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.
Literati is proud to be the bookseller for the 2016 Jill Harris Memorial Lecture, presented by the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities.
Laila Lalami is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist, and The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was on the Man Booker Prize longlist. The Moor’s Account was also a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, the Guardian, the New York Times, and in many anthologies. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.
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.
Literati is proud to be the bookseller for the Author’s Forum presentation of The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare: A conversation with Steven Mullaney and Doug Trevor.
The crises of faith that fractured Reformation Europe also caused crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling as well as structures of belief were transformed; there was a reformation of social emotions as well as a Reformation of faith. As Steven Mullaney shows in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan popular drama played a significant role in confronting the uncertainties and unresolved traumas of Elizabethan Protestant England. Shakespeare and his contemporaries—audiences as well as playwrights—reshaped popular drama into a new form of embodied social, critical, and affective thought. Examining a variety of works, from revenge plays to Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy and beyond, Mullaney explores how post-Reformation drama not only exposed these faultlines of society on stage but also provoked playgoers in the audience to acknowledge their shared differences. He demonstrates that our most lasting works of culture remain powerful largely because of their deep roots in the emotional landscape of their times.
Steven Mullaney is professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England.
Douglas Trevor is the author of the novel Girls I Know and the short story collection The Thin Tear in the Fabric of Space. He is an associate professor of Renaissance literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan.
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 Department of English Language and Literature.
Book Signing and Talk with Diane Burney, author of Spiritual Balancing: A Guidebook for Living in the Light
Apr. 6, 7 p.m. in the Crazy Wisdom Tea Room
A free author event that will include an overview of Burney’s book, situations that create auric weaknesses, ways to increase your vibrations, and spiritual protection.
Saadia Faruqi is a Pakistani American writer of fiction and nonfiction. She writes for a number of publications including Huffington Post and The Islamic Monthly about the global contemporary Muslim experience and about interfaith dialogue. She has trained law enforcement on cultural sensitivity issues and offers community college classes on a variety of topics related to Islam and Muslims. She is editor-in-chief of Blue Minaret, a magazine for Muslim art, poetry and prose. Her short stories have been published in several American literary journals and magazines such as Catch & Release, On the Rusk, In Flight and The Great American Literary Magazine. “Brick Walls: Tales of Hope & Courage from Pakistan” is her debut fiction book. She is currently working on a novel based in Pakistan and the U.S. as well as a children’s book series.
Literati is pleased to present a roundtable discussion, in conjunction with the Jean & Samuel Frankel Center for Judaic Studies, to mark the publication of Women’s Hebrew Poetry on American Shores: Poems by Anne Kleiman and Annabelle Farmelant.
Although Anne (Chana) Kleiman—who died in 2011 at the age of 101—was the first American-born Jewish woman to publish poems in Hebrew, and Annabelle (Chana) Farmelant—who is still living and occasionally publishing—wrote a substantial body of Hebrew verse from the 1940s to the 1960s, their work is virtually unknown today, even to those familiar with Hebrew literature in America. The roundtable will discuss the singular voices of these women, introduce their captivating and wide–ranging poetry and place it in its historical, literary, and cultural contexts. The rountable will feature editor Shachar Pinsker, the translator Adriana Jacobs, Adina Kleiman (the daughter of the poet Anne Kleiman), and faculty from the Frankel Center who are experts on American Jewish Literature.
Literati is the bookseller for the Zell Visiting Writers Series at the University of Michigan and the 2016 Sarah Marwil Lamstein Children’s Literature Lecture, presented by R.J. Palacio.
R.J. Palacio is the author of New York Times #1 Bestseller Wonder, a novel about a young boy born with a facial deformity entering the fifth grade. A former art director and book jacket designer, Palacio lives in New York City with her husband, two sons, and two dogs.
