Author Jill Grunenwald will read from her new book Reading Behind Bars: a True Story of Literature, Law, and Life as a Prison Librarian. After graduating with a Masters in Library and Information Science, Jill returned to Northeast Ohio and took a job as a librarian at an all-male, minimum security prison on the far west side of Cleveland. Reading Behind Bars is the true account of her experiences there.
This event includes a signing with books for sale.
This event will be recorded
Monthly meeting of the AASG Open to the public. This Month we are at the Ann Arbor Civic Theatre’s Studio.
Come on out to Serendipity Books in Chelsea for a night of chills and thrills. The telling starts simple and small with not-so-scary stories for kids. The stories slowly become more scary and MORE ADULT as the night progesses. Stay if you dare, but BE WARNED! Things get pretty creepy around here.
Mollie Glick is a literary agent at Creative Artists Agency. She graduated from Brown University and began her career as a literary scout, advising foreign publishers regarding the acquisition of rights to American books. She then worked in the editorial department at the Crown imprint of Random House, before becoming an agent in 2003. Glick joined CAA in 2016, following eight years at Foundry Literary + Media.
Glick represents many top authors and thought leaders, including Vice President Joe Biden; Senator Kamala Harris; Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Ken Armstrong and T. Christian Miller; MacArthur Grant-recipient astrophysicist Sara Seager; National Book Award-nominee Ali Benjamin; NYT Top 50 Memoirs of the Past 50 Years recipient Patricia Lockwood; #1 NYT bestselling author Mark Manson; and NYT bestselling novelists Carol Rifka Brunt; Jonathan Evison; Sarah McCoy and Nic Stone.
Glick lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and two young sons.
We welcome award-winning author Ayelet Tsabari in support of her acclaimed memoir, The Art of Leaving. A book signing will follow. The event is free and open to the public.
About the book: An intimate memoir in essays by an award-winning Israeli writer who travels the world, from New York to India, searching for love, belonging, and an escape from grief following the death of her father when she was a young girl.
This searching collection opens with the death of Ayelet Tsabari’s father when she was just nine years old. His passing left her feeling rootless, devastated, and driven to question her complex identity as an Israeli of Yemeni descent in a country that suppressed and devalued her ancestors’ traditions.
In The Art of Leaving, Tsabari tells her story, from her early love of writing and words, to her rebellion during her mandatory service in the Israeli army. She travels from Israel to New York, Canada, Thailand, and India, falling in and out of love with countries, men and women, drugs and alcohol, running away from responsibilities and refusing to settle in one place. She recounts her first marriage, her struggle to define herself as a writer in a new language, her decision to become a mother, and finally her rediscovery and embrace of her family history–a history marked by generations of headstrong women who struggled to choose between their hearts and their homes. Eventually, she realizes that she must reconcile the memories of her father and the sadness of her past if she is ever going to come to terms with herself.
With fierce, emotional prose, Ayelet Tsabari crafts a beautiful meditation about the lengths we will travel to try to escape our grief, the universal search to find a place where we belong, and the sense of home we eventually find within ourselves.
Ayelet Tsabari was born in Israel to a large family of Yemeni descent. After serving in the Israeli army, she traveled extensively throughout Southeast Asia and North America, and now lives in Tel Aviv. She teaches creative writing at the University of King’s College’s MFA Program in Creative Nonfiction and at Tel Aviv University. Tsabari’s first book, The Best Place on Earth, won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for Jewish Fiction, and was nominated for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. It was also a New York Times Editors’ Choice pick and included in Kirkus Reviews‘ Best Debut Fiction of 2016. Essays from this book have also won several awards, including a National Magazine Award. In addition to writing, Tsabari has worked as a photographer and a journalist.
Detroit is home to gargoyles, grotesques, and guardians that silently watch over the city from their posts high above the sidewalks and streets. Author and photographer Jeff Morrison will discuss the symbolism behind the ornamentation and hear some of the untold stories of the artists, artisans, and architects involved in its creation, all drawn from his book The Guardians of Detroit: Architectural Sculpture in the Motor City. Copies of the book and coloring book will be available for purchase before and after the presentation.
Description:Ruth Behar — storyteller, author, poet, educator, and public speaker
Dr. Behar will present a multilayered view of the Jews of Cuba, weaving together various forms of storytelling, from history and ethnography to fiction and poetry.
Ellen Muehlberger (history, classical studies, Middle East studies) and Deborah Dash Moore (Judaic studies, history) discuss Muehlberger’s latest book, followed by Q & A.
Late antiquity saw a proliferation of Christian texts dwelling on the emotions and physical sensations of dying—not as a heroic martyr in a public square or a judge’s court but as an individual, at home in a bed or in a private room. In sermons, letters, and ascetic traditions, late ancient Christians imagined the last minutes of life and the events that followed death in elaborate detail. This book traces how, in late ancient Christianity, death came to be thought of as a moment of reckoning: a physical ordeal whose pain is followed by an immediate judgment of one’s actions by angels and demons and, after that, fitting punishment. This emphasis on the experience of death ushered in a new ethical sensibility among Christians, in which one’s death was to be imagined frequently and anticipated in detail. This was initially meant as a tool for individuals: preachers counted on the fact that becoming aware of a judgment arriving at the end of one’s life tends to sharpen one’s scruples. But, as this book argues, the change in Christian sensibility toward death did not just affect individuals. Death imagined as the moment of reckoning created a fund of images and ideas within late ancient Christian culture about just what constituted a human being and how variances in human morality should be treated. This had significant effects on the Christian adoption of power in late antiquity, especially in the case of power’s heaviest baggage: the capacity to authorize violence against others
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.
The African American Literature and Culture Now symposium brings together a group of leading scholars in African American humanistic fields to identify and discuss the central questions that animate 21st-century Black Studies.
Held over two days, the symposium features a keynote lecture, “The End of Black Studies,” from Stephen Best (Berkeley), three panels comprised of guest speakers and Michigan respondents, a writing workshop for graduate students and postdocs, and a concluding roundtable focused on teaching. Over the course of the symposium, conversations will range across a number of vital topics including: nation/diaspora; political activism; historicity; gender/sexuality; and cross-media cultural production.
In addition to keynote speaker Stephen Best, the symposium’s guest speakers are Margo Crawford (UPenn), Madhu Dubey (UIC), Erica Edwards (Rutgers), Emily Lordi (UMass/Vanderbilt), Kevin Quashie (Brown), and Courtney Thorsson (Oregon).
