Literati is thrilled to welcome author Morgan Jerkins who will be discussiong her new book This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminists in (White) America.
About This Will Be My Undoing:
Doubly disenfranchised by race and gender, often deprived of a place within the mostly white mainstream feminist movement, black women are objectified, silenced, and marginalized with devastating consequences, in ways both obvious and subtle, that are rarely acknowledged in our country’s larger discussion about inequality. In This Will Be My Undoing, Jerkins becomes both narrator and subject to expose the social, cultural, and historical story of black female oppression that influences the black community as well as the white, male-dominated world at large.
Whether she’s writing about Sailor Moon; Rachel Dolezal; the stigma of therapy; her complex relationship with her own physical body; the pain of dating when men say they don’t “see color”; being a black visitor in Russia; the specter of “the fast-tailed girl” and the paradox of black female sexuality; or disabled black women in the context of the “Black Girl Magic” movement, Jerkins is compelling and revelatory.
Morgan Jerkins is an associate editor at Catapult whose work has been featured in The New Yorker, Vogue, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Elle, Rolling Stone, Lenny, and BuzzFeed, among many others. She lives in New York.
All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Hieu Minh Nguyen is the author of This Way to the Sugar (Write Bloody Press, 2014) which was a finalist for both a Minnesota Book Award and a Lambda Literary Award. A queer Vietnamese American poet, Hieu is a Kundiman fellow and a poetry editor for Muzzle Magazine. His work has also appeared in the Southern Indiana Review, Guernica, Ninth Letter, Devil’s Lake, Bat City Review, the Paris-American, and elsewhere. Hieu is a nationally touring poet, performer, and teaching artist. He lives in Minneapolis.
Nicholson Baker is the author of nine novels, including Mezzanine and Vox, and four works of nonfiction, including Double Fold, which won a National Book Critics Circle Award, and House of Holes, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and The New York Review of Books. He lives in Maine with his family.
Literati is proud to welcome author Jeff Kass who will be be reading and sharing with us his thrilling debut novel set in Ann Arbor, Takedown
About Takedown:
Ann Arbor: a small city with a big university A city of cute coffee shops, leftover hippies, hybrid cars, indie bookstores, and craft breweries. A city, above all, that values education. Or does it? Jim Harrow has been an Ann Arbor cop for fifteen years. He mostly handles things like stolen cars and fratboy fights, giving him time to coach high school wrestling and help raise his teenage daughters. But things take a deadly turn the night after the Michigan–Michigan State football game, when a house party ends in a fire. Its single victim is a graduate student with no job, no friends, and no research. What was Sanders Bolgim working on, and why would someone want to kill him for it? Nothing about the case makes sense, and as Jim traces the events leading to the fire, he uncovers a shady party company, dark money buying for-profit charter schools, and a string of murders stretching back years. In a town where money and education are always in each other’s pockets, someone is paying a killer to teach the ultimate lesson. Kass’ debut novel is an astute commentary on the darker side of education reform wrapped in a gripping adventure. Filled with authentic characters, a strong voice, and the perfect portrait of a Midwest college town, Takedown is as sharp and crisp as a football Saturday.
Jeff Kass is the author of the award-winning short story collection Knuckleheads and the poetry collection My Beautiful Hook-Nosed Beauty Queen Strutwave. His stories, poems, and essays have appeared in multiple literary journals. He founded the Literary Arts Program at The Neutral Zone, Ann Arbor’s Teen Center, and is currently an English teacher at Pioneer High School and the Assignment Editor at Current Magazine.
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.
Readings by 2 U-M creative writing grad students, including fiction writer Laura Preston and poet Lea Xue.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 764-0395.
. http://umma.umich.edu/events/4270/mark-webster-reading-series
Literati is thrilled to host novelist Thisbe Nissen who will be reading and discussing her latest Our Lady of the Prairie
About Our Lady of the Prairie
A sharp and bitingly funny novel about a professor whose calm-ish midwestern life gives way to a vortex of crises–and her attempts to salvage the pieces without going to pieces herself
In the space of a few torrid months on the Iowa prairie, Phillipa Maakestad–long-married theater professor and mother of an unstable daughter–grapples with a life turned upside down. After falling headlong into a passionate affair during a semester spent teaching in Ohio, Phillipa returns home to Iowa for her daughter Ginny’s wedding. There, Phillipa must endure (among other things) a wedding-day tornado, a menace of a mother-in-law who may or may not have been a Nazi collaborator, and the tragicomic revenge fantasies of her heretofore docile husband.
Naturally, she does what any newly liberated woman would do: she takes a match to her life on the prairie and then steps back to survey the wreckage.
Set in the seething political climate of a contentious election, Thisbe Nissen’s new novel is sexy, smart, and razor-sharp–a freight train barreling through the heart of the land and the land of the heart.
Thisbe Nissen is the author of a story collection, Out of the Girls’ Room and into the Night, and two novels, The Good People of New York and Osprey Island. Her fiction has been published in the Iowa Review and the American Scholar, among others, and her nonfiction has appeared in Vogue, Glamour, and elsewhere. She teaches at Western Michigan University and lives in Battle Creek, Michigan, with her husband, writer Jay Baron Nicorvo, and their son.
Robin Coste Lewis, the winner of the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, is the poet laureate of Los Angeles. She is writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California, as well as a Cave Canem fellow and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California. Lewis was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.
Literati is thrilled to welcome poety Chris Glomski who will be reading from his new collection Lit Up.
About Lit Up:
There are fissures in quotidian details, light in the cracks of our daily lives, and nowhere are these gaps, reliefs, ands releases better displayed and bridged than in this book, Chris Glomski’s third collection of poetry. With characteristic intelligence and skill, the poet illuminates the *right* details and brings his artistry to recalling and connoting the scenes memory brings to bear, as narrative, event, and non sequitur.
Chris Glomski was born in Pueblo, Colorado, and has mostly lived in or around Chicago. He is the author of TRANSPARENCIES LIFTED FROM NOON (Spuyten Duyvil, 2005), THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND OTHER POEMS (The Cultural Society, 2011), and LIT UP (The Cultural Society, 2017). He lived in Pisa, Italy, from 1991 to 1992, and translates Italian poetry as an intermittent pursuit.
Literati is thrilled to welcome poet Lauren Clark who will be reading from her new collection Music for a Wedding.
About Music for a Wedding:
Lauren Clark’s poems move lucidly, depicting beautiful struggles of distrust, dream, grief, and intimacy. They show such conflicts through entrancing narrative drive and song-like abandon. In their unpredictable, unforgettable language, they make pain a tonic for pleasure, sorrow ground for revelation. This is a book that is celebratory, gentle, and queer.
Lauren Clark’s poems have appeared in FIELD, Ninth Letter, the Offing, and many other journals. They earned an MFA from the University of Michigan, where they won four of five categories of the university’s prestigious Hopwood Awards. They have been the recipient of scholarships from the New York State Summer Writers Institute and the Sewanee Writers Conference. They work as program and development coordinator at Poets House in New York City and collaborate with Etc. Gallery in Chicago.
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2-4 p.m., Ann Arbor District Library Freespace (3rd floor). Free. 971-5763.
