Literati is so excited to welcome author Susan Choi who will be reading and discussing her new novel Trust Exercise. Susan will be joined for a post-reading conversation with author Lillian Li.
About Trust Exercise:
In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed–or untoyed with–by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley.
The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls–until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true–though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place–revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence.
As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.
Susan Choi is the author of the novels My Education, A Person of Interest, American Woman, and The Foreign Student. Her work has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award and winner of the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award and the Asian-American Literary Award for fiction. With David Remnick, she co-edited Wonderful Town: New York Stories from The New Yorker. She’s received NEA and Guggenheim Foundation fellowships. She lives in Brooklyn.
Lillian Li received her BA from Princeton and her MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Hopwood Award in Short Fiction, as well as Glimmer Train‘s New Writer Award. Her work has been featured in Guernica, Granta , and Jezebel. She is from the D.C. metro area and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Number One Chinese Restaurant is her first novel.
On the second Wednesday of the month, we hold a relaxed and informal poetry workshop. Anyone is welcome to participate. At a workshop, you are encouraged to present a poem you are working on for positive and constructive comment by your peers. Please bring about 6 copies of the work you are presenting.
Your Poetry Circle Coordinators are Edward Morin, Joseph Kelty, and David Jibson.
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 authors Anne O’Brien Carelli and Brigit Young who will be sharing their new novels Skylark and Wallcreeper & Worth a Thousand Words.
About Skylark and Wallcreeper:
Queens, 2012.
Hurricane Sandy is flooding New York City, and Lily is at a nursing home with her grandmother, Collette. Lily visits Collette often, as she is beginning to lose her memories. When the National Guard shows up to evacuate the building and take them to safety at the Park Slope armory in Brooklyn, Lily’s granny suddenly produces a red box she’s hidden in a closet for years. Once they get to safety, Lily opens the box, where she finds an old, beautiful Montblanc pen. Granny tells Lily that the pen is very important and that she has to take care of it, as well as some letters written in French.
But Lily loses the pen in the course of helping other nursing home residents, and as she searches the city trying to find it, she learns more about her grandmother’s past in France and begins to uncover the significance of the pen with the help of her best friend, a quirky pen expert, and a larger-than-life, off-Broadway understudy. Told in alternating sections (2012 and 1944), this engaging book explores a deep friendship during difficult times and the importance of family.
About Worth a Thousand Words:
Whether it’s earrings, homework, or love notes, Tillie “Lost and Found” Green and her camera can find any lost thing–until a search for a missing person forces her to step out from behind the lens.
Ever since a car accident left Tillie Green with lasting painful injuries, she’s hidden behind her camera. She watches her family and classmates through the lens, tracking down misplaced items and spotting the small details that tell a much bigger story than people usually see. But she isn’t prepared for class clown Jake Hausmann’s request: to find his father.
In a matter of days, Tillie goes from silent observer to one half of a detective duo, searching for clues to the mystery of Jake’s dad’s disappearance. When the truth isn’t what Jake wants it to be, and the photographs start exposing people’s secrets, Tillie has to decide what–and who–is truly important to her.
Anne O’Brien Carelli is the author of adult nonfiction and the picture book Amina’s New Friends. She has always been fascinated by the French Resistance, and studied history at Case Western Reserve University. For her PhD, Anne researched psychology of the gifted. Originally from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Anne lives in the Hudson River Valley in upstate New York. This is her debut middle grade novel.
Brigit Young lives in NYC, along with her lovely husband, Jonathan, a master of funny voices, and hilarious daughter, Simone, a master of colors and the ABCs. She is the author of Worth a Thousand Words.
This month we are featuring members of the Tornado Wine Poetry group including Janet Cannon, Karen Holman, Jennifer Burd, Doug Smith, Mary Beam, Lakshmi Narayanan, and Josephine Rood. We will begin with an open mic session in a relaxed, welcoming atmosphere. Please join us to hear some fantastic local poets, and feel free to share your own work or that of a favorite author. This is part of a series held on the 2nd Thursday of most months in partnership with Les Go Social Media Marketing & Training.
Literati is excited to welcome author and craftsman Eric Gorges who will be discussing his new book A Craftman’s Legacy: Why Working With Our Hands Gives Us Meaning.
About A Craftman’s Legacy:
The host of TV’s A Craftsman’s Legacy makes the case that the craftsman’s way–the philosophy, the skills, and the mindset–can provide a helpful blueprint for all of us in our increasingly hurried, mass-manufactured world.
Today, even as so many of us spend hours in front of screens and in the virtual world, there is a growing movement that recognizes the power in the personal, the imperfect, the handmade. Eric Gorges, a metal shaper, taps into that hunger to get back to what’s “real” through visits with the fellow artisans he has profiled for his popular public television program. In this book, he tells their stories and shares the collective wisdom of calligraphers, potters, stone carvers, glassblowers, engravers, wood workers, and more while celebrating the culture they’ve created.
Filled with insights about the physical, psychological, and spiritual aspects of craftsmanship, A Craftsman’s Legacy identifies the craftsman’s shared values: taking time to slow down and enjoy the process, embracing failure, knowing when to stop and when to push through, and accepting that perfection is an illusion. Gorges extols the benefits of getting out of one’s comfort zone and the importance of learning the traditions of the past in order to carry those values into the future. Along the way, Gorges tells his own story about leaving the corporate world to focus on what he loves. This is a book for seekers of all kinds, an exhilarating look into the heart and soul of modern-day makers–and how they can inspire us all.
Eric Gorges has been the host of A Craftsman’s Legacy since it began in 2014. After a health crisis caused him to reevaluate his life, he sought out one of the best metal shapers in the country and signed on as his apprentice. In 1999, he struck out on his own, opening the custom motorcycle shop, Voodoo Choppers, in Detroit, Michigan, where he lives today.
Get hands-on with history with our storytelling workshop! During this interactive program, you’ll learn how to tell your own community stories. This event includes the chance to brainstorm and draft your story in addition to receiving friendly, constructive feedback from your workshop leader and peers.
This event is held in conjunction with the Exiled to Motown: Japanese Americans in Detroit Exhibit on display in the Downtown Library: 2nd Floor Exhibit Space through Sunday, May 12. This exhibit has been produced by the Japanese American Citizens League Detroit Chapter.
Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs of congregation and self-conception. They connect themes of loneliness, displacement, grief, ancestral trauma, and objectification, while exploring and troubling tropes and stereotypes of Black Americans. Focused primarily on depictions of Black womanhood alongside personal narratives, the collection tackles interior and exterior politics—of both the body and society, of both the individual and the collective experience.
In Magical Negro, Parker creates a space of witness, of airing grievances, of pointing out patterns. In these poems are living documents, pleas, latent traumas, inside jokes, and unspoken anxieties situated as firmly in the past as in the present—timeless black melancholies and triumphs.
For this event, Parker is in conversation with Aisha Sabatini Sloan, Visiting Professor of Creative Nonfiction at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan.
Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night. Her poetry and essays have appeared in Tin House, The Paris Review, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, Best American Poetry 2016, The New York Times, and The Nation. She is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a 2016 Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She hosts Reparations, Live!, co-curates the Poets With Attitude reading series with Tommy Pico, and with Angel Nafis she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She lives in Los Angeles.
Aisha Sabatini Sloan is the author of The Fluency of Light: Coming of Age in a Theater of Black and White (University of Iowa Press, 2013) and Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit (1913 Press, 2017). The latter was nominated for the Iowa Essay Prize, chosen by Maggie Nelson as the winner of the 1913 Open Prose Contest and won CLMP’s Firecracker award for Nonfiction in 2018.
This event is in partnership with Literati Bookstore. It includes a signing and books will be for sale.
Calling all athletes! Join us for an evening with Dan Wetzel, as he kicks off his new series of sports biographies for young readers, journalist Dan Wetzel tells the inspiring true life story of US Women’s Soccer star, Alex Morgan and the electrifying story of NBA superstar, Stephen Curry.
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
Epic Athletes – Stephen Curry
When you think of Stephen Curry, one word comes to mind: greatness. From shooting three-pointers with laser precision to his clutch ability to hit buzzer-beaters time and again, he has established himself as one of the best players in pro basketball.
But greatness was never a guarantee for Steph. The son of a talented NBA player, he dreamed of one day playing professionally just like his dad. Yet Steph, who was always smaller and weaker than the competition, was told over and over that he would never be talented enough to be a college star or NBA player–let alone the MVP of the entire league. Through tenacity and hard work, he proved them all wrong and went on to dismantle the record books.
With the high energy of a TV commentator, and featuring dynamic comic-style illustrations, this engaging biography tells the story of an NBA All-Star and the path he took to achieve his dreams.
* “Wetzel knows how to organize the facts and tell a good story. . . an unusually informative and enjoyable sports biography for young readers.” —Booklist (starred review)
Epic Athletes – Alex Morgan
Fierce competitor. World Cup winner. Role model.
U.S. Women’s Soccer star Alex Morgan has earned each of these impressive titles throughout her incredible career. As a young girl growing up in Southern California, she dreamed of being a professional soccer player, fighting to compete on the international stage against the world’s greatest athletes. Flash forward to the present and Alex Morgan has emerged as the face of U.S. Women’s soccer, famous for her clutch, late-game goals, and an inspiration to kids across the country.
Bestselling author Dan Wetzel details the rise of an American champion in this uplifting biography for young readers, complete with dynamic comic-style illustrations.
About the Author
New York Times bestselling author Dan Wetzel has been a Yahoo Sports national columnist since 2003. He’s covered events and stories around the globe, including college football, the NFL, the MLB, the NHL, the NBA, the UFC, the World Cup, and the Olympics. For years, he’s been called America’s best sports columnist, appeared repeatedly in the prestigious Best American Sports Writing, and been honored more than a dozen times by the Associated Press Sports Editors. Follow him on Twitter @DanWetzel.
Literati is thrilled to welcome back poet Franny Choi who will be reading from her new collection Soft Science
About Soft Science:
Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness–how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness.
“Franny Choi’s Soft Science offers an exceptional exploration both of all that comprises the intimate and of all that consumes the communal in our lives. Whether tracking the adventures of the ‘cyborg’ or eavesdropping on conversations between sisters, it’s all the same world. These striking poems ring through with a singular voice, creating a society that helps us understand our own. When you open a book of poems, ‘isn’t that what you came to see?’ Choi builds a world not only of striking beauty and lucid politics, but also, most importantly, with love.” –A. Van Jordan
Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her second collection, Soft Science, is forthcoming from Alice James Books.
