Performance by this RC Prison Creative Arts Project instructor, who was incarcerated at age 17 and released just last year, after serving 18 years. His free verse poems explore the dehumanization of mass incarceration and poverty.
7 p.m. Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry.
Literati Bookstore is thrilled to welcome Pete Souza to Ann Arbor for a visual presentation of his latest book, Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents.
Tickets are general admission and include a hardcover copy of Shade to be picked up at the venue the evening of the event. Books will be pre-signed.
PLEASE NOTE: Due to Rackham’s unique seating chart and as this event entails a photo presentation, we have restricted available seating in the venue to improve sightlines. Seating is general admission, so we encourage arriving early.
About Shade: From Pete Souza, the #1 New York Timesbestselling author of Obama: An Intimate Portrait, comes a powerful tribute to a bygone era of integrity in politics.
As Chief Official White House Photographer, Pete Souza spent more time alongside President Barack Obama than almost anyone else. His years photographing the President gave him an intimate behind-the-scenes view of the unique gravity of the Office of the Presidency–and the tremendous responsibility that comes with it.
Now, as a concerned citizen observing the Trump administration, he is standing up and speaking out.
Shade is a portrait in Presidential contrasts, telling the tale of the Obama and Trump administrations through a series of visual juxtapositions. Here, more than one hundred of Souza’s unforgettable images of President Obama deliver new power and meaning when framed by the tweets, news headlines, and quotes that defined the first 500 days of the Trump White House.
What began with Souza’s Instagram posts soon after President Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 has become a potent commentary on the state of the Presidency, and our country. Some call this “throwing shade.” Souza calls it telling the truth.
In Shade, Souza’s photographs are more than a rejoinder to the chaos, abuses of power, and destructive policies that now define our nation’s highest office. They are a reminder of a President we could believe in, and a courageous defense of American values.
About Pete Souza: Pete Souza was the Chief Official White House Photographer for President Obama and the Director of the White House Photo Office. Previously Souza was an Assistant Professor of Photojournalism at Ohio University, the national photographer for the Chicago Tribune, a freelancer for National Geographic, and an Official White House Photographer for President Reagan. His books include the New York Times bestsellers Obama: An Intimate Portraitand The Rise of Barack Obama. Souza is currently a freelance photographer based in Washington, D.C., and a Professor Emeritus at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication.
Reading by this award-winning local poet whose work often frames dark themes in plainspoken, imaginatively whimsical language. Preceded by an open mike.
7-8:30 p.m. Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663.
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.
This month, Writer to Writer welcomes Heather Ann Thompson, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
About Blood in the Water:
THE FIRST DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF THE INFAMOUS 1971 ATTICA PRISON UPRISING, THE STATE’S VIOLENT RESPONSE, AND THE VICTIMS’ DECADES-LONG QUEST FOR JUSTICE
On September 9, 1971, nearly 1,300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment. Holding guards and civilian employees hostage, the prisoners negotiated with officials for improved conditions during the four long days and nights that followed.
On September 13, the state abruptly sent hundreds of heavily armed troopers and correction officers to retake the prison by force. Their gunfire killed thirty-nine men–hostages as well as prisoners–and severely wounded more than one hundred others. In the ensuing hours, weeks, and months, troopers and officers brutally retaliated against the prisoners. And, ultimately, New York State authorities prosecuted only the prisoners, never once bringing charges against the officials involved in the retaking and its aftermath and neglecting to provide support to the survivors and the families of the men who had been killed.
Drawing from more than a decade of extensive research, historian Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on every aspect of the uprising and its legacy, giving voice to all those who took part in this forty-five-year fight for justice: prisoners, former hostages, families of the victims, lawyers and judges, and state officials and members of law enforcement. Blood in the Water is the searing and indelible account of one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century.
HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is an award-winning historian at the University of Michigan. Her most recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, the Ridenhour Book Prize, and the J. Willard Hurst Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other accolades. She is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City and the editor of Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s. She served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States and has given congressional staff briefings on the subject. She has written on the history of mass incarceration and its current impact for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, Salon, Newsweek, NBC, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and The Huffington Post, as well as for various top scholarly publications.
Literati is thrilled to partner with the Institute of Humanitites at the University of Michigan to have copies of Shachar Pinsker’s new book Rich Brew: How Cafes Created Modern Jewish Culture available for purchase.
About Rich Brew:
A fascinating glimpse into the world of the coffeehouse and its role in shaping modern Jewish culture Unlike the synagogue, the house of study, the community center, or the Jewish deli, the café is rarely considered a Jewish space. Yet, coffeehouses profoundly influenced the creation of modern Jewish culture from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. With roots stemming from the Ottoman Empire, the coffeehouse and its drinks gained increasing popularity in Europe. The “otherness,” and the mix of the national and transnational characteristics of the coffeehouse perhaps explains why many of these cafés were owned by Jews, why Jews became their most devoted habitués, and how cafés acquired associations with Jewishness. Examining the convergence of cafés, their urban milieu, and Jewish creativity, Shachar M. Pinsker argues that cafés anchored a silk road of modern Jewish culture. He uncovers a network of interconnected cafés that were central to the modern Jewish experience in a time of migration and urbanization, from Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, and Berlin to New York City and Tel Aviv. A Rich Brew explores the Jewish culture created in these social spaces, drawing on a vivid collection of newspaper articles, memoirs, archival documents, photographs, caricatures, and artwork, as well as stories, novels, and poems in many languages set in cafés. Pinsker shows how Jewish modernity was born in the café, nourished, and sent out into the world by way of print, politics, literature, art, and theater. What was experienced and created in the space of the coffeehouse touched thousands who read, saw, and imbibed a modern culture that redefined what it meant to be a Jew in the world.
Shachar M. Pinsker is Associate Professor of Hebrew Literature and Culture at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Literary Passports: The Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction in Europe
Retired U.S. Navy admiral Michael Giorgione discusses his 2017 book based on interviews with commanders and his own experience as the commanding officer at Camp David from 1999-2001. Book sale, signing, & reception follow.
7 p.m., Ford Library, 1000 Beal. Free. 205-0555.
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
Steve Hughes was born and raised in Ann Arbor, and still has a number of friends/family there. He’s also the publisher of Detroit’s longest-running zine, Stupor, and has many author friends and fans in the Detroit-Ann Arbor area.
Steve Hughes wrote Stiff with an audience in mind. As creator of The Good Tyme Writers Buffet-a literary series/potluck which runs out of a neighborhood art space-Hughes offers up each story in the collection like a dish to be passed. Just as each Buffet was thematically tied to a gallery show, so is each story in Stiff. The book serves as a kind of photo album of moments when artists were working separately and collaboratively in the same space. The process of eating, drinking, making, and working together (and apart) is what Hughes says is the central theme of the collection: finding home.
In Hughes’s stories, home is not just a physical structure where one arranges their stuff but the place where one most belongs. Finding that place can be a lifelong struggle. In “Ripening,” a man and woman in an illicit affair witness their genitals leave their bodies for a rendezvous. In “I Don’t Feel Sorry for Mrs. Miller,” a paperboy becomes “friendly” with one of his customers. In “Dexter’s Song,” a drug-addicted saxophone player meets a bored suburban woman who gives him her ex-boyfriend’s sax, which causes him to play better than ever. The stories in Stiff are odd and otherworldly, with themes ranging from cowboys to “burn” to “girlfriend material” to summer. And yet, at the end of the day, the characters in these stories are all just looking for a place to hang their hats and feel whole again.
Readers of contemporary fiction will enjoy this outrageous and evocative ensemble of stories.
Praise for Stiff
“Combining magical surrealism with downright grittiness, Steve Hughes’s astounding. Stiff reads as if Franz Kafka and Denis Johnson hooked up in one of the meaner sections of Detroit and spent the next year together in an abandoned pizza parlor writing short stories. Yes, it is that damn good.” –Donald Ray Pollock, author of The Devil All the Time
Lecture by U-M Afroamerican and African studies professor and former RC director Angela Dillard.
4 p.m., Rackham Amphitheatre (4th floor). Free. 615-6667.
NYC-based writer (and Ann Arbor native) Brigit Young offers tips on revising your written work and how to get published. Q&A. In conjunction with the end of National Novel Writing Month, a nonprofit promotion challenging teens and adults to write a 50,000-word novel by the end of November.
6:30-8 p.m., AADL Westgate. Free. 327-4200.
