Neutral Zone and Literati Bookstore are partnering to present an Open Mic Night for writers ages 19 and under! Poets, storytellers, short story writers…. everyone is invited to take to the mic in a safe and welcoming environment. The event is free and open to the public.
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.
Storytellers Guild members present a program of old tales and personal stories for grownups.
Free; donations accepted.annarborstorytelling.org, facebook.com/annarborstorytellers.
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.
BRYCE HAYES POPE is a writer from New York. This past summer, she was a Donor Relations intern at PEN America and a volunteer at MoMA. She once showed Donna Tartt where the bathroom was. She enjoys reading (duh), yoga, Seinfeld, and not cooking.
SIERRA BROWN hails from Florida. She walks quickly and drinks too much coffee. When not writing poetry, Sierra plays with Madam the cat and hopes for a world without capitalism. You will find Sierra’s poems in Blue Mesa Review and Salamander.
The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends – a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
U-M drama lecturer Kate Mendeloff directs RC students in scenes from several contemporary plays on race in America.
Reading by the widely published Detroit poet Casey Rocheteau, author of the new collection The Dozen and winner of the inaugural Detroit Write-a-House residency in 2014. The program begins with open mike readings.
