FRUIT is an independent, community-led reading and dialogue series for and by marginalized voices, hosted in Literati Bookstore. This month’s readers are Alise Alousi, Kamelya Youssef and Tariq Luthun.
FRUIT is a moment and a movement of reclamation. It is a space of and for literary artists representing the marginalized: the colored, the queer, the silenced, and the unseen. Each event showcases the work of fresh, revolutionary artists and features a conversation around their lives and their crafts. In this space, FRUIT strives to serve as a carefully curated reading and dialogue series for those who live at intersections ignored. This experience exists both physically and digitally in order to help those marginalized voices reclaim their flesh and plant their roots through short-form literature. Our goal is to create an experience that is intentional in its centering of the historically othered. Through this exploration of identity and craft, we hope to cultivate a platform in which the growth and sharing of radical joy— both encumbered and despite— happens in the presence of solidarity and healthy community.
Alise Alousi’s poetry has appeared in several journals and anthologies including, We are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War, Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You. In 2014, she was a Knight Arts Challenge Detroit awardee for From Detroit to Baghdad: Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a five month exhibit, workshop, and performance series commemorating the bombing of Baghdad’s centuries old street of booksellers. Alousi is the Associate Director of the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a nationally recognized writing program for K-12 students in metro Detroit.
Kamelya Youssef is a Detroit-based poet, organizer, student, and teacher. She is a member of the Z Collective and a board member of the Radius of Arab American Writers Inc (RAWI). Her poetry and essays have been published in Mizna and Bitch Magazine and she has shared her work on stages across the US. You can find her on Fridays hosting open mic nights at The Bottom Line Coffeehouse right near what will always be called the Cass Corridor. She’s a daughter of Lebanese immigrants with a special love for 90s freestyle and she makes a mean pecan pie.
Tariq Luthun is a Palestinian-American data strategist, community organizer, and Emmy Award-winning poet from Detroit, MI. He is currently an MFA candidate for poetry in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Amidst other things, Luthun is the Social Director of Organic Weapon Arts Press and a co-founder of the PoC-dedicated literary arts series FRUIT. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vinyl Poetry, The Offing, Winter Tangerine Review, and Button Poetry, among other credentials. He is a deep dish pizza evangelist, and can best be described as the end-result of Drake falsetto-rapping Edward Said’s Orientalism.
Literati is excited to welcome author Lynn Comella who will be discussing her book Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure. Lynn will be joined by University of Michigan Professor Katherine Sender
About Vibrator Nation:
Lynn Comella tells the fascinating history of how feminist sex-toy stores such as Eve’s Garden, Good Vibrations and Babeland raised sexual consciousness, redefined the adult industry, provided educational and community resources, and changed the way sex was talked about, had, and enjoyed.
In the 1970s a group of pioneering feminist entrepreneurs launched a movement that ultimately changed the way sex was talked about, had, and enjoyed. Boldly reimagining who sex shops were for and the kinds of spaces they could be, these entrepreneurs opened sex-toy stores like Eve’s Garden, Good Vibrations, and Babeland not just as commercial enterprises, but to provide educational and community resources as well. In Vibrator Nation Lynn Comella tells the fascinating history of how these stores raised sexual consciousness, redefined the adult industry, and changed women’s lives. Comella describes a world where sex-positive retailers double as social activists, where products are framed as tools of liberation, and where consumers are willing to pay for the promise of better living—one conversation, vibrator, and orgasm at a time.
Lynn Comella is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and coeditor of New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law.
Katherine Sender is professor of media and sexuality in Communication Studies at the University of Michigan.
Literati is thrilled to host author Daniel Wolff who will be sharing his new book Grown-up Anger. Daniel will be joined in conversation with fellow music writer David Marsh and there will be a special musical performance from Chris Buhalis!
About Grown-up Anger:
A tour de force of storytelling years in the making: a dual biography of two of the greatest songwriters, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, that is also murder mystery and a history of labor relations and socialism, big business and greed in twentieth-century America—all woven together in one epic saga that holds meaning for all working Americans today
When thirteen-year-old Daniel Wolff first heard Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” it ignited a life-long interest with understanding the rock poet’s anger. When he later discovered “Song to Woody,” Dylan’s tribute to his hero, Woody Guthrie, Wolff believed he’d uncovered one source of Dylan’s rage. Sifting through Guthrie’s recordings, Wolff found “1913 Massacre”—a song which told the story of a union Christmas party during a strike in Calumet, Michigan, in 1913 that ended in horrific tragedy.
Following the trail from Dylan to Guthrie to an event that claimed the lives of seventy-four men, women, and children a century ago, Wolff found himself tracing the history of an anger that has been passed down for decades. From America’s early industrialized days, an epic battle to determine the country’s direction has been waged, pitting bosses against workers, big business against the labor movement. In Guthrie’s eyes, the owners ultimately won; the 1913 Michigan tragedy was just one example of a larger, lost history purposely distorted and buried in time.
In this magnificent cultural study, Wolff braids three disparate strands—Calumet, Guthrie, and Dylan—together to create a devastating revisionist history of twentieth-century America. Grown-Up Anger chronicles the struggles between the haves and have-nots, the impact changing labor relations had on industrial America, and the way two musicians used their fury to illuminate economic injustice and inspire change.
Daniel Wolff is the author of The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back; How Lincoln Learned to Read; 4th of July/Asbury Park; and You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. He has been nominated for a Grammy and was named Literary Artist of 2013 for Rockland County, New York. A poet, songwriter, and essayist, he has helped produce a number of documentary films with director Jonathan Demme. He lives in Nyack, New York.
Dave Marsh is the author of the bestselling Bruce Springsteen biographies, Born to Run and Glory Days, and over a dozen other books, including Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who, Louie, Louie: The History and Myth, and The New Book of Rock Lists. A former editor of Creem and Rolling Stone, he currently edits the newsletter Rock & Roll Confidential.
Chris Buhalis is a singer and songwriter from Ann Arbor, MI
Readings by U-M creative writing grad students, including fiction writers Christina Kim and poet Chelsea Walsh.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free.
The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends – a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
Literati is pleased to partner with the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing and WCBN Radio for the latest installment of Writer to Writer, a series which puts a UM professor and member of the Sweetland faculty in conversation about writing.
This month Writer to Writer welcomes Dr. Howard Markel. Acclaimed medical historian, Dr. Howard Markel is the George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of Medicine and Director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. He is a professor of pediatrics, psychiatry, public health management and policy, history, and English literature and language. His work reaches a wide range of audiences and has had a broad impact on national and international health policy and on the public’s understanding of medicine.
Dr. Markel serves as editor-in-chief of the health policy journal The Milbank Quarterly and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times, PBS NewsHour.org, and national radio and television shows. From 2006 to 2015, he served as the principal historical consultant on pandemic preparedness for the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. His historical epidemiological work has influenced strategies employed by the WHO, the CDC, and the Mexican Ministry of Health.
Dr. Markel is the author, co-author, or co-editor of ten books, including the award-winning Quarantine! and the national bestseller An Anatomy of Addiction. He has written over 450 articles and book chapters for scholarly and popular publications. He was a regular contributor on NPR’s Science Friday and has appeared in several acclaimed film documentaries, including, most recently, Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies on PBS.
Dr. Markel has delivered lectures across the United States and in Europe and has spoken at U.S. government agencies, departments and the White House. His work has been recognized with numerous grants, honors and awards. In 2008 he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Medicine. In 2015 was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship.
A native of Detroit, he earned his bachelor’s (1982) and medical degrees (1986) at the University of Michigan. He completed his pediatrics residency and fellowship and Ph.D. in the history of medicine, science and technology at the Johns Hopkins Hospital and Medical School. In Fall, 2018, Pantheon/Random House will publish his new book, Corn Flakes, about Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, who invented the concept of “wellness,” and his brother, cereal magnate Will Kellogg.
$10 Suggested Donation
ÆPEX Contemporary Performance is excited to open its third season by bringing Hungarian-American violinist Hajnal Pivnick to Ann Arbor’s beloved Literati Bookstore.
Based in New York City, Pivnick will make her Ann Arbor debut with a solo program featuring internationally recognized composers Georg Friedrich Haas, Peter Eövös, Chrysanthe Tan, Kaija Saariaho, and Anahita Abbasi alongside poetry readings by local award-winning poet Adina Schoem (Midwestern Gothic, Palooka Press) and graduate students at the University of Michigan.
Pivnick’s performance will also feature an improvisation, which will accompany one of Schoem’s readings. This offering will expose concertgoers to the intimacy of musical creation, as Pivnick’s extemporaneous composition will be inspired by Schoem’s poem and tailored to the concert’s unique atmosphere.
You do not want to miss this special interdisciplinary presentation that brings local and national artists together in one of Ann Arbor’s most iconic cultural spaces!
ÆPEX Contemporary Performance is a concert presenting organization dedicated to presenting the music of underrepresented and rarely performed twentieth and twenty-first century composers to audiences across Michigan. Since our debut in December 2015, ÆPEX has produced fourteen concerts and community music events at venues in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Detroit, and Kalamazoo. Learn more about our past and future programs and make a donation to support ÆPEX at aepexcontemporary.org. ÆPEX Contemporary Performance is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
Widely published Cleveland performance poet Siaara Freeman, who rose to national prominence in 2014 at the Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam in Detroit with a searing performance of her autobiographical poem “The Drug Dealer’s Daughter,” reads from her debut collection Good Morning, Hood Warning. Many of her poems are in the voice of a persona called “Urban Girl.” The program begins with open mike readings.
7-8:30 p.m., Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663.
Literati is thrilled to partner with Current Magazine for an evening of Poetry and Fiction!
Come celebrate the submissions and winners of Current Magazine’s Poetry and Fiction contest.
Meet Current’s editor and contributors, and hear readings from the winners. Special guests Molly Raynor and Anthony Zick will be reading their work as well. If time permits there will be an open mic at the end.
Nov. 29: Reading by Zilka Joseph, a local poet whose work is notable for its vividly figured explorations of the natural world. Her latest book, Sharp Blue Search of Flame, is a collection of dark, brooding poems that reflect her Jewish Indian roots and her personal experiences living in Eastern and Western cultures. Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is pleased to host Dr. Rana Adwish who will discussing her book In Shock: My Journey from Death to Recovery and the Redemptive Power of Hope
About In Shock:
A riveting first-hand account of a physician who’s suddenly a dying patient and her revelation of the horribly misguided standard of care in the medical world.
Dr. Rana Awdish never imagined that an emergency trip to the hospital would result in hemorrhaging nearly all of her blood volume and losing her unborn first child. But after that first visit, Dr. Awdish spent months fighting for her life, enduring consecutive major surgeries and experiencing multiple overlapping organ failures. At each step of the recovery process, Awdish was faced with something even more unexpected: repeated cavalier behavior from her fellow physicians—indifference following human loss, disregard for anguish and suffering, and an exacting emotional distance.
Hauntingly perceptive and beautifully written, In Shock allows the reader to transform alongside Awidsh and watch what she discovers in our carefully-cultivated, yet often misguided, standard of care. Awdish comes to understand the fatal flaws in her profession and in her own past actions as a physician while achieving, through unflinching presence, a crystalline vision of a new and better possibility for us all.
As Dr. Awdish finds herself up against the same self-protective partitions she was trained to construct as a medical student and physician, she artfully illuminates the dysfunction of disconnection. Shatteringly personal, and yet wholly universal, she offers a brave road map for anyone navigating illness while presenting physicians with a new paradigm and rationale for embracing the emotional bond between doctor and patient.
Dr. Rana Adwish is the Director of the Pulmonary Hypertension Program at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit and a Critical Care Physician. She was recently named Medical Director of Care Experience for the ($6 billion, 24,000 employee) Health System. She was awarded the Speak-Up Hero award in 2014 for her work on improving communication, as well as the Critical Care Teaching Award in 2016. In 2017 she was named a finalist for the Schwartz Center’s 2017 National Compassionate Caregiver of the Year (NCCY) Award and awarded the Physician of the Year award from the Press Ganey National Client Conference. Dr. Awdish is board-certified in Internal Medicine, Pulmonary and Critical Care Medicine.
