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. January theme: Strict. $8. Doors open, and sign up start at 6.
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.
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. February theme: Love Hurts. $8. Doors open, and sign up start at 6.
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.
U-M drama students in Kate Mendeloff’s play production seminar direct and perform renowned English playwright Caryl Churchill’s acclaimed 2012 play about relationships in the digital age presented as an evolving mosaic
Feb. 27 & 28 (different programs). Performances for adults (Sat.) & families (Sun.) by top-notch storytellers from around the country and the state. Headliners are 2 storytellers whose commentaries have been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Kevin Kling is a Minneapolis storyteller who specializes in autobiographical tales about everything from growing up in Minnesota and eating things before knowing what they are to hopping freight trains and getting his play banned in Czechoslovakia. Bill Harley is a Massachusetts songwriter and storyteller with an off-center point of view whose stories paint vibrant and hilarious pictures of growing up, schooling, and family life. Opening act is Yvonne Healy, a Brighton-based raconteur named Top Irish Storyteller in the USA whose repertoire includes weird Irish legends, outrageous family tales, and more.
7:30 p.m. (Sat.) & 1 p.m. (Sun.), The Ark, 316 S. Main. Tickets $20 (Sat.) & $10 (Sun. family concert) in advance at the Michigan Union Ticket Office (mutotix.com) &theark.org, and at the door. To charge by phone, call 763-TKTS.