Calendar

Jul
7
Sun
Ann Arbor Poetry: Open Mike @ Espresso Royale
Jul 7 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Ann Arbor Poetry hosts an open mic every 1st and 3rd Sunday, with feature poets whenever we can get them.
$5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry.

 

Jul
8
Mon
Lisa Lenzo, Natalie Ruth Joynton, and Elizabeth Schmuhl @ Literati
Jul 8 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome three authors with recent works published by Wayne State University Press’s Made in Michigan Writers Series! After reading, each author will be available to sign books. The event is free and open to the public. 

Lisa Lenzo is the author of Within the Lighted City, chosen by Ann Beattie for the 1997 John Simmons Short Fiction Award, and 2015 Michigan Notable Book Award winner Strange Love (Wayne State University Press). Lenzo’s other awards include a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award, a Hemingway Days Festival Award, and First Prize for Fiction in the 2017 Literature and Medicine Writing Contest. Her stories and essays have appeared in Arts & Letters, Michigan Quarterly Review, Sacred Ground: Stories about Home, Fresh Water: Women Writing on the Great Lakes, and on NPR.

Natalie Ruth Joynton‘s work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Michigan Quarterly, and Poetry International. She is the recipient of the 2010 Scholl/Thompson Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets as well as a Quintilian Excellence in Teaching Award from Purdue University, where she earned her MFA in Creative Writing. Natalie lives, writes, and teaches in rural Michigan.

Elizabeth Schmuhl is a multidisciplinary artist whose work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Paper Darts, PANK, Hobart, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. She has worked at various nonprofits, including the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and currently works at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is also an RC creative writing alumna!

 

Jul
9
Tue
Richard Retyi: The Book of Ann Arbor @ Literati
Jul 9 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Once more with music! We’re thrilled to welcome back Richard Retyi in support of The Book of Ann Arbor: An Extremely Serious History Book. Rich has a new, fresh, special presentation in store for the book—one of the inaugural releases from the Ann Arbor District Library’s Fifth Avenue Press. He’s also open to answering questions from the audience, no matter how shockingly personal in nature. Book signing to follow. Free and open to the public. 

About The Book of Ann Arbor:

A suicide submarine parade. Ann Arbor’s top 10 astronauts. Shakey Jake, the Embassy Hotel, and train/building collisions. The birth of Iggy Pop. Nazis getting punched. Visits from heads of state, from presidents to a dictator. The Music Mobile, the Naked Mile and around-the-world flight. Plus, a few tales of murder, because it happens here too. These are a few of the stories that make up The Book of Ann Arbor.

Richard Retyi is the communications and marketing manager at the Ann Arbor District Library and part of the Ann Arbor Stories podcast.

 

Jul
10
Wed
Fiction with Elizabeth Ellen, Juliet Escoria, and Mary Miller @ Bookbound
Jul 10 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

 We are thrilled to host a night of fiction with Elizabeth Ellen, Juliet Escoria, and Mary Miller, who will read from their respective novels Person/a, Juliet the Maniac, and Biloxi. Signing to follow

Elizabeth Ellen is a Pushcart Prize winner whose stories, poems and essays have appeared in numerous journals including Hobart, Fanzine, Bookslut,  New York Tyrant, McSweeney’s, The GuardianCatapult, and Salon. She has also written books of poetry and short stories. She is deputy editor at the literary journal Hobart, and founder of Short Flight/Long Drive Books (SF/LD).

Juliet Escoria is the author of the poetry collection Witch Huntand the story collection Black Cloud. She was born in Australia, raised in San Diego, and currently lives in West Virginia with her husband, the writer Scott McClanahan.

Mary Miller is also the author of the novel The Last Days of California, and two short story collections. Her fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, the Oxford American, McSweeney’s, American Short Fiction, and many others. She is a former James A. Michener Fellow in Fiction at the University of Texas and John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. 

Poetry and the Written Word @ Crazy Wisdom
Jul 10 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

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.

 

Poetry Salon: One Pause Poetry @ Argus Farm Stop
Jul 10 @ 8:00 pm – 10:00 pm

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.

 

 

 

Jul
11
Thu
Douglas Brinkley: American Moonshot @ Literati
Jul 11 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome the CNN Presidential Historian and contributing editor at Vanity Fair in support of his instant New York Times Bestseller, American Moonshot. A book signing will follow the event. Free and open to the public. 

“Compelling and comprehensive….With a mixture of granular detail from a gigantic body of works on the subject and analyses of Kennedy’s decision-making and political savvy, American Moonshot transcends mere narrative to help the rest of us understand how America geared up for the astonishing feat of landing a man on the moon. With the approach of the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s ‘small step for man,’ Brinkley’s focus on the all-important early days provides a valuable perspective.”
— Washington Post

Douglas Brinkley is the Katherine Tsanoff Brown Chair in Humanities and Professor of History at Rice University, a CNN Presidential Historian, and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.  In the world of public history, he serves on boards, at museums, at colleges, and for historical societies. The Chicago Tribune dubbed him “America’s New Past Master.” The New-York Historical Society has chosen Brinkley as its official U.S. Presidential Historian. His recent book Cronkite won the Sperber Prize, while The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast received the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. He was awarded a Grammy for Presidential Suite and is the recipient of seven honorary doctorates in American studies. His two-volume, annotated Nixon Tapes recently won the Arthur S. Link–Warren F. Kuehl Prize. He is a member of the Century Association, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the James Madison Council of the Library of Congress. He lives in Austin, Texas, with his wife and three children.

 

Open Mic and Share: Karen Holman and Josephine Rood @ Bookbound
Jul 11 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Features Karen Holman and Josephine Rood.

This is part of a monthly series on the 2nd Thursday of most months in partnership with Les Go Social Media Marketing and Training. The event begins with an Open Mic session when area poets can read their own work or share a favorite poem by another author in a welcoming atmosphere.

Jul
14
Sun
Sari Solden and Michelle Frank: A Radical Guide for Women with ADHD @ Barnes and Noble Bookstore
Jul 14 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

Book launch party and author signing.

Jul
15
Mon
Rick Bailey: The Enjoy Agenda @ Literati
Jul 15 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome Rick Bailey back to the store for a reading from his latest, The Enjoy Agenda. Book signing to follow. Free and open to the public. 

About the book: Part memoir, part travelogue, The Enjoy Agenda takes readers from Rick Bailey’s one-stoplight town in Michigan farm country to Stratford, England, to the French Concession in Shanghai, the Adriatic coast of Italy, and to a small village in the Republic of San Marino. With his self-deprecating style, Bailey recalls the traumas of picture day in elementary school and lugging a guitar to the Cotswalds and back. He reflects on food safety in China, relives a dental emergency in Venice, and embarks on a quest for il formaggio del perdono (the cheese of forgiveness) in the hills above the Adriatic.

Bailey, whose voice is a combination of Dave Barry and Rick Steves with just a soupçon of Montaigne, writes with humor and wit about how these experiences reflect the issues and conflicts of contemporary American life: environmental change, life in digital times, and the vicissitudes of arriving at ripe old age. Throughout The Enjoy Agenda Bailey asks, “Where am I and how did I get here?” a question less about geography than the difficulties and gifts of becoming a husband and ultimately a partner changed and improved by a very smart woman and challenged and delighted by a gradual but seismic culture shift.

Rick Bailey is a retired English instructor who taught writing for thirty-eight years at Henry Ford Community College in Michigan. He is the author or editor of several books on writing, including The Creative Writer’s Craft, and is the author of American English, Italian Chocolate: Small Subjects of Great Importance (Nebraska, 2017).

 

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