Literati is pleased to welcome Rebecca J. Kinney and Stephen M. Ward for a discussion of their recent books about Detroit and the people who form its heart.
What is the “new Detroit” that everyone keeps talking about? In Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier, Rebecca J. Kinney reveals that the contemporary story of Detroit’s rebirth is an upcycled version of the American Dream, which has long imagined access to work, home, and upward mobility as race-neutral projects. She tackles key questions about the future of postindustrial America, and shows how the narratives of Detroit’s history are deeply steeped in material and ideological investments in whiteness.
Rebecca J. Kinney, who grew up in metropolitan Detroit, is assistant professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University.
In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs details both the personal and the political dimensions of the Boggses’ lives, highlighting the vital contributions these two figures made to black activist thinking. At once a dual biography of two crucial figures and a vivid portrait of Detroit as a center of activism, Ward’s book restores the Boggses, and the intellectual strain of black radicalism they shaped, to their rightful place in postwar American history.
Stephen Ward is associate professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS) and the Residential College at the University of Michigan. He is also a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership in Detroit.
Reading by the 2017 Ann Arbor Youth Poetry Slam Team, fresh from their performance at the Brave New Voices poetry festival in Washington, D.C. The program begins with open mike readings.
7-8:30 p.m., Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663
Literati is delighted to welcome staff-favorite Daniel Magariel in support of his debut novel, One of the Boys, a Literati Cultura selection. Daniel will be joined in conversation by Literati’s event manager John Ganiard, a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program.
A “gripping and heartfelt” (The New York Times Book Review) story about two young brothers contending with the love they have for their abusive father, One of the Boys is a stunning, compact debut by a major new talent. The three of them—a twelve-year-old boy, his older brother, their father—have won the war: the father’s term for his bitter divorce and custody battle. They leave their Kansas home and drive through the night to Albuquerque, eager to begin again, united by the thrilling possibility of carving out a new life together. The boys go to school, join basketball teams, make friends. Meanwhile their father works from home, smoking cheap cigars to hide another smell. But soon the little missteps—the dead-eyed absentmindedness, the late night noises, the comings and goings of increasingly odd characters—become worrisome, and the boys find themselves watching their father change, grow erratic, then dangerous.
Set in the sublimely stark landscape of suburban New Mexico and a cramped apartment shut tight to the world, One of the Boys conveys with propulsive prose and extraordinary compassion a young boy’s struggle to hold onto the pieces of his shattered family. Tender, moving and beautiful, Daniel Magariel’s masterful debut is a story of resilience and survival: two foxhole-weary brothers banding together to protect each other from the father they once trusted, but no longer recognize. With the emotional core of A Little Life and the speed of We the Animals, One of the Boys is among the most remarkable debut novels you’ll ever read.
Daniel Magariel is a fiction writer from Kansas City. He has a BA from Columbia University, as well as an MFA from Syracuse University, where he was a Cornelia Carhart Fellow. He has lived in Kansas, Missouri, New Mexico, Florida, Colorado, and Hawaii. He currently lives in New York with his wife. One of the Boys is his first novel.
Reading by Richard Solomon, a prominent local developmental pediatrician who is also a widely published, prize-winning poet. Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is delighted to launch Tal Klein’s debut novel, The Punch Escrow.
It’s the year 2147. Advancements in nanotechnology have enabled us to control aging. We’ve genetically engineered mosquitoes to feast on carbon fumes instead of blood, ending air pollution. And teleportation has become the ideal mode of transportation, offered exclusively by International Transport—a secretive firm headquartered in New York City. Their slogan: Departure… Arrival… Delight!
Joel Byram, our smartass protagonist, is an everyday twenty-fifth century guy. He spends his days training artificial-intelligence engines to act more human, jamming out to 1980’s new wave—an extremely obscure genre, and trying to salvage his deteriorating marriage. Joel is pretty much an everyday guy with everyday problems—until he’s accidentally duplicated while teleporting.
Now Joel must outsmart the shadowy organization that controls teleportation, outrun the religious sect out to destroy it, and find a way to get back to the woman he loves in a world that now has two of him.
“An alt-futuristic hard-science thriller with twists and turns you’ll never see coming. I couldn’t put it down.” —Felicia Day
Tal M. Klein was born in Israel, grew up in New York, and currently lives in Detroit with his wife and two daughters. When she was five years old, his daughter Iris wrote a book called I’m a Bunch of Dinosaurs that went on to become one of the most successful children’s book projects on Kickstarter –something that Tal explained to Iris by telling her, “Your book made lots of kids happy.” Iris then asked Tal, “Daddy, why don’t you write a book that makes lots of grownups happy?” Tal mulled this over for a few years, and eventually wrote his first book, The Punch Escrow. It won the Inkshares Geek & Sundry Hard Science Fiction publishing contest, and will be the first book published on the Geek & Sundry imprint.
Literati is pleased to host Oneita Jackson in support of her books, Letters from Mrs. Grundy and Nappy-Headed Negro Syndrome.
Oneita Jackson is a satirist and Detroit cab driver who has an English degree from Howard University. She was a copy editor for 11 years at the Detroit Free Press. During that time, she served as public editor, wrote music reviews, edited on the Features, Nation/World, and Web desks, and received awards for her headlines. She was a member of the Accuracy and Credibility Committee and the Editorial Endorsement Board for the 2008 City of Detroit mayoral and City Council elections. She also wrote the “O Street” column for three years; it received the newspaper’s 2008 Columnist of the Year award. She stopped writing the column in May 2010 and returned to the News Copy Desk, where she stayed until August 2012. Her next adventure was driving a yellow cab. Her book, Nappy-Headed Negro Syndrome, features observations and commentary on people and culture. These stories about identity are written by a woman who is uniquely, unabashedly, and extraordinarily herself. A native of Dayton, Ohio, Oneita spent her summers in New York City and has lived in Washington, D.C., and Albany, N.Y. She now lives in Detroit. Oneita was recently profiled by Mercedes-Benz.
Literati is pleased to welcome Michelle Kuo in support of her memoir, Reading with Patrick.
A memoir of race, inequality, and the power of literature told through the life-changing friendship between an idealistic young teacher and her gifted student, jailed for murder in the Mississippi Delta.
Recently graduated from Harvard University, Michelle Kuo arrived in the rural town of Helena, Arkansas, as a Teach for America volunteer, bursting with optimism and drive. But she soon encountered the jarring realities of life in one of the poorest counties in America, still disabled by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In this stirring memoir, Kuo, the child of Taiwanese immigrants, shares the story of her complicated but rewarding mentorship of one student, Patrick Browning, and his remarkable literary and personal awakening.
Convinced she can make a difference in the lives of her teenaged students, Michelle Kuo puts her heart into her work, using quiet reading time and guided writing to foster a sense of self in students left behind by a broken school system. Though Michelle loses some students to truancy and even gun violence, she is inspired by some such as Patrick. Fifteen and in the eighth grade, Patrick begins to thrive under Michelle’s exacting attention. However, after two years of teaching, Michelle feels pressure from her parents and the draw of opportunities outside the Delta and leaves Arkansas to attend law school.
Then, on the eve of her law-school graduation, Michelle learns that Patrick has been jailed for murder. Feeling that she left the Delta prematurely and determined to fix her mistake, Michelle returns to Helena and resumes Patrick’s education—even as he sits in a jail cell awaiting trial. Every day for the next seven months they pore over classic novels, poems, and works of history. Little by little, Patrick grows into a confident, expressive writer and a dedicated reader galvanized by the works of Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, W. S. Merwin, and others. In her time reading with Patrick, Michelle is herself transformed, contending with the legacy of racism and the questions of what constitutes a “good” life and what the privileged owe to those with bleaker prospects.
Reading with Patrick is an inspirational story of friendship, a coming-of-age story of both a young teacher and a student, a deeply resonant meditation on education, race, and justice in the rural South, and a love letter to literature and its power to transcend social barriers.
“This book is special and could not be more right on time. It’s an absorbing, tender, and surprisingly honest examination of race and privilege in America that helps articulate what is often lost, seemingly intentionally, in national debates over criminal justice and education: the inner life and imagination of a young person.”—Wes Moore, author of The Other Wes Moore
Michelle Kuo taught English at an alternative school in the Arkansas Delta for two years. After teaching, she attended Harvard Law School as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow, and worked legal aid at a nonprofit for Spanish-speaking immigrants in the Fruitvale district of Oakland, California, on a Skadden Fellowship, with a focus on tenants’ and workers’ rights. She has volunteered as a teacher at the Prison University Project and clerked for a federal appeals court judge in the Ninth Circuit. Currently she teaches courses on race, law, and society at the American University in Paris.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Lynne Cox in celebration of the paperback release of her latest memoir, Swimming in the Sink.
In this stunning memoir of life after loss, open-water swimming legend and bestselling author of Grayson and Swimming to Antarctica Lynne Cox tells of facing the one challenge that no amount of training could prepare her for.
A celebrated athlete who set swimming records around the world, Lynne Cox achieved astonishing feats of strength and endurance. She was the first to swim the frigid waters of the Bering Strait, the Strait of Magellan, and the coast of Antarctica, and she was the fastest to swim the English Channel. But it is a different kind of struggle that pushes her to the brink. In a short period of time, Lynne loses her father, and then her mother, and then Cody, her beloved Labrador retriever. Soon after, Lynne herself is diagnosed with a life-threatening heart condition that leaves her unable to swim and barely able to walk.
But against all odds, and with the support of her friends and family, Lynne begins the slow pull toward recovery, reaching always for the open waters that give her the freedom and mastery that mean everything to her. What follows is a beautifully poignant meditation on loss and an exhilarating celebration of life as, to Lynne’s surprise, she begins to find, within the unfamiliar space of vulnerability, the greatest treasures—like falling in love.
LYNNE COX was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and grew up in Los Alamitos, California. She has held open-water swimming records all over the world, swimming without a wetsuit. Cox has been inducted into the International Swimming Hall of Fame. Her articles have appeared in many publications, among them The New Yorker, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Cox lives in Long Beach, California.
Literati is delighted to welcome Molly Patterson in support of her debut novel, Rebellion.
A sweeping debut that crosses continents and generations, Rebellion tells the story of Addie, Louisa, Hazel, and Juanlan: four women whose rebellions, big and small, are as unexpected as they are unforgettable.
At the heart of the novel lies a mystery: In 1900, Addie, an American missionary in China, goes missing during the Boxer Rebellion, leaving her family back home to wonder at her fate. Her sister Louisa—newly married and settled in rural Illinois—anticipates tragedy, certain that Addie’s fate is intertwined with her own legacy of loss.
In 1958, Louisa’s daughter Hazel has her world upended by the untimely death of her husband. It’s harvest time, and with two small children and a farm to tend, she is determined to keep her land and family intact. Yet even while she learns to enjoy her independence, Hazel realizes that the tradeoff for some freedoms is more precious than expected.
Nearly half a century later, Juanlan has returned to her parents’ home in Heng’an. With her father ill, her sister-in-law soon to give birth, and the construction of a new highway rapidly changing the town she once knew, she feels pressured on every side by powers outside her control. Frustrated by obligation and the smallness of her own dreams, Juanlan at last dares to follow desire, only to discover an anger that cannot be contained.
Moving from rural Illinois to the far reaches of China, Rebellion brilliantly links through action and consequence the story of four women, spanning more than a century. From the secrets they keep and the adventures they embark on, to the passions that ultimately drive them forward, the characters at the center ofthis electric debut dramatically fight against expectation in pursuit of their own thrilling fates.
“Molly Patterson is a writer of the first order, and her debut novel is a revelatory, immersive miracle. Ambitious in scope and exacting in its language, Rebellion becomes a grand exploration of fate and circumstance.”—Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus
Molly Patterson was born in St. Louis and lived in China for several years. The winner of a 2014 Pushcart Prize, she was also the 2012-2013 writer-in-residence at St. Albans School in Washington, DC. Her work has appeared in several magazines, including the Atlantic and the Iowa Review. Rebellion is her first novel.
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 Tommye Blount, Nandi Comer, and Nathan McClain.
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.
Tommye Blount graduated from Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers and is a Cave Canem fellow. He is the author of the chapbook, What Are We Not For, and is currently working on his first full-length manuscript, Trapped in the Wrong Body Again.
Nandi Comer is currently pursuing a joint MFA/MFA in Poetry and African American and African Diaspora Studies at Indiana University. She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Callaloo. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming Callaloo, The New Sound, The Journal for Pan-African Studies and Third Coast.
Nathan McClain is the author of Scale (Four Way Books, 2017), a recipient of scholarships from The Frost Place and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and a graduate of Warren Wilson’s MFA Program for Writers. A Cave Canem fellow, his poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Ploughshares, Sou’wester, Southern Humanities Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and Waxwing, among others.
