RC assistant professor Stephen Ward discusses In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs, his new book about two largely unsung but critically important Detroit figures in the black freedom struggle. Signing.
Sit and sign with children’s/YA authors:
Lisa Wheeler is the author of over 35 children’s books including The Christmas Boot and the popular Dino-Sports series. Lisa’s book, Bubble Gum, Bubble Gum is the 2017 Michigan Reads! One Book One State Children’s Book Program recipient. Her awards include The Michigan Mitten, Texas Bluebonnet, and the Theodore Geisel Honor given by the American Library Association. Lisa shares her Michigan home with one husband, one dog, and an assortment of anthropomorphic characters. Check out Lisa’s website at: www.lisawheelerbooks.com
Gin Price began writing stories in the sixth grade, though hopefully they’ve improved since then. She’s written in a few genres, but has crashed landed on young adult shelves where she hopes to remain. Currently she lives in the Metro Detroit area with her biologist partner-in-crime David, her three children, many reptiles and an ornery cat.
Laura Wolfe is a wife and mother to two children and a lover of animals and nature. When she is not writing or reading, you can find her playing games with her kids, riding horses, cooking vegan food, or doting on her rescue dog. She dreams of someday living on a hundred-acre horse farm. In her previous life, she was an attorney, a legal editor, and a successful real estate broker. After having kids, she quickly decided that life was too short not to pursue her passions.She holds a BA in English from the University of Michigan and a JD from DePaul University College of Law. She is a member of multiple writing groups, including International Thriller Writers, Sisters in Crime, and the SCBWI. Her novel, Trail of Secrets, was published in August 2015 by Fire and Ice YA, and was named a Finalist in the 2016 Next Generation Indie Book Awards – First Novel category. Additional writing credits include: articles in Practical Horseman magazine and PKA’s Advocate.
Kathy Higgs-Coulthard lives in a small farmhouse on the prairie in Southwestern Michigan with four kids, two dogs, one kitten, and a hedgehog. Kathy’s work has appeared in Jack & Jill Magazine, Women on Writing, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and Facts on File’s Encyclopedia of Great American Writers. Her debut novel, Hanging with My Peeps, came out in April, 2016.
Kristin Bartley Lenz is a Michigan writer and social worker who fell in love with the mountains when she moved to Georgia and California. Now she’s back in Detroit where she plots wilderness escapes and manages the Michigan Chapter blog for the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI-MI). THE ART OF HOLDING ON AND LETTING GO is her debut young adult novel.
Heather Smith Meloche’s work has appeared in SPIDER, YOUNG ADULT REVIEW NETWORK (YARN), and ONCE UPON A TIME, and she has placed twice in the children’s/YA category of the WRITER’S DIGEST Annual Competition. Her short story, “Him,” won the HUNGER MOUNTAIN Katherine Paterson Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing in 2011, and Heather’s novel, RIPPLE, released September 20, 2016, is based on that short work. She lives in Rochester Hills.
Darcy Woods had three big loves in grade school: Reading, writing, and pizza day. Some things never change. She now lives in Michigan with her madly supportive husband, and two tuxedo cats who overdress for everything. Once upon a time, she was in a US Army aviation unit and threw live grenades. Now she throws words. SUMMER OF SUPERNOVAS, a YA contemporary romance, is Darcy’s first novel and is published by Random House/Crown BFYR.
Erica M. Chapman is a young adult author who writes dark, emotional novels with a burst of humor, and lighter contemporaries with smart-ass protagonists. Her first novel, TEACH ME TO FORGET will be published by Merit Press on 12/02/16. Her writing is represented by Christa Heschke of McIntosh & Otis. She’s a member of SCBWI and a lifetime Lions and Michigan football fan who loves alternative music. She blogs, tweets, and watches various CW & Freeform shows while typing her next story on her MacBook in a Detroit Lions Snuggie.
Every 1st & 3rd Sun. Readings by featured poets, preceded by a poetry open mike.
Dec. 4: Readings Siaara Freeman, a poet from Cleveland whose poems explore the resilient spirit of people struggling with the realities of inner-city living, and Scott Beal, a Pushcart Prize-winning local poet whose recently published debut collection Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems deploys familiar characters from Rapunzel to Perseus and whimsically surreal tall tales to explore the varied and violent forces that shape human identities.
Dec. 18: Open mike only.
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7-9 p.m. (sign-up begins at 6:30 p.m.), Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry.
Literati is pleased to welcome Jason Corey and Stephen Rush for an evening of music in celebration of their recent publications.
Jason Corey is an Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Music at the University of Michigan He is a recipient of the Paul D. Fleck Fellowship at The Banff Centre in Banff, Canada, where he has worked as an Audio Research Associate. He has presented his research at conferences in Europe, Canada, and the United States. His research and education have been supported by the Audio Engineering Society Educational Foundation (New York), Bang & Olufsen A/S (Denmark), McGill University Stern Fellowship for Doctoral Studies in Music, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Pioneer Electronic Corporation (Japan), and TC Electronic A/S (Denmark). Professor Corey has been a member of the Audio Engineering Society since 1995, and is also a member of the Acoustical Society of America, the International Computer Music Association, College Music Society, and the Society for Music Perception and Cognition.
Stephen Rush is Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, where he founded the Digital Music Ensemble, which he has directed for 25 years. He has had over 200 premieres in five continents and released over 30 CDs, as well as a book on Jazz theology, Better Get It In Your Soul. His new book is Free Jazz, Harmolodics, and Ornette Coleman. Rush has premiered and recorded his classical and jazz compositions worldwide and performed with Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Grimes, Steve Swell, Eugene Chadbourne, Pauline Oliveros, his band “Yuganaut”, “Blue” Gene Tyranny, and the late Peter Kowald. His music has been performed by Leonard Slatkin, Neeme Jaarvi (Detroit Symphony Orchestra) and recorded by members of the Cleveland Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic.
All writers welcome to share and discuss their poetry and short fiction. Sign up for new participants begins at 6:45 p.m.
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.
Laura Kasischke was raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, 2012, for Space, in Chains. She has published nine novels, one short story collection, and eight books of poetry, most recently The Infinitesimals. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as several Pushcart Prizes and numerous poetry awards and her writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Harper’s and The New Republic. She has a son and step-daughter and lives with her family and husband in Chelsea, Michigan. She is Allan Seager Colleagiate Professor of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan.
Reading by Siena Heights University English professor Saleem Peeradina, an anthologized Chelsea-based poet who recently published his 5th poetry collection, Final Cut. The program begins with a brief open mike for poets, who are welcome to read their own work or a favorite poem by another writer.
7 p.m., Bookbound, 1729 Plymouth, Courtyard Shops.
Literati is pleased to welcome Geneviève Zubrzycki in support of her latest work, Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion, and Secularism in Quebec.
The province of Quebec used to be called the priest-ridden province by its Protestant neighbors in Canada. During the 1960s, Quebec became radically secular, directly leading to its evolution as a welfare state with lay social services. What happened to cause this abrupt change? Genevieve Zubrzycki gives us an elegant and penetrating history, showing that a key incident sets up the transformation. Saint John the Baptist is the patron saint of French Canadians, and, until 1969, was subject of annual celebrations with a parade in Montreal. That year, the statue of St. John was toppled by protestors, breaking off the head from the body. Here, then is the proximate cause: the beheading of a saint, a symbolic death to be sure, which caused the parades to disappear and other modes of national celebration to take their place. The beheading of the saint was part and parcel of the so-called Quiet Revolution, a period of far-reaching social, economic, political, and cultural transformations. Quebec society and the identity of its French-speaking members drastically reinvented themselves with the rejection of Catholicism. Zubrzycki is already acknowledged as a leading authority on nationalism and religion; this book will significantly enlarge her stature by showing the extent to which a core feature of the Quiet Revolution was an aesthetic revolt. A new generation rejected the symbols of French Canada, redefining national identity in the process (and as a process) and providing momentum for institutional reforms. We learn that symbols have causal force, generating chains of significations which can transform a Catholic-dominated conservative society into a leftist, forward-looking, secular society.
Geneviève Zubrzycki is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia at the University of Michigan. Born and raised in Quebec City, she was educated at McGill University and the Université de Montréal before obtaining her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. Her work examines politics and religion, nationalism, as well as national mythology and the politics of commemorations. Her publications include the award-winning The Crosses of Auschwitz: Nationalism and Religion in Post-Communist Poland (University of Chicago Press, 2006); Beheading the Saint: Nationalism, Religion and Secularism in Quebec (University of Chicago Press, 2016); and National Matters: Nationalism, Culture and Materiality (forthcoming, Stanford University Press.). She is now completing a third monograph on the current revival of Jewish communities in Poland and non-Jewish Poles’ interest in all things Jewish. She has published articles on the topic in Comparative Studies in History and Society and the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. Her scholarship was awarded prizes from the Association for Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies, the Polish Studies Association, and from the American Sociological Association’s sections on Sociology of Culture, Political Sociology, Sociology of Religion, and Collective Behavior and Social Movements.
U-M drama lecturer Kate Mendeloff directs RC students in scenes from Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, Tony Kushner’s celebrated 2-play series exploring the apocalyptic fears at the heart of contemporary culture, and ‘Night Mother, Marsha Norman’s controversial 1983 Pulitzer Prize-winning drama about a divorced woman, living with her mother, who chooses suicide in an effort to take control of her own life.
