All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell.
2-4 p.m., AADL Downtown 3rd-floor freespace rm., 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free. annarborstorytelling.org, 997-5388
We are so excited to welcome back to Ann Arbor food writer Julia Turshen who will be sharing with us her latest cookbook Now & Again: Go-To Recipies, Inspired Menus + Endless Ideas for Reinventing Leftovers. Julia will be in conversation with Chef Kate Williams of Lady of the House restaurant in Detroit and journalist Ashley Woods
About Now & Again:
Small Victories, one of the most beloved cookbooks of 2016, introduced us to the lovely Julia Turshen and her mastery of show-stopping home cooking, and her second book, Feed the Resistance, moved a nation, winning Eater Cookbook of the Year in 2017. In Now & Again, the follow-up to what Real Simple called “an inspiring addition to any kitchen bookshelf,” more than 125 delicious and doable recipes and 20 creative menu ideas help cooks of any skill level to gather friends and family around the table to share a meal (or many!) together. This cookbook comes to life with Julia’s funny and encouraging voice and is brimming with good stuff, including:
– can’t-get-enough-of-it recipes
– inspiring menus for social gatherings, holidays and more
– helpful timelines for flawlessly throwing a party
– oh-so-helpful “It’s Me Again” recipes, which show how to use leftovers in new and delicious ways
– tips on how to be smartly thrifty with food choices
Now & Again will change the way we gather, eat, and think about leftovers, and, like the name suggests, you’ll find yourself reaching for its pages time and time again.
JULIA TURSHEN is the bestselling author of Feed the Resistance, named the Best Cookbook of 2017 by Eater, and Small Victories, named one of the Best Cookbooks of 2016 by the New York Times and NPR. Her latest book, Now & Again, will be out in September, 2018. She has coauthored numerous cookbooks and hosted the first two seasons of Radio Cherry Bombe. She has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, and Saveur. Epicurious has called her one of the ‘100 Greatest Home Cooks of All Time’ and she sits on the Advisory Board of the National Museum of American History’s Kitchen Cabinet. She is the founder of Equity At The Table (EATT), an inclusive digital directory of women and non-binary individuals in food. Julia lives in the Hudson Valley with her wife and pets.
KATE WILLIAMS is the owner and executive chef of Lady of the House. With the opening of Lady of the House, Williams brought a new breed of progressive, vibrant and dynamic cooking to Detroit’s Corktown district. In its first year of opening, Lady of the House was named James Beard Foundation semi-finalist for “Best New Restaurant” 2017, GQ “Best New Restaurant in America, 2018”, and was profiled twice in the New York Times. In May 2018 Williams received the honor of Food & Wine“Best New Chef 2018”. Passionate about highlighting local farms, Williams focuses on #uglyfood, which minimizes food waste on farms to feed more people and encourage them to grow their own food. An extension of the Slow Food movement, it’s meant to beautifully prepare food that would otherwise be thrown away on the farm.
ASHLEY WOODS is the founder of Detour Media, a digital content publisher and agency based in Detroit, which publishes the Detour newsletter to thousands of engaged subscribers in the Motor City. She is a member of The Information Accelerator, a Silicon Valley-based initiative to fund the next generation of subscription-based news publications. Ashley was also a 2018 Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. Before startup life, Ashley led digital strategy and consumer experience at the Detroit Free Press, and was a reporter and editor for Detroit-based publications like HuffPost Detroit, MLive, Issue Media Group and Real Detroit Weekly, specializing in entrepreneurism, culture and city life.
Literati is so excited to welcome author Wayétu Moore who will be reading and sharing her debut novel She Would Be King.
About She Would Be King:
A novel of exhilarating range, magical realism, and history–a dazzling retelling of Liberia’s formation
Wayétu Moore’s powerful debut novel, She Would Be King, reimagines the dramatic story of Liberia’s early years through three unforgettable characters who share an uncommon bond. Gbessa, exiled from the West African village of Lai, is starved, bitten by a viper, and left for dead, but still she survives. June Dey, raised on a plantation in Virginia, hides his unusual strength until a confrontation with the overseer forces him to flee. Norman Aragon, the child of a white British colonizer and a Maroon slave from Jamaica, can fade from sight when the earth calls him. When the three meet in the settlement of Monrovia, their gifts help them salvage the tense relationship between the African American settlers and the indigenous tribes, as a new nation forms around them.
Moore’s intermingling of history and magical realism finds voice not just in these three characters but also in the fleeting spirit of the wind, who embodies an ancient wisdom. “If she was not a woman,” the wind says of Gbessa, “she would be king.” In this vibrant story of the African diaspora, Moore, a talented storyteller and a daring writer, illuminates with radiant and exacting prose the tumultuous roots of a country inextricably bound to the United States. She Would Be King is a novel of profound depth set against a vast canvas and a transcendent debut from a major new author.
Wayétu Moore is the founder of One Moore Book and is a graduate of Howard University, Columbia University, and the University of Southern California. She teaches at the City University of New York’s John Jay College and lives in Brooklyn.
Reading by this Thailand-based queer poet, a Midwest native, whose latest book, Naming the No-Name Woman, likens her experiences as a Chinese American woman with various overlapping identities to those of the 1st Chinese American movie star, Anna May Wong. “The poems in [this] transformative, erotic collection teeter on the impossible border between consuming and rebuffing, naming and not naming the enigmatic presence of [Wong],” says Michigan poet Diane Seuss. “An’s formal choices tread a wavering line between poetry and prose, just as the poems draw as much from theory as memory and feeling.” Preceded by an open mike.
7-8:30 p.m. Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663
All writers welcome to read their own or other favorite poetry or short fiction afterward at open mic.
Hosted by Joe Kelty, Ed Morin, and Dave Jibson
see our blog at Facebook/Crazy Wisdom Poetry Series
Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room, 114 S. Main St. Free. 7346652757.info@crazywisdom.net www.crazywisdom.net
Literati is proud to be partnering with the Helen Zell Writers Program to host author Sigrid Nunez and poet Aracelis Girmay at the University of Michigan Art Museum Helmet Stern Auditorium.
Aracelis Girmay was born and raised in Santa Ana, California. She received a BA from Connecticut College in 1999 and went on to earn an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is the author of The Black Maria (BOA Editions, 2016), Kingdom Animalia (BOA Editions, 2011), winner of the Isabella Poetry Award and a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award, and Teeth (Curbstone Press, 2007). In a statement for the New American Poets series, she says of her work, “I hope the poems are songs sometimes. I want the poems to ask questions. To engage other people. To promote compassion.” Girmay is also the author of a collage-based picture book, changing, changing (George Braziller, 2005). She has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Civitella Ranieri, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches and lives in New York City.
Sigrid Nunez has published seven novels, including A Feather on the Breath of God, The Last of Her Kind, Salvation City, and, most recently, The Friend. She is also the author of Sempre Susan: A Memoir of Susan Sontag. Sigrid’s honors and awards include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Berlin Prize Fellowship, and two awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters: the Rosenthal Foundation Award and the Rome Prize in Literature. She has taught at Columbia, Princeton, Boston University, and the New School, and has also been on the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and of several other writers’ conferences across the country. She lives in New York City.
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 U-M creative writing grad students, including poetry by Gerardo Sámano and prose by Elinam Agbo.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 764-6330.
Literati is exited to host poet Elizabeth Schmuhl, an RC Creative Writing alum, who will be reading from her new collection Premonitions. Keith Taylor will give an introduction to the reading and lead a Q&A discussion aftewards.
About Premonitions:
Visceral and brimming with vitality, the poems in Premonitions reverberate with the voice of a woman on a secluded farm, confronting her emotional and physical isolation. Drawing on her own experience as a daughter of a third-generation fruit farmer, Elizabeth Schmuhl gives readers a fresh and powerful perspective on what it means to be alive.
Layering one upon another, the poems blur boundaries and create a volatile state out of which the remarkable and unexpected occur. Embracing chaos, change, and unpredictability, these poems are energetically charged and infused with succinct, imagistic language. They reach beyond the constraints assigned to the female form and examine a place where time, the body, sexuality, and the natural world are not fixed. At times surreal, at others painfully real, the poems in Premonitions are the expression of a human life that merges and melds with the world around it, acting and reacting, loving and despairing, disintegrating and rebuilding. The speaker travels fluidly between strata of the natural world and her own body. Adding to the complexity of her poems, Schmuhl creates additional layers of meaning as the poems and their titles relate to the author’s synesthesia, a sensory phenomenon through which letters and numbers are experienced as colors and emotions.
Premonitions will turn the reader inward, encouraging the examination of the small details of life and a growing acceptance of the perpetual turmoil and uncertainty of existence despite our own desire to find a firm footing. This volume will be prized by lovers of contemporary poetry and literature alike.
Elizabeth Schmuhl is a multidisciplinary artist whose work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Paper Darts, PANK, Hobart, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. She has worked at various nonprofits, including the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and currently works at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Keith Taylor has published many books over the years: collections of poetry, a collection of very short stories, co-edited volumes of essays and fiction, and a volume of poetry translated from Modern Greek.
7 p.m., Literati, 124 E. Washington. Free. 585-5567
This local poet reads from Love Dream with Television, her debut collection, written in Tucson, Arizona, that “wonders through the ways in which television, film, advertising, sporting events, and celebrity culture weave their ways into our lived experiences,” says Ensor. “Tucson and its queers have pushed me to be more in my body, more in conversation with place and spirit and alchemy.” Signing.
7 p.m., Literati, 124 E. Washington. Free. 585-5567
Literati is thrilled to welcome author and New York magazine columnist Heather Havrilesky who will be sharing her new essay collection What if This Were Enough?
About What If This Were Enough?:
By the acclaimed critic, memoirist, and advice columnist, an impassioned collection tackling our obsession with self-improvement and urging readers to embrace the imperfections of the everyday
Heather Havrilesky’s writing has been called “whip-smart and profanely funny” ( Entertainment Weekly) and “required reading for all humans” (Celeste Ng). In her work for New York, The Baffler, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic, as well as in “Ask Polly,” her advice column for The Cut, she dispenses a singular, cutting wisdom–an ability to inspire, provoke, and put a name to our most insidious cultural delusions.
What If This Were Enough? is a mantra and a clarion call. In its chapters–many of them original to the book, others expanded from their initial publication–Havrilesky takes on those cultural forces that shape us. We’ve convinced ourselves, she says, that salvation can be delivered only in the form of new products, new technologies, new lifestyles. From the allure of materialism to our misunderstandings of romance and success, Havrilesky deconstructs some of the most poisonous and misleading messages we ingest today, all the while suggesting new ways to navigate our increasingly bewildering world.
Through her incisive and witty inquiries, Havrilesky urges us to reject the pursuit of a shiny, shallow future that will never come. These timely, provocative, and often hilarious essays suggest an embrace of the flawed, a connection with what already is, who we already are, what we already have. She asks us to consider: What if this were enough? Our salvation, Havrilesky says, can be found right here, right now, in this imperfect moment.
HEATHER HAVRILESKY is the author of How to Be a Person in the World and the memoir Disaster Preparedness. She is a columnist for New York magazine, and has written for The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and NPR’s All Things Considered, among others. She was Salon‘s TV critic for seven years. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and a loud assortment of dependents, most of them nondeductible.
