Literati is pleased to welcome author Simon Jacobs who will be sharing his latest novel Palaces.
About Palaces:
John and Joey are a young couple immersed in their local midwestern punk scene, who after graduating college sever all ties and move to a perverse and nameless northeastern coastal city. They drift in and out of art museums, basement shows, and derelict squats seemingly unfazed as the city slowly slides into chaos around them. Late one night, forced out of their living space, John and Joey are driven to take shelter in a chain pharmacy before emerging to a city in full-scale riot. They find themselves the only passengers on a commuter train headed north, and exit at the final stop to discover the area entirely devoid of people. As John and Joey negotiate their future through bizarre, troubling manifestations of the landscape and a succession of abandoned mansions housing only scant clues to their owners’ strange and sudden disappearance, they’re also forced to confront the resurgent violence and buried memories of their shared past.
Simon Jacobs is the author of Saturn (Spork Press), a collection of David Bowie stories, and of Masterworks (Instar Books), a short story collection. His other fiction has appeared in Tin House, Black Warrior Review, Joyland, and Paper Darts. He lives in New York City. Palaces is his first novel.
Literati is pleased to welcome author Leah Stewart who will be sharing her latest novel What You Don’t Know About Charlie Outlaw. Leah will be joined by fellow author Eileen Pollack for a discussion after the reading.
About What You Don’t Know About Charlie Outlaw:
After a series of missteps in the face of his newfound fame, actor Charlie Outlaw flees to a remote island in search of anonymity and a chance to reevaluate his recent breakup with his girlfriend, actress Josie Lamar. But soon after his arrival on the peaceful island, his solitary hike into the jungle takes him into danger he never anticipated.
As Charlie struggles with gaining fame, Josie struggles with its loss. The star of a cult TV show in her early twenties, Josie has spent the twenty years since searching for a role to equal that one, and feeling less and less like her character, the heroic Bronwyn Kyle. As she gets ready for a reunion of the cast at a huge fan convention, she thinks all she needs to do is find a part and replace Charlie. But she can’t forget him, and to get him back she’ll need to be a hero in real life.
Leah Stewart is the critically acclaimed author of The New Neighbor, The History of Us, Husband and Wife, The Myth of You and Me, and Body of a Girl. She received her BA from Vanderbilt University, and her MFA from the University of Michigan. The recipient of a Sachs Fund prize and an NEA Literature Fellowship, she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati and lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two children.
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.
Literati is pleased to welcome author Michael Ferro who will be reading and discussing his debut novel, Title 13.
About Title 13:
A timely investigation into the heart of a despotic government, TITLE 13 is a darkly comic cautionary tale of mental illness and unconventional love. The novel deftly blends satirical comedy aimed at the hot-button issues of modern society with the gut-wrenching reality of an intensely personal descent into addiction.
Young Heald Brown might be responsible for the loss of highly classified TITLE 13 government documents–and may have hopelessly lost himself as well. Since leaving his home in Detroit for Chicago during the recession, Heald teeters anxiously between despondency and bombastic sarcasm, striving to understand a country gone mad while clinging to his quixotic roots.
Trying to deny the frightening course of his alcoholism, Heald struggles with his mounting paranoia, and his relationships with concerned family and his dying grandmother while juggling a budding office romance at the US government’s Chicago Regional Census Center.
Michael A. Ferro‘s debut novel, TITLE 13, was published by Harvard Square Editions in February 2018. He has received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train for their New Writers Award, won the Jim Cash Creative Writing Award for Fiction, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Michael’s writing has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Crack the Spine, Entropy, Amsterdam Quarterly, Yale University’s Perch Journal, Duende, The Nottingham Review, Splitsider, Potluck Magazine, and elsewhere. Born and bred in Detroit, Michael has lived, worked, and written throughout the Midwest; he currently resides in rural Ann Arbor, Michigan
JOINT POETRY & PROSE READING AND BOOKSIGNING
Ruth Padel is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, known for her nature writing and connections with music, science, Greece and conservation. Padel has won the UK National Poetry Competition and published six collections of poetry, celebrated for glittering imagery, and for “passion, wit, music, texture and elegance.” Her collection Voodoo Shop (2002) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Whitbread Prizes. “Visual, sensuous and highly seductive, as if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in,” said the Times Literary Supplement. She is a great great grand-daughter of Charles Darwin and a Fellow of The Zoological Society of London. She currently lives in London, where she teaches poetry at King’s College.
Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (Feb 2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017, a USA Today Top 10 Books of 2017, and an American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next Great Reads. Min Jin went to Yale College where she was awarded both the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction. She attended law school at Georgetown University and worked as a lawyer for several years in New York prior to writing full time. She has received the NYFA Fellowship for Fiction, the Peden Prize from The Missouri Review for Best Story, and the Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writer. Her fiction has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts and has appeared most recently in One Story.
Literati is thrilled to partner with the Neutral Zone to celebrate the book release of Ann Arbor Youth Poet Laureate Zaphra Stupple! Zaphra will be reading from their debut collection There Will Still Be The Body.
Zaphra Stupple is a poet and multimedia artist living in Michigan. They are the 2017 Ann Arbor youth poet laureate and the 2017 Ann Arbor poetry slam champion. They were a feature in the Neutral Zone’s annual poetry show, Poetry Night In Ann Arbor, and are one third of the accompanying book, Joy, Despite. Their work has been published in The Offing, HEArt Journal, |tap| magazine, and Vinyl, among others. Find them at toothcage.wordpress.com.
Literati is thrilled to host poet (and former Literati bookseller!) Russell Brakefield who will be sharing his new collection Field Recordings
About Field Recordings:
Firmly rooted in the dramatic landscapes and histories of Michigan, Field Recordings uses American folk music as a lens to investigate themes of personal origin, family, art, and masculinity. The speakers of these poems navigate Michigan’s folklore and folkways while exploring more personal connections to those landscapes and examining the timeless questions that occupy those songs and stories. With rich musicality and lyric precision, the poems in Field Recordings look squarely at what it means to be a son, a brother, an artist, a person.
Inspired by the life and writings of famous ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, Field Recordings is divided into three sections. It is anchored by a long poem that tracks Alan Lomax on his 1938 journey through Michigan collecting music for the Library of Congress. This poem speaks to the complex process of recording the voices and stories of working-class musicians in Michigan in the early part of the twentieth century. It is rich with the pleasures of music and storytelling and is steeped in history. Like the rest of the collection, it also speaks to the questions and anxieties that, like music, transcend time and technology.
In poems alternately elegiac and rhapsodic, Field Recordings explores the way art is produced and translated, the line between innovation and appropriation, and the complex, beautiful stories that are passed between us. From poetry readers to poets, music fans to musicians, this collection will undoubtedly appeal to a wide audience.
Russell Brakefield received his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. His work has appeared in the Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Poet Lore, Crab Orchard Review and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the University of Michigan Musical Society, the Vermont Studio Center, and the National Parks Department.
Literati is pleased to welcome journalist Rochelle Riley who will be discussing the new book The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery.
About The Burden:
The Burden: African Americans and the Enduring Impact of Slavery is a plea to America to understand what life post-slavery remains like for many African Americans, who are descended from people whose unpaid labor built this land, but have had to spend the last century and a half carrying the dual burden of fighting racial injustice and rising above the lowered expectations and hateful bigotry that attempt to keep them shackled to that past.
The Burden, edited by award-winning Detroit newspaper columnist Rochelle Riley, is a powerful collection of essays that create a chorus of evidence that the burden is real. As Nikole Hannah-Jones states in the book’s foreword, “despite the fact that black Americans remain at the bottom of every indicator of well-being in this country-from wealth, to poverty, to health, to infant mortality, to graduation rates, to incarceration-we want to pretend that this current reality has nothing to do with the racial caste system that was legally enforced for most of the time the United States of America has existed.” The Burden expresses the voices of other well-known Americans, such as actor/director Tim Reid who compares slavery to a cancer diagnosis, former Detroit News columnist Betty DeRamus who recounts the discrimination she encountered as a young black Detroiter in the south, and the actress Aisha Hinds who explains how slavery robbed an entire race of value and self-worth. This collection of essays is a response to the false idea that slavery wasn’t so bad and something we should all just “get over.”
The descendants of slaves have spent over 150 years seeking permission to put this burden down. As Riley writes in her opening essay, “slavery is not a relic to be buried, but a wound that has not been allowed to heal. You cannot heal what you do not treat. You cannot treat what you do not see as a problem. And America continues to look the other way, to ask African Americans to turn the other cheek, to suppress our joy, to accept that we are supposed to go only as far as we are allowed.” The Burden aims to address this problem. It is a must-read for every American.
Rochelle Riley is an award-winning newspaper columnist for the Detroit Free Press who is no longer seeking permission to put the burden down. She hosts a weekday radio show on 910AM Superstation; she offers commentary on NPR, Michigan Radio and local television outlets and contributes to Essence and Ebony magazines. She was inducted into the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame in 2016, received the 2017 Ida B. Wells Award from the National Association of Black Journalists and Northwestern University, and was awarded the 2017 Eugene C. Pulliam Fellowship by the Society of Professional Journalists. She also is a global wanderer who has visited twenty-six countries and counting.
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 welcome poets Margaret Rhee and Jasmine Ann who will be reading from their latest collections Love, Robot and Naming the No-Name Woman.
About Love, Robot:
A collection of love poetry that undercuts and reassembles narratives, LOVE, ROBOT is an experimental text that humanizes our relationship with technology. Through liaisons between humans and machines in a science fictional world, the collection offers a tense, playful, yet complex portrait of love, reflective of our contemporary moment. Rhee draws from a wide array of forms from poetics and robotics such as algorithms, narrative poetry, chat scripts, and failed sonnets to create a world of transgressive love. This vision of an artificially intelligent future reveals and questions the contours of the human, and how robots and humans fall in and out of love.
About Naming the No-Name Woman:
“Fiercely sexual and frank, the speaker in Naming The No-Name Woman mythologizes her experiences as a Chinese-American woman, never flinching from the various overlapping identities she encounters. I am reminded of the fearlessness of Kimiko Hahn’s work, and am stirred anew by Jasmine An’s resistance to any kind of shame that identity—chosen and unchosen—is eager to place on us. The speaker’s foil in these poems is the actress Wong Liu Tsong (Anna May Wong), “the open secret, the uninvited guest, the hand resting / in the small of my back.” Jasmine An does not so much make use of Wong in an effort to compare and contrast, but instead, she joins with her, blending voices and giving new and roaring life to that long and still unfolding story of race, gender, and sexuality in our country.” — Keetje Kuipers
Margaret Rhee is a poet, artist, and scholar. She is the author of chapbooks Yellow (Tinfish Press, 2011) and Radio Heart; or, How Robots Fall Out of Love (Finishing Line Press, 2015), nominated for a 2017 Elgin Award, Science Fiction Poetry Association. Her project The Kimchi Poetry Machine was selected for the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 3. Literary fellowships include Kundiman, Hedgebrook, and the Kathy Acker Fellowship. She received her PhD from UC Berkeley in ethnic and new media studies. Currently, she is a Visiting Scholar at the NYU A/P/A Institute, and a Visiting Assistant Professor at SUNY Buffalo in the Department of Media Study.
Jasmine An is a queer, third generation Chinese-American who comes from the Midwest. A 2015 graduate of Kalamazoo College, she has also lived in New York City and Chiang Mai, Thailand, studying poetry, urban development, and blacksmithing. Her chapbook, Naming the No-Name Woman, was published as the winner of the 2015 Two Sylvias Press Chapbook Prize. Her work can be found in HEArt Online, Stirring, Menacing Hedge, and Southern Humanities Review, among others. She is an editor for Agape Editions and currently lives in Chiang Mai continuing her study of the Thai language and urban resilience to climate change.
Ann Arbor Storytellers Guild members host a storytelling program. Audience members are encouraged to bring a 5-minute story to tell.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom Tea Room, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
