Literati is delighted to celebrate the publication of Blood in the Water by UM professor Heather Ann Thompson.
Blood in the Water is the first definitive account of the infamous 1971 Attica prison uprising, the state’s violent response, and the victims’ decades-long quest for justice–including information never released to the public–published to coincide with the forty-fifth anniversary of this historic event.
On September 9, 1971, nearly 1300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment. Holding guards and civilian employees hostage, during the next four long days and nights the inmates negotiated with state officials for improved living conditions. On September 13, the state abruptly ended talks and sent many hundreds of heavily armed state troopers and corrections officers to retake the prison by force. In the ensuing gunfire, thirty-nine men were killed–hostages as well as prisoners–and close to one hundred were severely injured. Over the following hours, days, and weeks, troopers and officers brutally retaliated against the prisoners. For decades afterward, instead of charging any state employee who had committed murder or carried out egregious human rights abuses, New York officials only prosecuted the prisoners and failed to provide necessary support to the hostage survivors or the families of any of the men who’d been killed.
Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century, exploring every aspect of the uprising and its legacy from the perspectives of all of those involved in this forty-five year fight for justice: the prisoners, the state officials, the lawyers on both sides, the state troopers and corrections officers, and the families of the slain men.
Heather Ann Thompson is an award-winning historian at the University of Michigan. She has written on the history of mass incarceration as well as its current impact for The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and The Huffington Post. She served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States and has given Congressional Staff briefings on this subject. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City and editor of Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Literati is pleased to welcome poets Leila Chatti and Tracey Knapp.
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet. She holds a BA from Michigan State University and an MFA from North Carolina State University. The recipient of a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, a scholarship from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and prizes from Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Academy of American Poets, her poems appear in Best New Poets, Narrative, Boston Review, North American Review, The Missouri Review, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. www.leilachatti.com
The poems in Tracey Knapp’s Mouth are about the world of the mouth and its many satellites. Words, especially. And when you’re lucky, another mouth. The poems address the beautiful failures of language to mean what it says, and to be less than the physical. At the end of the day, you are left with only the words in your head, the mouth on your face.
“Quotidian, weird, intimate, witty, and skittery, Knapp’s poems are refractions through a funhouse mirror. They’re self-conscious without being self-important. The wounded heart is everywhere apparent; we of that tribe can be grateful for one more of us to voice it, brilliantly. MOUTH is a charmer of a first book. Read it and weep over your nachos and wine; it will leave you wanting more.”—Kim Addonizio
“…part Frank O’Hara, part Robert Herrick …it’s a book that hurts, and a book that flirts… It’s also part of the least self-important, and therefore the most important, tradition of lyric, the tradition of trying to make the tiny moments, their delights and disappointments, last.”–Stephen Burt, Slate
“Deliciously irreverent, Knapp’s poems welcome us into a weird urban landscape full of airports, broken hearts, wine and spilled dog chow. …[She] delves into the shadow and still finds glimpses of light.”–San Francisco Chronicle
Tracey Knapp‘s first full-length collection of poems, Mouth, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award and was published in 2015. Tracey has received scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2008 and 2010, The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems (Red Hen Press), and has appeared in Poetry Daily, Five Points, Ink Node (as a featured poet),The National Poetry Review, Red Wheelbarrow Review, The New Ohio Review, The Minnesota Review, and elsewhere.
Reading by this U-M creative writing grad student, author of the poetry collections[insert] boy and Don’t Call Us Dead. The program begins with open mike readings.
Monthly open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. The 3 judges are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Space limited, so it’s smart to arrive early.
Note: Beginning in August, the Storyslam is held twice a month, on the 1st & 3rd Tuesdays.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), The Circus, 210 S. First. $10. 764-5118.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Eileen Pollack back to the store in support of her latest book, A Perfect Life.
Love and science converge in Eileen Pollack’s luminous new novel, A Perfect Life. With singular insight and narrative grace, Pollack explores the moral complexities of scientific discovery through the story of a brilliant research biologist facing heartrending decisions about her personal life and the fate that genetics may have preordained for her.
Jane Weiss is a young post doc at MIT who is obsessed with finding the genetic marker for Valentine’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that killed her mother. With the clear vision of a scientist, she knows that she and her sister each stand a fifty percent chance of inheriting the disease, and her research is fueled by a need to discover if they are genetic carriers. Having witnessed the devastating effect that Valentine’s had on her parents’ marriage, Jane has vowed to steer clear of love unless she is sure she is free of the disease, refusing to become a burden on anyone else. But that determination is upended when she meets and falls in love with Willie, whose own father died of Valentine’s. Suddenly, with the very real possibility of their relationship ending in tragedy, her research takes on a new ferocity.
“A Perfect Life probes how we live in the face of uncertainty and the ways risk can both disable and empower us. Eileen Pollack has crafted a tender exploration of family love that is as smart and thought-provoking as it is moving.”–Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You
“Like Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations and Allegra Goodman’s Intuition, Eileen Pollack’s compelling novel offers an intimate portrait of scientists engaged in research with the potential to change all our lives—and equally engaged in relationships that change their own lives.”–Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and Servants of the Map
“A tense scientific mystery propels this gripping novel, but what resonates most powerfully are the keenly observed discoveries Jane makes about even deeper mysteries: the risks and pleasures of being human, and the nuances—as well as the costs—of love.”–Kim Edwards, author of The Memory-Keeper’s Daughter
With both an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BS in physics from Yale,Eileen Pollack is uniquely positioned to have written A Perfect Life, bringing both a fiction-writer’s sensibility and a scientific background to the novel. She is the author of two previous novels, two story collections, and two books of nonfiction, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michener Foundation and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her work has been included in both the Best American Short Stories and the Best American Essays series. Pollack has been a professor at the Helen Zell MFA Program at the University of Michigan since 1999, and was a director of the program for five years. She now divides her time between Ann Arbor and Manhattan.
Nisi Shawl is a writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories and a journalist. She is the co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of “Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction.” Her short stories have appeared in “Asimov’s SF Magazine,” “Strange Horizons,” and numerous other magazines and anthologies.
The Hopwood Awards Program celebates summer awardees with a reception at 3:15 and awards at 4:10. Three RC students won summer awards:
Literati is thrilled to be the bookseller for the Zell Visiting Writers Series at the University of Michigan. More information about the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, including a full calendar of visiting writers, can be found here. The September 22nd installment of ZVWS will feature poet Bob Hicok.
Bob Hicok was born in 1960 in Michigan and worked for many years in the automotive die industry. A published poet long before he earned his MFA, Hicok is the author of several collections of poems, including The Legend of Light, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry in 1995 and named a 1997 ALA Booklist Notable Book of the Year; Plus Shipping; Animal Soul, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; Insomnia Diary; This Clumsy Living, which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry from the Library of Congress; Words for Empty, Words for Full; Elegy Owed, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award; and, most recently, Love & Sex &. His work has been selected numerous times for the Best American Poetry series. Hicok has won Pushcart Prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has taught creative writing at Western Michigan University and Virginia Tech.
Local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal host an open house for writers to connect with one another and/or work on their projects.
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Literati is delighted to partner with the University of Michigan’s Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures to celebrate new work by their esteemed faculty. Authors include:
Johannes von Moltke is Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures and Professor and Chair of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan. He is the author of No Place Like Home: Locations of Heimat in German Cinema and the editor of two volumes of writings by and about Siegfried Kracauer. His most recent book is The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America.
Helmut Puff is Professor of German and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the co-editor of Cultures of Communication: Theologies of Media in Early Modern Europe and Beyond, forthcoming in December.
Scott Spector is Professor of History, German Studies, and Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. He is a cultural and intellectual historian of modern central Europe, focusing on the interplay of ideology and culture in its many forms. He is the author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle (2000), and co-editor, with Helmut Puff and Dagmar Herzog, of After the History of Sexuality: German Genealogies With and Beyond Foucault (2012). Violent Sensations: Sex, Crime, and Utopia in Vienna and Berlin, 1860-1914 is a study of understandings of urban sex and crime in scientific, police, and popular press representations, and in the articulations of criminal and sexual subjects themselves.
Silke-Maria Weineck is particularly interested in the many ways in which classical literature and philosophy continue to reverberate in the modern world. Her first book,The Abyss Above traces the figure of the mad poet through writings by Plato, Hölderlin and Nietzsche. The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West looks at the tensions that have characterized the concept of fatherhood from Sophocles and the Bible over Hobbes to Kleist and Freud. Our Ancient Wars, co-edited with Victor Caston, explores the presence of classical war writing in contemporary cultural production. She is currently working on a book tentatively titled The Irony Monster: First and Last Deity.
