Started in 2003, the Kerrytown BookFest is an event celebrating those who create books and those who read them. The primary goal is to highlight the area’s rich heritage in the book and printing arts while showcasing local and regional individuals, businesses, and organizations. Since 2003 we have been growing, sharing, and discovering more and more about the rich book culture in our region.
The BookFest features authors, storytellers, publishers bookbinders, book artists, book illustrators, poets, letterpress printers, wood engravers, calligraphers, papermakers, librarians, teachers, publishers, new, used, and antiquarian booksellers and many others associated with books and their diverse forms, structure, and content.
More information at kerrytownbookfest.org
10:30 AM – Main Tent
Community Book Award Winner Presentation – James and Robin Agnew
11:00 AM – Main Tent – “Women in History” with Laurel Huber Davis, Theresa Kaminski, Greer Macallister and Pamela Toler with Barbara Mhangami-Ruwende as moderator
11:00 AM – Kerrytown Concert House –
“Terror in the City of Champions” with Tom Stanton moderated by D.E. Johnson
11:00 AM – Kerrytown Tent –
Mother Goose
11:45 AM – Kerrytown Tent – “Everyone Loves Dogs!” with Cartoonist Dave Coverly and Stacie Grissom and Morgane Chang from Bark Box and a FUNDRAISER for the Humane Society of Huron Valley Bountiful Bowls Program – Please bring dry dog or cat food or cat litter on the day of the event for donation to the program
12:15 PM – Main Tent – “Historical Suspense” with James R. Benn, Anna Lee Huber and Deanna Raybourn moderated by Nancy Herriman
12:15 PM – Kerrytown Concert House – “The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek” with Howard Markel
1:00 PM – Kerrytown Tent – “Fantasy and Adventure” with Middle Grade author Ted Sanders and moderated by Molly McCaffrey
1:30 PM – Main Tent –
“Literary Leanings” with Peter Ho Davies, Simon Van Booy moderated by Douglas Trevor
1:30 PM – Kerrytown Concert House –
“Civil Rights in 1960’s Detroit” with Stephen M. Ward and the story of James and Grace Lee Boggs
2:15 PM – Kerrytown Tent –
“YA Authors From Michigan!” with Erica Chapman, Kristin Bartley Lenz, Heather Meloche and Darcy Woods moderated by Patrick Flores-Scott
2:45 PM – Main Tent – “Short Stories from ‘Bob Seger’s House'” with Ellen Airgood, Loren D. Estelman, Gordon Henry and Michael Zadoorian moderated by M.L. Liebler
2:45 PM – Kerrytown Concert House – “A $500 Dollar House in Detroit” with Drew Philip and moderated by Desiree Cooper
3:30 PM – Kerrytown Tent –
“Page Turning Thrillers” with David Bell, Karen Dionne and Stephen Mack Jones moderated by Elizabeth Heiter
4:00 pm – Main Tent – “Poetic Musings” with Robert Fanning, Cindy Hunter Morgan, Keith Taylor and Z.G. Tomaszewski moderated by Zilka Joseph
4:00 pm – Kerrytown Concert House – “Washtenaw Literacy Volunteer Workshop” – Learn about becoming a volunteer for Washtenaw Literacy
A U-M Residential College creative writing alumna, Laura Hulthen Thomas heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
A U-M Residential College creative writing alumna, Laura Kasischke’s book of poems, Space, in Chains, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches writing at U-M English and the Residential College.
Set in Michigan small towns both real and fictional, the stories in Laura Hulthen Thomas’s State of Motion take place against a backdrop of economic turmoil and the domestic cost of the war on terror. As familiar places, privilege, and faith disappear, what remains leaves these broken characters wondering what hope is left.
Laura Kasischke’s Where Now: New and Selected Poems showcases her probing vision that subverts the so-called “normal.” A lover of fairy tales, Kasischke’s command of the symbolic includes a keen attention to sound in her exploration of the everyday—whether reflections on loss or the complicated realities of childhood and family.
Many RC creative writing alums will read.
Alisa Solomon, RC ’78, Drama and Philosophy, Professor and Director, Arts and Culture Concentration in the M.A. Program, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University
Literati is thrilled to partner with Current Magazine for an evening of Poetry and Fiction!
Come celebrate the submissions and winners of Current Magazine’s Poetry and Fiction contest.
Meet Current’s editor and contributors, and hear readings from the winners. Special guests Molly Raynor and Anthony Zick will be reading their work as well. If time permits there will be an open mic at the end.
Laura Kasischke’s most recent book, from which she will read, brings new poems together with work from her previous nine collections of poetry, published over the last twenty-five years. The citation for the National Book Critics Circle Award, which she received in 2011, reads: “No poet alive has worked harder to depict the contemporary American life course: she has shown herself, in sharply vivid poems, as a girl, as a wayward teen, as a young adult, as a passionate and worried mother with a baby, a child, and now a teenaged son…And no poet now at work does better than Kasischke in finding ways to depict not just how we feel about life stages and the people in them but also how we change as those stages go by…Kasischke stands for many among us.” Her collection of new and selected poems gathers together the breadth of this vision, and Kasischke will offer readings from both her earliest and most recent work.
For questions, contact Julie Sparkman at jmallard@umich.edu
Jessica Shattuck is the award-winning author of The Hazards of Good Breeding, which was a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award, and Perfect Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones, Wired, and The Believer, among other publications. A graduate of Harvard University, she received her MFA from Columbia University. She lives with her husband and three children in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Laura Hulthen Thomas’s short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany, and Witness. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
Join our triple header on Sunday, January 13 at 2, when we welcome book club favorite and RC creative writing alumna Carrie Smith, who has a new Claire Codella novel out, Unholy City; C.M. Gleason, who is joining the mystery community with her first mystery Murder in the Lincoln White House; and popular teacher and poetry slammer, Jeff Kass, whose first mystery Takedown was just published by the new press at the Ann Arbor District Library.
Keith Taylor is Coordinator of English’s Undergraduate Creative Writing Program, and Director of the Bear River Writers Conference. He has written or edited some thirteen books or chapbooks, including Marginalia for a Natural History, Ghost Writers (co-edited with Laura Kasischke), If the World Becomes So Bright and Guilty at the Rapture. His work has appeared widely in journals, magazines, anthologies and newspapers in the United States and in Europe. He has received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and support from the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs.
Performances include dance, music, spoken word, and a variety of mixed media and digital arts. Artists include Anthony Coffee, Spencer Haney, Olivia Johnson, Alex Kime (RC 2017), Hannah Marcus, Maddy Joss & Johnny Matthews, Augie Lessins & Daniel Kumapayi, Red Shoe Company, Nichole Reehorst, and more!
Join us for this special evening hosted by the UMMA Student Engagement Council, in partnership with Arts at Michigan, the Michigan Community Scholars Program, the School of Music, Theatre & Dance, and Multi-Ethnic Student Affairs.
