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.
Sweetland Center for Writing’s 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. Each semester, Writer to Writer pairs one esteemed University professor with a Sweetland faculty member for a conversation about writing.
This month Writer to Writer welcomes Susan Scott Parrish. Susan Scott Parrish is a Professor in the English Department and the Program in the Environment at UM. Her research addresses the interrelated issues of the environment, race and knowledge-making in the Atlantic world from the seventeenth century up through the present, with a particular emphasis on southern and Caribbean plantation zones. Her new book, The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2017), examines how the most devastating, and publicly absorbing, US flood of the twentieth century took on meaning as it moved across media platforms, across sectional divides and across the color line. Her first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006), is a study of how people in England and in British-controlled America conceived of—and made knowledge about—American nature within Atlantic scientific networks. This book won both Phi Beta Kappa’s Emerson Award and the Jamestown Prize.
Writer to Writer takes place at the Literati bookstore and are broadcast live on WCBN radio. These conversations offer students a rare glimpse into the writing that professors do outside the classroom. You can hear instructors from various disciplines describe how they handle the same challenges student writers face, from finding a thesis to managing deadlines. Professors will also discuss what they want from student writers in their courses, and will take questions put forth by students and by other members of the University community. If there’s anything you’ve ever wanted to ask a professor about writing, Writer to Writer gives you the chance.
Literati is proud to be partnering with the Helen Zell Writers Program to host author Lydia Davis at University of Michigan Museum Helmet Stern Auditorium
Lydia Davis is the author of one novel and seven story collections. Her collection Varieties of Disturbance: Stories was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award of Merit Medal, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of the Arts and Letters by the French government for her fiction and her translations of modern writers, including Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, and Marcel Proust. Lydia Davis is the winner of the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.
Literati is excited to partner with the University of Michigan Classical Studies Department to welcome poet Gail Holst-Warhaft! She will be sharing her new book The Fall of Athens.
About The Fall of Athens:
The Fall of Athens reflects the bleak state of present-day Athens and reminds the reader that there is nothing new about Greece’s suffering. Combining present observations with portraits of the Greek musicians and writers, Holst-Warhaft’s book is both a peon of praise for the music and poetry that the author first discovered in the Greece of the 1960’s, and a reminder of how much the country has changed since it returned to democracy in 1974. Having played in the orchestras of such legends as Mikis Theodorakis and Dionysis Savvopoulos, the author had a bird’s eye view of 20th century Greek music at its apogee. Translating Greek poetry and prose later brought her in close contact with some of the leading writers of the period. With the discovery of Greek music and poetry came the forging of lasting friendships with these giants of Greek culture. This eclectic compilation of poetry, prose, translation, memoir, and songs captures the enigmatic, hybrid nature of Greece, a country that has always had the ability to create extraordinary beauty out of suffering.
Gail Holst-Warhaft was born in Australia. Besides being a poet she has been a journalist, broadcaster, prose-writer, academic, musician, and translator. In the 1970’s, while researching a book on Greek music, Holst-Warhaft performed as a keyboard-player with Greece’s leading composers, including Mikis Theodorakis. Among her many publications are Road to Rembetika (1975, 5th edition 2013), Theodorakis: Myth and Politics in Modern Greek Music (Hakkert, Amsterdam, 1980), Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature (Routledge, 1992), The Cue for Passion: Grief and its Political Uses (Harvard, 2000), I Had Three Lives: Selected Poems of Mikis Theodorakis (Livanis, 2005), and Penelope’s Confession (poems, Cosmos, 2007), Losing Paradise: The Water Crisis in the Mediterranean (Ashgate, 2010). She has published translations of Aeschylus, and of a number of modern Greek poets and prose-writers. Her poems and translations of Greek poetry have appeared in journals in the US (Literary Imagination, Bookpress, Seneca Review, Antipodes, Per Contra, Literary Matters), the U.K. (Agenda, Stand), Australia (Southerly), and Greece (Poetry Greece). She was appointed Poet Laureate of Tompkins County for 2011 and 2012.
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. 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.
Readings by 2 U-M creative writing grad students, fiction writer Callie Collins and poet Clare Hogan.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 615-3710.
Literati is excited to host author and actor Alexandra Silber who will be reading and sharing her new novel After Anatevka: A Novel Inspired by “Fiddler on the Roof”.
About After Anatevka:
The world knows well the tale of Tevye, the beloved Jewish dairyman from the shtetl Anatevka of Tsarist Russia. In stories originally written by Sholem Aleichem and then made world-famous in the celebrated musical Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye, his wife Golde, and their five daughters dealt with the outside influences that were encroaching upon their humble lives. But what happened to those remarkable characters after the curtain fell? In After Anatevka, Alexandra Silber picks up where Fiddler left off. Second-eldest daughter Hodel takes center stage as she attempts to join her Socialist-leaning fiancae Perchik to the outer reaches of a Siberian work camp. But before Hodel and Perchik can finally be together, they both face extraordinary hurdles and adversaries–both personal and political–attempting to keep them apart at all costs. A love story set against a backdrop of some of the greatest violence in European history, After Anatevaka is a stunning conclusion to a tale that has gripped audiences around the globe for decades.
Alexandra Silber is an actress and singer who starred most recently as Tzeitel in the Broadway revival of Fiddler on the Roof. She earlier played Hodel in the same show in London’s West End. Those two roles inspired her to write After Anatevka. Her other Broadway, New York, and West End credits include Master Class, Arlington (Outer Critics Circle nomination), Carousel (TMA Award and Ovation Nomination), Kiss Me Kate, and Hello, Again (Drama League nomination). She received a Grammy nomination for her portrayal of Maria in the recording of West Side Story with the San Francisco Symphony. She has appeared on all three incarnations of “Law & Order” and has performed in a variety of concert outlets including the 57th Grammy Awards, Royal Albert Hall, and Carnegie Hall. She lives in New York.
Reading by GVSU creative writing lecturer Gale Thompson, whose 2015 collection, Soldier On, examines the relationship between living spaces and memories. 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 welcome poets Sam Sax and Franny Choi who will be reading from their latest collections Madness and Death By Sex Machine.
About Madness:
“An “astounding” (Terrance Hayes) debut collection of poems – Winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series Competition In this —powerful debut collection, sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet’s personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners. Ultimately, Madnessattempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax’s innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it”
About Death By Sex Machine:
“Franny Choi’s poetry has the extraordinary ability to solder with tender focus one moment, then rage like electrical fire in the next.” — francine j. harris
“These poems—sparking with the deep, connective work of persona and genre—helped me to look at the world once more, and to glimpse a world worth dreaming of… When the future might feel simply cold, Franny Choi gifts us complex fire.” — Lo Kwa Mei-En
Sam Sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, The MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Michener Center for Writers. He’s the winner of the 2016 Iowa Review Award and his poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other journals.
Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her second collection, Soft Science, is forthcoming from Alice James
Literati is honored to welcome back poet Tarfia Faizullah who will be sharing her latest collection Registers of Illuminated Villages. She will joined by poet Keith Taylor for a post-reading conversation.
About Registers of Illuminated Villages:
Registers of Illuminated Villages is Tarfia Faizullah’s highly anticipated second collection, following her award-winning debut, Seam. Faizullah’s new work extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voices–elegies, outcries, self-portraits, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, family, and memory. One poem steps down the page like a Slinky; another poem responds to makeup homework completed in the summer of a childhood accident; other poems punctuate the collection with dark meditations on dissociation, discipline, defiance, and destiny; and the near-title poem, “Register of Eliminated Villages,” suggests illuminated texts, one a Qur’an in which the speaker’s name might be found, and the other a register of 397 villages destroyed in northern Iraq. Faizullah is an essential new poet whose work only grows more urgent, beautiful, and–even in its unsparing brutality–full of love.
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam, winner of a VIDA Award and a Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. She teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Detroit.
Join us for a special event as we celebrate the release of Notes from a Public Typewriter!
About Notes from a Public Typewriter:
When Michael Gustafson and his wife Hilary opened Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they put out a typewriter for anyone to use. They had no idea what to expect. Would people ask metaphysical questions? Write mean things? Pour their souls onto the page? Yes, no, and did they ever.
Every day, people of all ages sit down at the public typewriter. Children perch atop grandparents’ knees, both sets of hands hovering above the metal keys: I LOVE YOU. Others walk in alone on Friday nights and confess their hopes: I will find someone someday. And some leave funny asides for the next person who sits down: I dislike people, misanthropes, irony, and ellipses … and lists too.
In Notes from a Public Typewrite Michael and designer Oliver Uberti have combined their favorite notes with essays and photos to create an ode to community and the written word that will surprise, delight, and inspire.
Michael Gustafson is the co-owner of Literati Bookstore, an independent bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and Literati Bookstore co-owner, Hilary.
Oliver Uberti is an award-winning graphic designer and was Senior Design Editor at National Geographic before turning to books. He is the co-author and designer of two books published by Penguin in the UK, London: The Information Capital (2014) and Where the Animals Go (2016). He lives in Los Angeles.
In celebration of Literati Bookstore’s Fifth Birthday, please join us for a reading of poetry and prose by booksellers past and present!
