MSU journalism professor Joe Grimm reads from his new history of the iconic Detroit soda pop company, founded over a century ago by 2 Russian immigrant bakers who repurposed their cake frosting recipes for carbonated beverages. Introduction by 107.1 FM morning host Martin Bandyke.
7-8:30 p.m., AADL Downtown 4th fl. meeting rm., 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free. 327-4200.
Let Me Sing and I’m Happy is the history of an actress who sings popular songs. It is also a handbook detailing an approach to bringing the song to life. Author Morris writes “For forty years I’ve been privileged to sing the greatest songs from our American musical theater history – Kern, Berlin, Gershwin, Porter, and Rodgers and Hart. I was fortunate to find a musical partner, William Bolcom, who felt the same way, who helped me illuminate and bring to life the history and drama in each song. Our approach gained us entry into the serious-music concert world. It helped us, in Schiller’s words, to ‘…unite that which fashion had sternly parted.’”
5:30 p.m., 100 U-M Hatcher Grad Library Gallery, enter from the Diag. Free. 763-8994.
Literati is pleased to be on hand as a bookseller for the University of Michigan Hopwood Awards Ceremony, featuring a reading from Raquel Salas Rivera.
Please join the Hopwoods Award Program as they celebrate the winners of the 2019-20 Hopwood First- and Second-Year Awards, as well as the winners of six additional contests.
Following the announcement of the awards, there will be a reading from Raquel Salas Rivera, Poet Laureate of Philadelphia, winner of the 2018 Ambroggio Prize, & winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry.
Light reception to follow. Free to attend and open to all!
If you have any accessibility questions or requests about attending, please contact the Hopwood Program Manager at hopwoodprogram@umich.edu or by phone at 764-6296.
Please join us as we celebrate the fall winners of the 2018-19 Hopwood Underclassmen awards, which includes RC writing students and U-M students taking RC writing classes.
Following the announcement of the awards, there will be a reading from former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey and a light reception. Free to attend and open to all!
This event is presented in collaboration with the UM branch of Phi Beta Kappa.
Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000) which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Join author Shannon Gibney as she shares her new book Dream Country. In the book she spins a riveting tale of the nightmarish spiral of death and exile connecting America and Africa, and of how one determined young dreamer tries to break free and gain control of her destiny. Shannon Gibney is an author and university professor. Her novel See No Color, drawn from her life as a transracial adoptee, won the Minnesota Book Award and was hailed by Kirkus as “an exceptionally accomplished debut”.
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Event Details
Seating at the event will be first-come first-served. This event will be a standing-room crowd, so if you require a seat for medical reasons, please contact us in advance to make arrangements.
About the Book
Dream Country begins in suburban Minneapolis at the moment when seventeen-year-old Kollie Flomo begins to crack under the strain of his life as a Liberian refugee. He’s exhausted by being at once too black and not black enough for his African American peers and worn down by the expectations of his own Liberian family and community. When his frustration finally spills into violence and his parents send him back to Monrovia to reform school, the story shifts. Like Kollie, readers travel back to Liberia, but also back in time, to the early twentieth century and the point of view of Togar Somah, an eighteen-year-old indigenous Liberian on the run from government militias that would force him to work the plantations of the Congo people, descendants of the African American slaves who colonized Liberia almost a century earlier. When Togar’s section draws to a shocking close, the novel jumps again, back to America in 1827, to the children of Yasmine Wright, who leave a Virginia plantation with their mother for Liberia, where they’re promised freedom and a chance at self-determination by the American Colonization Society. The Wrights begin their section by fleeing the whip and by its close, they are then the ones who wield it. With each new section, the novel uncovers fresh hope and resonating heartbreak, all based on historical fact.
In Dream Country, Shannon Gibney spins a riveting tale of the nightmarish spiral of death and exile connecting America and Africa, and of how one determined young dreamer tries to break free and gain control of her destiny.
About the Author
Shannon Gibney is an author and university professor. Her novel See No Color, drawn from her life as a transracial adoptee, won the Minnesota Book Award and was hailed by Kirkus as “an exceptionally accomplished debut” and by Publishers Weekly as “an unflinching look at the complexities of racial identity.” Her essay “Fear of a Black Mother” appears in the anthology A Good Time for the Truth. She lives with her two Liberian-American children in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
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 Justin Balog and prose by Rachel Ann Girty.
Performances by these two 2018 Ann Arbor Youth Poetry Slam finalists.
7 p.m. Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry
Join us as we welcome author Suzanne Dalton who will be sharing her new memoir A Year Lost, a Life Gained: Fighting Breast Cancer with Wit, Humor, Friends and a Perky Poodle.
About A Year Lost, a Life Gained:
Suzanne Dalton has accomplished much in her life–she is an artist, writer, actor, web designer, and program manager. The one undertaking for which she did not sign up was breast cancer. In her new memoir, humor guides Suzanne through difficult decisions about treatments, surgeries, and reconstruction. Her story, told through witty letters to friends, includes a party before surgery, a zany poodle, and refusal to let cancer define her. A Year Lost, A Life Gained: Fighting Breast Cancer With Wit, Humor, Friends and a Perky Poodle is at its heart a beautifully-told story and a guide intended to aid anyone diagnosed with cancer whether they’ve completed the journey or are just embarking upon the path.
Suzanne Dalton graduated from Wayne State University with a BS in geology. She studied fine art, industrial design, watercolor, and photography at College for Creative Studies, and has a TEFL diploma and a Master Certificate in Applied Project Management from Villanova University. Suzanne wrote the humorous short story series Poodle Possessed for Hoflin Publishing’s bimonthly international publication, Poodle Review, for 14 years. A Year Lost, A Life Gained is Suzanne’s first book. She is presently working on her next, a book of travel, adventure, and poodles. Suzanne is currently a program manager of software development at an automotive company in Detroit, where she lives with her husband and her standard poodle, American Canadian Champion Ascot Rosebar Double Diaka CGC, a.k.a. “Fletcher,” but being such an accomplished poodle, of course, he prefers “Mr. Fletcher.”
Hosted by the RC Student Union, the event features RC creative writing head Laura Thomas, local author Michael Ferro, and LSA creative writing major Necko Fanning.
Literati is excited to welcome David Stephen Calonne who will be presenting this new collection of Charles Bukowski’s work The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way: On Writers and Writing.
About The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way:
In The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way, Charles Bukowski considers the art of writing, and the art of living as a writer. Bringing together a variety of previously uncollected stories, columns, reviews, introductions, and interviews, this book finds him approaching the dynamics of his chosen profession with cynical aplomb, deflating pretensions and tearing down idols armed with only a typewriter and a bottle of beer. Beginning with the title piece–a serious manifesto disguised as off-handed remarks en route to the racetrack–The Mathematics of the Breath and the Way runs through numerous tales following the author’s adventures at poetry readings, parties, film sets, and bars, and also features an unprecedented gathering of Bukowski’s singular literary criticism. From classic authors like Hemingway to underground legends like d.a. levy to his own stable of obscure favorites, Bukowski uses each occasion to expound on the larger issues around literary production. The book closes with a handful of interviews in which he discusses his writing practices and his influences, making this a perfect guide to the man behind the myth and the disciplined artist behind the boozing brawler.
David Stephen Calonne is the author of several books and has edited four previous collections of the uncollected work of Charles Bukowski for City Lights: Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook, Absence of the Hero, More Notes of a Dirty Old Man, and The Bell Tolls for No One.
