Every 1st & 3rd Sun. 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.
7-9 p.m. (sign-up begins at 6:30 p.m.), Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetrySlam.
Literati is pleased to celebrate two of the works chosen as 2016 Michigan Notable Books:Yamasaki in Detroit by John Gallagher and The Orbit Magazine Anthology by Rob St. Mary.
Although his best-known project was the World Trade Center in New York City, Japanese American architect Minoru Yamasaki (1912–1986) worked to create moments of surprise, serenity, and delight in distinctive buildings around the world. In his adopted home of Detroit, where he lived and worked for the last half of his life, Yamasaki produced many important designs that range from public buildings to offices and private residences. In Yamasaki in Detroit: A Search for Serenity, author John Gallagher presents both a biography of Yamasaki—or Yama as he was known—and an examination of his working practices, with an emphasis on the architect’s search for a style that would express his artistic goals. Both knowledgeable fans of modernist architecture and general readers will enjoy Yamasaki in Detroit.
With a mischievous globe-headed mascot that appeared in every issue and even on Quentin Tarantino’s T-shirt in Pulp Fiction, Orbit was an instantly recognizable arbiter of 1990s Detroit culture. But its irreverent tone and unique editorial features could be traced to two earlier local publications from creator Jerry Peterson, a.k.a. Jerry Vile—White Noise (1978–1980) and Fun: The Magazine for Swinging Intelectuals [sic] (1986–1990). In The Orbit Magazine Anthology: Re-Entry, author Rob St. Mary details the full run of White Noise, Fun, and Orbit, collecting two decades’ worth of Detroit’s alternative publishing history into an oversized, heavily illustrated volume that situates the publications in the city’s pop culture and media history. Anyone interested in Detroit arts and culture or the history of alternative publishing will be grateful for The Orbit Magazine Anthology.
Kristine Kruppa is a mechanical engineer at Ford Motor Company, writer, and world traveler. Her days are spent designing cool new car parts, but her evenings are filled with writing and cats. She has traveled solo to seventeen countries on five continents. Her other hobbies include hunting for the perfect cup of coffee, exploring used book stores, and accidentally climbing mountains.
27 Days to Midnight: Everyone in Dahlia’s world knows when they’re going to die. Except her.Her father has never shown her the pocket watch counting down the days she has left to live. When he sacrifices himself to save her from her scheduled death, Dahlia abandons her comfortable home and sets off after his murderer to uncover the secrets her father died to protect…and the time research that could bring him back to life. Then she meets Farren Reed. She should hate him. He’s an enemy soldier, a cowardly deserter, and the most insufferable man Dahlia’s ever met. Still, she needs all the help she can get, and Farren is the only chance she has to find the man who murdered her father. But Farren has only twenty-seven days left on his watch. In that time, Dahlia must recover her father’s time research, foil a psychotic general’s plot, and learn to survive in a world that will never be the same. But the research holds secrets more dangerous than she had ever imagined. She will have to choose what is most important: revenge, Farren’s life, or her own. And time is running out.
Elena Bozzi: Elena Bozzi prefers to focus rather than multi-task, and has a good habit of dropping things that don’t really matter in order to walk through the forest. She received honors and degrees in literature, science, and teaching middle school from Central Michigan University. She has worked in various greenhouses and as a freelance gardener, and has written much more than she has shared. She has been a teacher, and still is, though not always in a formal setting. She is and will always be a student, though not always in a formal setting. She thinks one of the best things anyone can do for themselves is travel, and if one can’t get out, books work perfectly fine. She hopes you will enjoy her first novel, Puddle: A Tale for the Curious.
Puddle: A Tale for the Curious: Puddle is a tale for the curious, the lover of plants, and the healer inside each of us. It is for those of us who notice the little details, such as reflections upon tranquil water. Here is a story that celebrates the power of stories, and knows that solid connections can be made over meals, especially woodland-foraged meals.
Birch loves her garden. Her sanctuary is the nearby forest. She understands that adventures can happen at any moment, especially when there are cats involved. When she witnesses a boy crawl from a puddle that wouldn’t cover a toad, she suspends her disbelief in order to see his side of the tale.
Get your feet wet with Birch and Puddle as they travel to worlds by way of the reflections upon puddles. Prowl with Caht, the cat who spells its name with an h, and arrange necessary… encounters.. with Nimupara, the Watcher of Worlds. Dance all night with the Trees, as they share their stories and their secrets. And listen to the land.
Join the fireside for conversations concerning science and magic (which is often science that has not been explained yet). Review facts, and wonder about wonderful perhapses. Celebrate life, love, joy, health, healing, and the nonjudgmental approach to life that is common among trees.
Former federal prosecutor Leotta, an MSU grad best, discusses The Last Good Girl, a mystery set in a thinly veiled Ann Arbor that’s the latest in her series of legal thrillers featuring sex-crimes prosecutor Anna Curtis, and Washington (DC) writer Lehane discusses Murder at the 42nd Street Library, a mystery set in a NYC public library that features a librarian-turned-reluctant sleuth. Signings.
Ann Arbor Community High School students read their poetry.
Literati is delighted to host the launch of Chris McCormick’s debut, Desert Boys.
A vivid and assured work of fiction from a major new voice, following the life of a young man growing up, leaving home, and coming back again, marked by the stark beauty of California’s Mojave Desert and the various fates of those who leave and those who stay behind. This series of powerful, intertwining stories illuminates Daley Kushner’s world–the family, friends and community that have both formed and constrained him, and his new lief in San Francisco. Back home, the desert preys on those who cannot conform: an alfalfa farmer on the outskirts of town; two young girls whose curiosity leads to danger; a black politician who once served as his school’s confederate mascot; Daley’s mother, an immigrant from Armenia; and Daley himself, introspective and queer. Meanwhile, in another desert on the other side of the world, war threatens to fracture Daley’s most meaningful–and most fraught–connection to home, his friendship with Robert Karinger. A luminous debut, Desert Boys traces the development of towns into cities, of boys into men, and the haunting effects produced when the two transformations overlap. Both a bildungsroman and a portrait of a changing place, the book mines the terrain between the desire to escape and the hunger to belong.
“This is a book about place, or really like so many books about place (Dubliners, Winesburg, Ohio) two places, in this case two Californias―San Francisco on the one hand; the less familiar but finely evoked small desert community from which the narrator originates on the other. But it’s also a book about shame, two shames, the shame of where we come from, and the shame of leaving it. Through a series of quietly intimate confessions we learn how torn the teller is between past and present, small town and big city, and McCormick captures this tension beautifully in the contrast between his laconic, but frankly feeling prose and his restless formal innovation. Wise and vulnerable by turns, this is a quietly stunning debut.”―Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl
Chris McCormick was raised in the Antelope Valley. He earned his B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.F.A. at the University of Michigan, where he was the recipient of two Hopwood Awards. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal are joined by retired AADL librarian Shutta Crum, author of more than 1 bookd for kids, to discuss writing children’s books and getting them published. For adult and teen (grade 6 & up) fiction and nonfiction writers.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Jennifer Haigh in support of her latest novel, Heat and Light, a staff favorite and our Literati Cultura pick for May!
Jennifer Haigh returns to the Pennsylvania town at the center of her iconic novel Baker Towers, in this ambitious, achingly human story of modern America and the conflicting forces at its heart.
Forty years ago, Bakerton coal fueled the country. Then the mines closed, and the town wore away like a bar of soap. Now Bakerton has been granted a surprise third act: it sits squarely atop the Marcellus Shale, a massive deposit of natural gas. To drill or not to drill? Prison guard Rich Devlin leases his mineral rights to finance his dream of farming. He doesn’t count on the truck traffic and nonstop noise, his brother’s skepticism or the paranoia of his wife, Shelby, who insists the water smells strange and is poisoning their frail daughter. Meanwhile his neighbors, organic dairy farmers Mack and Rena, hold out against the drilling—until a passionate environmental activist disrupts their lives.
Heat and Light depicts a community blessed and cursed by its natural resources. Soaring, ambitious, it zooms from drill rig to shareholders’ meeting to the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor to the ruined landscape of the “strippins,” haunting reminders of Pennsylvania’s past energy booms. This is a dispatch from a forgotten America—a work of searing moral clarity from one of the finest writers of her generation, a courageous and necessary book.
“Heat and Light achieves pure novelistic virtuosity. It’s brilliant beginning to end.” — Richard Ford
“Heat and Light is a work of tremendous sweep and ambition, a timely, inventive novel powered by Jennifer Haigh’s remarkable compassion for her characters.” — Jess Walter, author ofBeautiful Ruins
“Paragraph by paragraph, the prose is full of marvelous texture and material sensation. Heat and Light is an intricate and ambitious novel, firmly grounded in history and our time. The narrator’s encyclopedic knowledge and keen insights about the physical world and social life make the novel a thrilling page turner.” —Ha Jin, National Book Award-winning author of Waiting
Jennifer Haigh is the author of four previous novels: Faith, The Condition, Baker Towers, and Mrs. Kimble, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her short story collection News from Heaven won the Massachusetts Book Award and the PEN New England Award in Fiction. Haigh’s short stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Granta, The Best American Short Stories and many other places. She lives in Boston.
Literati is pleased to welcome poet Maggie Smith in support of her most recent collection, The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison.
Delving into the depths of fairy tales to transform the daily into encounters with the marvelous but dangerous, Maggie Smith’s poems question whether the realms of imagination and story can possibly be safe. Even as her compressed stories are unfolding on a suburban cul de sac, they are deep in the mythical woods, “where children, despite their commonness, / are a delicacy.”
“Enchantment: that rarest of all poetic gifts. As when the neurons, in the kaleidoscopic movie they call a “functional MRI,” speak to us in colors on a screen from the deepest recesses of what we already know. Maggie Smith’s are poems of transformation: haunting, gorgeous, intimately unsettling. I cannot remember when I last read a book to match her powers of delight.” — Linda Gregerson
Maggie Smith holds a BA from Ohio Wesleyan University and an MFA from The Ohio State University. Her previous books are Lamp of the Body (Red Hen Press, 2005) and three prizewinning chapbooks, Disasterology (Dream Horse Press, forthcoming), The List of Dangers (Kent State/Wick Poetry Series, 2010), and Nesting Dolls (Pudding House, 2005). She lives with her husband and two children in Bexley, Ohio, where she works as a freelance writer and editor.
