Purple Rose Theatre artistic director Guy Sanville directs Purple Rose actors in readings, usually from new scripts being considered for production. Followed by a discussion with the audience. Dec. 2: Match, Stephen Belber’s 2004 dramatic comedy about an aging Juilliard professor who discovers that the couple he invites into his home for an interview have ulterior motives for their visit. Feb. 10: TBA.
10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., CDL McKune Room, 221 S. Main, Chelsea. Free. Preregistration required. 475-8732.
Looking for that perfect gift for a youngster or new parent? Join us for a signing event with six local authors who are members of the Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators. Join us and meet and talk with this wonderful array of authors. For more information regarding SCBWI – Michigan go to https://michigan.scbwi.org
Authors Participating:
Leslie Helakoski
Leslie Helakoski grew up in south Louisiana. She is the author of Big Chickens (Puffin Books; the Michigan Reads picture book for 2007, Great Lakes Great Books Award and a GLBA finalist) and Woolbur (HarperCollins; a Book Sense pick for 2008, Florida Reading Association Honor Book and nominee for state book awards in nine states). Her other books include Big Chickens Fly the Coop (Puffin Books) , The Smushy Bus (Millbrook Press), and Fair Cow (Two Lions). She lives in southern MI. https://www.helakoskibooks.com/
Nancy Shaw
Nancy Shaw is the author of seven beloved tales featuring the endearing and comical sheep. She came up with the idea for the sheep books during a very long car trip with her husband and two children. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her family. http://www.nancyshawbooks.com/
Jodi McKay
Jodi McKay lives in Michigan with her husband, son, and a crazy Goldendoodle named Ralph. She’s too embarrassed to tell you what her typical day as a writer looks like, but she will say that it involves a ton of weird daydreams. Jodi is a proud member of the writing community and is involved in multiple writing groups including SCBWI and 12×12. http://www.jodimckaybooks.com/
Jeff Jantz
Deep within the mind of Jeff Jantz… lives a mad sculptor named Dr. Jantzer…Dr. Jantzer is the creative mastermind behind Jantzer Studios, he dreams up original characters, creatures, and contraptions. Jeff is tasked with constructing Dr. Jantzer’s ideas using clay, wood, metal and whatever else he can get his hand on. Jeff writes fun and quirky stories to accompany the sculptures and with a little hard work, light, and artistic magic colorful and energetic picture books are forged. Jantzer studios creates imaginative sculptures, sets, and props. Gruel Snarl Draws a Wild Zugthing is Jantzer Studios picture book debut. http://www.jeffjantz.com/
Kathryn Madeline Allen
Kathryn Madeline Allen is the author of numerous books, short stories, and poems for children. She lives in Michigan with her three children. http://www.kmabooks.com/blog/
Janet Ruth Heller
Janet Ruth Heller is a poet, literary critic, college professor, essayist, playwright, and fiction writer. I am a past president of the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature, and I am currently president of the Michigan College English Association. I have a Ph.D. in English Language and Literature from the University of Chicago. http://www.janetruthheller.com/
Local writer Natalie Bakopoulos, author of The Green Shore, offers tips on revising your written work and how to get published. Q&A. In conjunction with the end of National Novel Writing Month, a nonprofit promotion challenging teens and adults to write a 50,000-word novel by the end of November.
1-2:30 p.m., AADL Westgate Branch West Side Room, Westgate shopping center, 2503 Jackson. Free. 327-8301.
Jewish Theological Seminary modern Jewish history professor David Fishman discusses his recent book about ghetto residents who rescued thousands of rare books and manuscripts from the Nazis and the Soviets.
6:30 p.m., Beth Israel Congregation, 2000 Washtenaw. Free. 665-9897.
Performances by Detroit slam poet/high school English teacher Brittany Rogers and U-M Zell Writers Program MFA candidate Franny Choi, whose new chapbook, Death by Sex Machine, imagines the inner monologues of different femme cyborgs featured in movies and manga. Preceded by a poetry open mike.
7 p.m. Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry.
U-M Zell Writers’ Program director Douglas Trevor reads from his new collection of witty and satirical short stories about characters, often academics, facing big changes in their lives. “Trevor manages again and again to steer the stories into deeper, weirder, more fascinating waters,” says a Kirkus review. He also discusses the book with U-M English professor and award-winning fiction writer Peter Ho Davies.
5:30-7 p.m., 100 U-M Hatcher Grad Library Gallery, enter from the Diag. Free. 764-3166.
Come join us for our first ever Books We Love and Love to Share Panel!
Buying gifts for friends and family throughout the holiday season can be quite stressful. What do you get the brother-in-law who (thinks he) has everything? What about the niece whose interests alter as constantly as our peculiar Michigan weather? And of course, there are the rowdy kids and the beloved partner and the cordial neighbors and….Just thinking about it makes us unstoppably anxious.
So in order to help you buy books for the woods walking naturalist, or the news junkie, or the literary fiction enthusiast, or the esoteric indie book reading hipster, we will be hosting a panel to provide options, answers, and most importantly, soothing advice regarding a vast array of titles. With a stellar line up of booksellers, writers, editors, critics, and one of our favorite publisher reps, we hope this event might make the burden of holiday shopping somewhat lighter–maybe even entertaining? We hope to see you there!
Our list of panelists…
Keith Taylor teaches at the University of Michigan. He has published many books over the years: collections of poetry, a collection of very short stories, co-edited volumes of essays and fiction, and a volume of poetry translated from Modern Greek. His most recent collection, published by Wayne State University Press, is The Bird-while.
Claire Vaye-Watkins is the author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn, which won the Story Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize, New York Public Library’s Young Lions Fiction Award, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. A Guggenheim Fellow, she has been a professor at Bucknell University and Princeton, and is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. She is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada. She earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, Tin House, Freeman’s, The Paris Review, Story Quaterly, New American Stories, Best of the West, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many others. A recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, Claire was also one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35.”
Polly Rosenwaike’s story collection, Look How Happy I’m Making You, will be published by Doubleday in 2019. Her stories have appeared in Colorado Review, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, Copper Nickel, Indiana Review, and Glimmer Train. Her story “White Carnations” was selected for the O. Henry Prize Stories 2013. She has published book reviews and essays in the San Francisco Chronicle, The New York Times Book Review, The Millions, and The Brooklyn Rail. She lives in Ann Arbor and teaches creative writing at Eastern Michigan University.
Kate McCune is a publisher representative for Harper Collins. She is a voracious reader who has been known to write outstanding reviews. It is often quite difficult for her to speak about a book without making you want to immediately read said title.
Jill Zimmerman is a bookseller, children’s book buyer, and manager at Literati Bookstore. When she isn’t ordering the latest children’s books, making sure the deposits make it to the bank in a timely manner, or helping customers find that perfect title for a close friend, she enjoys spending time with her lovely daughter and phenomenol husband.
Hilary Gustafson is a co-owner of Literati Bookstore. A serious reader, authentic cat lover, and dedicated coffee drinker, Hilary chooses the titles for Literati’s signed first edition book club, Literati Cultura, in addition to running the bookstore.
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
Literati is proud to be partnering with the Helen Zell Writers Program to host poet Gregory Pardlo at University of Michigan Museum of Art Apse
Gregory Pardlo’s collection Digest (Four Way Books) won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Digest was also nominated for an NAACP Image Award, named a standout book by the Academy of American Poets, a New York Times best poetry book of the year, and a finalist for the Hurston Wright Legacy Award and INDIEFAB Book of the Year. Gregory Pardlo’s other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. His first poetry collection, Totem, won the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize in 2007.
John U. Bacon is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including Three and Out; Fourth and Long; and Endzone. He appears often on NPR and national television, and teaches at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and the University of Michigan. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and son.
Book:
From New York Times bestselling author John U. Bacon, a gripping narrative history of the largest manmade detonation prior to Hiroshima: in 1917 a ship laden with the most explosives ever packed on a vessel sailed out of Brooklyn’s harbor for the battlegrounds of World War I; when it stopped in Halifax, Nova Scotia, an extraordinary disaster awaited…
