All poets invited to compete in a poetry slam judged by a randomly chosen panel from the audience. The program begins with a poetry open mike and (occasionally) a short set by a featured poet.
8-11 p.m. (sign-up begins at 7:30 p.m.), $5 suggested donation. A2poetry.com.
Sweetland’s Word²: Writer to Writer series lets you hear directly from University of Michigan professors about their challenges, processes, and expectations as writers and also as readers of student writing. Word² pairs one esteemed University professor with Sweetland faculty member for a conversation about writing.
This session features a conversation with Robin Queen. Robin Queen is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Linguistics, Germanic Languages and Literatures, and English Language and Literature and Chair of the Linguistics Department at the University of Michigan. She is a sociolinguist with strong interests in the relationship of language variation and social cognition. She has done research on intonation and prosody; contact-related language change; language, gender, and sexuality; human-canine interaction involving language; and language variation in the mass media. Her most recent book, Vox Popular: The Surprising Life of Language in the Media (2015), is aimed at providing an informed lay audience a window into the many ways that language variation circulates in fictional television and film. She was the co-editor (with Anne Curzan) of the Journal of English Linguistics from 2005-2011.
This event is also broadcast live over the airwaves by WCBN (88.3FM or wcbn.org)
Former CIA daily intelligence briefer David Priess discusses his new book based largely on his experience working for the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Reception and signing follow.
Diane Wakoski won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams prize with her selected poems, Emerald Ice. Most recent of her more than 20 poetry collections is Bay of Angels. Now retired, Wakoski was Poet in Residence and University Distinguished Professor at MSU, 1975-2012.
This presentation explores methodological questions for the interdisciplinary scholar who interprets archival documents and material culture for the recovery of trans-hemispheric links between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Lisa Lowe is Professor of English and American Studies at Tufts University and author of the recent book, “The Intimacies of Four Continents” (Duke University Press, 2015). In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.
This talk is presented by IRWG’s Race, Colonialism, and Sexualities Initiative.
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a 2009 National Book Award finalist, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as Poems in Conversation and a Conversation, a chapbook in collaboration with Elizabeth Alexander. Her work has appeared in such journals as African American Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and Shenandoah, and in the anthologies Bum Rush the Page, Role Call, Common Wealth, Gathering Ground, and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. She is currently at work on a third collection, The Coal Tar Colors.
Tom Bissell will read from his latest, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve, a journey into the heart of Christianity. The widely acclaimed author of”The Disaster Artist” explores the mysterious and often paradoxical lives and legacies of the Twelve Apostles a book both for those of the Christian faith and those who want to understand it from the outside in.
Peter, Matthew, Thomas, John: Who were these men? What was their relationship to Jesus? Tom Bissell gives us rich and deeply informed answers to these ancient and surprisingly elusive questions. He examines not just who these men were (and weren’t), but how their identities have taken shape over the course of two millennia. He makes clear that, ultimately, their story is the story of Christianity and its growth from an obscure Jewish sect to the global faith we know today. Bissell has visited holy sites from Rome and Jerusalem to Turkey, India, and Kyrgyzstan, and he vividly captures the rich diversity of Christianity’s global reach. Written with warmth, humor, and rare acumen, Apostle is a brilliant synthesis of travel writing, biblical history, and a deep lifelong relationship with Christianity. The result is an unusual, erudite, at times hilarious book a religious, intellectual, and personal adventure.
Tom Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. He has lived in New York City, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Italy, Las Vegas, Estonia, Portland, and currently lives in Los Angeles. In 2006 he was awarded the Rome Prize, and in 2010 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also done scriptwriting for several popular video-game franchises, including Gears of War, Battlefield, and Uncharted.
From the editors: “We are The Oleander Review, an undergraduate-run literary magazine at the University of Michigan that publishes both local and national writers of all levels of expertise and backgrounds. We aim to provide a professional experience for undergraduates to try their hand at evaluating, editing, and publishing a physical journal that can be found on bookshelves and purchased online. We also aim to reach out to established writers from all around the country, thereby encouraging young writers to continue pursuing their creative endeavors.”
All are welcome!
Retired University of Toledo history professor Peter Linebaugh discusses his new book, a compendium of reflections on May Day from figures as far flung as Karl Marx and W.E.B. Du Bois. Refreshments & signing.
All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell.
