The Hopwood Awards Program celebates summer awardees with a reception at 3:15 and awards at 4:10. Three RC students won summer awards:
Literati is thrilled to be the bookseller for the Zell Visiting Writers Series at the University of Michigan. More information about the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, including a full calendar of visiting writers, can be found here. The September 22nd installment of ZVWS will feature poet Bob Hicok.
Bob Hicok was born in 1960 in Michigan and worked for many years in the automotive die industry. A published poet long before he earned his MFA, Hicok is the author of several collections of poems, including The Legend of Light, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry in 1995 and named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year; Plus Shipping; Animal Soul, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Insomnia Diary; This Clumsy Living, which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress; Words for Empty, Words for Full; Elegy Owed, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and, most recently, Love & Sex &. His work has been selected numerous times for the Best American Poetry series. Hicok has won Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has taught creative writing at Western Michigan University and Virginia Tech.
Local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal host an open house for writers to connect with one another and/or work on their projects.
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Literati is delighted to partner with the University of Michigan’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures to celebrate new work by their esteemed faculty. Authors include:
Johannes von Moltke is Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures and Professor and Chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. He is the author of No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema and the editor of two volumes of writings by and about Siegfried Kracauer. His most recent book is The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America.
Helmut Puff is Professor of German and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the co-editor of Cultures of Communication: Theologies of Media in Early Modern Europe and Beyond, forthcoming in December.
Scott Spector is Professor of History, German Studies, and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern central Europe, focusing on the interplay of ideology and culture in its many forms. He is the author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (2000), and co-editor, with Helmut Puff and Dagmar Herzog, of After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies With and Beyond Foucault (2012). Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914 is a study of understandings of urban sex and crime in scientific, police, and popular press representations, and in the articulations of criminal and sexual subjects themselves.
Silke-Maria Weineck is particularly interested in the many ways in which classical literature and philosophy continue to reverberate in the modern world. Her first book,The Abyss Above traces the figure of the mad poet through writings by Plato, Hölderlin and Nietzsche. The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West looks at the tensions that have characterized the concept of fatherhood from Sophocles and the Bible over Hobbes to Kleist and Freud. Our Ancient Wars, co-edited with Victor Caston, explores the presence of classical war writing in contemporary cultural production. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Irony Monster: First and Last Deity.
All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell.
Shutta Crum is an author, lecturer, teacher, and retired librarian, all in the field of children s books. Among her most popular titles are Thunder-Boomer (Clarion), which received four starred reviews, was nominated for a Cybil Award, and was an SLJ Best Book, a Smithsonian Magazine Notable Book, and an ALA Notable Book, and Mine (Knopf), which also received four starred reviews. She lives in Michigan. Learn more at www.shutta.com.
Kristin Bartley Lenz is a writer and social worker whose career has taken her through rural Appalachia, the California Bay Area, and inner-city Detroit. She is the coeditor of the Michigan Chapter blog for the Society of Childrens Book Writers and Illustrators. She lives in Royal Oak, Michigan.
Literati is delighted to welcome Margaret Lazarus Dean and Christopher Hebert back to Ann Arbor, in celebration of their recent (staff-favorite!) works.
Christopher Hebert is the author of the novels Angels of Detroit and The Boiling Season, winner of the 2013 Friends of American Writers award. He is also co-editor of Stories of Nation: Fictions, Politics, and the American Experience (forthcoming from UT Press). His short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in such publications as FiveChapters, Cimarron Review, Narrative, Interview, and the Millions. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan and is editor-at-large for the University of Michigan Press. Currently he lives in Knoxville, TN, where he is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Tennessee.
Margaret Lazarus Dean received a BA in anthropology from Wellesley College and an MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the author of the novel The Time It Takes to Fall and the recipient of fellowships from the NEA and the Tennessee Arts Commission. She is an associate professor of English at the University of Tennessee.
Author’s Forum Event hosted by Evans Young. I will talk about my book Sharp Blue Search of Flame with Lolita Hernandez, author of Making Callaloo in Detroit.
Zilka Joseph has been nominated twice for a Pushcart prize and her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, Mantis, Kenyon Review Online, Quiddity, Review Americana, Gatronomica, Cutthroat, Rattle, The MacGuffin, The Paterson Literary Review, pacificREVIEW, Cheers To Muses: An Anthology of Contemporary Works by Asian American Women, and Uncommon Core: Poems for Living and Learning, a Neutral Zone Anthology. She has won several honors including a Hopwood award, the Elsie Choy Lee Scholarship from the Center for Education of Women, and a Zell Fellowship from the University of Michigan. Her poems have won contests, or been finalists, and received honorable mentions.
Her first chapbook Lands I Live In (Mayapple Press, 2007) was nominated for a PEN America Beyond Margins award, and her second chapbook What Dread (2011) which was a semi finalist in Finishing Line Press’ New Women’s Voices contest, was nominated for a Pushcart. Her full-length collection of poems Sharp Blue Search of Flame was published by Wayne State University Press in April 2016.
She has collaborated with other artists on interdisciplinary projects which culminated in exhibitions, performances and readings at the University of Michigan, and in art galleries and cultural centers in several cities in the US. Her poems were published along with her collaborators’ work, in India: A Light Within, and Wisdom of the Lotus. In addition, her work had been selected several times by the jurors of Asian American Woman Writers Artists Association (San Francisco, CA) for curated art and culture exhibitions and for their anthology.
The University of Michigan WCBN Radio’s Living Writers Series recorded two interviews with her, (most recently on 4/20/2016) and her work has appeared in The Living Room, Michigan Radio/NPR, an episode about diaspora, and also Art in the Air.
Her 27 years of teaching experience cover higher education to elementary levels, and a wide range of populations–senior citizens, immigrant, international and diverse groups. She has taught and/or worked at the University of Michigan, Washtenaw Community College and Oakland Community College, been a Writer in Residence at InsideOut Detroit, a teacher at the Roeper School, an ESL instructor at the Utica Adult Education Center in Michigan, a volunteer instructor at the Indo American Center and Nettelhorst School in Chicago, and a high school English teacher at St. James’ School for Boys, Calcutta. She has a BA in English and a BEd–a post-graduate teaching degree, from the University of Calcutta, India, an MA in Comparative Literature from Jadavpur University, Calcutta, India, and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Currently, she teaches workshops in Ann Arbor, Metro-Detroit, and in other cities in the US, works as a manuscript coach and editor, and mentors writers in the Ann Arbor community.
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.
Literati is pleased to welcome Chuck Collins in support of Born on Third Base: A One Percenter Makes the Case for Tackling Inequality, Bringing Wealth Home, and Committing to the Common Good.
As inequality grabs headlines, steals the show in presidential debates, and drives deep divides between the haves and have nots in America, class war brews. On one side, the wealthy wield power and advantage, wittingly or not, to keep the system operating in their favor—all while retreating into enclaves that separate them further and further from the poor and working class. On the other side, those who find it increasingly difficult to keep up or get ahead lash out—waging a rhetorical war against the rich and letting anger and resentment, however justifiable, keep us from seeing new potential solutions.
But can we suspend both class wars long enough to consider a new way forward? Is it really good for anyone that most of society’s wealth is pooling at the very top of the wealth ladder? Does anyone, including the one percent, really want to live in a society plagued by economic apartheid? It is time to think differently, says longtime inequality expert and activist Chuck Collins. Born into the one percent, Collins gave away his inheritance at 26 and spent the next three decades mobilizing against inequality. He uses his perspective from both sides of the divide to deliver a new narrative. Collins calls for a ceasefire and invites the wealthy to come back home, investing themselves and their wealth in struggling communities. And he asks the non-wealthy to build alliances with the one percent and others at the top of the wealth ladder.
Stories told along the way explore the roots of advantage, show how taxpayers subsidize the wealthy, and reveal how charity, used incorrectly, can actually reinforce extreme inequality. Readers meet pioneers who are crossing the divide to work together in new ways, including residents in the author’s own Boston-area neighborhood who have launched some of the most interesting community transition efforts in the nation. In the end, Collins’s national and local solutions not only challenge inequality but also respond to climate change and offer an unexpected, fresh take on one of our most intransigent problems.
“I have never read a story remotely like the one Chuck Collins has to tell. Born to the one percent, in circumstances few of us can imagine, he grew an outsized conscience and gave up his inherited wealth for a life of fighting the vicious inequality that is destroying our country. Somewhere along the way, he came to understand that the rich can be part of the solution instead of the problem and started organizing them to join in the struggle for a fair economy. The result is an electrifying challenge to the affluent as well as the one percent. ‘Come out of your gated communities and gated hearts,’ he writes, because outside lies the warmth of human solidarity.”–Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed
Chuck Collins is a researcher, campaigner, storyteller, and writer based at the Institute for Policy Studies where he co-edits Inequality.org. He has written extensively on wealth inequality in previous books like 99 to 1, Wealth and Our Commonwealth (with Bill Gates Sr.), and Economic Apartheid in America as well as in The Nation, The American Prospect, and numerous other magazines and news outlets. Collins grew up in the 1 percent as the great grandson of meatpacker Oscar Mayer, but at age 26 he gave away his inheritance. He has been working to reduce inequality and strengthen communities since 1982 and in the process has cofounded numerous initiatives, including Wealth for the Common Good (now merged with the Patriotic Millionaires), United for a Fair Economy, and Divest-Invest. He is also a leader in the transition movement, and a co-founder of the Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition and the Jamaica Plain Forum, both in the Boston-area community in which he lives.
Sept. 28:Readings by Leah Zazulyer, author of a recent collection of translations of Yiddish poems by Soviet refugee Israel Emiot, and Mitzi Alvin, a veteran Detroit poet whose poems have been described as “jewels of loss and renewal.” Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
