Literati is pleased to welcome Scott Ellsworth in support of The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph.
The Secret Game is the true story of the game that never should have happened–and of a nation on the brink of monumental change. In the fall of 1943, at the little-known North Carolina College for Negroes, Coach John McLendon was on the verge of changing basketball forever. A protégé of James Naismith, the game’s inventor, McLendon taught his team to play the full-court press and run a fast break that no one could catch. His Eagles would become the highest-scoring college team in America–a basketball juggernaut that shattered its opponents by as many as sixty points per game. Yet his players faced danger whenever they traveled backcountry roads.
Across town, at Duke University, the best basketball squad on campus wasn’t the Blue Devils, but an all-white military team from the Duke medical school. Composed of former college stars from across the country, the team dismantled everyone they faced, including the Duke varsity. They were prepared to take on anyone–until an audacious invitation arrived, one that was years ahead of anything the South had ever seen before. What happened next wasn’t on anyone’s schedule.
Based on years of research, The Secret Game is a story of courage and determination, and of an incredible, long-buried moment in the nation’s sporting past. The riveting, true account of a remarkable season, it is the story of how a group of forgotten college basketball players, aided by a pair of refugees from Nazi Germany and a group of daring student activists, not only blazed a trail for a new kind of America, but helped create one of the most meaningful moments in basketball history.
Scott Ellsworth has written about American history for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Formerly a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, he is the author ofDeath in a Promised Land, a groundbreaking account of the 1921 Tulsa race riot. He lives with his wife and twin sons in Ann Arbor, where he teaches at the University of Michigan.
Pamela Reynolds, Professor Emerita at Johns Hopkins University, is RC Visiting Scholar. She reads from her recent book, War in Worcester: Youth in the Apartheid State. She has received the NOMA Literary Prize.
Literati celebrates its third birthday!
As on our previous anniversary parties, In the spirit of donating and giving back, all book sales throughout the day will benefit SafeHouse Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending domestic violence and sexual assault in Washtenaw County, Michigan.
Additionally, we’ll be hosting a reading from friends & family, featuring the work of former Literati booksellers Russ Brakefield and Tom McCartan, current Literati booksellers John Ganiard, Mairead Small Staid, Sam Krowchenko, and Gina Balibrera, and our dear friend Ray McDaniel.
This event is free and open to the public.
Gina Balibrera is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and was a Zell Postgraduate Fellow in Prose at the University of Michigan in 2013-2014. Gina lives in Ann Arbor, where she works at a bookstore, teaches writing at the University of Michigan, and is finishing a novel set in 1930s El Salvador and France.
Russell Brakefield received his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He lives in Ann Arbor where he teaches writing at the University of Michigan and works as the managing editor for Canarium Books. His most recent work appears in The Southern Indiana Review, Hobart, and Language Lessons: An Anthology by Third Man Records. He is currently an artist in residence with the University Musical Society.
John M. Ganiard lives and works in Ann Arbor (Michigan, USA).
Sam Krowchenko’s writing has appeared in Salon, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Full Stop.
Tom McCartan used to work at LIterati. He’s had stories published in Unsaid,Hobart, and some other places. He also used to work at Melville House. Once he even at a music show at Literati, to which he brought a case of beer.
Mairead Small Staid is a poet and essayist whose work can be found in AGNI, The Believer, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Ninth Letter, andPloughshares, as well as online at The Awl, The Hairpin, Jezebel, and The Point.
Raymond McDaniel is the author of Special Powers and Abilities, Saltwater Empire and Murder (a violet), a National Poetry Series selection. His writing appears in many magazines and in the anthology American Poets in the 21st Century. Born in Florida, McDaniel now lives in Ann Arbor, teaches at the University of Michigan, and writes for The Constant Critic.
Join us to celebrate the release of Book I in ‘The Sadhana Trilogy’! Ann Arbor author Shelley Schanfield practices Buddhism and yoga. Her research sparked her curiosity about Yasodhara, the woman who became Siddhartha’s wife, and she became inspired by the personal and spiritual struggles of women who knew him.
The Tigress and the Yogi takes you to a vivid mythical world with a talking tigress, a wandering yogi, and a young woman’s journey through an ancient land where chaos threatens gods and mortals alike. It examines the longing for spiritual transformation and inner peace, and the ways in which the search for wisdom and compassion can go terribly wrong. Signing to follow.
Learn more at ShelleySchanfield.com
These 3 mystery writers discuss their new books. Hellmann’s Jump Cut is the latest in her series about a Chicago industrial video producer who this time finds herself entangled in a web of espionage, murder, and suspicion. Swanson’s Between a Book and a Hard Place is the 5th in her series of mysteries featuring the owner of an old-fashioned five-and-dime shop in small-town Missouri. Zettel’s The Assasin’s Masque is the final installment of her trilogy about a spy posing as a lady in waiting at the palace of King George I, and her new cozy, A Familiar Tail, published under the pen name Delia James, features an unlucky-in-love artist who falls in with a group of witches while vacationing in Portsmouth (NH).
Literati is pleased to welcome James Stevens and Ralph Nelson for a discussion of their book Digital Vernacular: Architectural Principles, Tools, and Processes.
Digital Vernacular addresses the why and how of digital fabrication in hundreds of step-by-step color images, illuminating a set of working principles and techniques that join theory with practice. Authors James Stevens and Ralph Nelson reconcile local traditions and innovations with globally accessible methods and digital toolsets. By combining ethics with hardware, the book will root you in the origins of making, ensuring a lasting and relevant reference for your studio practice.
The book opens with the origins and principles of the digital vernacular, then outlines digital vernacular tools including computer numerically controlled (CNC) mills, laser cutters, and 3D printers. You’ll even learn to create your own digital fabrication tools out of inexpensive materials. The book concludes with the processes of the digital vernacular, including techniques for removing, joining, forming, and adding.
A companion website at make-Lab.org hosts additional step-by-step processes and project outcomes.
James Stevens is an Associate Professor and the Director of makeLab, a digital fabrication studio in the College of Architecture and Design at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan, USA.
Ralph Nelson is an Associate Professor in the College of Architecture and Design at Lawrence Technological University and Principal of Loom, a collaborative design practice, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA.
All poets invited to compete in a poetry slam judged by a randomly chosen panel from the audience. The program begins with a poetry open mike and (occasionally) a short set by a featured poet.
8-11 p.m. (sign-up begins at 7:30 p.m.), $5 suggested donation. A2poetry.com.
Literati is delighted to welcome Desiree Cooper in support of her debut, Know the Mother.
While a mother can be defined as a creator, a nurturer, a protector—at the center of each mother is an individual who is attempting to manage her own fears, desires, and responsibilities in different and sometimes unexpected ways. In Know the Mother, author Desiree Cooper explores the complex archetype of the mother in all of her incarnations. In a collage of meditative stories, women—both black and white—find themselves wedged between their own yearnings and their roles as daughters, sisters, grandmothers, and wives.
In this heart-wrenching collection, Cooper reveals that gender and race are often unanticipated interlopers in family life. An anxious mother reflects on her prenatal fantasies of suicide while waiting for her daughter to come home late one night. A lawyer miscarries during a conference call and must proceed as though nothing has happened. On a rare night out with her husband, a new mother tries convincing herself that everything is still the same. A politician’s wife’s thoughts turn to slavery as she contemplates her own escape: “Even Harriet Tubman had realized that freedom wasn’t worth the price of abandoning her family, so she’d come back home. She’d risked it all for love.” With her lyrical and carefully crafted prose, Cooper’s stories provide truths without sermon and invite empathy without sentimentality.
Know the Mother explores the intersection of race and gender in vignettes that pull you in and then are gone in an instant. Readers of short fiction will appreciate this deeply felt collection.
A 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, Desiree Cooper is a former attorney, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist and Detroit community activist whose fiction dives unflinchingly into the intersection of racism and sexism. Using the compressed medium of flash fiction, she explores intimate spaces to reveal what it means to be human. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Callaloo,Detroit Noir, Best African American Fiction 2010, and Tidal Basin Review, among other online and print publications. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging black poets. She is currently a Kimbilio fellow, a national residency for African American fiction writers.
Calling all trivia enthusiasts and book lovers!
We’re hosting a fun, prize-filled evening of book trivia. Bring your own teams (no larger than 6 people per team) or come and we’ll pair you with new bookish friends.
The team who wins receives $25 gift cards for each person; 2nd place gets $10 gift cards. Free, sign up when you arrive (and start thinking of those creative, book-themed team names!)
Also, we’ll have a tournament at the end of the year with the winning teams. (Still TBD.)
Rule #1: The first rule of Trivia Night is that you can’t talk about Trivia Night (kidding!).
Rule #2: Teams can be up to 6 players. Come with a team or recruit one when you arrive.
Rule #3: No cell phones or any other devices can be used.
Teams work together to answer questions on paper. Scores will be announced after every round. There is no limit to the number of teams. There will be adult and children’s book clues.
You will be required to have a team name, and creativity is encouraged. Past teams have been: Little Random House on the Prairie, Bookslingers on Ice, Poets “R” We, well, you get the drift.
Grand Prize– Bragging rights and Literati Gift Cards.
Consolation Prize: There is no such thing as consolation in the cut-throat world of Trivia Night!
And may the odds be ever in your favor!
Lisa Beazley has worked in journalism and public relations for more than fifteen years. Before becoming self-employed, she worked as a Media Relations Manager for Gensler and as the managing editor at “Hawaii Woman “magazine. She received her bachelor’s degree at Ohio University. “Keep Me Posted” is her first novel.
