Jessica Lipowski is the author of Flavors of Life (2016). Jessica, originally from Troy, Michigan and a graduate of Michigan State University, moved to the Netherlands in February 2011. With previous journalistic work published on 10Best.com (part of USAToday) and in The Washington Times, she is now an author. She is also a permanent host of two travel-related Twitter chats, #TRLT (The Road Less Travelled) and #CultureTrav.The book, in combination with Jessica’s past work experience, travels, and life as an expat, has enabled her to view food, travel, and culture through a different lens.
Flavors of Life (ISBN: 9789082523805) is a collection of inspirational biographies, sharing the stories of 62 entrepreneurs from around the world. Ranging from a famous Swiss drummer to an American ballet dancer, they are connected by a common thread: all own a restaurant in Amsterdam. Discover how these diverse individuals landed in the same city, in the same industry, with a shared passion – a love for food. While the restaurateurs live in Amsterdam, the stories have universal themes. The book examines culture, lifestyle, entrepreneurship, food, and family values. Regardless or whether someone has visited Amsterdam or not, readers can find a piece of themselves in this book. If you’d like, you can read more on my website: https://jessicalipowski.com/
Literati is pleased to welcome Julia Sonnevend in support of her book Stories without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event. Julia will be joined in conversation by Professor William Uricchio.
How do stories of particular events turn into global myths, while others fade away? What becomes known and seen as a global iconic event? In Stories without Borders, Julia Sonnevend considers the ways in which we recount and remember news stories of historic significance. Focusing on journalists covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and on subsequent retellings of the event in a variety of ways – from Legoland reenactments to slabs of the Berlin Wall installed in global cities – Sonnevend discusses how certain events become built up so that people in many parts of the world remember them for long periods of time. She argues that five dimensions determine the viability and longevity of international news events. First, a foundational narrative must be established with certain preconditions. Next, the established narrative becomes universalized and a mythical message developed. This message is then condensed and encapsulated in a simple phrase, a short narrative, and a recognizable visual scene. Counter-narratives emerge that reinterpret events and in turn facilitate their diffusion across multiple media platforms and changing social and political contexts. Sonnevend examines these five elements through the developments of November 9, 1989 – what came to be known as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Stories Without Borders concludes with a discussion of how global iconic events have an enduring effect on individuals and societies, pointing out that after common currencies, military alliances, and international courts have failed, stories may be all that we have to bring hope and unity.
Julia Sonnevend is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. She was a Lady Davis Fellow at the Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace in Israel in 2014 and a Leibniz Fellow at the Center for Contemporary History in Germany in 2015. She is co-editor of Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future (forthcoming with MIT Press in 2016). She is author and co-author of articles published in journals including Journalism Studies, Columbia Journalism Review and The New Everyday. Her work also appears in edited collections including Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (Ed. Benjamin Peters, Princeton University Press, forthcoming in 2016),Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life (Eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline (Eds. James Elkins et al, Routledge, 2012). She received her Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University, her Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School and her Juris Doctorate and Master of Arts degrees in German Studies and Aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
William Uricchio revisits the histories of old media when they were new; explores interactive and participatory documentary; writes about the past and future of television; thinks a lot about algorithms and archives; and researches cultural identities and the question of “Americanization” in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and faculty director of the MISTI-Netherlands Program. He is also Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has held visiting professorships at the Freie Universität Berlin, Stockholm University, the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Lichtenberg-Kolleg), China University of Science and Technology, and in Denmark where he was DREAM professor. He has been awarded Guggenheim, Humboldt and Fulbright fellowships and the Berlin Prize; and is currently Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. His publications include Reframing Culture (Princeton); We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (Chicago/Intellect); Media Cultures(Heidelberg); hundreds of essays and book chapters … and, timed to coincide with the Batman-Superman big screen face-off, a forthcoming collection entitled Many More Lives of the Batman (BFI/Palgrave). He is currently completing a book on new forms of documentary; and another on games and playing with history and historiography after post-structuralism.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Jonathan Safran Foer to Rackham Auditorium on the campus of The University of Michigan, in celebration of his most recent novel, Here I Am. Following a reading will be an in-conversation segment with Douglas Trevor, director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at The University of Michigan.
Tickets are available exclusively through Brown Paper Tickets:
About Here I Am
How do we fulfill our conflicting duties as father, husband, and son; wife and mother; child and adult? Jew and American? How can we claim our own identities when our lives are linked so closely to others? These are the questions at the heart of Jonathan Safran Foers first novel in eleven years, a work of extraordinary scope and heartbreaking intimacy.
Unfolding over four tumultuous weeks in present-day Washington, D.C., Here I Am is the story of a fracturing family in a moment of crisis. As Jacob and Julia Bloch and their three sons are forced to confront the distances between the lives they think they want and the lives they are living, a catastrophic earthquake sets in motion a quickly escalating conflict in the Middle East. At stake is the meaning of homeand the fundamental question of how much aliveness one can bear.
Showcasing the same high-energy inventiveness, hilarious irreverence, and emotional urgency that readers loved in his earlier work, Here I Am is Foers most searching, hard-hitting, and grandly entertaining novel yet. It not only confirms Foers stature as a dazzling literary talent but reveals a novelist who has fully come into his own as one of our most important writers.
About the Event
This event will take place at Rackham Auditorium on the campus of The University of Michigan on November 4th, 2016, at 7pm. Doors for seating will open at 6:15. There are two ticket options: a $12 dollar general admission ticket, and a $32 dollar general admission and hardcover bundle. Follow the link above to purchase your tickets through Brown Paper Tickets. Tickets will not be sold in store. Though both ticketing options provide general admission seating, book-bundle ticket holders will have first access to the signing line following the reading and conversation. Additional copies of Here I Am, as well as Jonathan Safran Foer’s other titles, will be available to purchase in the lobby. General admission ticket holders may also have books signed, and are asked to join the signing line after book-bundle ticket holders. Those wishing to have more than 3 previous Foer titles signed are asked to wait until the end of the signing. Books may be personalized.
Edward Morin is from Chicago, where he earned degrees in English at University of Chicago and Loyola University. His poems have appeared in Hudson Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Collections of his poems include Labor Day at Walden Pond (1997) and The Dust of Our City (1978). A chapbook titled Housing for Wrens is forthcoming from Cervena Barva Press in September 2016. His co-translations of modern Greek and Chinese poems have appeared in Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Poetry Miscellany. He edited and co-translated an anthology, The Red Azalea: Chinese Poetry since the Cultural Revolution (U. of Hawaii Press, 1990) and a book of poems by Cai Qijiao. Recent co-translations of Arabic poems have been published in Banipal: Magazine of Modern Arab Literature, The Dirty Goat, and Asymptote. He is editor of the Poetry Society of Michigan’s journal, Peninsula Poets, and co-hosts the Crazy Wisdom Poetry Series in Ann Arbor.
Bob Brill is a retired computer programmer and digital artist. He is now devoting his energies to writing fiction and poetry. His novellas, short stories and 150 poems have appeared in over 45 online magazines, print journals, and anthologies. His most recent publications are 2 poems in Water Music: The Great Lakes State Poetry Anthology, and his first book of poems, Hello Goodbye, Selected Poems by Bob Brill.
Every 1st & 3rd Sun. 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.
7-9 p.m. (sign-up begins at 6:30 p.m.), Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetrySlam.
Literati is pleased to welcome Randa Jarrar in support of her recent story collection Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. Randa will be joined by Michigan writers Tariq Luthun and Kamelya Youssef.
Award-winning novelist Randa Jarrar’s new story collection moves seamlessly between realism and fable, history and the present, capturing the lives of Muslim women and men across myriad geographies and circumstances. With acerbic wit, deep tenderness, and boundless imagination, Jarrar brings to life a memorable cast of characters, many of them “accidental transients”—a term for migratory birds who have gone astray—seeking their circuitous routes back home. Fierce and feeling, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali is a testament to survival in the face of love, loss, and displacement.
Randa Jarrar is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved to the U.S. after the first Gulf War. Her novel A Map of Home, was published in six languages and won a Hopwood Award, an Arab-American Book Award, and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes & Noble Review. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, The Rumpus, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Five Chapters, and other venues. She’s received fellowships and residencies from the Lannan Foundation at Marfa, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Hedgebrook, Caravansarai, and Eastern Frontier. In 2010, the Hay Festival and Beirut UNESCO’s world capital of the book named Jarrar one of the most gifted writers of Arab origin under the age of 40.
Tariq Luthun is a Palestinian-American writer & strategist from Detroit, MI. He is currently an MFA candidate for poetry at Warren Wilson College’s Program for Writers. Among other things, Luthun is the Social Director of Organic Weapon Arts, an advisory board member of the Detroit‐based nonprofit Write A House, and is Director of the Ann Arbor Poetry Slam. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, Winter Tangerine Review, and Button Poetry, among others.
Kamelya Youssef is a poet, teacher, and organizer. A graduate of the University of Michigan, she is currently an M.A. candidate in English at Wayne State University in Detroit.
George Washington University law professor and National Constitution Center CEO Jeffrey Rosen on Louis Brandeis: American Prophet, his new book about the hugely influential Supreme Court justice.
Literati is pleased to welcome poet Scott Beal and poet and translator Mariela Griffor in support of their recent work.
Scott Beal is the author of Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems and the chapbook The Octopus. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other journals, and have received awards including a 2014 Pushcart Prize. He serves as writer-in-the-schools for Dzanc Books in Ann Arbor and teaches in the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan.
Mariela Griffor was born in the city of Concepción in southern Chile and attended the University of Santiago and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. In 1985, she left Chile for an involuntary exile in Sweden, and now lives in the United States, in Washington DC and Michigan, where she is Honorary Consul of Chile. She holds a BA in Journalism from Wayne State University and a MFA in Creative Writing from New England College. She is founder of Marick Press and author of three books of poems, Exiliana, House, and The Psychiatrist.
Literati is pleased to welcome Maya Barzilai and Rachel Seelig in support of their most recent works.
In the twentieth century the golem became a figure of war. It represented the chaos of warfare, the automation of war technologies, and the devastation wrought upon soldiers bodies and psyches. Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monstersdraws on some of the most popular and significant renditions of this story in order to unravel the paradoxical coincidence of wartime destruction and the fantasy of artificial creation. Due to its aggressive and rebellious sides, the golem became a means for reflection about how technological progress has altered human lives, as well as an avenue for experimentation with the media and art forms capable of expressing the monstrosity of war.
Maya Barzilai is assistant professor of Hebrew literature and Jewish culture at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009. Her new book, Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters (NYU Press), explores how the infamous monster of clay became a metaphor of war and its destructive technologies across German, Israeli, and American cultures. Barzilai also researches Hebrew-German translation, Hebrew writing on World War I, and Jewish comics.
Berlin in the 1920s was a cosmopolitan hub where for a brief, vibrant moment German-Jewish writers crossed paths with Hebrew and Yiddish migrant writers. Working against the prevailing tendency to view German and East European Jewish cultures as separate fields of study, Strangers in Berlin is the first book to present Jewish literature in the Weimar Republic as the product of the dynamic encounter between East and West. Whether they were native to Germany or sojourners from abroad, Jewish writers responded to their exclusion from rising nationalist movements by cultivating their own images of homeland in verse, and they did so in three languages: German, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Author Rachel Seelig portrays Berlin during the Weimar Republic as a threshold between exile and homeland in which national and artistic commitments were reexamined, reclaimed, and rebuilt. In the pulsating yet precarious capital of Germany s first fledgling democracy, the collision of East and West engendered a broad spectrum of poetic styles and Jewish national identities.
Rachel Seelig is a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. A native of Vancouver, Canada, she received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2011 and has taught German Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her articles have appeared in various journals, including Prooftexts, Modern Language Notes, and The Jewish Quarterly Review. Rachel is currently co-editing a volume with Amir Eshel entitled The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange, which will be published by De Gruyter in 2017. Strangers in Berlin is her first book.
All writers welcome to share and discuss their poetry and short fiction. Sign up for new participants begins at 6:45 p.m.
