Literati is thrilled to host author Rachel DeWosking who will be visitng to share her latest YA novel Someday We Will Fly:
About Someday We Will Fly:
From the author of Blind, a heart-wrenching coming-of-age story set during World War II in Shanghai, one of the only places Jews without visas could find refuge.
Warsaw, Poland. The year is 1940 and Lillia is fifteen when her mother, Alenka, disappears and her father flees with Lillia and her younger sister, Naomi, to Shanghai, one of the few places that will accept Jews without visas. There they struggle to make a life; they have no money, there is little work, no decent place to live, a culture that doesn’t understand them. And always the worry about Alenka. How will she find them? Is she still alive?
Meanwhile Lillia is growing up, trying to care for Naomi, whose development is frighteningly slow, in part from malnourishment. Lillia finds an outlet for her artistic talent by making puppets, remembering the happy days in Warsaw when her family was circus performers. She attends school sporadically, makes friends with Wei, a Chinese boy, and finds work as a performer at a “gentlemen’s club” without her father’s knowledge.
But meanwhile the conflict grows more intense as the Americans declare war and the Japanese force the Americans in Shanghai into camps. More bombing, more death. Can they survive, caught in the crossfire?
Rachel DeWoskin spent her twenties in China as the unlikely star of a nighttime soap opera that inspired her memoir Foreign Babes in Beijing. She is the author of Repeat After Me and Big Girl Small, which received the American Library Association’s Alex Award for an adult book with special appeal to teen readers; Rachel’s conversations with young readers inspired her to write her first YA novel, Blind. Rachel is on the faculty of the University of Chicago, where she teaches creative writing. She lives in Chicago with her husband, playwright Zayd Dohrn, and their two daughters.
Rachel and her family spent six summers in Shanghai while she researched Someday We Will Fly.
Join us for a talk and signing with Arjun Alva. Arjun is a 6th Grader at Forsythe Middle School here in Ann Arbor. Arjun has always loved writing. It took him around 6 months to write “Adventures of Jimmy Hailbuster”. He is presently writing his second book.
Feb. 14, 16, 22, & 23 (different programs). U-M students and faculty perform staged readings of works by this acclaimed English playwright in honor of her 80th birthday. Today: the 2017 play Escaped Alone (3 p.m.),a brisk 55-minute surrealist set piece in which 4 British women share tea in a tranquil garden and discuss the end of the world. Also: The 1979 play Cloud Nine (7 p.m.), a racy, merrily merciless spoof of the moral pretensions of imperial Britain. Set in colonial Africa in 1880, the first act is a nonstop flurry of sexual liaisons involving a British functionary, his wife, his son and daughter, an explorer, a woman dressed in a riding habit, and an all-knowing black servant. The second act is set in 1980s London (though the characters have aged a mere 25 years) and blends farce and pathos in a surprising denouement. The 2009 play Seven Jewish Children (10:30 p.m.) is a 10-minute drama where 7 unnamed characters discuss how to teach their children about complex events in Jewish history, from the Holocaust to the creation of Israel to violence in Gaza. Also today, U-M theater studies professor Leigh Woods gives a lecture on “Caryl Churchill at 80” (5 p.m.) at Mendelssohn Theatre.
Various times, U-M Walgreen Drama Center Newman Studio, 1226 Murfin. Free.. 764-5350
U-M theater studies professor Leigh Woods gives a lecture on “Caryl Churchill at 80” (5 p.m.) at Mendelssohn Theatre.
Feb. 23 & 24 (different programs). Performances for adults (Sat.) & families (Sun.) by 3 top storytellers from around the country. Headliner is Hand Christian Andersen Storytelling Center (NYC) director Laura Simms, an internationally celebrated veteran storyteller whose repertoire includes both traditional tales and personal narratives. Also, playwright and performance artist Edgar Oliver, a celebrated NYC raconteur best known for his mesmerizing one-man show about his childhood in Savannah with his songster and his mentally ill mother, and Ivory D. Williams, a veteran Detroit storyteller known for his engaging, interactive renditions of traditional African and African American tales.
7:30 p.m. (Sat.) & 1 p.m. (Sun.), The Ark, 316 S. Main. Tickets $20 (Sat.) & $10 (Sun. family concert) in advance at the Michigan Union Ticket Office (mutotix.com) & theark.org, and at the door. To charge by phone, call 763-TKTS.
Feb. 23 & 24 (different programs). Performances for adults (Sat.) & families (Sun.) by 3 top storytellers from around the country. Headliner is Hand Christian Andersen Storytelling Center (NYC) director Laura Simms, an internationally celebrated veteran storyteller whose repertoire includes both traditional tales and personal narratives. Also, playwright and performance artist Edgar Oliver, a celebrated NYC raconteur best known for his mesmerizing one-man show about his childhood in Savannah with his songster and his mentally ill mother, and Ivory D. Williams, a veteran Detroit storyteller known for his engaging, interactive renditions of traditional African and African American tales.
7:30 p.m. (Sat.) & 1 p.m. (Sun.), The Ark, 316 S. Main. Tickets $20 (Sat.) & $10 (Sun. family concert) in advance at the Michigan Union Ticket Office (mutotix.com) & theark.org, and at the door. To charge by phone, call 763-TKTS.
Kate Mendeloff directs U-M drama students in Aristophanes’ bawdy masterpiece of classical Greek comedy about war-weary Athenian wives who decide to withhold their favors from their husbands until the warring ceases. Both sides suffer from the sexual strike, and the dramatic question becomes which side will give in first, and on what terms.
7:30 p.m., Keene Theatre, East Quad, 701 East University. Free. 647-4354.
Literati is proud to partner with the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health to have copies of Dr. Leonardo Trasande’s Sicker, Fatter, Poorer and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha’s What the Eyes Don’t See available for purchase at this event.
Come meet with Dr. Leonardo Trasande and Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha at their book talk. Dr. Trasande’s book “Sicker, Fatter, Poorer: The Urgent Threat of Hormone-Disrupting Chemicals to Our Health and Future . . . and What We Can Do About It” and Dr. Hanna-Attisha’s book “What the Eyes Don’t See: A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City” feature important messages about environmental exposures to contaminants that have been associated with adverse health effects.
About Sicker, Fatter, Poorer:
Lurking in our homes, hiding in our offices, and polluting the air we breathe is something sinister. Something we’ve turned a blind eye to for far too long. Dr. Leonardo Trasande, a pediatrician, professor, and world-renowned researcher, tells the story of how our everyday surroundings are making us sicker, fatter, and poorer.
Dr. Trasande exposes the chemicals that disrupt our hormonal systems and damage our health in irreparable ways. He shows us where these chemicals hide–in our homes, our schools, at work, in our food, and countless other places we can’t control–as well as the workings of policy that protects the continued use of these chemicals in our lives. Drawing on extensive research and expertise, he outlines dramatic studies and emerging evidence about the rapid increases in neurodevelopmental, metabolic, reproductive, and immunological diseases directly related to the hundreds of thousands of chemicals that we are exposed to every day. Unfortunately, nowhere is safe.
But, thanks to Dr. Trasande’s work on the topic, and his commitment to effecting change, this book can help. Through a blend of narrative, scientific detective work, and concrete information about the connections between chemicals and disease, he shows us what we can do to protect ourselves and our families in the short-term, and how we can help bring the change we deserve.
About What the Eyes Don’t See:
Here is the inspiring story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water–and then battled her own government and a brutal backlash to expose that truth to the world. Paced like a scientific thriller, What the Eyes Don’t See reveals how misguided austerity policies, broken democracy, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk. And at the center of the story is Dr. Mona herself–an immigrant, doctor, scientist, and mother whose family’s activist roots inspired her pursuit of justice.
What the Eyes Don’t See is a riveting account of a shameful disaster that became a tale of hope, the story of a city on the ropes that came together to fight for justice, self-determination, and the right to build a better world for their–and all of our–children.
This lecture is on Victim/Persecutor with Gillian Eaton, award-winning actress, director, and Prof. U-M School of Theatre, Music and Dance.
Room 1423, East Quadrangle, 701 East University, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. Free. rc.communications@umich.edu https://lsa.umich.edu/rc/news-events/all-events.detail.html/59958-14803944.html
Literati is honored to welcome author Anissa Gray who will be reading from and discussing her debut novel The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls.
About The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls:
The Butler family has had their share of trials–as sisters Althea, Viola, and Lillian can attest–but nothing prepared them for the literal trial that will upend their lives.
Althea, the eldest sister and substitute matriarch, is a force to be reckoned with and her younger sisters have alternately appreciated and chafed at her strong will. They are as stunned as the rest of the small community when she and her husband Proctor are arrested, and in a heartbeat the family goes from one of the most respected in town to utter disgrace. The worst part is, not even her sisters are sure exactly what happened.
As Althea awaits her fate, Lillian and Viola must come together in the house they grew up in to care for their sister’s teenage daughters. What unfolds is a stunning portrait of the heart and core of an American family in a story that is as page-turning as it is important.
Anissa Gray is an Emmy and duPont-Columbia award-winning journalist at CNN Worldwide, responsible for helping to guide coverage of some of the most consequential stories of our time. She began her career at Reuters as a reporter, based in New York, covering business news and international finance. Born in St. Joseph, Michigan, Gray studied English and American literature at New York University. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, with her wife.
