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Author’s Forum Presents: Making Callaloo in Detroit: A Conversation with the RC’s Lolita Hernandez and Laura Thomas

Anna Clark’s new book, Michigan Literary Luminaries, will be published on May 4 by The History Press. Celebrate the release on Saturday, May 30 at Signal-Return (1345 Division Street, Suite 102), which is hosting this event. “Our agenda is simple: drink, food, music, laughter, joy.”

Poet Bob Clifford is an RC creative writing alum (’79) and is former associate director and coordinator of academic programs, where he designed and implemented an academic program for over 600 student-athletes and monitored compliance of Big Ten and NCAA regulations.  He is currently the associate athletic director at Oregon State University.  Clifford will be at Nicola’s Books for the release of his latest collection of poetry, Gasping for Air.

RC Creative Writing alum and professor Laura Kasischke  is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, 2012. Kasischke has published nine novels, three of which have been made into feature films—The Life Before Her Eyes, Suspicious River, White Bird in a Blizzard—and nine books of poetry, most recently The Infinitesimals. She has also published the short story collection If a Stranger Approaches You. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as several Pushcart Prizes and numerous poetry awards and her writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Harper’s and The New Republic. Laura Kasischke is Allan Seager Collegiate Professor of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan.

This event will be recorded

From Ernest Hemingway’s rural adventures to the gritty fiction of Joyce Carol Oates, the landscape of the “Third Coast” has inspired generations of the nation’s greatest storytellers.

Join Michigan Notable Author Anna Clark to unveil Michigan’s extraordinary written culture as she discusses Michigan authors and her new book, Michigan Literary Luminaries: From Elmore Leonard to Robert Hayden. The event includes a book signing and books will be for sale.

This fascinating book is a shines a spotlight on this rich heritage of the Great Lakes State with a mixture of history, literary criticism, and original reporting. Discover how Saginaw greenhouses shaped the life of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Theodore Roethke. Compare the common traits of Detroit crime writers like Elmore Leonard and Donald Goines. Learn how Dudley Randall revolutionized American literature by doing for poets what Motown Records did for musicians.

RC Creative Writing alumna Anna Clark is a freelance journalist in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The American Prospect, Grantland, Vanity Fair, the Columbia Journalism Review, Next City, and other publications. She is the director of applications for Write A House and founder of Literary Detroit. Anna also edited A Detroit Anthology, a 2015 Michigan Notable Book.

RC Creative Writing alumna Carrie Smith will read from Silent City, her new crime novel. Carrie won three Hopwood Awards (one in 1977 and two in 1979), and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has been a finalist in Nimrod Magazine’s Katherine Anne Porter prize for fiction, and is the author of a literary first novel, Forget Harry published by Simon & Schuster.   Carrie moved to New York City in 1981. By day, she is Senior Vice President and Publisher of Benchmark Education Company. By night, she thinks about murder. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her partner and sixteen year old twins.