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
Talk on some aspect of MLK’s legacy by this renowned actor and author of several best-selling books, most recently Letters to an Incarcerated Brother: Encouragement, Hope, and Healing for Inmates and Their Loved Ones.
10-11:30 a.m., Hill Auditorium. Free. 764-7522.
Literati is proud to partner with the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design to host artist Shawn Martinbrough for a talk entitled “Continuing the Legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Through the Art of Storytelling”
Shawn Martinbrough is the author of How to Draw Noir Comics: The Art and Technique of Visual Storytelling, published by Random House and reprinted in several languages. He is a critically acclaimed creator/artist whose DC, Marvel and Dark Horse Comics projects include Batman: Detective Comics, Luke Cage Noir, Captain America, The Black Panther and Hellboy: Secret Nature. Currently, Martinbrough is the artist of Thief of Thieves, the acclaimed crime series written by Robert Kirkman, creator of the AMC television series, The Walking Dead and award winning author Andy Diggle.
Martinbrough has co-created characters featured in the blockbuster 20th Century Fox feature film, Deadpool, the animated Batman: Gotham Knights and the FOX television series, GOTHAM and The GIFTED.
Shawn’s work has been covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, BET, ESSENCE, EBONY, The New York Daily News, USA Today, AOL, Publisher’s Weekly, and SIRIUS/XM Radio.
Literati is pleased to partner with the University of Michigan School of Social Work to host Adrienne Maree Brown, author of Emergent Strategy, for a MLK Symposium lecture entitled “From Theory to Practice: Engaging Intersectional Organizing for Structual Transformation.”
About Emergent Strategy:
Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.
adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit.
Literati is pleased to welcome Gregory Boyle to Ann Arbor! He will be speaking at the Rogel Ballrom in the Union on topics from his new book Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship.
About Barking to the Choir:
In his first book, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, Gregory Boyle introduced us to Homeboy Industries, the largest gang-intervention program in the world . Critics hailed that book as an “astounding literary and spiritual feat” ( Publishers Weekly) that is “destined to become a classic of both urban reportage and contemporary spirituality” ( Los Angeles Times). Now, after the suc-cessful expansion of Homeboy Industries, Boyle returns with Barking to the Choir to reveal how com-passion is transforming the lives of gang members.
In a nation deeply divided and plagued by poverty and violence, Barking to the Choir offers a snapshot into the challenges and joys of life on the margins. Sergio, arrested at nine, in a gang by twelve, and serving time shortly thereafter, now works with the substance-abuse team at Homeboy to help others find sobriety. Jamal, abandoned by his family when he tried to attend school at age seven, gradually finds forgive-ness for his schizophrenic mother. New father Cuco, who never knew his own dad, thinks of a daily adventure on which to take his four-year-old son. These former gang members uplift the soul and reveal how bright life can be when filled with unconditional love and kindness.
This book is guaranteed to shake up our ideas about God and about people with a glimpse at a world defined by more compassion and fewer barriers. Gently and humorously, Barking to the Choir invites us to find kinship with one another and reconvinces us all of our own goodness.
Gregory Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, CA. Now in its 30th year, Homeboy traces its roots to when Boyle, a Jesuit priest with advanced degrees in English and theology, served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church, then the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles, which also had the highest concentration of gang activity in the city. Homeboy has become the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and reentry program in the world, and employs and trains gang members and felons in a range of social enterprises, as well as provides critical services to thousands of men and women each year who walk through its doors seeking a better life. Father Boyle has received the California Peace Prize, the James Beard Foundation Humanitarian of the Year Award, and the University of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal. He was inducted into the California Hall of Fame and named a 2014 Champion of Change by the White House. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion.
Literati is proud to partner with the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities to present Yaa Gyaasi, author of Homegoing, as the speaker for The 2018 Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture.
About Homecoming
Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and will live in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising children who will be sent abroad to be educated before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the empire. Esi, imprisoned beneath Effia in the Castle’s women’s dungeon and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, will be sold into slavery. Stretching from the wars of Ghana to slavery and the Civil War in America, from the coal mines in the American South to the Great Migration to twentieth-century Harlem, Yaa Gyasi’s novel moves through histories and geographies and captures—with outstanding economy and force—the troubled spirit of our own nation. She has written a modern masterpiece.
Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana in 1989, raised in Huntsville, Alabama, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Literati is thrilled to partner with the Stamps School of Art and Design to welcome author and musician Joseph Keckler to the Rackham Auditorium as part of the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.
Straddling the worlds of music, art, and performance, Joseph Keckler has garnered acclaim for his rich, versatile 3+ octave voice and sharp wit. Keckler’s live performances have been seen at SXSW Music, the New Museum, Issue Project Room, the BAM Fischer Center, Joe’s Pub, the Afterglow Festival, and many other venues. He has received residencies from MacDowell and Yaddo, as well as a Franklin Furnace Grant and a Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His most recent performance piece, I am an Opera, was commissioned by Dixon Place. The Village Voicenamed him Best Downtown Performance Artist, 2013. For this special speaker series event, Keckler will read from his latest book, Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World (Dragon Point Press, 2017). Drawn from the stories of his life, Keckler’s essays explore the corners of downtown New York, where he made his name performing his songs and plays, and back to the Midwest, where everything began. The texts included in Dragon at the Edge of a Flat Worldrepresent both the continuation and foundation of Keckler’s work on stage.
EMU women’s and gender studies professor Elizabeth Currans discusses her new book.
4:10 p.m., 2239 Lane, 204 S. State. Free. 764-9537.
Talk by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.
4-5:30 p.m., Mendelssohn Theatre. Free. 998-7666.
Literati is proud to partner with the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies to welcome author and activist Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman to Ann Arbor for a talk on their new book Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia. This lecture will occur at the Weiser Hall on the University of Michigan campus.
About Never Remember:
The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than half a century after the end of Stalinist terror, the geography of the Gulag has been barely sketched and the number of its victims remains unknown. Has the Gulag been forgotten? Writer Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman set out across Russia in search of the memory of the Gulag. They journey from Moscow to Sandarmokh, a forested site of mass executions during Stalin’s Great Terror; to the only Gulag camp turned into a museum, outside of the city of Perm in the Urals; and to Kolyma, where prisoners worked in deadly mines in the remote reaches of the Far East. They find that in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where Stalin is remembered as a great leader, Soviet terror has not been forgotten: it was never remembered in the first place.
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin. Gessen’s books include The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She is the recipient of numerous other awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Fellowship, and her work appears regularly in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and Slate. A longtime resident of Moscow, Gessen now lives in New York City.
Misha Friedman regularly photographs for The New Yorker, Time, Der Spiegel, GQ, Le Monde, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Sports Illustrated, Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders. His work has received numerous awards, including grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. He was born in Moldova and graduated from Binghamton University and the London School of Economics. He taught himself photography while working in humanitarian medical aid. He lives in New York City.
