Literati is thrilled to host novelist Chloe Benjamin in support of her latest book The Immortalists, a story of four siblings struggling with fate and family following a psychic’s mysterious prophecy.
About The Immortalists:
If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?
It’s 1969 in New York City’s Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. In search of one thing they can know for sure, the Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.
Though the siblings keep the dates secret from one another, their prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in ’80s San Francisco. Dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11, hoping to control fate; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.
A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.
Chloe Benjamin is the author of the novel The Anatomy of Dreams, which received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was longlisted for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. She is a graduate of Vassar College and holds an MFA in fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in The Millions, PANK, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband in Madison, Wisconsin.
Literati is thrilled to welcome back poet Raymond McDaniel who will read from his new collection Cataracts
About Cataracts:
Poetry as Escher: shifting perspective, a landscape that doesn’t stand still, and questions that fold in on themselves.
“A registering, a remembering, a naming, a seeing behind and beyond seeing: The Cataracts is a book of blindness and insight, offering a tenderly, sometimes painfully, scrutinized world. With gorgeous catalogs, reticulated narratives, and aphoristic summings-up, McDaniel offers a mode of neo-Stoic inquiry into ethics and epistemology, of ‘logopoeia, ‘ the dance of the intellect. Here too are sharpened senses, alert to ‘the emerald blur’ of a richly greened world, to ‘the sea the stupid wall exists to stop, ‘ to trip-wired words and moonlit reflections. McDaniel is an astute, generous poet of human stupidity and longing, and his is a mature, ramifying sensibility, alive to the profound tension between the many and the one, the pressure of multitudes and the requirement to declare oneself. These poems both name the wounds and refuse easy balm. As the title of one stunning long poem has it, ‘This Is Going to Hurt.'” –Maureen McLane
“Raymond McDaniel has always been the most brilliant of poets–razor sharp in intellect, take-no-prisoners in form. What is new in The Cataracts is a broader, more hospitable ease with the legible forms of feeling, with even–remarkable!–the partial lineaments of narrative. Make no mistake: this is narrative-with-leverage; the poet’s dazzling mind-play is perfectly intact. Among the other gifts these poems have to offer is a penetrating inquiry into the physics, the metaphysics, and the brutal socioeconomics of sight. From its ravishing title poem to its most excoriating political critiques, this is a book for which I am profoundly grateful.” –Linda Gregerson
Raymond McDaniel is the author of Special Powers and Abilities, Saltwater Empire and Murder (a violet), a National Poetry Series selection. Born in Florida, McDaniel now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, teaches at the University of Michigan, and writes for The Constant Critic.
Literati is excited to welcome poet Rae Paris who will be reading from her new collection The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory
About The Forgetting Tree:
Rae Paris began writing The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory in 2010, while traveling the United States, visiting sites of racial trauma, horror, and resistance. The desire to do this work came from being a child of parents born and raised in New Orleans during segregation, who ultimately left for California in the late 1950s. After the death of her father in 2011, the fiction Paris had been writing gave way to poetry and short prose, which were heavily influenced by the questions she’d long been considering about narrative, power, memory, and freedom. Paris is driven by the familial and historical spaces and by what happens when we remember seemingly disparate images and moments. A blending of prose, poetry, and images, The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory is a necessary collection that argues for a deeper understanding of past and present so we might imagine a more hopeful, sustaining, and loving future for Black lives.
Rae Paris is from Carson, California with roots extending to New Orleans. Her work has been supported by a NEA Literature Fellowship, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Hedgebrook, Hambidge Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts, and VONA. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington.
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. 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.
This week’s reading features Sam Krowchenko and Kyle Hunt.
Sam Krowchenko’s writing has appeared in Salon, Full-Stop, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among other venues. A bookseller at Literati, he also hosts Shelf Talking, the store’s official podcast.
Kyle Hunt is a poet from West Texas and Middle Tennessee. He has work published with Toe Good, previously known as Toe Good Poetry.
Literati is excited to welcome cardiologist and clinical professor Dr. Joel Kahn to share with us his new book The Plant-Based Solution
About The Plant-Based Solution:
Each of us has access to the most powerful source of preventative medicine on the planet—a whole-foods, plant-based diet. With The Plant-Based Solution, leading cardiologist Dr. Joel Kahn explores how a vegan diet can help us prevent and reverse our most common chronic diseases, supported with decades of scientific research. Includes a 21-day meal plan with over 60 easy and delicious recipes from Kahn’s popular health food restaurant, the GreenSpace Café.
A passionate, compelling, and scientific argument for plant-based nutrition
Are you ready to feel better, look better, and heal the planet at the same time? Then it’s time to revolutionize your health from the inside out. With The Plant-Based Solution, leading cardiologist Dr. Joel Kahn shows how everyone can cultivate optimal well-being with a whole-foods, plant-based diet.
Known as America’s Healthy Heart Doc, Dr. Kahn has already helped thousands of people prevent and reverse heart disease. But what about other chronic conditions, such as adult diabetes, obesity, gut health, osteoporosis, autoimmune disease, and even low sex drive? It turns out that all these conditions and more can be improved with a plant-based diet—and Dr. Kahn has the evidence to prove it.
Drawing from decades of experience, Dr. Kahn brings together a wealth of scientific research and in-depth case studies to clearly demonstrate how you can take charge of your own health. Highlights include:
- Learn how you can lose weight, get off medication, reduce your risk of cancer, and reverse diabetes with a plant-based diet
- Myth-busting—why most people get it wrong when it comes to calcium, protein, carbs, and more
- The surprising links between a vegan diet and your sex drive, gut health, and brain chemistry
- Why plants might hold the key to better aging
- Understand exactly what’s happening inside your body, so you can decide for yourself what to eat and why
Joel Kahn, MD, is one of the world’s leading cardiologists, a bestselling author, and a popular lecturer who inspires others to think scientifically and critically about the body’s ability to heal through proper nutrition. Dr. Kahn serves as Clinical Professor of Medicine at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit and is founder of the Kahn Center for Cardiac Longevity. His first book, The Whole Heart Solution, was the basis of a national public TV special. Dr. Kahn lives with his wife and three children in the Detroit area, where he has recently opened the popular health food restaurant, the GreenSpace Café.
Rescheduled from November. Widely published Cleveland performance poet Siaara Freeman, who rose to national prominence in 2014 at the Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam in Detroit with a searing performance of her autobiographical poem “The Drug Dealer’s Daughter,” reads from her debut collection Good Morning, Hood Warning. Many of her poems are in the voice of a persona called “Urban Girl.” The program begins with open mike readings.
7-8:30 p.m., Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663
Reading by Ferris State University writing professor Jamie Thomas, a widely published poet whose debut collection, Etch and Blur, is praised by a Poets’ Quarterly review for its “wordplay and cleverness, the irony of which offers up moving turns when the poems brush against genuine introspective emotionality.” Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
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 bring poet Jane Hirshfield and novelist Brit Bennett at University of Michigan Museum Helmut Stern Auditorium.
JANE HIRSHFIELD is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Beauty; Come, Thief; After; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She has edited and cotranslated four books presenting the work of poets from the past and is the author of two major collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. Her books have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize; they have been named best books of the year by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, and Financial Times; and they have won the California Book Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Hirshfield has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Poetry, Orion, Discover, The American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and eight editions of The Best American Poetry. A resident of Northern California since 1974, she is a current chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Her work is featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. She is one of the National Book Foundation’s 2016 5 Under 35 honorees.
Literati is thrilled to welcome poets Katherine Edgren and Jennifer Burd for a reading of their new books The Grain Beneath the Gloss and Day’s Late Blue.
Katherine Edgren grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan and was first published at the age of seventeen under her maiden name: Kathy Kool. In 2004, she was awarded first place for the Writer’s Digest non-rhyming poetry contest, and appeared in The Year’s Best Writing in 2005. Her poems have been published in the Christian Science Monitor, the Birmingham Poetry Review, Barbaric Yawp, Main Channel Voices, Oracle, Bear Creek Haiku, the Coe Review, and the Evening Street Review. They also appear in Writers Reading at Sweetwaters, An Anthology, 2007, and the Poetry Society of Michigan Anthology 2016. While Katherine is now retired, in her work life she served as a City Councilmember in Ann Arbor, Michigan, raised money for the ACLU, was a project manager on research and intervention projects in Detroit addressing asthma and air quality, and managed a department at University Health Service, the University of Michigan. Her two chapbooks were published by Finishing Line Press: “Transports,” and “Long Division.” In addition to writing, she loves to bike, garden, hike, swim, sing, and walk her dog. She lives in Dexter with her husband, and has two grown children and two grandchildren.
Jennifer Burd has had poetry published in numerous print and online journals. She is author of two full-length books of poetry, Days’ Late Blue (2017; Cherry Grove Collections) and Body and Echo (2010; PlainView Press), a chapbook with CD of original poems set to music by Laszlo Slomovits, Receiving the Shore(2016, Little Light Publications), and a book of creative nonfiction, Daily Bread: A Portrait of Homeless Men & Women of Lenawee County, Michigan (2009; Bottom Dog Press). She is co-author of a children’s play based on Patricia Polacco’s book I Can Hear the Sun, which was produced by Wild Swan Theatre of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2015. She is also the recipient of the 2017-2018 Picture Book Mentorship from the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), Michigan chapter. Burd received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington in Seattle. She currently teaches writing and literature classes at Jackson Community College, as well as creative writing classes online through The Loft Literary Center (Minneapolis).
Have you ever pulled a ratatouille and found a rat on your head? Do you ever question the larger impact of a cup of coffee? Have you gotten fed up with constantly being kidnapped? Ever daydream about America’s history if women were the founders?
Do you enjoy question leads that ultimately serve as clickbait in order to intrigue potential audience members?
Then we are the place for you! RC Players is hosting our semi-annual comedic Evening of Scenes performance Friday, Jan. 26 and Saturday, Jan. 27 at 8 p.m. in the Keene Theater, located in the basement of our dear East Quad. As always, our production is as free as the wind beneath my wings!
Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your parents, tell your dogs and cats and lizards and rats (they can find themselves in the subject matter of one of the scenes)! Feel free to share this event, or invite people who would love a good laugh in a theater.
