Nonfiction, The Faster Times, The Fix, and Men’s Health.
Elizabeth Ellen‘s stories have appeared in numerous online and print journals over the last ten years, including elimae, Quick Fiction, Hobart, Lamination Colony, Muumuu House, HTMLGIANT, and many others. She is the author of the chapbook Before You She Was a Pit Bull (Future Tense) and her collection of flash fictions, Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix, was included in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: four chapbooks of short short fiction by four women (Rose Metal Press). Fast Machine is a collection of her best work from the last decade. She was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize for her story “Teen Culture” which appeared in American Short Fiction in 2012. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she co-edits Hobart and oversees Hobart’s book division, Short Flight/Long Drive Books.
Mira Gonzalez‘s work has been featured on VICE, Thought Catalog, Muumuu House, Hobart, and in various other places online and in print.Her debut poetry collection I will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together was published by Sorry House in 2013. It was a finalist for Goodread’s Choice Awards, coming out ahead of Poet Laureate Billy Collins, and losing to J.R.R. Tolkien.
Chelsea Martin was 23 when she published her first collection, Everything Was Fine until Whatever (2009), a genre-blurring book of short fiction, nonfiction, prose, poetry, sketches, and memoir. She is also the author, most recently, of The Real Funny Thing about Apathy (2010) and Even Though I Don’t Miss You (2013).
Rae Paris is from Carson, California. Her poetry and fiction appear or are forthcoming in Dismantle: an Anthology of Writing from the VONA/ VOICES Writers Workshop, Solstice, Blackberry, Guernica, Feminist Studies, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by an NEA Literature Fellowship, and writing residencies from the Hambidge Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA), and Norcroft. Her poem “The Forgetting Tree” was nominated for Best of the Net 2013. Her short story “The Girl Who Ate Her Own Skin” was a recommended story in the 2009 O. Henry Prize Stories, and her collection was a finalist for the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction. She recently completed a young adult novel titled You, excerpts of which were finalists for the Summer Literary Seminars and the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards.
Join Michigan poets Anne-Marie Oomen, Teresa Scollon, and Ellen Stone for reading and conversation.
Anne-Marie Oomen is author of two memoirs, Pulling Down the Barn and House of Fields, both Michigan Notable Books, An American Map: Essays (Wayne State University Press); and a full-length collection of poetry, Uncoded Woman (Milkweed Editions). She is also represented in New Poems of the Third Coast: Contemporary Michigan Poetry, and edited Looking Over My Shoulder: Reflections on the Twentieth Century, an anthology of seniors’ essays funded by the Michigan Humanities Council. She has written seven plays, including the award-winning Northern Belles (inspired by oral histories of women farmers), and most recently, Secrets of Luuce Talk Tavern, 2012 winner of the CTAM contest. She adapted the meditations of Gwen Frostic for Chaotic Harmony, a choreopoem. She is founding editor of Dunes Review, former president of Michigan Writers, Inc., serves as instructor of creative writing at Interlochen Arts Academy, ICCA Writer’s Retreat, and Solstice MFA at Pine Manor College, MA. She and her husband, David Early, have built their own home near Empire.
Teresa Scollon is a poet, essayist, editor, and reviewer. Author of To Embroider the Ground with Prayer(Wayne State University Press, 2012) and the chapbook Friday Nights the Whole Town Goes to the Basketball Game (Michigan Writers Cooperative Press, 2009), she has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Western Michigan University’s Prague Summer Program. She is alumna and past Writer-in-Residence at Interlochen Arts Academy. Her poems have appeared in several journals, including Third Coast, Dunes Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, Atlanta Review, Damselfly Press, andNimrod. Her poem “River, Page” won the Split This Rock 2009 poetry contest. A native of Michigan’s Thumb, she is interested in themes of community and story. She serves on the board of directors of Michigan Writers, Inc., a literary nonprofit organization devoted to supporting the development of writers in northern Michigan. Former book review editor for ForeWord Reviews, Teresa continues freelance editing and reviewing. She teaches composition and creative writing at Northwestern Michigan College.
Ellen Stone teaches at Community High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her poetry collection, The Solid Living World, won the 2013 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press chapbook contest. Ellen’s poems have appeared in Cottonwood Review, Dunes Review, Melancholy Hyperbole, and in the anthologies, In the Garden published by Outrider Press, as well as Uncommon Core published by Red Beard Press.
U-M alum (and former NELP professor) Diane Cook who will read from her debut story collection Man V. Nature. Diane’s fiction has been published in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Tin House, Zoetrope, One Story,Guernica, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and on This American Life, where she worked as a radio producer for six years. She earned an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Teaching Fellow. She lives in Oakland, California.
This event will be recorded
At a time when daily print newspapers across the country are failing, the Michigan Daily continues to thrive.
Completely operated by students of the University of Michigan, the paper was founded in 1890 and covers national and international news topics ranging from politics to sports to entertainment. The Daily has been a vital part of the college experience for countless UM students, none more so than those who staffed the paper as editors, writers, and photographers over the years. Many of these Daily alumni are now award-winning journalists who work for the premier news outlets in the world.
Join us for a fascinating look at this groundbreaking newspaper with Stephanie Steinberg, editor of the new book In the Name of Editorial Freedom: 125 Years at the Michigan Daily, a compilation of original essays by some of the best-known Daily alumni about their time on staff. This inside look at the U-M newspaper is, according the former U-M President Mary Sue Coleman, “a unique window into the lives of students at the University of Michigan. Their stories are powerful and remind us of the magic of this place where students both are challenged and challenge others daily to change the world for the better.”
Stephanie will be joined by Laura Berman, former Detroit News columnist; Chris Dzombak, senior software engineer for The New York Times; and Roger Rapoport, producer of the feature films “Pilot Error” and “Waterwalk” and author of the Michael Moore biography “Citizen Moore.”
Local radio personality Martin Bandyke hosts this event, which includes a book signing. Books will be for sale.
Friday Night’s Alright for Reading
Midwestern Gothic is excited to be hosting a reading at The Benzinger Library in East Quad, featuring the following contributors:
Julie Babcock is a Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of grants and fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including The Iowa Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Plume. She lived the first twenty years of her life in Ohio, then she made a circle around the Midwest and currently teaches at University of Michigan.
John Counts is a crime reporter at The Ann Arbor News. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in A Detroit Anthology, Chicago Reader’s Pure Fiction Issue and Midwestern Gothic, among other places. He is also an editor at the Great Lakes Review where he coordinates the online Narrative Map essay project.
Robert James Russell is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominated author and founding editor of the literary journals Midwestern Gothic and CHEAP POP. His work has appeared in Joyland, Great Lakes Review, Squalorly, Buffalo Almanack, Pithead Chapel, WhiskeyPaper, and The Collagist, among others. Find him online at robertjamesrussell.com.
Jared Yates Sexton is a Hoosier living and working in the South as an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Georgia Southern University. He is the Managing Editor of BULL and the author of three story collections, two of which are forthcoming from Split Lip Press, and a novel due out from New Pulp Press.
Laura Hulthen Thomas grew up in the Ann Arbor area but was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Over the years swimming in the Atlantic was replaced by swimming in Lake Michigan. Running the dunes came to mean at Sleeping Bear, not Hampton Beach, and digging for clams turned into luring trout on the Pigeon, the Au Sable, and the Pere Marquette. Now she heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College. Her short fiction has appeared in a number of journals, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany and Witness. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and received an honorable mention in the 2009 Nimrod Literary Awards. She is a contributor to Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them, a collection of ghost stories by noted Michigan authors published by Wayne State University Press.
Deepak Singh‘s memoir Chasing America: Of Lollipops, Night Clubs and Ferocious Dogs is an anthropological view of his journey from urban India to rural America. Describing encounters tinged with both racism and understanding, he offers insights into the world of working class Indian immigrants. Singh is a freelance journalist who has worked for the BBC World Service and regularly contributes to PRI’s The World.
Signing to follow.
