The second year of the Zell Fellows Reading Series continues , featuring fresh writing from the third year fellows in the U-M Helen Zell Writers’ Program, program alumni, and special guests. March’s theme is “Sports.” Readers include Zell Fellows Chris McCormick and Mindy Misener with Zell alums John Ganiard and Tricia Khleif.
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.
Rachel Hartman‘s new book, Shadow Scale, is forthcoming from Random House. As a child, Hartman played cello, lip-synched Mozart operas with her sisters, and fostered the deep love of music that inspired much of her previous novel, Seraphina. Rachel earned a degree in comparative literature but eschewed graduate school in favor of bookselling and drawing comics. Born in Kentucky, she has lived in Philadelphia, Chicago, St. Louis, England, and Japan. She now lives with her family in Vancouver, Canada. To learn more, please visit SeraphinaBooks.com or RachelHartmanBooks.com.
Reading by local poet Joseph Chapman, whose poems have appeared in Boston Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. The program begins with open mike readings.
Monthly open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. The 3 judges are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Space limited, so it’s smart to arrive early. March theme: Confusion. $8. Doors open, and sign up start at 6.
Talk by the Oxford based scholar-translator Rosamund Bartlett, author of an acclaimed new translation of Tolstoy’s classic novel Anna Karenina. Bring a bag lunch, if you like. Room 1636.
“My Beautiful Hook-Nosed Beauty Queen Strut Wave and Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems”
Poet and fiction writer Stuart Dybek will be the RC’s 2015 Artist in Residence, March 19-21, 2015. He will also be keynote speaker at the second annual Voices of the Middle West conference, at the RC on March 21st.
Lecture by this graphic designer, author, filmmaker, and farmer who left a successful design career in New York to return to his native Zimbabwe and open the country’s first school of graphic design and new media.
U-M English professor and renowned poet Mattawa and highly acclaimed Latino poet Espada discuss Espada’s work. In conjunction with Espada’s reading on Mar. 17.
