Conversation between Harvard social sciences professor Matthew Desmond, author of the bestseller Evicted: Poverty & Profit in an American City, and veteran journalist and nonfiction writer Alex Kotlowitz, author of There Are No Children Here, an award-winning 1991 best-seller about 2 young boys growing up in Chicago’s public housing. Q&A. Reception follows.
4-6 p.m., Rackham Amphitheatre. Free. 936-3518.
Literati is pleased to partner with the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing and WCBN Radio for the latest installment of Word^2: Writer to Writer, a series which puts a UM professor and member of the Sweetland faculty in conversation about writing.
This month, Writer to Writer welcomes Clare Croft, a historian, theorist, and dramaturg working at the intersection of dance studies and performance studies. She specializes in 20th and 21st century American dance, cultural policy, feminist and queer theory, and critical race theory. In all of these areas, Croft considers how dance is a way of thinking and a mode for asking questions. What does it mean to acknowledge that people have bodies and that they use their bodies to make meaning, create community, and critique social structures?
Croft’s current book project, Funding Footprints: Dance and American Diplomacy (Oxford University Press), examines the history of U.S. State Department funding of international dance tours. Croft’s writing about dance has appeared in Dance Research Journal, Theatre Journal, and Theatre Topics, and is forthcoming in Dance Chronicle. From 2002-2005, Croft was a regular contributor to The Washington Post, and from 2005-2010, she covered dance, as well as theatre and musical theatre, for the Austin American-Statesman.
In 2010, Croft’s article, “Ballet Nations: The New York City Ballet’s 1962 U.S. State Department-Sponsored Tour of the Soviet Union,” received the American Society of Theatre Research’s Biennial Sally Banes Publication Prize, which recognizes the publication that best explores the intersections of theatre and dance/movement. Croft was also the 2007 recipient of the Society of Dance History Scholar’s Selma Jeanne Cohen Award. At the University of Michigan, Croft teaches courses in the BFA and MFA dance programs, as well as in the BFA interarts program.
Mar. 22: Readings by Jennifer Clark, a Kalamazoo poet who has a forthcoming 2nd collection Johnny Appleseed: The Slice and Times of John Chapman, and InsideOut Literary Arts Project (Detroit) interim director and Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Detroit project coordinator Alise Alousi, whose work is featured in Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry. Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
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7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is pleased to be the bookseller for Diana Butler Bass’s visit to Ann Arbor. Diana is the Lenten speaker at First United Methodist Church in downtown Ann Arbor, and will speak on the topic of “Relocating Faith: Finding God in the Horizons of Nature and Neighbor.” This event is free and open to all. For more information, and to RSVP, please click here.
Diana Butler Bass is an author, speaker, and independent scholar specializing in American religion and culture. She holds a Ph.D. in religious studies from Duke University. After a dozen years teaching undergraduates, she became a full-time writer, independent researcher, educator, and consultant. Her work has been cited in the national media, including TIME Magazine, USA TODAY, and the Washington Post, and she has appeared on CNN, FOX, PBS, and NPR. Diana is the author of nine books. Her most recent book is Grounded: Finding God in the World — A Spiritual Revolution. She comments on religion, politics, and culture in a variety of media.
Please join us for a not-be-missed evening of conversation about urban “renewal,” racial capitalism, and resistance in contemporary Detroit. To mark the Detroit launch of Kinney’s Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier (2016), the author will be in conversation with Andrew Herscher, member of the We the People of Detroit Community Research Collective and Detroit Resists and author of The Unreal Estate Guide to Detroit (2012). Together they will discuss the logics of racism and capitalism that have structured Detroit throughout the 20th century and into the city’s current “renewal.” They will explore how the branding of “New Detroit” as an “exciting” and “amenity-driven” landscape relies upon a simultaneous representation and destruction of working-class black neighborhoods—the displacement of the very people and the destruction of the very spaces that the branding of New Detroit relies upon. In so doing, they will ask if and how the narrative of Detroit’s contemporary “renewal” ought to be troubled and what narratives might open onto a truly inclusive and democratic city.
Rebecca J. Kinney, who grew up in metropolitan Detroit, is assistant professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies and Popular Culture at Bowling Green State University.
Bestselling writer Kate Andersen Brower discusses her White House books, The Residence and First Women. Followed by book sale, signing, and reception.
7 p.m., Ford Library, 1000 Beal. Free. 205-0555.
Literati is pleased to be the bookseller for “Muslim Beats in the New Millennium,” an event of the University of Michigan’s Islamic Studies Program and Arab & Muslim American Studies. Associate professor of American culture Evelyn Alsultany will moderate the conversation between Hisham Aidi, lecturer of international and pulic affairs at Columbia University and author of Rebel Music, and Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, assistant professor of anthropology and African American studies at Purdue University and author of Muslim Cool.
Literati is pleased to be the bookseller for “Poets at Michigan, Then and Now: A Symposium,” taking place in the Rogel Ballroom of the Michigan Union.
Though most people associate him with New England, Robert Frost spent several years in Ann Arbor in the 1920s, serving as the University of Michigan’s poet in residence. A local drugstore even named one of its ice-cream treats, the Frost-Bite, after him. In the decades that followed, U-M offered teaching positions to scores of remarkable poets, including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur Award, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. A partial roll call would include such names as W. H. Auden, Robert Hayden, Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Alice Fulton, and Anne Carson. A number of other major poets—Theodore Roethke, Frank O’Hara, Anne Stevenson, X. J. Kennedy, Marge Piercy, Jane Kenyon—studied at the university. And in 1978, Donald Hall founded the University of Michigan Press’s Poets on Poetry series—the most notable series of its kind in the country, and now boasting 115 titles.
This symposium, which is part of the University of Michigan Bicentennial celebration, will offer a retrospective of U-M poetry from the Robert Frost era through mid-century poets to the current generation. The day’s schedule follows:
10:00–11:30 a.m.
Robert Frost, the Hopwood Awards, and the History of Poetry at Michigan
Panelists: Nicholas Delbanco, Paul Dimond, Donald Sheehy
1:00–2:30 p.m.
The Middle Years
Panelists: Laurence Goldstein, X. J. Kennedy, Thomas Lynch
2:30–4:00 p.m.
The Art Continues: Contemporary Michigan Poets
Panelists: Tarfia Faizullah, Vievee Francis, Laura Kasischke
Detroit children’s book writer Mark Crilley, author of the Mike Falls and Akiko series, discusses the art of writing and presents awards to the winners of the AADL short story contest for 3rd-5th graders. Refreshments.
2-3 p.m., AADL multipurpose room, 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free. 327-8301.
Literati is pleased to welcome Margot Singer in support of her new novel, Underground Fugue. Margot will be joined in conversation by UM professor and author Eileen Pollack.
Set against the backdrop of the London tube bombings in 2005, Underground Fugue interweaves the stories of four characters who are dislocated by shock waves of personal loss, political violence, and, ultimately, betrayal. It’s April and Esther has left New York for London, partly to escape her buckling marriage, and partly to care for her dying mother; Lonia, Esther’s mother, is haunted by memories of fleeing Czechoslovakia on the eve of World War II; Javad, their next-door neighbor and an Iranian neuroscientist, struggles to connect with his college-aged son; and Amir, Javad’s son, is seeking both identity and escape in his illicit exploration of the city’s forbidden spaces. As Esther settles into life in London, a friendship develops among them. But when terrorists attack the London transit system in July, someone goes missing, and the chaos that follows both fractures the possibilities for the future, and reveals the deep fault lines of the past. With nuanced clarity and breathtaking grandeur, Margot Singer’s Underground Fugue is an elegant, suspenseful, and deeply powerful debut.
