Literati is pleased to welcome poets Raymond McDaniel, Christina Quintana, Sarah Sala, and Keith Taylor for the latest installment of our Poetry at Literati reading series.
Raymond McDaniel is the author of Murder, Saltwater Empire, Special Powers & Abilities, and in 2017 The Cataracts, all from Coffee House Press.
Christina Quintana is a New York-based writer of plays, poetry, and fiction with Cuban and Louisiana roots. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Raspa Magazine, Saw Palm, and Nimrod International Journal, and her chapbook of poems, The Heart Wants, has been released by Finishing Line Press.
Sarah Sala is the former editor-in-chief of the University of Michigan’s literary magazine, Oleander Review. Her poem “Hydrogen” was recently featured in the “Elements” episode of NPR’s hit show Radio Lab in collaboration with Emotive Fruition. The Ghost Assembly Line, a chapbook of her selected poetry, has been published by Finishing Line Press. Her poems appear in Poetry Ireland Review, Atlas Review, and the Stockholm Review of Literature.
Keith Taylor‘s most recent books are Fidelities and The Ancient Murrelet (published by Alice Greene & Co.), Marginalia for a Natural History (published by Black Lawrence Press), and Ghost Writers: Us Haunting Them, co-edited with Laura Kasischke (published by Wayne State University Press).
Adam Rex has written several books for young readers, including the “New York Times” bestselling “Frankenstein Makes a Sandwich “and “The True Meaning of Smekday. “His first day of school was at Lookout Mountain Elementary in Phoenix. He lives now with his wife and son in Tucson.
Christian Robinson’s award-winning books for young readers include “Josephine, ” which was a Coretta Scott King Honor Book as well as a Sibert Honor Book and “Harlem’s Little Blackbird, “which was an NAACP Image Award nominee. His latest book “Last Stop on Market Street ” earned four starred reviews and was on the “New York Times” bestseller list. This is his first book for Roaring Brook Press.
William Ayers, formerly Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) has written extensively about social justice and democracy, education and the cultural contexts of schooling, and teaching as an essentially intellectual, ethical, and political enterprise. His books include A Kind and Just Parent; Teaching toward Freedom; Fugitive Days: A Memoir; Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident; On the Side of the Child;Teaching the Personal and the Political; To Teach: The Journey, in Comics; Teaching toward Democracy; and Race Course: Against White Supremacy.
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 welcome Katie Chase, reading from her story collection, Man and Wife.
Fiction. From Twilight Zone suburbia to cities on fire to post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan, these award-winning stories range over unexpected landscapes—and land squarely in the wildness of the human heart.
Katie Chase‘s short fiction has appeared in the Missouri Review, Five Chapters, the Literary Review, Narrative, Prairie Schooner, ZYZZYVA, Mississippi Review, and the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she is the recipient of a Teaching-Writing Fellowship, a Provost’s Postgraduate Writing Fellowship, and a Michener- Copernicus Award. She has also been a fellow of the MacDowell Colony and the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San José State University. Born and raised outside Detroit, Michigan, she lives currently in Portland, Oregon.
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. This year’s Distinguished International Writer in Residence is China Mieville. On Thursday, October 6th, he’ll be joined in conversation by Joshua Miller, Associate Professor of English.
China Miéville lives and works in London. He is three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice. The City & The City, an existential thriller, was published to dazzling critical acclaim and drew comparison with the works of Kafka and Orwell and Philip K. Dick. His most recent novel is The Last Days of New Paris.
Literati is pleased to welcome Josh MacIvor-Andersen in support of his memoir, On Heights & Hunger.
On Heights & Hunger is a memoir of two professional and competitive tree-climbing brothers, both hungry for transcendence and adventure, coming to terms with their relationship to the divine, the family that first provided a framework for faith, and their own obsessions, victories, and failures.
Josh MacIvor-Andersen is a former Tennessee-state tree climbing champion, the author of the memoir On Heights & Hunger, and the editor of Rooted, An Anthology of Arboreal Nonfiction. His essays, reviews, and reportage have won numerous awards and nominations for the Pushcart Prize, and can be found in journals and magazines such as Gulf Coast, Paris Review Daily, Fourth Genre, Arts and Letters, Sycamore Review, Sojourners, Geez, Ruminate, Rock and Sling, National Geographic/Glimpse, Diagram, The Drum, The Collagist, Garden and Gun, Memoir (and), New Millennium Writings, Our State, Prism, and The Northwest Review, among others.
Monthly open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. The 3 judges are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Space limited, so it’s smart to arrive early.
Note: Beginning in August, the Storyslam is held twice a month, on the 1st & 3rd Tuesdays.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), The Circus, 210 S. First. $10. 764-5118.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Derek Palacio in support of his novel, The Mortifications.
Derek Palacio’s stunning, mythic novel marks the arrival of a fresh voice and a new chapter in the history of 21st century Cuban-American literature.
In 1980, a rural Cuban family is torn apart during the Mariel Boatlift. Uxbal Encarnación—father, husband, political insurgent—refuses to leave behind the revolutionary ideals and lush tomato farms of his sun-soaked homeland. His wife Soledad takes young Isabel and Ulises hostage and flees with them to America, leaving behind Uxbal for the promise of a better life. But instead of settling with fellow Cuban immigrants in Miami’s familiar heat, Soledad pushes further north into the stark, wintry landscape of Hartford, Connecticut. There, in the long shadow of their estranged patriarch, now just a distant memory, the exiled mother and her children begin a process of growth and transformation.
Each struggles and flourishes in their own way: Isabel, spiritually hungry and desperate for higher purpose, finds herself tethered to death and the dying in uncanny ways. Ulises is bookish and awkwardly tall, like his father, whose memory haunts and shapes the boy’s thoughts and desires. Presiding over them both is Soledad. Once consumed by her love for her husband, she begins a tempestuous new relationship with a Dutch tobacco farmer. But just as the Encarnacións begin to cultivate their strange new way of life, Cuba calls them back. Uxbal is alive, and waiting.
Breathtaking, soulful, and profound, The Mortifications is an intoxicating family saga and a timely, urgent expression of longing for one’s true homeland.
Derek Palacio received his MFA in Creative Writing from the Ohio State University. His short story “Sugarcane” appeared in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013, and his novella How to Shake the Other Man was published by Nouvella Books. He lives and teaches in Ann Arbor, MI, is the co-director, with Claire Vaye Watkins, of the Mojave School, and serves as a faculty member of the Institute of American Indian Arts MFA program.
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. This year’s Distinguished International Writer in Residence is China Mieville. On Thursday, October 6th, he’ll be joined in conversation by Joshua Miller, Associate Professor of English.
China Miéville lives and works in London. He is three-time winner of the prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award and has also won the British Fantasy Award twice. The City & The City, an existential thriller, was published to dazzling critical acclaim and drew comparison with the works of Kafka and Orwell and Philip K. Dick. His most recent novel is The Last Days of New Paris.
