The Ann Arbor District Library is pleased to announce the release of NINE new literary works from our Fifth Avenue Press imprint.
We’re releasing four titles for adults:
The Elements: a love letter to all things everywhere (Hannah Burr) An artist’s exploration of the periodic table of elements and our inseparability with everything.
All That We Encounter (Bethany Grey) A literary novel with a metaphysical and time-travel slant that addresses the complexity of family bonds, explores self-discovery at every age, and raises the question: to truly move on from one’s past, must one first come to terms with it?
Breaking Through (Johnny Thompson) A novel about Sam, a twenty-eight year old teacher, who navigates changing friendships and her own out-of-control love life as forgotten pieces of her past begin to resurface.
Shape Notes (Judy Patterson Wenzel) Expressing both the harmonious and dissonant parts of life, Shape Notes is organized around four shapes and four themes: social justice, places, family and community. The poems attempt to create connections and discover how our connections can bring joy.
One title for teens:
Intersections (Shanelle Boluyt) When a tragic car accident cuts short the life of vivacious Chloe, the lives of everyone involved are forever changed. Told from nine different perspectives, Intersections portrays the crossroads of the struggle to find the light or surrender to the shadows.
Four titles for children:
The Dragon Library (James Barbatano, with illustrations by Douglas Bosley) A charming beginning reader about a mysterious library and the three dragons who work hard to keep it going.
Modern Crab Adventures: Fantastic Planet (Douglas Bosley) Crab is on an outer space adventure, but when the ship breaks down on an unfamiliar planet how will Crab get back home? Find out in this delightful picture book.
Over In Motown (Debbie Taylor, with illustrations by Keisha Morris) An energetic picture book celebrating the musical genres and rhythms of industry that fueled Detroit in the Motown era.
The Planet We Live On (Shanda Trent) In this picture book told in a lively House That Jack Built style, discover the connections among plants, animals, and the resources they need to survive. How do people fit into earth’s web of life?
Join us to hear readings and meet our fourth group of authors, buy their books, get them signed, and enjoy light refreshments!
For more information about Fifth Avenue Press or to submit your work visit fifthavenue.press.
The theatre company Apollo’s Troupe, will stage the theatre adaptation of the critically-acclaimed epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, written by Michigan poet Frederick Glaysher and published in 2012 by Earthrise Press. Fresh from performing in May at Wayne State University’s Studio Theatre, this stage adaptation of Mr. Glaysher’s epic work in verse keeps intact much of the beautiful poetry that exemplifies this spectacular book while seeking to reach a new audience with its message of how poetry and artistry from all times and cultures can elevate the world and redefine our lives for the better.
Glaysher studied with Robert Hayden during the last year of his life, worked for him as a secretary, and edited his Collected Prose for the University of Michigan Press and his Collected Poems for Liveright. Glaysher holds two degrees from U of M, the latter a Master’s in English. When it came time for writing his epic poem, Glaysher knew he had to include Robert Hayden to try to honor his former teacher, mentor, and friend.
Taking place on the moon at the Apollo 11 landing site, a lone poet finds himself charged by Don Quixote and “The Parliament of Poets” to spread a new message of beauty, unity, and love to all nations of our fractured modern world. He is then sent to meet with the great poets, myths, and characters from history, East and West, to be mentored on his quest towards enlightenment and understanding.
We welcome contributors to this intersectional collection of essays, fiction, and poetry featuring black, Latinx, Asian, queer, and trans writers. Details and readers to be announced.
About the book: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” said Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford when she testified to congress in September 2018 about the men who victimized her. A year earlier, in October 2017, the hashtag #MeToo shone a light on the internalized, normalized sexual harassment and abuse that’d been ubiquitous for women for generations.
Among the first books to emerge from the #MeToo movement, Indelible in the Hippocampus is a truly intersectional collection of essays, fiction, and poetry. These original texts sound the voices of black, Latinx, Asian, queer, and trans writers, to name but a few, and says “me too” 23 times. Whether reflecting on their teenage selves or their modern-day workplaces, each contributor approaches the subject with unforgettable authenticity and strength.
Together these pieces create a portrait of cultural sea-change, offering the reader a deeper understanding of this complex, galvanizing pivot in contemporary consciousness.
Professor Hottman-Wei, Director of the U-M Residential College’s Chinese Music Ensemble, presents a rare opportunity to hear the bowed stringed instrument considered a symbol of the Mongolian nation. She will also discuss the numerous cultural contexts in which the Morin Khurr is played.
The Center for World Performance Studies Faculty Lecture Series features our Faculty Fellows and visiting scholars and practitioners in the fields of ethnography and performance. Designed to create an informal and intimate setting for intellectual exchange among students, scholars, and the community, faculty are invited to present their work in an interactive and performative fashion.
We are delighted to host Terry Blackhawk with special guest Dennis Hinrichsen for a night of poetry.
About the Book
One Less River An “elegantly conceived collection…(of) refined, learned, and liberating poetry” according to Kirkus Reviews, One Less River is nominated for the 2019 Kirkus Prize and was named one of The 13 Best Environmental Books of July 2019 by The Revelator. Through a variety of formal moves, Blackhawk follows Hafiz’s injunction to ‘Greet yourself/In your thousand other forms/As you mount the hidden tide and travel/Home.’ Hafiz serves her well, as do Dickinson and Whitman who inspire, or are sampled in, many of the poems. In the search for home, Blackhawk journeys through alternate selves, shape-shifting, crossing boundaries, inhabiting myriad beings. The poems meander through the environs of Detroit and its river, following currents of separation, love, and loss, and, ultimately, celebration of poetry’s power to rename and redeem our world.
[q / lear] Of these poems Sue William Silverman says, “[q / lear] concerns itself with the big issues of mortality and madness—like the play it uses as a backdrop. While some of these poems refer to bodies in decay, the poems themselves build, accrete, and pulse with Hinrichsen’s trademark restlessness and energy. As a great poet of the soul as well as the flesh, Hinrichsen explores the primordial dance between the human spirit and our vulnerable bodies while making us experience it anew.”
About the Author
Terry Blackhawk’s most recent book is One Less River (Mayapple Press, 2019). Other books include Escape Artist (winner of the John Ciardi Prize) and The Light Between (Wayne State University Press). A Kresge Arts in Detroit Literary Fellow and Founding Director Emerita (1995-2015) of Detroit’s InsideOut Literary Arts Project, Blackhawk now divides her time between Michigan and her family in Connecticut.
Dennis Hinrichsen’s most recent work is [q / lear], a chapbook from Green Linden Press, and Skin Music, winner of the 2014 Michael Waters Poetry Prize from Southern Indiana Review Press. New work of his can be found in two anthologies from MSU Press, Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice, and RESPECT: The poetry of Detroit Music. From May 2017 – April 2019, he served as the first Poet Laureate of the Greater Lansing [MI] area.
The stuff of nightmares in both their looks and the wounds inflicted on their victims, sea lampreys are perhaps the deadliest invasive species to ever enter the Great Lakes. At the invasion’s apex in the mid-20th century, harvests of lake trout, the lampreys’ preferred host fish in the Great Lakes, plummeted from peak annual catches of 15 million pounds to just a few hundred thousand pounds per year—a drop of 98% in only a few decades.
In his new book, Great Lakes Sea Lamprey,author Cory Brant explores the incredible story of the lamprey invasion—what started it, how it was halted, and what this history can teach us about the response to biological invaders in the present and future. In addition to discussing the book, Brant will showcase an aquarium of live sea lamprey at this event and talk about the otherworldly anatomy that made the species such a terror in the Great Lakes. This event is in partnership with The University of Michigan Press. It includes a signing with books for sale.
Cory Brant is a researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey Great Lakes Science Center in Ann Arbor, Michigan. For over a decade, his work has focused on sea lampreys, particularly the species’ use of chemical communication, and how to exploit that biology as a method of control.
Michelle Peñaloza is the author of Former Possessions of the Spanish Empire, winner of the 2018 Hillary Gravendyk National Poetry Prize (Inlandia Books, 2019). She is also the author of two chapbooks, landscape/heartbreak (Two Sylvias, 2015), and Last Night I Dreamt of Volcanoes (Organic Weapon Arts, 2015). Her work can be found in River Styx, Prairie Schooner, upstreet, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the University of Oregon, Kundiman, and Hugo House as well as the 2019 Scotti Merrill Emerging Writer Award for Poetry from The Key West Literary Seminar. Michelle has also received support from Artist Trust, Lemon Tree House, Caldera, 4Culture, Vermont Studio Center, Literary Arts, VONA/Voices, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, among others. The proud daughter of Filipino immigrants, Michelle was born in the suburbs of Detroit, MI and raised in Nashville, TN. She now lives, farms, and writes in rural Northern California.
Bill Carty lives in Seattle and is the author of HUGE CLOUDY (Octopus Books, 2019) and the chapbook Refugium(Alice Blue Books). He has received poetry fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Artist Trust, and the Richard Hugo House. His poems have recently appeared (or will soon) in the Boston Review, Ploughshares, the Iowa Review, Willow Springs, Conduit, Oversound, and other journals.
Literati is pleased to partner with the Knight-Wallace Fellowship for Journalists at the University of Michigan in welcoming Anne Nelson in support of her latest book, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right.
About the book: The chilling story of the covert group that masterminds the Radical Right’s ongoing assault on America’s airwaves, schools, environment, and, ultimately, its democracy.
In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan’s election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes behind the scenes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese, and Tim LaHaye in the Council’s early days to Mike Pence, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos family today.
In Shadow Network, award-winning author and media analyst Anne Nelson chronicles this astonishing history and illuminates the coalition’s key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy’s information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data – outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided.
In a time of stark and growing threats to our most valued institutions and democratic freedoms, Shadow Networkis essential reading.
Anne Nelson has received a Livingston Award for her journalism, a Guggenheim Fellowship for her historical research, and a Bellagio Fellowship for her research on the social impact of digital media. A graduate of Yale University, she began her career as a journalist in the U.S and abroad. She won an Associated Church Press Award for her writing on the conflict in Central America, which she covered for the Los Angeles Times, NPR, and the BBC. She has taught at Columbia University for over two decades, first at the School of Journalism and then at the School of International and Public Affairs. Her previous books include Red Orchestra: The Berlin Underground and the Circle of Friends Who Resisted Hitler, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice; andSuzanne’s Children: A Daring Rescue in Nazi Paris, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. A native of Oklahoma, she lives in New York City.
Matthew Riemer, co-author of We Are Everywhere: Protest, Power, and Pride in the History of Queer Liberation, uses imagery and narrative culled from years of research to examine how the struggles and triumphs of the queer past can inform the present with an eye toward a more liberated future.
Matthew Riemer co-wrote We Are Everywhere with his husband Leighton Brown. They are also the creators of Instagram’s @lgbt_history, and live in Washington, D.C., where Leighton is an attorney and Matthew, a former attorney, is a writer and lecturer. With their meticulous and visually engaging approach to documenting the radical fight for queer liberation, Matthew and Leighton are respected members of a new generation of queer historians. We Are Everywhere is the couple’s first book.
This event includes a signing with books for sale.
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.
