Literati is honored to partner with the University Musical Society and the Penny Stamps Speaker Series to host author Claudia Rankine at the Michigan Theater for a conversation with editor P. Carl entitled Theatre Matters; Activism, Imagination, Citizenship. This event is the keynote for the No Safety Net series.
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books, including the highly praised collection Citizen: An American Lyric. She currently is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Pomona College.
About Citizen:
A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine’s long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV–everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.
Literati is excited to welcome poet Rae Paris who will be reading from her new collection The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory
About The Forgetting Tree:
Rae Paris began writing The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory in 2010, while traveling the United States, visiting sites of racial trauma, horror, and resistance. The desire to do this work came from being a child of parents born and raised in New Orleans during segregation, who ultimately left for California in the late 1950s. After the death of her father in 2011, the fiction Paris had been writing gave way to poetry and short prose, which were heavily influenced by the questions she’d long been considering about narrative, power, memory, and freedom. Paris is driven by the familial and historical spaces and by what happens when we remember seemingly disparate images and moments. A blending of prose, poetry, and images, The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory is a necessary collection that argues for a deeper understanding of past and present so we might imagine a more hopeful, sustaining, and loving future for Black lives.
Rae Paris is from Carson, California with roots extending to New Orleans. Her work has been supported by a NEA Literature Fellowship, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Hedgebrook, Hambidge Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts, and VONA. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington.
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends – a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
This week’s reading features Sam Krowchenko and Kyle Hunt.
Sam Krowchenko’s writing has appeared in Salon, Full-Stop, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among other venues. A bookseller at Literati, he also hosts Shelf Talking, the store’s official podcast.
Kyle Hunt is a poet from West Texas and Middle Tennessee. He has work published with Toe Good, previously known as Toe Good Poetry.
Zingerman’s Bakehouse co-owners Frank Carollo and Amy Emberling discuss their new cookbook, which features 65 of their most popular recipes.
3-5 p.m., AADL Malletts Creek. Free. 327-8301.
Tom Grace is the internationally bestselling author of Undeniable, The Liberty Intrigue, The Secret Cardinal, Fatal Orbit, Dark Ice, Quantum and Spyder Web. His books have been translated into eight languages and sold in over twenty-five countries. They have collectively appeared for one hundred weeks on USA Today and Associated Press bestseller lists, primarily in the top ten.
In addition to fascinating characters, intricately woven plots and breakneck pacing, Tom Grace novels are infused with technology on the cutting edge or just over the horizon. His fascination with science and technology is drawn from his real-world experience designing state-of-the-art research facilities. In the early 1990s, Tom designed the world’s first human applications laboratory for genetic therapy.
Tom was born and raised in Michigan, where he resides with his family. He divides his professional life between writing and a private practice in architecture. Tom is also a member of the International Thriller Writers.
Undeniable, the sixth Nolan Kilkenny thriller from international bestselling author Tom Grace, takes Nolan into the brave new world of reproductive technology, where the building blocks of life are manipulated in a Petri dish, women lease their wombs like rental properties, and money trumps morality. In an age of rapid advances in human genetics, cloning and stem cell research, what seemed impossible just a few years ago is now a reality. DNA has been reduced from a miraculous molecule into a data storage device, and the information it contains is as easy to hack as any computer file. Undeniable is a novel that steps beyond the traditional parent-child relationship into a chilling new reproductive reality.
Literati is excited to welcome cardiologist and clinical professor Dr. Joel Kahn to share with us his new book The Plant-Based Solution
About The Plant-Based Solution:
Each of us has access to the most powerful source of preventative medicine on the planet—a whole-foods, plant-based diet. With The Plant-Based Solution, leading cardiologist Dr. Joel Kahn explores how a vegan diet can help us prevent and reverse our most common chronic diseases, supported with decades of scientific research. Includes a 21-day meal plan with over 60 easy and delicious recipes from Kahn’s popular health food restaurant, the GreenSpace Café.
A passionate, compelling, and scientific argument for plant-based nutrition
Are you ready to feel better, look better, and heal the planet at the same time? Then it’s time to revolutionize your health from the inside out. With The Plant-Based Solution, leading cardiologist Dr. Joel Kahn shows how everyone can cultivate optimal well-being with a whole-foods, plant-based diet.
Known as America’s Healthy Heart Doc, Dr. Kahn has already helped thousands of people prevent and reverse heart disease. But what about other chronic conditions, such as adult diabetes, obesity, gut health, osteoporosis, autoimmune disease, and even low sex drive? It turns out that all these conditions and more can be improved with a plant-based diet—and Dr. Kahn has the evidence to prove it.
Drawing from decades of experience, Dr. Kahn brings together a wealth of scientific research and in-depth case studies to clearly demonstrate how you can take charge of your own health. Highlights include:
- Learn how you can lose weight, get off medication, reduce your risk of cancer, and reverse diabetes with a plant-based diet
- Myth-busting—why most people get it wrong when it comes to calcium, protein, carbs, and more
- The surprising links between a vegan diet and your sex drive, gut health, and brain chemistry
- Why plants might hold the key to better aging
- Understand exactly what’s happening inside your body, so you can decide for yourself what to eat and why
Joel Kahn, MD, is one of the world’s leading cardiologists, a bestselling author, and a popular lecturer who inspires others to think scientifically and critically about the body’s ability to heal through proper nutrition. Dr. Kahn serves as Clinical Professor of Medicine at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit and is founder of the Kahn Center for Cardiac Longevity. His first book, The Whole Heart Solution, was the basis of a national public TV special. Dr. Kahn lives with his wife and three children in the Detroit area, where he has recently opened the popular health food restaurant, the GreenSpace Café.
Rescheduled from November. Widely published Cleveland performance poet Siaara Freeman, who rose to national prominence in 2014 at the Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam in Detroit with a searing performance of her autobiographical poem “The Drug Dealer’s Daughter,” reads from her debut collection Good Morning, Hood Warning. Many of her poems are in the voice of a persona called “Urban Girl.” The program begins with open mike readings.
7-8:30 p.m., Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663
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.
U-M English professor Aida Levy-Hussen reads from her new book and discusses it with U-M English and women’s studies professor Victor Mendoza.
5:30-7 p.m., 100 U-M Hatcher Grad Library Gallery, enter from the Diag. Free.
Reading by Ferris State University writing professor Jamie Thomas, a widely published poet whose debut collection, Etch and Blur, is praised by a Poets’ Quarterly review for its “wordplay and cleverness, the irony of which offers up moving turns when the poems brush against genuine introspective emotionality.” Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
