This Ohio-based American-Israeli writer reads from Sadness Is a White Bird, his debut novel about a young man preparing to serve in the Israeli army while trying to reconcile his close relationship to 2 Palestinian siblings with his deeply ingrained loyalty to family and country. Signing.
About The Bible of Dirty Jokes:
When Ketzel Weinrach’s beloved brother Potsie goes missing in Las Vegas, she not only must try to find him, she must confront her family’s shady history and their ties to the legendary Jewish mob, Murder, Inc., as well as her troubling relationship to her cousin Perry (who runs a strip club on the outskirts of Vegas), her long and apparently not-so-loving marriage to her recently departed husband Morty Tittelman (a self-styled professor of dirty jokes and erotic folklore), and her own failed career as a stand-up comic.
Eileen Pollack is the award-winning author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction, including Breaking and Entering (Four Way Books 2012) and In The Mouth (Four Way Books 2008). She lives in Manhattan and Ann Arbor and teaches on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program in creative writing at the University of Michigan.
About When History Is Personal:
When History Is Personal contains the stories of twenty-five moments in Mimi Schwartz’s life, each heightened by its connection to historical, political, and social issues. These essays look both inward and outward so that these individualized tales tell a larger story—of assimilation, the women’s movement, racism, anti-Semitism, end-of-life issues, ethics in writing, digital and corporate challenges, and courtroom justice.
A shrewd and discerning storyteller, Schwartz captures history from her vantage as a child of German-Jewish immigrants, a wife of over fifty years, a breast cancer survivor, a working mother, a traveler, a tennis player, a daughter, and a widow. In adding her personal story to the larger narrative of history, culture, and politics, Schwartz invites readers to consider her personal take alongside “official” histories and offers readers fresh assessments of our collective past.
Mimi Schwartz is an award-winning, socially conscious memoirist and essayist who crafts personal experiences into compelling narratives. Her recent books include When History Is Personal (2018); Good Neighbors, Bad Times- Echoes of My Father’s Germany Village (2008); Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed (2002); and Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, co-authored with Sondra Perl. Her short work has appeared in Agni, Creative Nonfiction, The Writer’s Chronicle, Calyx, Prairie Schooner, Tikkun, The New York Times and The Missouri Review, among others. A recipient of a Foreword Book of the Year Award in Memoir and the New Hampshire Outstanding Literary Nonfiction Award, Schwartz’s essays have been widely anthologized and nine have been Notables in the Best American Essays Series. She is Professor Emerita in writing at Richard Stockton University and gives talks and creative writing workshops nationwide and abroad.
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
Literati is thrilled to partner with the University of Michigan History Department to showcase fifteen recent publications by fourteen U-M History faculty members.
Authors and editors include:
Rita Chin is associate professor of history at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany and the coauthor of After the Nazi Racial State.
Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History and Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan, USA. He is the author of Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (2002), A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005) and Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945 (2013).
Susan Juster is Rhys Isaac Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is author of Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution and coeditor of Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, both available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Valerie A. Kivelson is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books, including Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2013) and Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2006). She is the editor of Witchcraft Casebook: Magic in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, 15th-21st Centuries [ Russian History/Histoire russe vol. 40, nos. 3-4 (2013)], and co-editor, with Joan Neuberger, of Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (2008).
Deborah Dash Moore has provided a magisterial history of the Jews of New York. A hub of both American and Jewish innovation, New York’s bustling metropolis became home to millions of Jews. New York gave Jewish life a distinct character, even as Jews helped to shape the essence of the city. This fascinating study explores the streets, synagogues, politics, and organizations of New York Jewry as well as its diverse cultural expressions. Moore’s mastery of New York Jewish history and deep knowledge of the urban rhythms of the city shine through on every page.-Beth S. Wenger, Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Dario Gaggio is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds a PhD in History from Northwestern University and is the author of In Gold We Trust: Social Capital and Economic Change in the Italian Jewelry Towns (2007). His research has pioneered the integration of cultural change and political economy from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining historical methodologies with the theoretical insights of sociology, anthropology and human geography.
Joel D. Howell is a physician, medical historian at the University of Michigan
Powel H. Kazanjian, MD, PhD is a professor and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Internal Medicine, at the University of Michigan Medical Center and a professor in the department of history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Derek R. Peterson is Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan
Helmut Puff is Professor of German and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
LaKisha Michelle Simmons is assistant professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Michigan.
Scott Spector is Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan. He is author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siecle.
Ronald Grigor Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and Senior Researcher at the National Research University-Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg.
Melanie S. Tanielian is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
Erin Adair-Hodges is visiting assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Toledo and is the co-creator and curator of the Bad Mouth Reading Series. Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, theGeorgia Review, Boulevard, and Green Mountains Review, among other venues. Winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, she has also been a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe scholar, and has received awards from the Rockland Residency and The Writer’s Hotel.
Jenny Molberg, originally from Texas, earned her BA at Louisiana State University, her MFA at American University, and her PhD at the University of North Texas. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Best New Poets, Poetry International, North American Review, Copper Nickel, and other publications. She teaches at the University of Central Missouri and is Co-editor for Pleiades
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, fiction writer Nell David and poet Franny Choi.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 615-3710
Literati is proud to be partnering with the Helen Zell Writers Program to host author Lydia Davis at University of Michigan Museum of Art Apse
Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections. Her collection Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award of Merit Medal, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust. Lydia Davis is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.
Literati is pleased to partner with the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing and WCBN Radio for the latest installment of Writer to Writer, a series which puts a UM professor and member of the Sweetland faculty in conversation about writing.
Sweetland Center for Writing’s Writer to Writer series lets you hear directly from University of Michigan professors about their challenges, processes, and expectations as writers and also as readers of student writing. Each semester, Writer to Writer pairs one esteemed University professor with a Sweetland faculty member for a conversation about writing.
This month Writer to Writer welcomes Susan Scott Parrish. Susan Scott Parrish is a Professor in the English Department and the Program in the Environment at UM. Her research addresses the interrelated issues of the environment, race and knowledge-making in the Atlantic world from the seventeenth century up through the present, with a particular emphasis on southern and Caribbean plantation zones. Her new book, The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2017), examines how the most devastating, and publicly absorbing, US flood of the twentieth century took on meaning as it moved across media platforms, across sectional divides and across the color line. Her first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006), is a study of how people in England and in British-controlled America conceived of—and made knowledge about—American nature within Atlantic scientific networks. This book won both Phi Beta Kappa’s Emerson Award and the Jamestown Prize.
Writer to Writer takes place at the Literati bookstore and are broadcast live on WCBN radio. These conversations offer students a rare glimpse into the writing that professors do outside the classroom. You can hear instructors from various disciplines describe how they handle the same challenges student writers face, from finding a thesis to managing deadlines. Professors will also discuss what they want from student writers in their courses, and will take questions put forth by students and by other members of the University community. If there’s anything you’ve ever wanted to ask a professor about writing, Writer to Writer gives you the chance.
Literati is proud to be partnering with the Helen Zell Writers Program to host author Lydia Davis at University of Michigan Museum Helmet Stern Auditorium
Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections. Her collection Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award of Merit Medal, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust. Lydia Davis is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.
