Join us for the RC Creative Writing Program Senior Reading celebrating December Graduates Elena Potek and Nadia Todoroff. Light refreshments, great writing!
RC students present a varied program of choral music from Mozart and Mendelssohn to Shakespearean madrigals, folk songs, and gospel.
Professor Heather Thompson, of the RC Social Theory and Practice Program, delivers the second in the RC Faculty Talks series: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and its Legacy: The Perils of Writing the Painful Past“
U-M drama lecturer Kate Mendeloff directs RC students in scenes from Uncle Vanya (7 p.m.), Chekhov’s richly varied ensemble piece about the search for happiness–from love, achievement, or nature–at various stages of life, and Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes ( (8 p.m.), Tony Kushner’s celebrated 2-play series exploring the apocalyptic fears at the heart of contemporary culture. Also, “Race in America” (9 p.m.), a collage of scenes and monologues by major contemporary playwrights about racial profiling, interracial and interreligious relationships, illegal immigration, and identity.
Ana Fernandez teaches art courses at the University of Michigan’s Residential College in drawing and printmaking. Her artwork includes elements of drawing, printmaking, fibers and collage. It reflects a tactile sensibility and an affinity for layering, patterning and ornamentation. Thematically, it focuses on the interaction between fashion, representations of the female body and notions of femininity.
Jan. 29 & 30. RC students direct and perform this popular semiannual 90-minute program of short scenes on a variety of topics and in a variety of styles, many written by RC students.
Jan. 29 & 30. RC students direct and perform this popular semiannual 90-minute program of short scenes on a variety of topics and in a variety of styles, many written by RC students.
RC Writers Tea, open to majors and current writing students who are non majors, and current students interested in the writing major. In RC’s Benzinger Library.
Stephen Berrey reads from his new book The Jim Crow Routine, followed by a discussion with Angela Dillard and audience Q&A.
The South’s system of Jim Crow racial oppression is usually understood in terms of legal segregation that mandated the separation of white and black Americans. Yet, as Stephen A. Berrey shows, it was also a high-stakes drama that played out in the routines of everyday life, where blacks and whites regularly interacted on sidewalks and buses and in businesses and homes. Every day, individuals made, unmade, and remade Jim Crow in how they played their racial roles—how they moved, talked, even gestured. The highly visible but often subtle nature of these interactions constituted the Jim Crow routine.
In this study of Mississippi race relations in the final decades of the Jim Crow era, Berrey argues that daily interactions between blacks and whites are central to understanding segregation and the racial system that followed it. Berrey shows how civil rights activism, African Americans’ refusal to follow the Jim Crow script, and national perceptions of southern race relations led Mississippi segregationists to change tactics. No longer able to rely on the earlier routines, whites turned instead to less visible but equally insidious practices of violence, surveillance, and policing, rooted in a racially coded language of law and order. Reflecting broader national transformations, these practices laid the groundwork for a new era marked by black criminalization, mass incarceration, and a growing police presence in everyday life.
About the Author
Stephen A. Berrey is assistant professor of American culture and history at the University of Michigan. His research explores the relationship between racial practices and everyday culture in the twentieth-century U.S.
Angela D. Dillard is the Earl Lewis Collegiate Professor of Afroamerican and African Studies and in the Residential College. She specializes in American and African-American intellectual history, particularly around issues of race, religion and politics—on both the Left and the Right sides of the political spectrum.
The Author’s Forum is a collaboration between the U-M Institute for the Humanities, University Library, & Ann Arbor Book Festival.
Additional support for this event provided by the departments of Afroamerican and African History, American Culture, History, and the Residential College.
RC Creative Writing alumna Carrie Smith will read from Silent City, her new crime novel. Carrie won three Hopwood Awards (one in 1977 and two in 1979), and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has been a finalist in Nimrod Magazine’s Katherine Anne Porter prize for fiction, and is the author of a literary first novel, Forget Harry published by Simon & Schuster. Carrie moved to New York City in 1981. By day, she is Senior Vice President and Publisher of Benchmark Education Company. By night, she thinks about murder. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her partner and sixteen year old twins.
