Jon M. Stevens was born in Powell, Ohio, and grew up in the shadow of Ohio Stadium. He earned a master’s degree from U-M in 2004 and is currently a designer for an architecture firm in Ann Arbor. Ken Magee is an expert in Wolverine football history. He is a 30-year veteran of law enforcement, former chief of police for the University of Michigan, and a retired federal agent. A portion of this book’s proceeds will benefit the Ken Magee Foundation for Cops, which assists police officers permanently injured in the line of duty. They are the authors of The Game: The Michigan-Ohio State Football Rivalry.
Literati welcomes Robert James Russell for the launch of his western novel, Mesilla. Reading with Robert will be Chicago-based author Ben Tanzer.
A born and bred Michigander, Robert James Russell is the co-founding editor of the literary journal Midwestern Gothic, which aims to catalog the very best fiction of the Midwestern United States (an area he believes is ripe with its own mythologies and tall tales, yet often overlooked), as well as the micro-press MG Press. In 2013 he launched the online literary journal CHEAP POP, which publishes micro-fiction, 500 words or less.
Fascinated by regionalist literature and the intersection of place and relationships, his work has appeared in numerous publications, both print and online. His first novel, Sea of Trees, was published by Winter Goose Publishing in 2012. His first collection of stories, Don’t Ask Me to Spell It Out, was released in April 2015 by WhiskeyPaper Press. His Western novel, Mesilla, will be released in September 2015 by Dock Street Press. He’s been nominated three times for the Pushcart Prize, and was awarded an artist residency with the University Musical Society for the 2014-2015 performance season. He currently has a lecturer appointment at the U-M Residential College.
Ben Tanzer is the author of the books My Father’s House, You Can Make Him Like You, So Different Now, Orphans and Lost in Space, among others. Ben can be found online at This Blog Will Change Your Life, the center of his growing lifestyle empire. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two sons.
Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best American Mystery Stories 2014, Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, A Public Space, McSweeney’s, Tin House, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, West Branch, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Time, The Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The Rumpus, Salon, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK. She is also the author of the books Ayiti, An Untamed State, Bad Feminist, and Hunger, forthcoming from Harper in 2016.
Note: Q&A with Roxane Gay at 2 pm in the Hopwood Room.
Literati welcomes Jon Fine, author of Your Band Sucks: What I Saw at Indie Rock’s Failed Revolution (But Can No Longer Hear). Jon Fine is the executive editor of Inc. magazine. As a guitarist—in Bitch Magnet, Coptic Light, and Don Caballero, among others–he’s performed around the world and appeared on MTV. As a writer, Fine’s long-running BusinessWeek column “Media Centric” won both American Society of Business Publication Editors and National Headliner awards, and his work for Food & Wine won a James Beard Award. He has served as an on-air contributor to CNBC, and his work has also appeared in The Atlantic, GQ, and Details.
Deborah L. Wolter is an elementary teacher consultant in Ann Arbor public schools. She has worked for over 18 years with public school teachers and their students from all walks of life and who were in different places of exploring multiple languages and literacies. Reading Upside Down offers a paradigm shift from achievement gaps to opportunity gaps in literacy instruction. Drawing on the author’s rich experiences working one-on-one with challenged readers, this book presents case studies illustrating the complexities of student learning experiences and the unique circumstances that shaped their acquisition of literacy. Wolter explores eight key factors that contribute to reading challenges in developing readers, including school readiness, the use of prescribed phonics-based programs, physical hurdles, unfamiliarity with English, and special education labeling. With a focus on the differences that educators can make for individual students, the text suggests ways to identify and address early opportunity gaps that can impact students throughout their entire educational career.
This Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist discusses her series of mystery novels featuring the crusading small-town West Virginia prosecutor Bell Elkins. Keller also talks about mining in Appalachia, including a disastrous 1972 flood — the subject of her latest Bell Elkins novel, Last Jagged Breath— caused by the failure of a coal slurry impoundment dam in Buffalo Creel (WV). .
Literati welcomes Claire Vaye Watkins in support of her first novel, Gold Fame Citrus. Claire Vaye Watkins is the author of Battleborn, winner of the Story Prize, the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Silver Pen Award from the Nevada Writers Hall of Fame. Battleborn was named a Best Book of 2012 by the San Francisco Chronicle, Boston Globe, Time Out New York, and Flavorwire, and a Best Short Story Collection by NPR.org. In 2012, the National Book Foundation named Claire one of the 5 Best Writers Under 35. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, One Story, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Best of the West 2011, Best of the Southwest 2013, and elsewhere. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno and the Ohio State University, Claire has received fellowships from the Writers’ Conferences at Sewanee and Bread Loaf. An assistant professor at Bucknell University, Claire is also the co-director, with Derek Palacio, of the Mojave School, a free creative writing workshop for teenagers in rural Nevada.
Julie Babcock is a Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of grants and fellowships from the Indiana Arts Commission and the Vermont Studio Center. Her poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including The Iowa Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Plume. She lived the first twenty years of her life in Ohio, then she made a circle around the Midwest and currently teaches at U-M.
Scott Beal’s first full-length collection, Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems, was published by Dzanc Books in November 2014. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Beloit Poetry Journal, Indiana Review, Muzzle, Southern Indiana Review, The Collagist, Sonora Review, and many other journals. He won a 2014 Pushcart Prize for the poem “Things to Think About.” Beal teaches full-time in the Sweetland Center for Writing, the English Department Writing Program, and the Lloyd Hall Scholars Program at the University of Michigan, and serves as Dzanc Writer-in-Residence for Ann Arbor Open School. He has led poetry and fiction workshops for the Neutral Zone, the InsideOut Literary ArtsProject, 826michigan, and other organizations. He earned his MFA from the University of Michigan in 1996, where he received several Hopwood Awards. He co-authored Jangle the Threads with Rachel McKibbens and Aracelis Girmay (Red Beard Press, 2010) and Underneath: The Archaeological Approach to Creative Writing with Jeff Kass (Red Beard Press, 2011). His chapbook, Two Shakespearean Madwomen Vs. the Detroit Red Wings, won the Fall 1998 Chapbook Contest from White Eagle Coffee Store Press. The manuscript for Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems was a 2012 finalist for the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize from Pleiades Press and the ABZ Press Poetry Prize. Beal has competed in the Individual World Poetry Slam and has been a featured performer at schools, bookstores, and poetry slams around the country, including the Green Mill in Chicago, the Nuyorican Poet’s Cafe in New York, and the Cantab Lounge in Boston. He curates and co-hosts the Skazat! monthly poetry series in Ann Arbor, where he lives with his two daughters.
Cathy Park Hong’s first book, Translating Mo’um was published in 2002 by Hanging Loose Press. Her second collection, Dance Dance Revolution, was chosen for the Barnard Women Poets Prize and was published in 2007 by W.W. Norton. Her third book of poems, Engine Empire, was published in Spring 2012 by W.W. Norton. Hong is also the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. Her poems have been published in A Public Space, Poetry, Paris Review,Conjunctions, McSweeney’s, APR, Harvard Review, Boston Review, The Nation, and other journals. She is an Associate Professor at Sarah Lawrence College and is regular faculty at the Queens MFA program in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Note: Q&A with Cathy Park Hong at 2 pm in the Hopwood Room.
Amelia Gray is the author of four books: AM/PM, Museum of the Weird, THREATS, and Gutshot. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Tin House, and VICE. She lives in Los Angeles.
Colin Winnette is the author of Revelation, Animal Collection, Fondly, Coyote, and Haints Stay. His work has appeared in The Believer, The American Reader, Gulf Coast, Buzzfeed, and many other publications. He conducts a semi-regular interview series for Electric Literature, and he is an associate editor of PANK.
