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)
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.
Literati is pleased to welcome Scott Ellsworth in support of The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph.
The Secret Game is the true story of the game that never should have happened–and of a nation on the brink of monumental change. In the fall of 1943, at the little-known North Carolina College for Negroes, Coach John McLendon was on the verge of changing basketball forever. A protégé of James Naismith, the game’s inventor, McLendon taught his team to play the full-court press and run a fast break that no one could catch. His Eagles would become the highest-scoring college team in America–a basketball juggernaut that shattered its opponents by as many as sixty points per game. Yet his players faced danger whenever they traveled backcountry roads.
Across town, at Duke University, the best basketball squad on campus wasn’t the Blue Devils, but an all-white military team from the Duke medical school. Composed of former college stars from across the country, the team dismantled everyone they faced, including the Duke varsity. They were prepared to take on anyone–until an audacious invitation arrived, one that was years ahead of anything the South had ever seen before. What happened next wasn’t on anyone’s schedule.
Based on years of research, The Secret Game is a story of courage and determination, and of an incredible, long-buried moment in the nation’s sporting past. The riveting, true account of a remarkable season, it is the story of how a group of forgotten college basketball players, aided by a pair of refugees from Nazi Germany and a group of daring student activists, not only blazed a trail for a new kind of America, but helped create one of the most meaningful moments in basketball history.
Scott Ellsworth has written about American history for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times. Formerly a historian at the Smithsonian Institution, he is the author ofDeath in a Promised Land, a groundbreaking account of the 1921 Tulsa race riot. He lives with his wife and twin sons in Ann Arbor, where he teaches at the University of Michigan.
Literati celebrates its third birthday!
As on our previous anniversary parties, In the spirit of donating and giving back, all book sales throughout the day will benefit SafeHouse Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to ending domestic violence and sexual assault in Washtenaw County, Michigan.
Additionally, we’ll be hosting a reading from friends & family, featuring the work of former Literati booksellers Russ Brakefield and Tom McCartan, current Literati booksellers John Ganiard, Mairead Small Staid, Sam Krowchenko, and Gina Balibrera, and our dear friend Ray McDaniel.
This event is free and open to the public.
Gina Balibrera is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program and was a Zell Postgraduate Fellow in Prose at the University of Michigan in 2013-2014. Gina lives in Ann Arbor, where she works at a bookstore, teaches writing at the University of Michigan, and is finishing a novel set in 1930s El Salvador and France.
Russell Brakefield received his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. He lives in Ann Arbor where he teaches writing at the University of Michigan and works as the managing editor for Canarium Books. His most recent work appears in The Southern Indiana Review, Hobart, and Language Lessons: An Anthology by Third Man Records. He is currently an artist in residence with the University Musical Society.
John M. Ganiard lives and works in Ann Arbor (Michigan, USA).
Sam Krowchenko’s writing has appeared in Salon, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Full Stop.
Tom McCartan used to work at LIterati. He’s had stories published in Unsaid,Hobart, and some other places. He also used to work at Melville House. Once he even at a music show at Literati, to which he brought a case of beer.
Mairead Small Staid is a poet and essayist whose work can be found in AGNI, The Believer, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Ninth Letter, andPloughshares, as well as online at The Awl, The Hairpin, Jezebel, and The Point.
Raymond McDaniel is the author of Special Powers and Abilities, Saltwater Empire and Murder (a violet), a National Poetry Series selection. His writing appears in many magazines and in the anthology American Poets in the 21st Century. Born in Florida, McDaniel now lives in Ann Arbor, teaches at the University of Michigan, and writes for The Constant Critic.
