Literati is proud to partner with the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities to present Yaa Gyaasi, author of Homegoing, as the speaker for The 2018 Jill S. Harris Memorial Lecture.
About Homecoming
Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and will live in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising children who will be sent abroad to be educated before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the empire. Esi, imprisoned beneath Effia in the Castle’s women’s dungeon and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, will be sold into slavery. Stretching from the wars of Ghana to slavery and the Civil War in America, from the coal mines in the American South to the Great Migration to twentieth-century Harlem, Yaa Gyasi’s novel moves through histories and geographies and captures—with outstanding economy and force—the troubled spirit of our own nation. She has written a modern masterpiece.
Yaa Gyasi was born in Ghana in 1989, raised in Huntsville, Alabama, and is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
Literati is thrilled to partner with the Stamps School of Art and Design to welcome author and musician Joseph Keckler to the Rackham Auditorium as part of the Penny Stamps Distinguished Speaker Series.
Straddling the worlds of music, art, and performance, Joseph Keckler has garnered acclaim for his rich, versatile 3+ octave voice and sharp wit. Keckler’s live performances have been seen at SXSW Music, the New Museum, Issue Project Room, the BAM Fischer Center, Joe’s Pub, the Afterglow Festival, and many other venues. He has received residencies from MacDowell and Yaddo, as well as a Franklin Furnace Grant and a Fellowship in Interdisciplinary Work from the New York Foundation for the Arts. His most recent performance piece, I am an Opera, was commissioned by Dixon Place. The Village Voicenamed him Best Downtown Performance Artist, 2013. For this special speaker series event, Keckler will read from his latest book, Dragon at the Edge of a Flat World (Dragon Point Press, 2017). Drawn from the stories of his life, Keckler’s essays explore the corners of downtown New York, where he made his name performing his songs and plays, and back to the Midwest, where everything began. The texts included in Dragon at the Edge of a Flat Worldrepresent both the continuation and foundation of Keckler’s work on stage.
EMU women’s and gender studies professor Elizabeth Currans discusses her new book.
4:10 p.m., 2239 Lane, 204 S. State. Free. 764-9537.
Talk by New York Times columnist Bret Stephens.
4-5:30 p.m., Mendelssohn Theatre. Free. 998-7666.
Literati is proud to partner with the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies to welcome author and activist Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman to Ann Arbor for a talk on their new book Never Remember: Searching for Stalin’s Gulags in Putin’s Russia. This lecture will occur at the Weiser Hall on the University of Michigan campus.
About Never Remember:
The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than half a century after the end of Stalinist terror, the geography of the Gulag has been barely sketched and the number of its victims remains unknown. Has the Gulag been forgotten? Writer Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman set out across Russia in search of the memory of the Gulag. They journey from Moscow to Sandarmokh, a forested site of mass executions during Stalin’s Great Terror; to the only Gulag camp turned into a museum, outside of the city of Perm in the Urals; and to Kolyma, where prisoners worked in deadly mines in the remote reaches of the Far East. They find that in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where Stalin is remembered as a great leader, Soviet terror has not been forgotten: it was never remembered in the first place.
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and the bestselling biographer of Vladimir Putin. Gessen’s books include The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia, winner of the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She is the recipient of numerous other awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Carnegie Fellowship, and her work appears regularly in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and Slate. A longtime resident of Moscow, Gessen now lives in New York City.
Misha Friedman regularly photographs for The New Yorker, Time, Der Spiegel, GQ, Le Monde, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Sports Illustrated, Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders. His work has received numerous awards, including grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. He was born in Moldova and graduated from Binghamton University and the London School of Economics. He taught himself photography while working in humanitarian medical aid. He lives in New York City.
Karen L. Cox is an award-winning historian who has written op-eds for the New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, TIME magazine, Publishers Weekly, and the Huffington Post. Her expertise on the American South has led to interviews with the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The Daily Beast, Mic, The Atlantic, the Wall Street Journal, Slate (France), the Atlanta-Journal Constitution, the Houston Chronicle, and the Charlotte Observer, as well as international newspapers in Germany, Denmark, Ireland, and Japan. She has also appeared on BBC Newshour, Black Politics Today, The Mike Smerconish Show (Sirius XM), C-SPAN, Canadian Public Broadcasting, Minnesota Public Radio, Georgia Public Radio, and Charlotte Talks.
Cox is the author of three books and numerous essays and articles on the subject of southern history and culture. Her first book, Dixie’s Daughters: The United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Preservation of Confederate Culture, won the 2004 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize from the Southern Association for Women Historians for the Best Book in Southern Women’s History. Her second book, published by UNC Press in 2011, is Dreaming of Dixie: How the South Was Created in American Popular Culture. She is also the editor of Destination Dixie: Tourism and Southern History (University Press of Florida, 2012), which won the Allen G. Noble Book Award from the Pioneer America Society for the Best Edited Book on North American material culture. She authored the blog Pop South: Reflections on the South in Popular Culture where she wrote over 100 essays about representations of the region and its people in popular media.
Her most recent book, Goat Castle: A True Story of Murder, Race, and the Gothic South, was released in October 2017.
Cox is originally from Huntington, West Virginia, and is professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.
The RC’s Center for World Performance Studies Faculty Lecture Series features Faculty Fellows and visiting scholars and practitioners in the fields of ethnography and performance. Designed to create an informal and intimate setting for intellectual exchange among students, scholars, and the community, faculty are invited to present their work in an interactive and performative fashion.
Emily Wilcox is Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Studies at U-M.
During the latter half of the 1980s, a popular dance craze known as “piliwu” 霹雳舞 swept urban communities across China. Incorporating two new styles of U.S. urban popular dance–New York-based b-boying/b-girling or “breaking” and California-based popping and locking– piliwu was China’s first localized movement of hip-hop culture, which reflected new circuits of intercultural exchange between China and the United States during the first decade of China’s Reform Era. Analyzing the dance choreography recorded in a 1988 Chinese film, Rock Youth 摇滚青年 (dir. Tian Zhangzhuang), together with media reports and testimonials from members of China’s piliwu generation, this talk reconstructs the history of the piliwu movement, arguing for the central influence of U.S. pop culture icon Michael Jackson, the growth of China’s underground commercial dance (zou xue 走穴) economy, and the agency of dancers’ bodies in transnational movements of media culture.
Jim May STORYTELLING WORKSHOP. 1-3 pm. No charge, but you must register for this event as participation is limited.
New America think tank CEO Anne-Marie Slaughter, a former U.S. State Department policy planning director, presents a talk adapted from her new book, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Dangerous World. Reception follows; signing.
4-5:30 p.m., 1010 Weiser, 500 Church. Free. 763-9200.
Talk by local writer Beverly Jenkins, recipient of the 2017 Romance Writers of America Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award. She sets her African American historical romance novels in the decades after emancipation to emphasize black history after slavery.
7-8:30 p.m., AADL Malletts Creek, 3090 E. Eisenhower (between Stone School & Packard). Free. 327-4200.
