Calendar

Literati is pleased to welcome Scaachi Koul, author of One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, and Samantha Irby, author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

In One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter, Scaachi Koul deploys her razor-sharp humor to share all the fears, outrages, and mortifying moments of her life. She learned from an early age what made her miserable, and for Scaachi anything can be cause for despair. Whether it’s a shopping trip gone awry; enduring awkward conversations with her bikini waxer; overcoming her fear of flying while vacationing halfway around the world; dealing with Internet trolls, or navigating the fears and anxieties of her parents. Alongside these personal stories are pointed observations about life as a woman of color: where every aspect of her appearance is open for critique, derision, or outright scorn; where strict gender rules bind in both Western and Indian cultures, leaving little room for a woman not solely focused on marriage and children to have a career (and a life) for herself. With a sharp eye and biting wit, incomparable rising star and cultural observer Scaachi Koul offers a hilarious, scathing, and honest look at modern life.

“One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter is an absolutely wonderful, impossible-not-to-love book. Whether writing about race or girlhood, the internet or family, Scaachi Koul’s writing makes each issue feel fresh and newfound. Hilarious but thoughtful, Koul draws you in to her life and makes you never want to leave.”—Jessica Valenti, New York Times bestselling author of Sex Object

Scaachi Koul was born and raised in Calgary, Alberta, and is a culture writer for BuzzFeed. Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Hairpin, The Globe and Mail, and Jezebel. One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter is her first book. She lives in Toronto.

Sometimes you just have to laugh, even when life is a dumpster fire. With We Are Never Meeting in Real Life., “bitches gotta eat” blogger and comedian Samantha Irby turns the serio-comic essay into an art form.  Whether talking about how her difficult childhood has led to a problem in making “adult” budgets, explaining why she should be the new Bachelorette—she’s “35-ish, but could easily pass for 60-something”—detailing a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, sharing awkward sexual encounters, or dispensing advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms—hang in there for the Costco loot—she’s as deft at poking fun at the ghosts of her past self as she is at capturing powerful emotional truths.

“Reading Samantha Irby’s We Are Never Meeting In Real Life cracked my heart all the way open. The essays in this outstanding collection are full of her signature humor, wit, and charming self-deprecation but there is so much more to her writing. For every laugh, there is a bittersweet moment that could make you cry. From black women and mental health to the legacies created by poverty to dating while living in an all too human body, Irby lays bare the beautiful, uncompromising truths of her life. I cannot remember the last time I was so moved by a book. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life is as close to perfect as an essay collection can get.” —Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Difficult Women and Bad Feminist

Samantha Irby writes a blog called “bitches gotta eat.”

Literati is pleased to welcome Amy Thielen in support of her debut memoir, Give a Girl a Knife.

Before Amy Thielen frantically plated rings of truffled potatoes in some of New York City’s finest kitchens—for chefs David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten—she grew up in a northern Minnesota town, home to the nation’s largest French fry factory, with a mother whose generous cooking pulsed with joy, family drama, and an overabundance of butter.

Give a Girl a Knife, Amy Thielen’s coming-of-age account, pulses with energy, a cook’s eye for intimate detail, and a dose of dry Midwestern humor. Inspired by her grandmother’s tales of cooking on the family farm, Thielen moves with her artist husband to the rustic off-the-grid cabin he built in the woods in northern Minnesota. There, standing at the stove three times a day, she finds the seed of a growing food obsession that sends her on a wild ride through diverse kitchens and eras—from her mother’s 1970s suburban electric range to a turn-of-the-century farmhouse to a hot plate in an illegal warehouse squat—and finally to the sensory madhouse of New York’s top haute cuisine brigades. When she returns to her rural cabin, she comes face-to-face with her past and its veritable cellar of taste memories, discovering that good food can be made anywhere—and that beneath every foie gras sauce lies a rural foundation of potatoes and onions.

Give a Girl a Knife offers a fresh, vivid view into New York’s high-end restaurant scene before returning Thielen to her roots, where she realizes that the marrow running through her bones is not demi-glace at all, but gravy—honest, irresistible, and thick with the complications of home.

Amy Thielen is a chef, TV cook, and two-time James Beard Award–winning writer. She is the author of The New Midwestern Table (2013), hosted Heartland Table on Food Network, and worked for celebrated New York City chefs David Bouley, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and Daniel Boulud before moving back home to the Midwest. Amy speaks widely about home cooking and contributes to radio programs and magazines, including Saveur, where she’s a contributing editor. She lives with her husband, visual artist Aaron Spangler, their son, his dog, and a bunch of chickens, in Park Rapids, Minnesota. She can be found athttp://www.amythielen.com/ and @amyrosethielen on Instagram and Twitter.

Literati is pleased to welcome Keith Lesmeister in support of his debut short story collection, We Could’ve Been Happy Here. Keith will be joined in reading by Markin Jenkins, a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, and Alexander Weinstein, author of Children of the New World.

In his first collection of short fiction, Keith Lesmeister plows out a distinctive vision of the contemporary Midwest. These stories peer into the lives of those at the margins-the broken, the resigned, the misunderstood. Hopeful and humorous, tender and tragic, these stories illuminate how we are shaped and buoyed by our intimate connections.

Keith Lesmeister was born in North Carolina, raised in Iowa, and received his M.F.A. from the Bennington Writing Seminars. His fiction has appeared in American Short Fiction, Slice, Meridian, Redivider, Gettysburg Review, and many other print and online publications. His nonfiction has appeared in Tin House Open Bar, River Teeth, The Good Men Project, and elsewhere. He currently lives in northeast Iowa where he teaches at Northeast Iowa Community College. We Could’ve Been Happy Here is his first book.

Alexander Weinstein is the Director of The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the author of the short story collection Children of the New World (Picador 2016). His fiction and translations have appeared in Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Notre-Dame Review, Pleiades, PRISM International, World Literature Today, and other journals. He is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his fiction has been awarded the Lamar York, Gail Crump, Hamlin Garland, and New Millennium Prize. His stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and appear in the anthologies 2013 New Stories from the Midwest, and the 2014 & 2015 Lascaux Prize Stories. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and a freelance editor, and leads fiction workshops in the United States and Europe.

Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit. A poetry graduate from University of Michigan’s MFA program, his work has been given homes by The Collagist, The Offing, The Journal, and Bennington Review, among others. He has worked with students in Detroit Public Schools through the Inside Out Literary Arts program and received a fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center. He is also a runner and a dancer.

Literati is pleased to welcome Desiree Cooper, Robin Gaines, Mardi Jo Link, and Mary Kay Zuravleff in celebration of their recent publications.

A 2015 Kresge Artist Fellow, Desiree Cooper is a former attorney, Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist, and Detroit community activist. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Callaloo, Detroit Noir, Best African American Fiction 2010, and Tidal Basin Review, among other online and print publications. Cooper was a founding board member of Cave Canem, a national residency for emerging black poets, and she is a Kimbilio fellow, a national residency for African American fiction writers. She is the author of the short story collection Know the Mother.

Robin Gaines is an award winning journalist and fiction writer. Her work has appeared in literary journals, newspapers, magazines and anthologies. Invincible Summers is her first novel. She lives in Michigan.

Mardi Jo Link has worked as a police and general assignment reporter, magazine editor, and freelance writer. She is a Heartland bestselling author of the critically acclaimed memoir Bootstrapper–which won the Great Lakes, Great Reads Booksellers’ Choice Award and the Michigan Notable Book Award–as well as When Evil Came to Good Hart, Isadore’s Secret, and The Drummond Girls. She lives with her family on a small farm in northern Michigan.

Mary Kay Zuravleff is also the author of Man Alive!, The Bowl Is Already Broken, which The New York Times praised as “a tart, affectionate satire of the museum world’s bickering and scheming,” and The Frequency of Souls, which the Chicago Tribune deemed “a beguiling and wildly inventive first novel.” Honors for her work include the American Academy’s Rosenthal Award and the James Jones First Novel Award, and she has been nominated for the Orange Prize. She lives in Washington, D.C., where she serves on the board of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation and is a cofounder of the D.C. Women Writers Group.

Literati is proud to present its first ever Exit Interview! In celebration of his recent retirement from the academy, Literati will host Laurence Goldstein for an evening of conversation and poetry. Laurence will be interviewed by local poet, Cody Walker, in addition to reading poems from his previous collections. We hope you might join us as we admire and continue to learn from one of the greats!

Laurence Goldstein is the author of The American Poet at the Movies: A Critical History (1994), four books of poems, including A Room in California (2005), and seven edited or co-edited volumes of cultural commentary. His latest book explores both the city where he spent his first 22 years and a vibrant American tradition of topographical verse. Poetry Los Angeles sets the agenda for twenty-first century studies of urban poetry in general, and the literature of Los Angeles in particular.

Cody Walker is the author of The Self-Styled No-Child (Waywiser, 2016) and Shuffle and Breakdown (Waywiser, 2008). His poems have appeared in The New York Times, The Yale Review, Slate, Salon, and The Best American Poetry (2015 and 2007); his essays have appeared online in The New Yorker and the Kenyon Review. The former Poet Populist of Seattle, he now lives with his family in Ann Arbor, where he directs the creative writing minor at the University of Michigan. His new collection, The Trumpiad (Waywiser, 2017), was released in April.

Literati is pleased to celebrate Sara Schaff’s debut story collection, Say Something Nice About Me.

In the twelve stories in this engrossing collection, Sara Schaff introduces us to characters at turning points in their lives; in doing so, she charts the way we take risks—or create illusions—in the face of the unknown. A newly blended family’s vacation is upended by one daughter’s mythmaking and another’s eagerness to believe her. A young couple on the verge of breaking up take one last trip together, only to have their reconciliation disrupted by uninvited guests. A woman faces accusations of theft by the very people who think they have saved her from a troubled past. In beautiful prose that is sometimes dark, sometimes humorous, Schaff’s stories grapple with class, sexuality, and relationships in ways that feel revelatory and yet deeply true. Awkward, flawed, and hopeful, these characters’ stories hum with the regrets and desires that drive us—sometimes closer to our goals, sometimes heartbreakingly further away.

“The stories in Sara Schaff’s collection intertwine in complex and fascinating patterns. They are all explorations of the meaning of human connection—what is a mother, a father, a child, a wife, a sister, a friend, a lover? How does it feel to wear the roles we choose to take on? The roles that are forced upon us? Say Something Nice About Me is a thoughtful and provoking book, the beginning to a great career!”—Dan Chaon

Sara Schaff‘s writing has appeared in FiveChapters, Hobart, Southern Indiana Review, Carve Magazine, The Rumpus and elsewhere. She graduated from Brown University, received her MFA from the University of Michigan, and has taught at Oberlin College, the University of Michigan, and in China, Colombia, and Northern Ireland, where she also studied storytelling.