Local writer (and Observer contributor) Patti Smith hosts a story time for adults, with Ken MacGregor, Callie Feyen, John Hritz, Morgan Hoeffel, Kelly Rowlands. Pajamas encouraged. For adults only.
Join us for a Night Time Story Time to meet author-illustrator Emmy Kastner as she shares Nerdy Babies: Space. Cookies and milk will be served to all—and don’t forget to wear your pajamas!
About the Book
In Nerdy Babies: Space, follow our intrepid infants into the great unknown. Check out the moon and the sun and all the planets in our solar system. Plus, learn about gravity and orbits in this simple text written in question and answer format.
With bright artwork by Emmy Kastner, this will be a book that the very littlest nerds will want to return to again and again.
Stay curious. There’s more to learn about everything!
About the Illustrator
Emmy Kastner is a former classroom teacher and the co-founder of Read and Write Kalamazoo (RAWK), a nonprofit devoted to cultivating reading and writing for youth pre-K through high school. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, with her husband and three young kids. Emmy’s books include Nerdy Babies: Ocean and Nerdy Babies: Space.
All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell, at the AASG monthly meeting.
Kim Darst from Husky Haven Sled Dogs will share her experience competing in the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race in Anchorage, Alaska. Husky Haven Sled Dogs was established in 1999 with two Samoyeds and a dream to run the Iditarod. In 2009 that dream came true, and they were the first team from New Jersey to qualify, enter, and run the Iditarod Sled Dog Race. Come learn about what it takes to train for the Iditarod, and meet one of Kim’s sled dogs! Copies of Cotton’s Tale, a children’s book about Kim’s story, will be available for sale.
We welcome NEA Fellow and PEN/Hemingway Finalist Catherine Chung in support of her new novel, The Tenth Muse, which Roxane Gay calls “ambitious and intriguing,” as part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati series. The event is free and open to the public.
About the book: From childhood, Katherine knows she is different, and that her parents are not who they seem to be. But in becoming a mathematician, she must face the most human of problems–who is she? What is the cost of love, and what is the cost of ambition?
On her quest to conquer the Riemann hypothesis, the greatest unsolved mathematical problem of her time, she turns to a theorem with a mysterious history that holds both the lock and key to her identity, and to secrets long buried during World War II in Germany. Forced to confront some of the most consequential events of the twentieth century and rethink everything she knows of herself, she strives to take her place in the world of higher mathematics and finds kinship in the stories of the women who came before her–their love of the language of numbers connecting them across generations.
In The Tenth Muse, Catherine Chung offers a gorgeous, sweeping tale about legacy, identity, and the beautiful ways the mind can make us free.
About the author: Catherine Chung won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award with her first novel, Forgotten Country, and has been a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a Granta New Voice, and a Director’s Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. She has a degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, and worked at a think tank in Santa Monica before receiving her MFA from Cornell University. She has published work in The New York Times and Granta, and is a fiction editor at Guernica Magazine. She lives in New York City.
Cozine Welch is managing editor of Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing. The program begins with open mike readings.
Crazy Wisdom Poetry Series hosted by Joe Kelty, Ed Morin, and David Jibson • Second and Fourth Wednesdays, 7-9 p.m. in the Crazy Wisdom Tea Room • Second Wednesdays are poetry workshop nights. All writers welcome to share and discuss their own poetry and short fiction. Sign up for new participants begins at 6:45 p.m.
Fourth Wednesdays have a featured reader for 50 minutes and then open mic for an hour. All writers welcome to share. Sign up begins at 6:45 p.m. Free. Contact Ed at 668-7523; eacmorso@sbcglobal.net or cwpoetrycircle.tumblr.com.
June 26 • William Teets is a poet born in Peekskill, NY, currently living in Waterford, MI. He is author of the memoir, Upside Down (One on the House), and the novel, Reverend Went Walking. His poetry collection, Before The Flood, resonates with Americana and religiosity. His journal publications include Chronogram and Art and Life.
ONE PAUSE POETRY SALON is (literally) a greenhouse for poetry and poets, nurturing an appreciation for written art in all languages and encouraging experiments in creative writing.
We meet every Weds in the greenhouse at Argus Farm Stop on Liberty St. The poems we read each time are unified by form (haiku, sonnet, spoken word), poet, time / place (Tang Dynasty, English Romanticism, New York in the 70s) or theme / mood (springtime, poems with cats, protest poems). We discuss the poems and play writing games together, with time for snacks and socializing in between.
Members are encouraged to share their own poems or poems they like – they may or may not relate to the theme of the evening. This is not primarily a workshop – we may hold special workshop nights, but mostly we listen to and talk about poems for the sake of inspiring new writing.
Whether you are a published poet or encountering poetry for the first time, we invite you to join us!
$5 suggested donation for food, drinks and printing costs.
8-10 p.m., Argus Farm Stop greenhouse, 325 W. Liberty. $5 suggested donation. onepausepoetry.org, 707-1284.
Tom Grace is the internationally bestselling author of the Nolan Kilkenny thrillers “Undeniable”, “The Secret Cardinal”, “Bird of Prey”, “Twisted Web”, “Quantum” and “Spyder Web”; and the stand-alone thriller “The Liberty Intrigue”. His books have been translated into eight languages and sold in over twenty-five countries. Grace was born and raised in Michigan, and graduated twice from the University of Michigan with degrees in architecture. He is a member of the International Thriller Writers and resides in Michigan with his family.
The lights dimmed in the auditorium and the speaker for the OLLI Local Author lecture stood center stage. “Imagine if we were to discover a body among us,” he began, “that of a person who met a most unnatural end. There would be an investigation and we would have ourselves a mystery. But if, with the body, we found clues to a looming tragedy and the clock is ticking—then we have a thriller!”
This is the second in a three-lecture series. The subject is A Celebration of Local Authors. The next lecture will take place July 11, 2019. The title is William W. Cook and His Michigan Law Quadrangle.
We welcome the eight participants from Literati’s first Fiction Writing Workshop, reading original prose as a culmination and celebration of the eight-week course run by Literati bookseller and Creative Programs Manager, Gina Balibrera Amyx. Free and open to the public.
About Literati’s Fiction Writing Workshop: Literati Bookstore’s Fiction Writing Workshop is an 8-week writing intensive to be held in May and June 2019. The workshop will focus on elements of prose–narrative structure, context, and especially, voice. The arc of this course will be shaped by the curiosities and obsessions of the group. Each writer will be workshopped by the group, and will write and receive in-depth, typed critiques of work from other participants and the instructor. At the conclusion of the session, participants will receive two craft texts, as well as three texts selected personally for them by the instructor, to complement and inform their writing, a one-on-one conference with the instructor, and the opportunity to give a public reading of original work. The workshop is taught by Gina Balibrera Amyx, graduate of University of Michigan’s Helen Zell MFA program in Prose, and currently, Creative Programs Manager at Literati. Her writing has been featured in the Boston Review, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Wandering Song, an anthology of the Central American diaspora.
