Three authors discuss how their fiction transforms home into character. How do writers use assumptions about familiar places to find the unexpected and surprising? When is a hometown the whole trouble, and also the last, best hope for change? We’ll also talk about how the unique landscape of the upper Midwest inspires our fiction.
Prior to writing fiction and poetry, Kelly Fordon worked at the NPR member station in Detroit and for National Geographic magazine. Her fiction, poetry, and book reviews have appeared in The Boston Review, The Florida Review, Flashquake, The Kenyon Review, and various other journals. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks,On the Street Where We Live, which won the 2011 Standing Rock Chapbook Contest, and Tell Me When It Starts to Hurt, which was published by Kattywompus Press in 2013. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Queens University of Charlotte and works for InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit as a writer-in-residence.
Born and raised in Detroit, Lolita Hernandez is the author of Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant, winner of a 2005 PEN Beyond Margins Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Quiet Battles and snakecrossing. She is a 2012 Kresge Literary Arts fellow, and her poetry and fiction have appeared in a wide variety of literary publications. After over thirty-three years as a UAW worker at General Motors, she now teaches in the creative writing department in the University of Michigan Residential College.
Laura Hulthen Thomas’s short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany, and Witness. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
Stop by for your history mystery fix with writers Laura Joh Rowland, who has a second novel in her Victorian photographer series, A Mortal Likeness, coming out; and Nancy Herriman, who is beginning a new series set in Russia with Searcher of the Dead.
Join us for an event with award-winning Ann Arbor author Jeff Kass. Kass’ work has appeared in multiple literary journals, and he is the author of the award-winning short story collection Knuckleheads and the poetry collection My Beautiful Hook-Nosed Beauty Queen Strutwave. Now he will present his debut mystery thriller, Takedown, set in the city of Ann Arbor itself! 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.
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.
About the Author
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.
“Boss is a poet to watch, likely to prove one of the leading voices of the next decade. Readers may be drawn into this collection for the poems that touch on disaster and divorce, but they’ll stay for the memorable verses on nature and memory.” — Library Journal, starred review
“At the center of Tough Luck is a poem about the ill-fated I-35W Bridge in Minneapolis and its disastrous collapse, which killed 13 people and injured 145. The freighted, swiftly moving poems in Tough Luck crisscross the chasm between peril and safety as if between opposing riverbanks, revealing a frequently heart-stopping view of the muscled waters below. Marriage, family, home—all come crashing down, but Todd Boss rebuilds with his trademark musicality and “a reverent gusto for representing the tactile aspects of human life” (Tony Hoagland).
Todd Boss, a critically-acclaimed poet, librettist, public artist, and film producer, holds a diverse career with a passion for collaboration. His works for both page and stage have been read and produced throughout the world. Boss’s 2008 poetry debut, Yellowrocket was followed by Pitch in 2012 and Tough Luck forthcoming in 2017, all from W. W. Norton & Co. Todd’s poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, The London Times, The New Yorker, NPR, Best American Poetry, and Virginia Quarterly Review, which called Yellowrocket “one of the year’s 10 best poetry books” and awarded Todd the Emily Clark Balch Prize. Todd lives in Minneapolis where he teaches at the Loft Literary Center, has served on the board of directors of Ten Thousand Things Theater Company, and has been artist in residence at the Target Studio at the Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota. Learn more at toddbosspoet.com
Join us for a poetry reading by award-winning writer Jason Phoebe Rusch as he presents his debut full-length collection of poetry, Dualities. Rusch is a queer writer from the Chicago suburbs who earned his MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writing Program. Dualities explores gender and patriarchy from the perspective of a man who was socialized and is currently still read as a woman. He is interested in complication and nuance and messy human failing, his own and that of others. He will be joined by Detroit poet Marlin Jenkins and Ann Arbor poet Sylvan Thomson.
About the Author
Jason Phoebe Rusch is an essayist, poet and fiction writer with a BA in history from Princeton University and an MFA in fiction from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writing Program, where he received Hopwood awards in screenwriting and non-fiction as well as the Chamberlain award in creative writing for short fiction. His screenplay Banana Rat was a finalist in the 2010 Zoetrope Contest and his play 3⁄4 of a Mass for St. Vivian, which premiered at the Kennedy Center and ran at the D.C. Theater Alliance, was nominated for a Helen Hayes award. He has taught composition at the University of Michigan as well as creative writing at Interlochen Center for the Arts and Bisou Bisou Haiti. Most recently, he has been awarded a 2017 fellowship from the Luminarts foundation. His first book of poems, ‘Dualities,’ is forthcoming from Hobart’s SF/LD books in early 2018. He has also been working on a novel for a very long time.
Readings by writers featured in the 10th annual edition of Prison Creative Arts Project magazine that features work by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated writers.
4 p.m., Pierpont Commons East Room. Free. 615-3204, 647-6771.
This L.A.-based writer, lecturer, and media ecologist, who is in town for the Ann Arbor Film Festival, reads from his new book, Strange Questions: Experimental Film as Conversation. Discussion follows with guests TBA.
6-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is excited to host author and actor Alexandra Silber who will be reading and sharing her new novel After Anatevka: A Novel Inspired by “Fiddler on the Roof”.
About After Anatevka:
The world knows well the tale of Tevye, the beloved Jewish dairyman from the shtetl Anatevka of Tsarist Russia. In stories originally written by Sholem Aleichem and then made world-famous in the celebrated musical Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye, his wife Golde, and their five daughters dealt with the outside influences that were encroaching upon their humble lives. But what happened to those remarkable characters after the curtain fell? In After Anatevka, Alexandra Silber picks up where Fiddler left off. Second-eldest daughter Hodel takes center stage as she attempts to join her Socialist-leaning fiancae Perchik to the outer reaches of a Siberian work camp. But before Hodel and Perchik can finally be together, they both face extraordinary hurdles and adversaries–both personal and political–attempting to keep them apart at all costs. A love story set against a backdrop of some of the greatest violence in European history, After Anatevaka is a stunning conclusion to a tale that has gripped audiences around the globe for decades.
Alexandra Silber is an actress and singer who starred most recently as Tzeitel in the Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof. She earlier played Hodel in the same show in London’s West End. Those two roles inspired her to write After Anatevka. Her other Broadway, New York, and West End credits include Master Class, Arlington (Outer Critics Circle nomination), Carousel (TMA Award and Ovation Nomination), Kiss Me Kate, and Hello, Again (Drama League nomination). She received a Grammy nomination for her portrayal of Maria in the recording of West Side Story with the San Francisco Symphony. She has appeared on all three incarnations of “Law & Order” and has performed in a variety of concert outlets including the 57th Grammy Awards, Royal Albert Hall, and Carnegie Hall. She lives in New York.
Reading by GVSU creative writing lecturer Gale Thompson, whose 2015 collection, Soldier On, examines the relationship between living spaces and memories. The program begins with open mike readings.
7-8:30 p.m., Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663
Maya Barzilai (modern Herbrew and Jewish culture) and Kathryn Babayan (Iranian history and culture) discuss Barzilai’s new book Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters, a monster tour of the Golem narrative across various cultural and historical landscapes.
About the book:
“In the 1910s and 1920s, a “golem cult” swept across Europe and the U.S., later surfacing in Israel. Why did this story of a powerful clay monster molded and animated by a rabbi to protect his community become so popular and pervasive? The golem has appeared in a remarkable range of popular media: from the Yiddish theater to American comic books, from German silent film to Quentin Tarantino movies. This book showcases how the golem was remolded, throughout the war-torn twentieth century, as a muscular protector, injured combatant, and even murderous avenger. This evolution of the golem narrative is made comprehensible by, and also helps us to better understand, one of the defining aspects of the last one hundred years: mass warfare and its ancillary technologies.
