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.
Join us for a book signing featuring four acclaimed Michigan picture book authors! Maria Dismondy will be signing copies of her newest book, A Fruit Salad Friend, as well as her other popular back list titles. Lisa Wheeler is the author of the award-winning Dino-Sports series, as well as The Christmas Boot and her newest release A Hug is for Holding Me. They will be joined by Hindi and Hollywood film screenwriter Supriya Kelkar, who will be releasing her newest book The Many Colors of Harpreet Singh and Lisa Rose who will share her Star Powers books.
Nov. 30 & Dec. 1. RC student Maddie Lukomski directs RC students in Tanya Barfield’s 2014 LAMBDA award-winning emotionally searing 2-character play about a deeply committed but ultimately doomed interracial lesbian relationship.
8 p.m., Keene Theatre, East Quad, 701 East University. Free; donations welcome. 763-0176.
Storytelling by this New Jersey-based author and playwright, a Moth GrandSLAM winner whose stories have been featured on NPR and The Moth podcast. Hors d’oeuvres at 6 p.m. Reception and desserts.
6:30-9 p.m., EMU Sponberg Theatre, Quirk Hall, Ypsilanti. Tickets $18 (students, $10) at tinyurl.com/ycmyq7z5. 487-0978.
Literati is thrilled to welcome astrophysicist Adam Becker who will be presenting his new book What Is Real?: The Unfinished Quest for the Meaning of Quantum Physics
About What Is Real?:
The untold story of the heretical thinkers who dared to question the nature of our quantum universe
Every physicist agrees quantum mechanics is among humanity’s finest scientific achievements. But ask what it means, and the result will be a brawl. For a century, most physicists have followed Niels Bohr’s Copenhagen interpretation and dismissed questions about the reality underlying quantum physics as meaningless. A mishmash of solipsism and poor reasoning, Copenhagen endured, as Bohr’s students vigorously protected his legacy, and the physics community favored practical experiments over philosophical arguments. As a result, questioning the status quo long meant professional ruin. And yet, from the 1920s to today, physicists like John Bell, David Bohm, and Hugh Everett persisted in seeking the true meaning of quantum mechanics. What Is Real? is the gripping story of this battle of ideas and the courageous scientists who dared to stand up for truth.
Adam Becker is a science writer with a PhD in astrophysics. He has written for the BBC and New Scientist, and is a visiting scholar at University of California, Berkeley’s Office for History of Science and Technology. He lives in Oakland, California.
Literati is proud to be partnering with the Helen Zell Writers Program to host poet Elizabeth Alexander at University of Michigan Museum of Art Apse
Elizabeth Alexander is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University. She has recently been appointed President of the Andrew H. Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder in the arts and humanities. She composed and recited “Praise Song for the Day” for President Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. She is the author of six books of poetry–including American Sublime, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize–and is the first winner of the Jackson Prize for Poetry and a National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim fellow. She was the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry at Yale University for 15 years and chaired the African American Studies Department.
Literati is thrilled to welcome author Alyson Hagy in support of her novel, Scribe.
About Scribe:
A haunting, evocative tale about the power of storytelling
A brutal civil war has ravaged the country, and contagious fevers have decimated the population. Abandoned farmhouses litter the isolated mountain valleys and shady hollows. The economy has been reduced to barter and trade.
In this craggy, unwelcoming world, the central character of Scribe ekes out a lonely living on the family farmstead where she was raised and where her sister met an untimely end. She lets a migrant group known as the Uninvited set up temporary camps on her land, and maintains an uneasy peace with her cagey neighbors and the local enforcer. She has learned how to make paper and ink, and she has become known for her letter-writing skills, which she exchanges for tobacco, firewood, and other scarce resources. An unusual request for a letter from a man with hidden motivations unleashes the ghosts of her troubled past and sets off a series of increasingly calamitous events that culminate in a harrowing journey to a crossroads.
Drawing on traditional folktales and the history and culture of Appalachia, Alyson Hagy has crafted a gripping, swiftly plotted novel that touches on pressing issues of our time–migration, pandemic disease, the rise of authoritarianism–and makes a compelling case for the power of stories to both show us the world and transform it.
Alyson Hagy was raised on a farm in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. She is the author of seven previous works of fiction, most recently Boleto. She lives in Laramie, Wyoming.
This award-winning local writer reads from and discusses Tazia and Gemma, her new novel that spans 1911-1961, moving forward in time with the story of an unwed pregnant Italian immigrant and then backward with the story of her daughter’s search for her father. Writer Deepak Singh calls it a “moving story of racial and religious conflicts.” Followed by a menorah lighting and sufganiyot (doughnuts).
7-8:30 p.m., JCC, 2935 Birch Hollow Dr. Free. Preregistration required. 971-0990.
Nov. 6 & 20. Open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on themes of “Roads” (Dec. 4) & “Joy” (Dec. 18). The 3-person judging teams are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Seating limited, so it’s smart to arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), Greyline, 100 N. Ashley. General admission tickets $10 in advance only at themoth.org beginning a week before each event. 764-5118.
U-M classical studies professor Ian Fielding and U-M French professor Peggy McCracken discuss Fielding’s book examining the importance of Ovid’s poetry of exile to the Latin poets writing in the social upheaval of the 4th-6th centuries, as the Roman Empire gradually collapsed.
5:30 p.m., 100 U-M Hatcher Grad Library Gallery, enter from the Diag. Free. 763-8994.
