Literati is excited to welcome author and physician Anthony DeBenedet to discuss his book Playful Intelligence.
About Playful Intelligence:
As adults, we have more responsibilities than we could have ever imagined growing up. Learning the work of marriage. Navigating the bumpy terrain of parenting. Maintaining social relationships. Facing grave hardship. Finding contentment in our career.
As the years pass by, we sense how the good things in life are so often eclipsed by stress. We find ourselves doing everything we can just to endure adulthood, all the while wondering whether we are actually enjoying it. This is exactly why Dr. Anthony T. DeBenedet decided to write Playful Intelligence: The Power of Living Lightly in a Serious World, to show readers how playfulness helps us counterbalance the seriousness of adulthood.
“Five years ago, my life was becoming more intense and stressful,” DeBenedet says. “My relationships, clinical work as a physician, and basic interactions with the world were blurring into a frazzled mosaic. Going through the motions became my norm, and every day brought busyness and exhaustion. I thought about whether I was depressed. I didn’t think I was. Anxious? Sure, but aren’t we all anxious on some level? I also thought about the lifestyle factors that could be making me feel this way. Was I getting enough sleep? Was I exercising regularly? Was I eating healthy? Was I playing and remembering to be playful?”
Today, we live in a taxing world. The endless pressure to keep up with our responsibilities and the daily headlines swarming around us can be overwhelming. DeBenedet’s work comes at a time when stress, uncertainty, and intensity levels are high. Playful Intelligence shows adults that there is a way to live lighter–and smarter–as we navigate the seriousness of adulthood. It’s not about taking life less seriously; it’s about taking ourselves less seriously.
The book’s core chapters are devoted to exploring the effects and benefits of five playful qualities: imagination, sociability, humor, spontaneity, and wonder. By examining playfulness as a sum of its parts, readers will gain a working awareness of its power and be able to apply playful principles to their own lives, bringing the magic of childhood back into their day-to-day existence. The book also offers practical suggestions on how to make life more playful in nature.
Anthony T. DeBenedet, M.D. is a practicing physician and behavioral-science enthusiast. His interviews and writings have run in various media outlets, including the New York Times, the Today show, the Washington Post, and TIME Ideas. He also co-authored The Art of Roughhousing: Good Old-Fashioned Horseplay and Why Every Kid Needs It (Quirk Books, 2011), a parenting book about the importance of parent-child physical play. DeBenedet has a Bachelor of Science Degree in Biomedical Engineering from the Duke University Pratt School of Engineering, a Master of Science Degree in Health and Healthcare Research from the University of Michigan Rackham Graduate School, and a Doctor of Medicine Degree from the University of Virginia School of Medicine. He completed his internal medicine residency and gastroenterology fellowship at the University of Michigan Health System. DeBenedet lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he enjoys spending time with his family, connecting with friends, and playing a little basketball.
The Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREES) at the University of Michigan cordially invite you to join us for Dr. Assya Humesky’s talk about her and her family’s contributions to Ukrainian culture through published works, art, and teaching in higher education.
Light refreshments will be served.
Mezzo-soprano Joan Morris and U-M Professor Daniel Herwitz discuss Morris’ new book “Let Me Sing and I’m Happy: The Memoir and Handbook of a Singing Actress.” Followed by Q & A.
About the book:
Let Me Sing and I’m Happy: The Memoir and Handbook of a Singing Actress by Joan Morris 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.’”
Join us for a conversation with author, Andrew Reeves. Andrew Reeves is an award-winning environmental journalist. Andrew will be discussing the release of his new book, Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis and will be joined by local organizations that will be taking a look at one of North America’s most voraciously invasive species, the Asian Carp.
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
Intelligent investigative writing meets experiential journalism in this important look at one of North America’s most voraciously invasive species.
Politicians, ecologists, and government wildlife officials are fighting a desperate rearguard action to halt the onward reach of Asian Carp, four troublesome fish now within a handful of miles from entering Lake Michigan. From aquaculture farms in Arkansas to the bayous of Louisiana; from marshlands in Indiana to labs in Minnesota; and from the Illinois River to the streets of Chicago where the last line of defense has been laid to keep Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes, Overrun takes us on a firsthand journey into the heart of a crisis. Along the way, environmental journalist Andrew Reeves discovers that saving the Great Lakes is only half the challenge. The other is a radical scientific and political shift to rethink how we can bring back our degraded and ignored rivers and waterways and reconsider how we create equilibrium in a shrinking world.
With writing that is both urgent and wildly entertaining, Andrew Reeves traces the carp’s explosive spread throughout North America from an unknown import meant to tackle invasive water weeds to a continental scourge that bulldozes through everything in its path.
About the Author
Andrew Reeves is an award-winning environmental journalist. His work has appeared in the Walrus, This Magazine, and the Globe and Mail. He received a master of fine arts in creative nonfiction from the University of King’s College in 2016. He lives in Toronto, Ontario, with his wife and daughter.
Professor Richard Mann has been a pivotal figure in consciousness-related coursework and research on the U-M campus and far beyond. A revered pedagogue and visionary, he has impacted hundreds of students from across fields as well as maintained national prominence through his writings and longtime position as editor of the cutting-edge SUNY series in Transpersonal Psychology. In conversation with PCCS Director Ed Sarath, this evening’s talk will commemorate Mann’s long and distinguished tenure at U-M and engage in far-reaching reflections about his personal work and what might lie ahead for the still-nascent field of consciousness studies. Topics will range from research and ideas pursued by organizations such as Society for Scientific Exploration, Institute for the Noetic Sciences, and the Integral Theory community that challenge materialist assumptions, to socio-political-environmental ramifications of consciousness understanding, to what a 21st century program in consciousness studies might look like.
For more information on the Program in Creativity and Consciousness Studies and its Consciousness Next Series, contact Ed Sarath, sarahara@umich.edu, and also go to https://smtd.umich.edu/current-students-3/pccs/
ONE PAUSE POETRY SALON is (literally) a greenhouse for poetry and poets, nurturing an appreciation for written art in all languages and encouraging experiments in creative writing.
We meet every Weds in the greenhouse at Argus Farm Stop on Liberty St. The poems we read each time are unified by form (haiku, sonnet, spoken word), poet, time / place (Tang Dynasty, English Romanticism, New York in the 70s) or theme / mood (springtime, poems with cats, protest poems). We discuss the poems and play writing games together, with time for snacks and socializing in between.
Members are encouraged to share their own poems or poems they like – they may or may not relate to the theme of the evening. This is not primarily a workshop – we may hold special workshop nights, but mostly we listen to and talk about poems for the sake of inspiring new writing.
Whether you are a published poet or encountering poetry for the first time, we invite you to join us!
$5 suggested donation for food, drinks and printing costs.
8-10 p.m., Argus Farm Stop greenhouse, 325 W. Liberty. $5 suggested donation. onepausepoetry.org, 707-1284.
Literati is thrilled to welcome back poet Sarah Arvio who will reading and discussing her new translation of poems by Federico García Lorca
About Poet in Spain:
For the first time in a quarter century, a major new volume of translations of the beloved poetry of Federico García Lorca, presented in a beautiful bilingual edition
The fluid and mesmeric lines of these new translations by the award-winning poet Sarah Arvio bring us closer than ever to the talismanic perfection of the great García Lorca. Poet in Spain invokes the “wild, innate, local surrealism” of the Spanish voice, in moonlit poems of love and death set among poplars, rivers, low hills, and high sierras. Arvio’s ample and rhythmically rich offering includes, among other essential works, the folkloric yet modernist Gypsy Ballads, the plaintive flamenco Poem of the Cante Jondo, and the turbulent and beautiful Dark Love Sonnets —addressed to Lorca’s homosexual lover–which Lorca was revising at the time of his brutal political murder by Fascist forces in the early days of the Spanish Civil War. Here, too, are several lyrics translated into English for the first time and the play Blood Wedding–also a great tragic poem. Arvio has created a fresh voice for Lorca in English, full of urgency, pathos, and lyricism–showing the poet’s work has grown only more beautiful with the passage of time.
Sarah Arvio, the author of night thoughts: 70 dream poems & notes from an analysis, Sono: cantos, and Visits from the Seventh, is a recipient Rome Prize and the Bogliasco and Guggenheim fellowships, among other honors. For many years a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland, she has also taught poetry at Princeton.
Federico García Lorca may be Spain’s most famous poet and dramatist of all time. Born in Andalusia in 1898, he grew up in a village on the Vega and in the city of Granada. His prolific works, known for their powerful lyricism and an obsession with love and death, include the Gypsy Ballads, which brought him far-reaching fame, and the homoerotic Dark Love Sonnets, which did not see print until almost fifty years after his death. His murder in 1936 by Fascist forces at the outset of the Spanish Civil War became a literary cause célébre; in Spain, his writings were banned. Lorca’s poems and plays are now read and revered in many languages throughout the world.
Monday, April 22, 2019 at 7:00 PM
Michigan Theater and Nicola’s Books will host a conversation with Valerie Jarrett.
Just added: new discounted ticket for students in the balcony! Select Desired Section – Balcony to access these tickets.
Join us for an evening in conversation with the longest serving senior advisor to President Barack Obama, Valerie Jarrett. In her memoir, Finding My Voice, Valerie shares her journey as a daughter, mother, lawyer, business leader, public servant, and leader in government at a historic moment in American history. Jarrett has received numerous awards and honorary degrees, including Time’s “100 Most Influential People.” She received her B.A. from Stanford University in 1978 and her J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School in 1981.
This is a ticketed event and each ticket will include a signed copy of Jarrett’s memoir, Finding My Voice.
Tickets $65, $49.50, and $35, with a special $24.50 ticket for students.
The Michigan Quarterly Review launches their Spring issue featuring poetry, fiction, and essays, from contemporary Iran. Featuring readings in Farsi and English from contributors Shahla Farghadani and Mason Jabbari, Guest Editor Kathryn Babyran, MQR Editor Khaled Mattawa, and MQR Staff Readers. Letterpress prints, specially designed for this issue by Wolverine Press, will also be available.
Literati is thrilled to welcome acclaimed poet and activist Carolyn Forché who will be discussing her new memoir What You Have Heard Is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistance.
About What You Have Heard Is True:
The powerful story of a young poet who becomes an activist through a trial by fire
What You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoir about a young woman’s brave choice to engage with horror in order to help others. Written by one of the most gifted poets of her generation, this is the story of a woman’s radical act of empathy, and her fateful encounter with an intriguing man who changes the course of her life.
Carolyn Forché is twenty-seven when the mysterious stranger appears on her doorstep. The relative of a friend, he is a charming polymath with a mind as seemingly disordered as it is brilliant. She’s heard rumors from her friend about who he might be: a lone wolf, a communist, a CIA operative, a sharpshooter, a revolutionary, a small coffee farmer, but according to her, no one seemed to know for certain. He has driven from El Salvador to invite Forché to visit and learn about his country. Captivated for reasons she doesn’t fully understand, she accepts and becomes enmeshed in something beyond her comprehension.
Together they meet with high-ranking military officers, impoverished farm workers, and clergy desperately trying to assist the poor and keep the peace. These encounters are a part of his plan to educate her, but also to learn for himself just how close the country is to war. As priests and farm-workers are murdered and protest marches attacked, he is determined to save his country, and Forché is swept up in his work and in the lives of his friends. Pursued by death squads and sheltering in safe houses, the two forge a rich friendship, as she attempts to make sense of what she’s experiencing and establish a moral foothold amidst profound suffering. This is the powerful story of a poet’s experience in a country on the verge of war, and a journey toward social conscience in a perilous time.
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, editor, translator, and activist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. Forché lives in Maryland with her husband, the photographer Harry Mattison.
