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.
This local poet, an award-winning U-M creative writing grad, reads from Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems, his recently published debut collection which deploys familiar characters from Rapunzel to Perseus and whimsically surreal tall tales to explore the varied and violent forces that shape human identities. The program begins with open mike readings.
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.
All poets invited to compete in a weekly poetry slam judged by a randomly chosen panel from the audience. The program begins with a brief poetry open mike and (usually) a short set by a featured poet. (sign-up begins at 7:30 p.m.). $5 suggested donation.
Royal Oak based Josh Malerman published Bird Box in May 2014. Kirkus Starred Review calls it “an unsettling thriller,” and compares it to Hitchcock’s The Birds, “as well as the finer efforts of Stephen King and cult sci-fi fantasist Jonathan Carroll.” Malerman is the lead singer and songwriter for the rock band The High Strung from Detroit.
Reading by Detroit poet Jamaal May. The program begins with open mike readings.
Local professional cartoonists are on hand to help adults and teens in grade 9 & up work on their own comics. All completed strips may be submitted for inclusion in the new AADL webcomics page. AADL Malletts Creek Branch, 3090 E. Eisenhower (between Stone School & Packard).
