Sergio Troncoso is author of From This Wicked Patch of Dust, which Kirkus Reviews named as one of the Best Books of 2012 in a starred review. The novel won the Southwest Book Award. Troncoso also wrote Crossing Borders: Personal Essays, winner of the Bronze Award for Essays from ForeWord Reviews. The Portland Book Review called the collection “Heart-wrenching.” He is also the author of The Nature of Truth, hailed by The Chicago Tribune as “impressively lucid.” Publishers Weekly said of Troncoso’s first book, The Last Tortilla and Other Stories, “These stories are richly satisfying.” Troncoso was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters, and in 2014 he was co-chair of the Literature panel for the New York State Council on the Arts. Steve Inskeep from NPR’s Morning Edition recently interviewed Troncoso for a series on the United States-Mexico border, and the El Paso City Council voted unanimously to rename the Ysleta public library branch in honor of Troncoso.
Each term, Semester in Detroit and the U-M Detroit Center partner to organize community classroom events that are free and open to the public. Detroit community members join together with U-M students, faculty and staff to learn more about Detroit’s past and present. Format varies from traditional panels to poetry readings to trips to jazz and cultural clubs throughout Detroit. Topics of discussion range from Education Reform to the Contemporary Labor Movement to implementing the Detroit Future City Framework. Always dynamic and sometimes quite hot! Free to everyone and always preceded by some yummy food! So check out the dates below and plan to participate this fall!
1/22 – 1967: Part 1 -What Happened and Why – Stephen Ward and David Goldberg, Dan Aldridge
2/5 -A General Gordon Baker Jr. Memorial Panel
Detroit 1967: Part 2 – The Aftermath – Stephen Ward and Dan Aldridge, Maria Guadiana, Roy Levy Williams
2/19 – We Are Here: A multilayered presentation on the roles men and boys of color play in the development and healing of communities – Anita Gonzalez and Antonio Lyons and company
3/12 – Detroit Music Beyond the Motown Sound – Lolita Hernandez and Ozzie Rivera
3/26- Foundations and Detroit “Development” – A Public Evaluation – Craig Regester and Dale Thomson, Shea Howell, Ed Egnatios
4/9- Digging Deeper into Detroit’s Downtown “Boom” – Craig Regester and Ryan Felton
4/16 – Final Reflection – Lolita Hernandez/Craig Regester
Free transportation is provided by the MDetroit Center Connector which departs the Central Campus Transit Center (CCTC) at 5:40pm on Thursdays.
Reading, with accompaniment by a Detroit musician TBA, by this influential Puerto Rican poet, a retired Rutgers University English professor who cofounded the Nuyorican Poets Café. He is also the first English translator of Neruda’s Songs of Protest.
Veteran novelist, filmmaker, and Zen Buddhist priest Ruth Ozeki reads from her critically acclaimed 2014 novel, the 2014 Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti Reads selection. The story is an inventive, beguiling blend of 2 narratives, one of a desperately lonely 16-year-old Tokyo girl contemplating a suicide and the other of a writer living in British Colombia who finds the Tokyo girl’s diary washed up on shore some time after the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan. Full of Ozeki’s signature humor, the narrative deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth. Signing. Doors open at 6 pm.
Jean Valentine won the Yale Younger Poets Award for her first book, Dream Barker, in 1965. Her eleventh book of poetry is Break the Glass (Copper Canyon Press, 2010). Her new book, Shirt in Heaven, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon in 2015. Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems 1965–2003 was the winner of the 2004 National Book Award for Poetry. The recipient of the 2009 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets, Valentine has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia. She lives in New York City. Literati will be facilitating book sales.
Ann Arbor Storytellers Guild members host a storytelling program. Audience members are encouraged to bring a 5-minute story to tell.
Marion discusses her memoir for young people about her family’s struggle to survive the horrors of the Nazis. (DT 4th floor, meeting room).
Katie Hartsock is the author of a poetry chapbook, Hotels, Motels, and Extended Stays, published by Toadlily Press in their 2014 Quartet Series. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Massachusetts Review, Measure, Michigan Quarterly Review, RHINO, and Southwest Review; and in the anthology Down to the Dark River: Poems about the Mississippi River (Louisiana Literature Press, 2015). She holds a MFA from the University of Michigan and will receive a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University in summer 2015. Her full-length manuscript has been a finalist for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and the New Criterion Poetry Prize.
RC Writing alumna and U-M professor Laura Kasischke has published eight collections of poetry and eight novels. Her novels include Suspicious River (1996), White Bird in a Blizzard (1999), and The Life Before Her Eyes(2002). They have been translated widely, and adapted for film. She has been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, several Pushcart Prizes, the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, and the Beatrice Hawley Award. Her other collections of poetry include Space, in Chains, Lilies, Without, Gardening in the Dark, Wild Brides, Housekeeping in a Dream, Fire and Flower and What It Wasn’t. Her poems and stories have been published in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic , The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Iowa Review and elsewhere.
Note: rescheduled from February 11
This Manchester writer and illustrator discusses her 2 Christian children’s books, Guided by Grace and God’s Greatest Gift.
