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Literati is thrilled to welcome Roxane Gay to Ann Arbor for an exclusive reading and signing in support of her new book Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body.

Tickets are $30 plus service fees, reserved seating, and are available through the Michigan Union Ticketing Office by calling (734) 763-8587, visiting online, or in-person at the Michigan Union, 530 South State St.

Ticket includes a hardcover copy of the book to be picked up at the venue the night of the event. Literati will have a limited number of tickets available in store for in-person purchase only. No refunds and no exchanges.

BUY TICKETS BY CLICKING HERE. 

“I ate and ate and ate in the hopes that if I made myself big, my body would be safe. I buried the girl I was because she ran into all kinds of trouble. I tried to erase every memory of her, but she is still there, somewhere. . . . I was trapped in my body, one that I barely recognized or understood, but at least I was safe.”

New York Times bestselling author Roxane Gay has written with intimacy and sensitivity about food and bodies, using her own emotional and psychological struggles as a means of exploring our shared anxieties over pleasure, consumption, appearance, and health. As a woman who describes her own body as “wildly undisciplined,” Roxane understands the tension between desire and denial, between self-comfort and self-care. In Hunger, she casts an insightful and critical eye on her childhood, teens, and twenties—including the devastating act of violence that acted as a turning point in her young life—and brings readers into the present and the realities, pains, and joys of her daily life.

With the bracing candor, vulnerability, and authority that have made her one of the most admired voices of her generation, Roxane explores what it means to be overweight in a time when the bigger you are, the less you are seen. Hunger is a deeply personal memoir from one of our finest writers, and tells a story that hasn’t yet been told but needs to be.

Roxane Gay is the author of the essay collection Bad Feminist, which was a New York Times bestseller; the novel An Untamed State, a finalist for the Dayton Peace Prize; and the short story collections Difficult Women and Ayiti. A contributing opinion writer to the New York Times, she has also written for Time, McSweeney’s, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Bookforum, and Salon. Her fiction has also been selected for Best American Short Stories 2012, Best American Mystery Stories 2014, and other anthologies. She is the author of World of Wakanda for Marvel. She lives in Lafayette, Indiana and sometimes Los Angeles.

Literati is thrilled to once again be part of the Ann Arbor Book Festival. Stay tuned to this space for times and locations of events with the following fantastic authors:

Annette Gordon-Reed is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and a Professor of History in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, and formerly the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2010-2016) and the Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Queen’s College, University of Oxford (2014-2015). She won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2009), a subject she had previously written about in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (University Press of Virginia, 1997). She is also the author of Andrew Johnson (Times Books/Henry Holt, 2010). Her most recently published book (with Peter S. Onuf) is “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016). Her honors include a fellowship from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, a Guggenheim Fellowship in the humanities, a MacArthur Fellowship, the National Humanities Medal, the National Book Award, and the Woman of Power & Influence Award from the National Organization for Women in New York City. Gordon-Reed was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011 and is a member of the Academy’s Commission on the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Edward McClelland is the author of How to Speak Midwestern, Young Mr. Obama: Chicago and the Making of a Black President and Nothin’ But Blue Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times and Hopes of America’s Industrial Heartland. Ted’s writing has also appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Columbia Journalism Review, Salon, Slate, and the Nation.

Ellen Meeropol is the author of three novels, Kinship of Clover, On Hurricane Island and House Arrest. A former nurse practitioner, part-time bookseller, and literary late bloomer, Ellen’s short fiction and essay publications include Guernica, The Writer, Bridges, DoveTales, Pedestal, Rumpus, Portland Magazine and The Writers Chronicle. Her dramatic script “Carry it Forward” telling the story of the Rosenberg Fund for Children was produced in 2013 in New York. Ellen holds an MFA in fiction from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. She is a founding member and current Board President of Straw Dog Writers Guild.

Christina Olson is the author of the forthcoming collection of poetry Terminal Human Velocity (Stillhouse Press, 2017); the poetry collection Before I Came Home Naked (Spire Press, 2010); the poetry chapbook Weird Science (Paper Nautilus Press, 2016); and Rook & The M.E., a chapbook of narrative flash prose loosely based on the television show Law & Order (Red Bird Chapbooks, 2015). Her writing appears in the anthologies The Best Creative Nonfiction Volume Three, American Creative Writers on Class, Writing That Risks, and 99 Poems for the 99 Percent. Her poems “Lost” and “To the Stars, Through Difficulties,” have been featured on Verse Daily. Gerald Stern chose her as the winner of The Dirty Napkin’s Poetry Prize, and she has been awarded full fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Willapa Bay AiR.

Adam Schuitema is the author of the short-story collections The Things We Do That Make No Sense (2017) and Freshwater Boys (2010) and the novel Haymaker (2015). His works have twice been named Michigan Notable Books by the Library of Michigan. Adam’s stories have appeared in numerous magazines, including Glimmer Train, North American Review, Indiana Review, TriQuarterly, and The Southern Review. He earned his MFA and Ph.D. from Western Michigan University and is an associate professor of English at Kendall College of Art and Design. Adam lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan with his wife and daughter.