Literati is thrilled to welcome back poet Rob Halpern who will be reading from his new collection Weak Link
Rob Halpern lives between San Francisco and Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he teaches at Eastern Michigan University and Huron Valley Women’s Prison. His most recent book of poetry, prose, essays, letters, and manifestos is Weak Link (Atelos 2019). Other books include Common Place (Ugly Duckling Presse 2015) and Music for Porn (Nightboat Books 2012).
Literati is excited to welcome author Dorene O’Brien who will be sharing her new story collection What It Might Feel Like to Hope.
About What It Might Feel Like to Hope:
What It Might Feel Like to Hope, the second collection from award-winning author Dorene O’Brien, is a masterful and eclectic mix of stories that considers the infinitely powerful, and equally naive and damning force that is human hope. A couple tries to come to terms with one another as they travel west in the uncomfortable twilight of their youth; a mortician and an idealistic novelist spar about the true nature of death; an aspiring author hopes to impress Tom Hanks with zombies; a tarot reader deals out the future of Detroit. Showcasing her diverse talents, O’Brien offers a panoply of characters and settings that dwells beyond the borders of certainty, in a place where all that has been left to them is an inkling of possibility upon which they must place all their hopes. These stories offer a variety of tones, forms, and themes in which O’Brien displays an amazing range and control of her craft, all while exploring the essential nature of humanity with nuance, empathy, and at times a touch of skepticism.
Dorene O’Brien is a Detroit-based writer and teacher whose stories have won the Red Rock Review Mark Twain Award for Short Fiction, the Chicago Tribune Nelson Algren Award, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Prize, and the Wind Fiction Prize. Her story, “#12 Dagwood on Rye,” was chosen by writer and fiction judge Jim Crace from among 4,000 entries as first-place winner of the international Bridport Prize. She has earned fellowships from the NEA and the Vermont Studio Center. Her stories have been nominated for two Pushcart prizes, have been published in special Kindle editions and have appeared in The Best of Carve Magazine. Her work also appears in Madison Review, Short Story Review, The Republic of Letters, Southern Humanities Review, Detroit Noir, Montreal Review, Passages North, Baltimore Review, Cimarron Review, and others. Voices of the Lost and Found, her first fiction collection, was a finalist for the Drake Emerging Writer Award and won the USA Best Book Award for Short Fiction. Her second collection, What It Might Feel Like to Hope, was first runner-up in the Mary Roberts Rinehart Fiction Prize.
BRING ABOUT SIX COPIES OF YOUR WORK. COPIES WILL BE RETURNED TO YOU.
Hosted by Joe Kelty, Ed Morin, and Dave Jibson; see our blog at Facebook/Crazy Wisdom Poetry Series
Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room, 115 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 poet Marilyn Chin at the University of Michigan Art Museum Helmut Stern Auditorium.
Marilyn Chin was born in Hong Kong. She is the author of four previous poetry collections and a novel. Her work has appeared in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, and Best American Poetry, among other publications. She is the winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, five Pushcart Prizes, fellowships from the United States Artists Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, among other honors. Presently, she serves as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and lives in San Diego.
Literati is thrilled to welcome novelist Halle Butler who will be reading and discussing her latest book The New Me.
About The New Me:
Im still trying to make the dream possible: still might finish my cleaning project, still might sign up for that yoga class, still might, still might. I step into the shower and almost faint, an image of taking the day by the throat and bashing its head against the wall floating in my mind.
Thirty-year-old Millie just can’t pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates wildly between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, and the cycle begins again. When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she’s envisioning – one that involves nicer clothes, fresh produce, maybe even financial independence – within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization, lurking just beneath the surface, of just how hollow that vision has become. Darkly hilarious and devastating, The New Me is a dizzying descent into the mind of a young woman trapped in the funhouse of American consumer culture.
“The New Me is a bouncy, profane, highly addictive novel about work, female friendship, and other alienations. Halle Butler’s insane talent shimmers on every page of this deadpan misanthrope’s ode. A must-read!”
–Claire Vaye Watkins, author of Gold Fame Citrus and Battleborn
“Halle Butler has a way of looking at our twenty-first-century neoliberalist condition that simultaneously exposes its brutality and renders that same brutality absurd, hilarious, fizzy with humor. She’s an incisive, curmudgeonly bard of the uniquely precarious times we live in, and it is crucial that you read her immediately.”
–Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
Halle Butler is the author of Jillian. She has been named a National Book Award Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and a Granta Best Young American Novelist.
Literati is pleased to be a part of the 23rd Annual CLIFF Conference to host the Student Creative Reading Event.
U-M grad students were invited to submit creative pieces to read for up to five minutes each on the theme of “Silence.”
The Comparative Literature Intra-Student Faculty Forum (CLIFF) is an annual conference sponsored by the graduate students of the Department of Comparative Literature. CLIFF is designed to promote increased awareness of research being conducted in various languages and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Michigan.
U-M Near Eastern Studies and history professor Ellen Muehlberger is joined by a U-M Sweetland Center for Writing faculty member to discuss writing.
7 p.m., Literati, 124 E. Washington. Free. 585-5567.
The Zell Visiting Writers Series constitutes the backbone of the HZWP events calendar, bringing the world of contemporary literature to Ann Arbor with visits from working writers that include readings, extensive student-moderated Q&A sessions, individual consultations, craft lectures, and public panel discussions with members of our faculty.
Anthony Marra is the author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and New York Times-bestseller A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction, and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle in France and was the first English-language novel to win the Athens Prize for Literature in Greece. Marra received his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop before fellowship and teaching at Stanford University.
His work has been honored with the National Magazine Award, the Whiting Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2017, Marra was included in Granta’s decennial list of best young American novelists, and won the $50,000 Simpson Prize in 2018, which he will put toward finishing a new novel about exiles in 1940s Hollywood, slated for release in 2019.
About Elemental: A Collection of Creative Nonfiction:
Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction comes to us from twenty-three of Michigan’s most well-known essayists. A celebration of the elements, this collection is both the storm and the shelter. In her introduction, editor Anne-Marie Oomen recalls the “ritual dousing” of her storytelling group’s bonfire: “wind, earth, fire, water-all of it simultaneous in that one gesture. . . . In that moment we are bound together with these elements and with this place, the circle around the fire on the shores of a Great Lake closes, complete.”
The essays approach Michigan at the atomic level. This is a place where weather patterns and ecology matter. Farmers, miners, shippers, and loggers have built (or lost) their livelihood on Michigan’s nature-what could and could not be made out of our elements. From freshwater lakes that have shaped the ground beneath our feet to the industrial ebb and flow of iron ore and wind power-ours is a state of survival and transformation. In the first section of the book, “Earth,” Jerry Dennis remembers working construction in northern Michigan. “Water” includes a piece from Jessica Mesman, who writes of the appearance of snow in different iterations throughout her life. The section “Wind” houses essays about the ungraspable nature of death from Toi Dericotte and Keith Taylor. “Fire” includes a piece by Mardi Jo Link, who recollects the unfortunate series of circumstances surrounding one of her family members.
Elemental‘s strength lies in its ability to learn from the past in the hope of defining a wiser future. A lot of literature can make this claim, but not all of it comes together so organically. Fans of nonfiction that reads as beautifully as fiction will love this collection.
Anne-Marie Oomen is author of Love, Sex, and 4-H, House of Fields, Pulling Down the Barn, and Uncoded Woman, among others. She teaches at Solstice MFA at Pine Manor College, Interlochen’s College of Creative Arts, and at conferences throughout the country.
Literati is excited to welcome author Julie Dobrow who will be sharing her new biography, After Emily.
About After Emily:
Despite Emily Dickinson’s world renown, the story of the two women most responsible for her initial posthumous publication–Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham–has remained in the shadows of the archives. A rich and compelling portrait of women who refused to be confined by the social mores of their era, After Emily explores Mabel and Millicent’s complex bond, as well as the powerful literary legacy they shared.
Mabel’s tangled relationships with the Dickinsons–including a thirteen-year extramarital relationship with Emily’s brother, Austin–roiled the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts. After Emily’s death, Mabel’s connection to the family and reputation as an intelligent, artistic, and industrious woman in her own right led her to the enormous trove of poems Emily left behind. So began the herculean task of transcribing, editing, and promoting Emily’s work, a task that would consume and complicate the lives of both Mabel and her daughter. As the popularity of the poems grew, legal issues arose between the Dickinson and Todd families, dredging up their scandals: the affair, the ownership of Emily’s poetry, and the right to define the so-called “Belle of Amherst.”
Utilizing hundreds of overlooked letters and diaries to weave together the stories of three unstoppable women, Julie Dobrow explores the intrigue of Emily Dickinson’s literary beginnings. After Emily sheds light on the importance of the earliest editions of Emily’s work–including the controversial editorial decisions made to introduce her singular genius to the world–and reveals the surprising impact Mabel and Millicent had on the poet we know today.
Julie Dobrow is a professor with appointments in the department of Child Study and Human Development and the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University and serves as director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. Her writing has appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine and the Huffington Post, among other publications. She lives outside of Boston.
