Apr. 8-10. U-M drama lecturer Kate Mendelof directs RC students in Federico Garcia Lorca’s landmark 1932 drama, a lyrical, expressionist tragedy inspired by a sensational 20s murder case in rural Spain. A young bride flees an arranged marriage on her wedding day, with fatal consequences. Pitting passion against social conventions, the poetic drama conjures up an archetypal Spain, steeped in Andalusian music, dance, and cultural lore.
7:30 p.m., Matthaei Botanical Gardens Conservatory, 1800 N. Dixboro Rd. Free; donations to Matthaei encouraged. 647-4354.
Literati is pleased to welcome Sarah Messer and Suzanne Wise as part of our celebration of National Poetry Month.
Sarah Messer has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Michigan Council for the Arts and others. She is the author of four books: two poetry collections, Bandit Letters and Dress Made of Mice, a history/memoir Red House, and a book of translations, Having Once Paused, Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu. In 2008-2009, she was a Poetry Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. For many years she taught in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Currently she runs One Pause Poetry (onepausepoetry.org) in Ann Arbor, Michigan and works at White Lotus Farms.
Suzanne Wise is the author of the poetry collection The Kingdom of the Subjunctive and a chapbook, Talking Cure. Recent poems have appeared in Bomb, Guernica, Ploughshares, Bone Bouquet, Catch Up, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at Middlebury College in Vermont, and Pratt Institute and Poets House in New York City.
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. McDermott is Johns Hopkins University’s Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities. Born in Brooklyn, New York, McDermott attended St. Boniface School in Elmont, New York, on Long Island (1967), Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead (1971), and the State University of New York at Oswego, receiving her BA in 1975. She received her MA from the University of New Hampshire in 1978. She has taught at UCSD and American University, has been a writer-in-residence at Lynchburg College and Hollins College in Virginia, and was lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire. Her short stories have appeared in Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, and Seventeen. She has also published articles in the New York Times and Washington Post. Ms. McDermott lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband, a neuroscientist, and three children.
Literati is delighted to welcome Brian Blanchfield in support of his collection Proxies: Essays Near Knowing.
Past compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics —Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br’er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenus—that begin to unpack the essayist himself and his life’s rotating concerns: sex and sexuality, poetry and poetics, subject positions in American labor (not excluding academia), and his upbringing in working-class, Primitive Baptist, central-piedmont North Carolina. In Proxies an original constraint, a “total suppression of recourse to authoritative sources,” engineers Brian Blanchfield’s disarming mode of independent intellection. The “repeatable experiment” to draw only from what he knows, estimates, remembers, and misremembers about the subject at hand often opens onto an unusually candid assessment of self and situation. The project’s driving impulse, courting error, peculiar in an era of crowd-sourced Wiki-knowledge, is at least as old as the one Montaigne had when, putting all the books back on the shelf, he asked, “What do I know?”
“Into what some are calling a new golden age of creative nonfiction lands Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies, which singlehandedly raises the bar for what’s possible in the field. This is a momentous work informed by a lifetime of thinking, reading, loving, and reckoning, utterly matchless in its erudition, its precision, its range, its daring, and its grace. I know of no book like it, nor any recent book as thoroughly good, in art or in heart.” —Maggie Nelson
Brian Blanchfield is the author of two books of poetry, Not Even Then and A Several World, which received the 2014 James Laughlin Award and was a longlist finalist for the National Book Award. Recent essays and poems have appeared in Harper’s, BOMB, Brick, Guernica, The Nation, Chicago Review, The Brooklyn Rail, A Public Space, Lana Turner, The Paris Review, and The Awl. He has taught as core faculty in the graduate writing programs of Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and at the University of Montana, Missoula, where he was the 2008 Richard Hugo Visiting Poet. Since 2010 he has been a poetry editor of Fence. With his partner John, he lives out past the streetlights in Tucson, where is the host of Speedway and Swan on KXCI 91.3.
All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share. Hosted by local poets and former college English teachers Joe Kelty and Ed Morin.
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. McDermott is Johns Hopkins University’s Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities. Born in Brooklyn, New York, McDermott attended St. Boniface School in Elmont, New York, on Long Island (1967), Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead (1971), and the State University of New York at Oswego, receiving her BA in 1975. She received her MA from the University of New Hampshire in 1978. She has taught at UCSD and American University, has been a writer-in-residence at Lynchburg College and Hollins College in Virginia, and was lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire. Her short stories have appeared in Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker and Seventeen. She has also published articles in the New York Timesand Washington Post. Ms. McDermott lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband, a neuroscientist, and three children.
Peter Ho Davies is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl and the story collections The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. His work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Guardian, Independent, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune, among others. His short fiction has been widely anthologized, including selections for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 1998 and Best American Short Stories 1995, 96 and 2001. In 2003 Granta named him among its twenty “Best of Young British Novelists.” The Welsh Girl was ‘long-listed’ for the Man Booker Prize 2007, and short-listed for The Galaxy British Book Awards ‘Richard and Judy’ Best Read in 2008. Davies is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is a 2008 recipient of the PEN/Malamud award. Born in Britain in 1966 to Welsh and Chinese parents, Davies now makes his home in the US. He has taught at the University of Oregon and Emory University and is now on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Poet, Marilyn Churchill will be reading from her new book Memory Stones. “All of life is her material. She takes the everyday and shapes it into a mix of humor and quicksilver.” (Mary Koral)
Marilyn has a BFA from U of M and a Masters in Creative Writing from EMU. She is a visual artist and poet, and part-owner of the West Side Book Shop in Ann Arbor. The event begins with an open mic session when area poets can share their own work or that of a favorite author. Signing to follow.
Featured readers include Jennifer Allen, Harish Batra, Julia Byers, Cameron Finch, Hannah Levine, Sydney Morgan-Green, and Molly Reitman.
RC Singers present “Heart of My Own Heart” – a concert featuring works of Telemann, Mozart, Mendelssohn, and more.
Storytellers Guild members present a program of old tales and personal stories for grownups. Free; donations accepted.annarborstorytelling.org, facebook.com/annarborstorytellers. 665-2757.
