Calendar

Carey Salerno is the executive editor and director of Alice James Books where she has been serving underrepresented voices in the literary community since 2008. She is also the author of Shelter (2009) and coeditor of Lit From Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books (2013). She teaches poetry writing for the University of Maine at Farmington and has been invited to teach or lecture on poetry and editing at places like the University of Washington, Indiana University, Bread Loaf, Butler University, Washington State University, Colrain, The Writer’s Hotel, and The New School. You may find her poems–and articles and interviews regarding her other professional work–in print and online, most recently in The Literary Review and New England Review.

Literati Bookstore is pleased to be on hand to sell books as OLLI Reads, in Collaboration with Michigan Humanities’ Great Michigan Read, presents Mona Hanna-Attisha, MD, discussing her Book What the Eyes Don’t See – A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City.

What the Eyes Don’t See 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.

Mona Hanna-Attisha, MD, is the founder and director of the Michigan State University and Hurley Children’s Hospital Pediatric Public Health Initiative, an innovative and model public health program in Flint. Currently an associate professor of pediatrics and human development at the MSU College of Human Medicine, she has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World for her role in uncovering the Flint water crisis and leading recovery efforts. She was one of the first to question whether lead was leaching from the city’s water pipes after an emergency manager switched the city’s water supply to the Flint River in 2014.

OLLI Reads invites OLLI members to read together and discuss two books a year, non-fiction in the fall, fiction in the spring. This fall we are collaborating with Great Michigan Read, and other community partners, to enjoy participating in a wider project. Michigan Humanities’ Great Michigan Read creates a statewide discussion each year on the humanities themes of a selected book. Through partnerships with libraries, schools, book clubs, and a wide range of other non-profit organizations, the Great Michigan Read facilitates statewide reading and programs to bridge communities with a common conversation.

9:30am Coffee

10:00-11:00am Discussion with Mona Hanna-Attisha, followed by Q&A

11:00am-Noon Light Lunch and Book Signing

This event is free and open to the public; advanced registration is required and seating is limited. To register for this event or for more information, please contact olli.info@umich.edu or call 734-998-9351.

Come with questions, a work in progress, or an empty notebook. All writers are welcome in this casual, supportive environment. Authors Bethany Neal and Alex Kourvo will be on hand to answer questions and give encouragement. Bethany and Alex will also provide private, one-on-one critiques if you choose to have them read your work. Sharing your writing with other attendees is not required and is completely voluntary.

The Emerging Writers Meet-Up is an excellent opportunity to meet your fellow Ann Arbor writers and get feedback from published authors. This monthly meet-up welcomes all writers to ask questions, connect with other writers, or simply have a dedicated time and place to work on their projects. Do you have a completed manuscript? Consider submitting it to the library’s new imprint, Fifth Avenue Press.

Skazat! is back, and have we got a season lined up for you! Join us at Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea Washington St. on September 24 to celebrate with fabulous poetry and tasty treats. Whether you’re a page poet, slammer, performance artist or refuse a label, we want to hear your new stuff on our open mic. We look forward to sharing great poetry (and great coffee) with you and invite you to join this free open mic and monthly reading series!

Sign up! 7:00 p.m.
7:15 p.m. – Open mic
8:00 p.m. – Featured Reader
This month’s feature:  BRYAN THAO WORRA

Charles Eisendrath, retired University of Michigan Knight-Wallace journalism fellows director

Professor Eisendrath discusses his new book “Downstream from Here: A Big Life in a Small Place”, a series of essays about the loves of a place inhabited temporarily, but which shape a person permanently. “Prepare to be inspired.” –JEFF DANIELS

We are excited to welcome Kelly Fordon in support of her first full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House. Her work has appeared The Florida Review, The Kenyon Review, and other journals, as well as three poetry chapbooks. On the Street Where We Live won the 2012 Standing Rock Chapbook Award, and The Witness won the 2016 Eric Hoffer Award for the Chapbook. Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind,  was chosen as a Michigan Notable Book. She teaches at the College for  Creative Studies, Springfed Arts, and InsideOut Literary Arts Project in  Detroit.
Ann  Arbor’s Zilka Joseph has an MFA in Poetry from University of Michigan,  and she teaches workshops, works as a manuscript coach and editor, and  mentors writers in the Ann Arbor community. She has written several  books of poetry including her most recent, Sharp Blue Search of Flame.
Signing to follow.

“With words as effective and as  cunningly crafted as newly sharpened knives, a relentless insistence,  and stunning wordplay, Fordon gives voice to those trapped behind the  idyllic façade.”
–Gloria Whelan, author Homeless Bird, National Book Award winner
“Rich  with the scents and sounds and colors of her native Kolkata, Zilka  Joseph’s poetry is also haunted: by the real and imagined violence of  the world, by the losses entailed in migration, by the loved ones left  behind. Deeply felt and lushly rendered, these poems weave a tapestry of  sorrow and celebration, tenderness and outrage, bodily longing and  bodily vulnerability. A book as searching as its title.” –Linda  Gregerson

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.

White Flights: Race, Fiction, and the American Imagination (Graywok Press, August 2019) is a meditation on whiteness in American fiction and culture from the end of the civil rights movement to the present. At the heart of this collection of essays, Jess Row ties “white flight”—the movement of white Americans into segregated communities, whether in suburbs or newly gentrified downtowns—to white writers setting their stories in isolated or emotionally insulated landscapes, from the mountains of Idaho in Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping to the claustrophobic households in Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. Row uses brilliant close readings of work from well-known writers such as Don DeLillo, Annie Dillard, Richard Ford, and David Foster Wallace to examine the ways these and other writers have sought imaginative space for themselves at the expense of engaging with race.

White Flights aims to move fiction to a more inclusive place, and Row looks beyond criticism to consider writing as a reparative act. What would it mean, he asks, if writers used fiction “to approach each other again”? Row turns to the work of James Baldwin, Dorothy Allison, and James Alan McPherson to discuss interracial love in fiction, while also examining his own family heritage as a way to interrogate his position. A moving and provocative book that includes music, film, and literature in its arguments, White Flights is an essential work of cultural and literary criticism.

In addition to White Flights, Jess Row is the author of two collections of short stories, The Train to Lo Wu and Nobody Ever Gets Lost, and a novel, Your Face in Mine. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Tin House, Conjunctions, Ploughshares, Granta, n+1, and elsewhere, has been anthologized three times in The Best American Short Stories, and has won two Pushcart Prizes and a PEN/O. Henry Award. He has received a Guggenheim fellowship, an NEA fellowship in fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, and a Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant. In 2007, he was named a “Best Young American Novelist” by Granta. His nonfiction and criticism appear often in The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Bookforum, Threepenny Review, and Boston Review, among other venues. He teaches full time at The College of New Jersey and occasionally also at NYU. He lives in New York City with his wife and their two children. A student of Zen for 25 years, he is an ordained senior dharma teacher in the Kwan Um School of Zen.

For any questions about the event or to share accommodation needs, please email asbates@umich.edu– we are eager to help ensure that this event is inclusive to you. The building, event space, and restrooms are wheelchair accessible. A lactation room (Angell Hall #5209), reflection room (Haven Hall #1506), and gender-inclusive restroom (Angell Hall 5th floor) are available on site. ASL interpreters and CART services are available upon request; please email asbates@umich.edu at least two weeks prior to the event.

Pamela Reynolds will speak about her book The Uncaring, Intricate World: A Field Diary, Zambezi Valley, 1984-85 (Duke 2019). Professor Emerita of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University and Honorary Professor at the University of Cape Town, Reynolds is author of War in Worcester: Youth and the Apartheid State. As U-M Presidential Professor she conducted the 2001-02 Mellon Seminar: Contested Childhood in a Changing Global Order. Following her talk, she is available for further conversation at a reception and book signing held in her honor. Reception RSVP at lizgoode@umich.edu