Readings from local writers. Books and authors include Jeff Kass’s Takedown (murder mystery), R.J. Fox’s Tales from the Dork Side (memoir), Callie Feyen’s The Teacher Diaries: Romeo and Juliet (memoir), Michael Ferro’s Title 13 (suspense), and Gerald Nicks’s My European Adventures (travel guide). Signings. Refreshments.
7-8:45 p.m., AADL Westgate. Free. 327-4200.
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.
U-M sociology professor Geneviève Zubrzycki and U-M anthropology professor Andrew Shryock discuss Zubrzycki’s book examining the importance of the annual Feast of St. John the Baptist to Quebecois national identity.
5:30 p.m., 100 U-M Hatcher Grad Library Gallery, enter from the Diag. Free. 763-8994.
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
Toastmasters is an international group devoted to helping each other grow in our abilities to give speeches. The Sweetwaters Toastmasters Club meets twice monthly. We are a fun and friendly group! Toastmasters also helps you develop leadership skills if you wish to do that. Come as many times as you want for free, and decide later if you want to join. In the meantime, come make new friends and have fun!
Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea on Washington Street, 123 West Washington Street. Free. 323-286-3999. https://www.facebook.com/groups/TMSweet/
The highest scoring teens from the four high school preliminary bouts will grace the Neutral Zone stage to perform their poems in hopes of winning the opportunity to travel out of state this summer for a national teen poetry festival. This event is open to the public. There is a $5-10 suggested donation, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Poets invited to read their own work along with a favorite poem by another writer. In celebration of National Poetry Month. Tea & light refreshments.
7 p.m., Bookbound, Courtyard Shops. Free. 369-4345.
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
Literati is thrilled to welcome poet Diane Seuss who will be reading from her new collection Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. Diane will be joined by fellow poet Laura Kasischke for conversation after the reading.
About Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl:
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl takes its title from Rembrandt’s painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer’s own troubled gaze. In Diane Seuss’s new collection, the notion of the still life is shattered and Rembrandt’s painting is presented across the book in pieces–details that hide more than they reveal until they’re assembled into a whole. With invention and irreverence, these poems escape gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Instead, Seuss invites in the alienated, the washed-up, the ugly, and the freakish–the overlooked many of us who might more often stand in a Walmart parking lot than before the canvases of Pollock, O’Keeffe, and Rothko. Rendered with precision and profound empathy, this extraordinary gallery of lives in shards shows us that “our memories are local, acute, and unrelenting.”
Diane Seuss is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, winner of the Juniper Prize. She lives in Michigan.
Laura Kasischke is a poet and novelist whose fiction has been made into several feature-length films. Her book of poems, Space, in Chains, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Chelsea, Michigan.
