All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share. Hosted by local poets and former college English teachers Joe Kelty and Ed Morin.
Cole Lavalais’ short stories can be found in Obsidian, Apogee, Warpland, Tidal Basin Review, Aquarius Press, and others. She is a fellow of the Kimbilio Center for Black Fiction, VONA and the Callaloo Writing Workshops. She’s been awarded writing residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and The Noepe Center for the Literary Arts. She holds an M.F.A. from Chicago State University, and a Ph.D. in Creative Writing from University of Illinois at Chicago.
As a born and raised Chicagoan, she believes in encouraging, fostering, and championing writing by writers of color across genres. Cole has taught writing for over ten years and currently teaches community-based writing workshops on the south side of Chicago.
Summer of the Cicadas is her debut novel.
Storytellers Guild members present a program of old tales and personal stories for grownups.
Free; donations accepted. annarborstorytelling.org, facebook.com/annarborstorytellers. 665-2757.
FRUIT is an independent, community-led reading and dialogue series for and by marginalized voices, hosted in Literati Bookstore. This month’s installment features readings by TBD.
FRUIT is a moment and a movement of reclamation. It is a space of and for literary artists representing the marginalized: the colored, the queer, the silenced, and the unseen. Each event showcases the work of fresh, revolutionary artists and features a conversation around their lives and their crafts. In this space, FRUIT strives to serve as a carefully curated reading and dialogue series for those who live at intersections ignored. This experience exists both physically and digitally in order to help those marginalized voices reclaim their flesh and plant their roots through short-form literature. Our goal is to create an experience that is intentional in its centering of the historically othered. Through this exploration of identity and craft, we hope to cultivate a platform in which the growth and sharing of radical joy— both encumbered and despite— happens in the presence of solidarity and healthy community.
Seating will be open beginning at 7pm. The event will start at 7:30pm.
Literati is pleased to welcome Katie Kitamura in support of her most recent novel, A Separation, a staff favorite and a Literati Cultura selection.
A young woman has agreed with her faithless husband: it’s time for them to separate. For the moment it’s a private matter, a secret between the two of them. As she begins her new life, she gets word that Christopher has gone missing in a remote region in the rugged south of Greece; she reluctantly agrees to go look for him, still keeping their split to herself. In her heart, she’s not even sure if she wants to find him. As her search comes to a shocking breaking point, she discovers she understands less than she thought she did about her relationship and the man she used to love.
A searing, suspenseful story of intimacy and infidelity, A Separation lays bare the gult that divides us from the inner lives of others. With exquisitely cool precision, Katie Kitamura propels us into the experience of a woman on edge, with a fiercely mesmerizing story to tell.
“A slow burn of a novel that gathers its great force and intensity through careful observation and a refusal to accept old, shopworn narratives of love and loss.” —Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation
“A novel so seamless, that follows its path with such consequence, that even minor deviations seem loaded with meaning. Wonderful.” —Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of My Struggle
“The burnt landscape, the disappearance of a man, the brilliantly cold, precise, and yet threatening, churning tone of the narrator—make A Separation an absolutely mesmerizing work of art.” —Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers
“Profound and gripping. I had that rare sense of feeling like I was in a creation specifically made out of words, that couldn’t have been made out of any other substance. Kitamura combines the calm complexity of Joseph Conrad with the pacing and reveal of Patricia Highsmith. This novel is a wonder and a pleasure.” —Rivka Galchen, author of Atmospheric Disturbances and Little Labors
“A Separation opens up fissures of ambiguity in emotional experiences too often misunderstood as monolithic—grief, desire, estrangement—and plumbs these crevices for all their complexities. It has both urgency and afterglow: I read it quickly, but didn’t stop thinking about it for a long time once I was done.” —Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams
Katie Kitamura is a critic and novelist living in New York City. She is the author of Gone to the Forest and The Longshot, both of which were finalists for the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award. A recipient of a Lannan Residency Fellowship, Kitamura has written for The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta,BOMB, Triple Canopy, and is a regular contributor to Frieze.
Literati is thrilled to be the bookseller for the Zell Visiting Writers Series, presented by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, which brings world-renowned poets and fiction writers to Helmut Stern Auditorium in the University of Michigan Museum of Art. For this installment, Terrance Hayes will sign books during the reception at 5:15, and then read at 6pm.
Terrance Hayes, our Winter Distinguished Poet in Residence, is the author of Lighthead (Penguin 2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a Box(Penguin 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999). His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Zell Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn (Penguin 2015), his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.
Literati is thrilled to be the bookseller for the Zell Visiting Writers Series, presented by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, which brings world-renowned poets and fiction writers to Helmut Stern Auditorium in the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Terrance Hayes, our Winter Distinguished Poet in Residence, is the author of Lighthead (Penguin 2010), winner of the 2010 National Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His other books are Wind In a Box (Penguin 2006), Hip Logic (Penguin 2002), and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999). His honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a United States Artists Zell Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a MacArthur Fellowship. How To Be Drawn (Penguin 2015), his most recent collection of poems, was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award, the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award, and received the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry.
Jamaal May is the author of Hum (Alice James Books, 2013) and The Big Book of Exit Strategies (Alice James Books, 2016). His first collection received a Lannan Foundation Grant, American Library Association’s Notable Book Award, and was named a finalist for the Tufts Discovery Award and an NAACP Image Award. Jamaal’s other honors include a Spirit of Detroit Award, the Wood Prize from Poetry, an Indiana Review Prize, and fellowships from The Stadler Center, The Kenyon Review, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy. Jamaal May’s poetry explores the tension between opposites to render a sonically rich argument for the interconnectivity of people, worlds, and ideas. He co-directs OW! Arts with Tarfia Faizullah.
Literati is delighted to partner with our friends at the Children’s Literacy Network to bring Julie Danielson to Ann Arbor for a discussion of her fantastic blog, Seven Impossible Things Before Breakfast; her favorite picture books; her own book, Wild Things!; and more!
Julie Danielson holds an MS in Information Sciences and blogs about picture books atSeven Impossible Things Before Breakfast. The co-author of Wild Things! Acts of Mischief in Children’s Literature, she also writes a weekly column and conducts Q&As forKirkus Reviews. She reviews picture books for BookPage and has written for the Horn Book and the Association for Library Services to Children. She has been a judge for the Bologna Ragazzi Awards in Italy, as well as the Society of Illustrators’ Original Art Award, and she teaches a graduate course on picture books for the University of Tennessee’s Information Sciences program.
Literati is pleased to welcome Emily Fridlund in support of her debut novel, History of Wolves, a staff favorite and a Literati Cultura selection.
One of the most daring literary debuts of the season, History of Wolves is a profound and propulsive novel from an urgent, new voice in American fiction. Teenage Linda lives with her parents in the austere woods of northern Minnesota, where their nearly abandoned commune stands as a last vestige of a lost counter-culture world. Isolated at home and an outsider at school, Linda is drawn to the enigmatic, attractive Lily and new history teacher Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is faced with child pornography charges, his arrest deeply affects Linda as she wrestles with her own fledgling desires and craving to belong.
And then the young Gardner family moves in across the lake and Linda finds herself welcomed into their home as a babysitter for their little boy, Paul. But with this new sense of belonging come expectations and secrets she doesn’t understand. Over the course of a summer, Linda makes a set of choices that reverberate throughout her life. As she struggles to find a way out of the sequestered world into which she was born, Linda confronts the life-and-death consequences of the things people do—and fail to do—for the people they love.
Winner of the McGinnis-Ritchie award for its first chapter, and A BEA Buzz Book and An ABA Indies Introduce Selection, Emily Fridlund’s agonizing and gorgeously written History of Wolves introduces a new writer of enormous range and talent.
“‘Winter collapsed on us that year. It knelt down, exhausted, and stayed.’ So much is accomplished here, not least a kind of trust that this writer will make everything count, including the kind of data that is usually left for dead in a story. What is literary authority, after all, but the ability to regularly, without apparent effort, make the most of every sentence, build feeling in every line and do it in such a way that is tough, tight, funny, and often brilliantly disruptive?”—Ben Marcus
“So delicately calibrated and precisely beautiful that one might not immediately sense the sledgehammer of pain building inside this book. And I mean that in the best way. What powerful tension and depth this provides! I’m so excited for readers to encounter the talent and roiling intelligence of Emily Fridlund.”—Aimee Bender
“As exquisite a first novel as I’ve ever encountered. Poetic, complex, and utterly, heartbreakingly beautiful.” —T. C. Boyle
Emily Fridlund grew up in Minnesota and currently resides in the Finger Lakes region of New York. Her fiction has appeared in a wide variety of journals. She holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California and currently teaches at Cornell University. Fridlund’s collection of stories, Catapult, was a finalist for the Noemi Book Award for Fiction and the Tartts First Fiction Award. It won the Mary McCarthy Prize and will be published by Sarabande in 2017. The opening chapter of History of Wolves was published in Southwest Review and won the 2013 McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction.
