U-M Professors Tiya Miles and Martha Jones discuss Miles’ new book The Cherokee Rose, a novel that examines a little-known aspect of America’s past—slaveholding by Southern Creeks and Cherokees—and its legacy in the lives of three young women who are drawn to the Georgia plantation where scenes of extreme cruelty and equally extraordinary compassion once played out.
Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur “Genius” Award. She is the author of red doc>; Nox; Glass, Irony and God; The Autobiography of Red; The Beauty of the Husband; Decreation; Economy of the Unlost; Eros the Bittersweet; Grief Lessons; If Not, Winter; Men in the Off Hours;and Plainwater.
When the 17th c. British philosophers founded modern natural history, they proposed finding a poet to compile a poetic account of everything that existed in nature. This witty, learned, and satirical collection follows a year’s worth of submissions by one such researcher-poet, along with revisions and comments written in the margins between the poet and the editor. As their relationship unravels, Natural History becomes a tool of the heartbroken and obsessed.
“Holly Painter is a trickster poet, you never know where she’s going next. Sometimes she wants to lick your ear. Over the page she might chew your leg off.” — John Newton
Holly has an MFA from the University of Canterbury. She is originally from Michigan where she interned at 826Michigan and currently lives in Singapore with her wife and son.
PLEASE NOTE: The Open Mic & Share Poetry Series will be on hiatus in January 2016.
We will resume on February 11 at 7pm; featured poet TBA.
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. Tonight: poet Hanae Jonas and fiction writer Emily Chew.
The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends – a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
JACK DEMPSEY & BRIAN JAMES EGEN will read from their book, MICHIGAN AT ANTIETAM: THE WOLVERINE STATE’S SACRIFICE ON AMERICA ‘S BLOODIEST DAY
Jack Dempsey
Jack Dempsey is a lawyer and Michigan native. He co-founded and is the president of the Michigan Civil War Association, which is dedicated to erecting a Michigan monument at the Antietam National Battlefield. Jack is president of the Michigan Historical Commission, board member of the Michigan History Foundation and a member of the Michigan Historic Preservation Network, the Abraham Lincoln Civil War Roundtable, the Civil War Trust, Preservation Detroit, and runs the Michigan Civil War Blog.
Brian James Egen
Brian James Egen is executive producer at the Henry Ford and a Michigan native. He is a co-founder of the Michigan Civil War Association, chairman of the Michigan Civil War Sesquicentennial Committee and member of the Michigan Historical Commission, Monroe County Historical Commission and Commission on the Environment, City of Monroe. Brian is an award-winning director for an independent short film and has worked on several National Park Service and historic site Civil War documentaries.
John F. Buckley has published the poetry collection Sky Sandwiches and chapbooksBreach Birth and Leading an Aquamarine Shoat by Its Tail. He collaborated with Martin Ott on two additional books of poetry. His poems appear in The Carolina Quarterly, Narrative, and ZYZZYVA. He holds an MFA in creative writing from The University of Michigan
Kim D. Hunter works for social justice groups and in Detroit schools through Inside Out Literary Arts. His poems have appeared in What I Say, Rainbow Darkness, and Abandon Automobile. His books include borne on slow knives andedge of the time zone. His short fiction, The Official Report on Human Activity, earned a Kresge Literary Arts Fellowship.
Joshua Cohen will present from the title A Field Guide to the Natural Communities of Michigan.
The culmination of three decades of work, this field guide provides readers with an accessible introduction to Michigan’s natural community classification and is meant to serve as a tool for those seeking to understand, describe, document, conserve, and restore the diversity of ecosystems native to Michigan. In the course of an ecological tour of Michigan, Joshua will discuss the methods behind the creation of this book and its critical components that include dichotomous keys, natural community distribution maps and descriptions, plant lists, and places to visit the communities.
Joshua Cohen has worked for the past sixteen years as an ecologist with Michigan Natural Features Inventory (MNFI), Michigan’s natural heritage program. His primary duties as the lead ecologist with MNFI involve refining and revising the natural community classification through ecological inventory and sampling, literature research, and data analysis. He is also responsible for classifying conservation targets and prioritizing areas for conservation and restoration; creating and delivering training sessions for resource professionals on biodiversity and ecosystem management; and designing and conducting vegetative sampling, ecological mapping and modeling, monitoring, and surveys for natural communities and threatened and endangered species.
Readings by John F. Buckley, a recent U-M creative writing MFA who has published 2 chapbooks and the collection Sky Sandwiches, and Kim D. Hunter, a veteran Detroit poet known for what he calls the “social surrealism” of his gritty post-industrial city-scapes. Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
R.J. Fox is author of Love and Vodka: My Surreal Adventures in Ukraine. He is also tthe award-winning writer of several short stories, plays, poems, and fifteen feature-length screenplays. He is also the writer and director of several award-winning short films. In addition his writing and filmmaking exploits—not to mention his talents as a saxophonist—Fox teaches English and Video Production in the Ann Arbor Public Schools where he uses his own dream of making movies to inspire his students to follow their own dreams. Fox has also worked in public relations at Ford Motor Company and as a newspaper reporter. He resides in Ann Arbor, MI. Visit www.foxplots.com or follow him on Twitter @foxwriter7.
In Elephants and Kings, Trautmann traces the history of the war elephant in India and the spread of the institution to the west—where elephants took part in some of the greatest wars of antiquity—and Southeast Asia. He shows that because elephants eat such massive quantities of food, it was uneconomic to raise them from birth. Rather, in a unique form of domestication, Indian kings captured wild adults and trained them, one by one, through millennia. Kings were thus compelled to protect wild elephants from hunters and elephant forests from being cut down. By taking a wide-angle view of human-elephant relations, Trautmann throws into relief the structure of India’s environmental history and the reasons for the persistence of wild elephants in its forests. Thomas Trautmann is professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Michigan. Andrew Shryock is is chair and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan.
