Northern California native Tim Hunt reads from his latest book, Poem’s Poems & Other Poems, a collection of poems in which a persona named Poem seeks self-definition through the writing of poetry. DePauw University English profesor Deborah Geis says Poem is “always somewhere that he doesn’t quite belong, or is asking the ‘wrong’ questions, yet ultimately charms us with his love of both illusions and allusions.” The program begins with open mike readings.
7-8:30 p.m., Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663
Monica Youn is the author of three books of poetry: Blackacre (Graywolf Press, 2016); Barter(Graywolf Press, 2003); and Ignatz (Four Way Books, 2010), which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the New York Times Magazine, and she has been awarded fellowships from the Library of Congress and Stanford University, among other awards. A former attorney, she now teaches poetry at Princeton University and at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. She previously taught at Bennington College, Columbia University, and at the Sarah Lawrence College MFA Program. Youn’s poetry has been described as “interested in the intersection between the beauty we want in life, and the darkness that often serves as an invisible barrier for it,” with her background in law allowing her to “probe and navigate these gray areas gently, using an economy of language that both cuts to the heart of the matter and reveals nuanced layers of caution, lust, and desperation.”
One of the most prolific American writers of the 20th century, Joyce Carol Oates counts historical biographies, depictions of working class families, and magical realist Gothic fiction among her oeuvre. She often depicts hardships and violence in American towns, and has received both critical and popular acclaim in her 50-year career. Oates is the author of over 70 books, including the novels them (1969), winner of the National Book Award; Bellefleur (1980); You Must Remember This (1987); Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990); We Were the Mulvaneys (1996); Blonde (2000), winner of the National Book Award; The Gravedigger’s Daughter (2007); and The Accursed (2013). Her short stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Harper’s, and have been widely anthologized. In an interview for the Paris Review, she says: “I try to write books that can be read in one way by a literal-minded reader, and in quite another way by a reader alert to symbolic abbreviation and parodistic elements. And yet, it’s the same book—or nearly. A trompe l’oeil, a work of ‘as if.’”
Literati is excited to welcome Jennifer Weiss-Wolf in support of her new book Periods Gone Public.
About Periods Gone Public
Leading menstrual rights advocate, writer, and attorney Jennifer Weiss-Wolf’s PERIODS GONE PUBLIC examines the cultural and political history of menstruation and the new, high-profile menstrual equity movement dispelling stigma and promoting advocacy on a global level.
The first book to explore menstruation in the current cultural and political landscape and to investigate the new wave of period activism taking the world by storm.
After centuries of being shrouded in taboo and superstition, periods have gone mainstream. Seemingly overnight, a new, high-profile movement has emerged—one dedicated to bold activism, creative product innovation, and smart policy advocacy—to address the centrality of menstruation in relation to core issues of gender equality and equity.
In Periods Gone Public, Jennifer Weiss-Wolf—the woman Bustle dubbed one of the nation’s “badass menstrual activists”—explores why periods have become a prominent political cause. From eliminating the tampon tax, to enacting new laws ensuring access to affordable, safe products, menstruation is no longer something to whisper about. Weiss-Wolf shares her firsthand account in the fight for “period equity” and introduces readers to the leaders, pioneers, and everyday people who are making change happen. From societal attitudes of periods throughout history—in the United States and around the world—to grassroots activism and product innovation, Weiss-Wolf challenges readers to face stigma head-on and elevate an agenda that recognizes both the power—and the absolute normalcy—of menstruation.
Jennifer Weiss-Wolf is a leading advocate and voice for equitable menstrual policy in America. Her petition to end the tampon tax, launched in partnership with Cosmopolitan, catalyzed a national movement. Newsweek deemed her the “architect of the U.S. policy campaign to squash the tampon tax.” Weiss-Wolf’s writing and work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, TIME, Newsweek, Cosmopolitan, Glamour, The Nation, Bloomberg, and Ms. magazine, among others. She is on the Advisory Board of ZanaAfrica Foundation, which provides essential menstrual health education and products to girls in Kenya. She lives in Maplewood, New Jersey.
Literati is pleased to welcome the Honorable Raymond M. Kethledge who will be discussing his new book Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude.
About Lead Yourself First:
To inspire and lead others, you must first lead yourself: a powerful and invaluable guide to productive time spent alone.
Famous leaders have long used solitude as means for inspiration. Solitude is a state of mind, a space in which to focus on one’s own thoughts without distraction, with a unique power to bring mind and soul together in clear-eyed conviction. In our time-challenged world today, such space is ever more important to leaders, and increasingly difficult to find. We are losing solitude without even realizing it.
Lead Yourself First will inspire leaders to spend time alone. Through firsthand interviews with a wide range of contemporary leaders in politics, business, sports, the military, and family life, as well as through illuminating historical accounts of Abraham Lincoln, Jane Goodall, Pope John Paul II, Aung San Suu Kyi, and others, leadership experts Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin show how solitude can improve clarity and bolster creativity; generate the emotional balance needed to sustain certainty and the moral courage required to challenge convention; and strengthen a leader’s ability to make courageous decisions in the face of adversity and criticism. In years past, leaders used solitude subconsciously; today it takes a conscious choice to unplug from one’s daily life. Introduced by Jim Collins (author of the bestseller Good to Great), Lead Yourself First is a crucial and timely guide, a rallying cry for how leaders can reclaim the power of solitude in today’s over-connected world.
Raymond M. Kethledge, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, formerly served as a law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy. He lives near Ann Arbor, Michigan.
We are thrilled to welcome three wonderful poets to Literati as part of our Poetry at Literati series! Donald Dunbar, Christine Hume, and Becky Winn will be reading poems for their latest collections.
About Safe Word:
Safe Word, Donald Dunbar’s second collection of poetry, acts as a tonic against spiritual death. This book is the kompromat of the undersoul, the blotter paper in the plea deal, a crystal jutting out of the center of an otherwise-innocent forehead. Dunbar chops, screws, solders, and sutures forms of thought and feeling into abominations you might just fall in love with, and be consumed by. Never be bored again.
About Shot:
In alternating currents of prose and verse, SHOT reaches beyond the tradition of the nocturne to illuminate contradictory impulses and intensities of night. SHOT inhabits the sinister, visionary, intimate, haunted, erotic capacities to see and hear things at night, in the fertile void containing our own psychological and physical darkness. Via Levinas who locates self-knowledge and ethical contract in insomnia, this darkness is one “stuck full of eyes.” Here the insomniac falls into a Beckettian pattern of waiting, in an inextricable dialogue with a selfhood that cannot settle down. In a perpetual play between empirical and abstract knowledge, tantrum and meditation, SHOT creates torque that drives beyond material experience.
Donald Dunbar lives in Portland, OR, and is the author of SAFE WORD and EYELID LICK, winner of the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series prize, as well as a number of chapbooks. In 2016 he co-founded Eyedrop, a virtual reality design studio. He has helped run If Not For Kidnap: a PDX Poetry Concern, The Poetry Data Project, and has contributed to a number of other worthy projects.
Christine Hume is the author of Shot (Counterpath Press, 2010); Alaskaphrenia (New Issues, 2004), winner of the Green Rose Award and Small Press Traffic’s 2005 Best Book of the Year Award; and Musca Domestica (Beacon Press, 2000), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She currently serves as the coordinator of the creative writing program at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she also lives. Her latest collection of poetry is entitled Questions Like a Face.
Becky Winn is a poet and designer living in Portland, Oregon. She is a contributing editor for Gramma Poetry and the founder of ĐIỆN, an artist collective and clothing brand.
Readings by U-M creative writing grad students, including fiction writers Michelle Cheever and poet Colin Walker.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 764-6330
The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends – a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
We are excited to welcome author Helen Benedict who will be reading and discussing her new novel Wolf Season
About Wolf Season
After a hurricane devastates a small town in upstate New York, the lives of three women and their young children are irrevocably changed. Rin, an Iraq War veteran, tries to protect her blind daughter and the three wolves under her care. Naema, a widowed doctor who fled Iraq with her wounded son, faces life-threatening injuries. Beth, who is raising a troubled son, waits out her Marine husband’s deployment in Afghanistan, equally afraid of him coming home and of him never returning at all. As they struggle to maintain their humanity and find hope, their war-torn lives collide in a way that will affect their entire community.
“No one writes with more authority or cool-eyed compassion about the experience of women in war both on and off the battlefield than Helen Benedict. In Wolf Season, she shows us the complicated ways in which the lives of those who serve and those who don’t intertwine and how—regardless of whether you are a soldier, the family of a soldier, or a refugee—the war follows you and your children for generations. Wolf Season is more than a novel for our times; it should be required reading.” —Elissa Schappell, author of Use Me and Blueprints for Building Better Girls
Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia University, writes frequently about justice, women, soldiers, and war. She is the author of seven novels, including Wolf Season (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press) and Sand Queen, a Publishers Weekly “Best Contemporary War Novel.” A recipient of both the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Benedict is also the author of five works of nonfiction and the play The Lonely Soldier Monologues: Women at War in Iraq. She lives in New York.
All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share. Hosted by local poets and former college English teachers Joe Kelty and Ed Morin.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is proud to be partnering with the Helen Zell Writers Program to host writers Mark Doty and Fernanda Eberstadt at the University of Michigan Museum of Art Helmut Stern Auditorium.
Mark Doty is the author of eight previous books of poetry and four books of prose. His many honors include the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, in the UK, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.
Fernanda Eberstadt is the author of four previous novels and one book of nonfiction. Her essays and criticism have appeared in “The New Yorker,” “The New York Times Magazine,” “Vogue,” “Vanity Fair,” and “Commentary.” She lives in London with her husband and two children.
Literat is excited to welcome history professor Rita Chin who will be sharing her latest book The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History
About The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe:
In 2010, the leaders of Germany, Britain, and France each declared that multiculturalism had failed in their countries. Over the past decade, a growing consensus in Europe has voiced similar decrees. But what do these ominous proclamations, from across the political spectrum, mean? From the influx of immigrants in the 1950s to contemporary worries about refugees and terrorism, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe examines the historical development of multiculturalism on the Continent. Rita Chin argues that there were few efforts to institute state-sponsored policies of multiculturalism, and those that emerged were pronounced failures virtually from their inception. She shows that today’s crisis of support for cultural pluralism isn’t new but actually has its roots in the 1980s.
Chin looks at the touchstones of European multiculturalism, from the urgent need for laborers after World War II to the public furor over the publication of The Satanic Verses and the question of French girls wearing headscarves to school. While many Muslim immigrants had lived in Europe for decades, in the 1980s they came to be defined by their religion and the public’s preoccupation with gender relations. Acceptance of sexual equality became the critical gauge of Muslims’ compatibility with Western values. The convergence of left and right around the defense of such personal freedoms against a putatively illiberal Islam has threatened to undermine commitment to pluralism as a core ideal. Chin contends that renouncing the principles of diversity brings social costs, particularly for the left, and she considers how Europe might construct an effective political engagement with its varied population.
Challenging the mounting opposition to a diverse society, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe presents a historical investigation into one continent’s troubled relationship with cultural difference.
Rita Chin is associate professor of history at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany and the coauthor of After the Nazi Racial State.
