Three authors discuss how their fiction transforms home into character. How do writers use assumptions about familiar places to find the unexpected and surprising? When is a hometown the whole trouble, and also the last, best hope for change? We’ll also talk about how the unique landscape of the upper Midwest inspires our fiction.
Prior to writing fiction and poetry, Kelly Fordon worked at the NPR member station in Detroit and for National Geographic magazine. Her fiction, poetry, and book reviews have appeared in The Boston Review, The Florida Review, Flashquake, The Kenyon Review, and various other journals. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks,On the Street Where We Live, which won the 2011 Standing Rock Chapbook Contest, and Tell Me When It Starts to Hurt, which was published by Kattywompus Press in 2013. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Queens University of Charlotte and works for InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit as a writer-in-residence.
Born and raised in Detroit, Lolita Hernandez is the author of Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant, winner of a 2005 PEN Beyond Margins Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Quiet Battles and snakecrossing. She is a 2012 Kresge Literary Arts fellow, and her poetry and fiction have appeared in a wide variety of literary publications. After over thirty-three years as a UAW worker at General Motors, she now teaches in the creative writing department in the University of Michigan Residential College.
Laura Hulthen Thomas’s short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany, and Witness. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
Readings by writers featured in the 10th annual edition of Prison Creative Arts Project magazine that features work by incarcerated and formerly incarcerated writers.
4 p.m., Pierpont Commons East Room. Free. 615-3204, 647-6771.
12 former inmates perform their new original play exploring alternatives to mass incarceration.
6:30-8 p.m., Keene Theatre, East Quad, 701 East University. Free. 647-4354.
Talk by freelance journalist Kerry Myers, whose reporting on the death penalty during his tenure as editor of the Louisiana State Penitentiary news magazine won a 2007 Thurgood Marshall Journalism Award.
4 p.m., Pierpont Commons East Room. Free. 615-3204, 647-6771.
The RC RAs are proud to host a Moth Story Slam, open to all!
The theme will be “The Caveat” — do with that what you will 
🙂
Find out more about the moth here: https://themoth.org/about
We will be having a workshop on March 22nd, 7-8pm in the Greene Lounge, open to anyone who wants to come listen to some stories, talk to other storywriters, bounce off ideas, be inspired by prompts, or practice their stories!
Apr. 7 & 8. U-M drama lecturer Kate Mendeloff directs RC students in Tennessee Williams’ one-act play about an American ex-prizefighter who arrives in an unnamed South or Central American town and meets a variety of surreal characters from history, myth, and literature over the course of 10 hallucinatory scenes.
7 p.m., U-M Matthaei Botanical Gardens, 1800 N. Dixboro. Free, but limited seating. Metered parking. 647-4354.
Apr. 7 & 8. U-M drama lecturer Kate Mendeloff directs RC students in Tennessee Williams’ one-act play about an American ex-prizefighter who arrives in an unnamed South or Central American town and meets a variety of surreal characters from history, myth, and literature over the course of 10 hallucinatory scenes.
7 p.m., U-M Matthaei Botanical Gardens, 1800 N. Dixboro. Free, but limited seating. Metered parking. 647-4354.
Literati is thrilled to welcome poet Diane Seuss who will be reading from her new collection Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl. Diane will be joined by fellow poet Laura Kasischke for conversation after the reading.
About Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl:
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl takes its title from Rembrandt’s painting, a dark emblem of femininity, violence, and the viewer’s own troubled gaze. In Diane Seuss’s new collection, the notion of the still life is shattered and Rembrandt’s painting is presented across the book in pieces–details that hide more than they reveal until they’re assembled into a whole. With invention and irreverence, these poems escape gilded frames and overturn traditional representations of gender, class, and luxury. Instead, Seuss invites in the alienated, the washed-up, the ugly, and the freakish–the overlooked many of us who might more often stand in a Walmart parking lot than before the canvases of Pollock, O’Keeffe, and Rothko. Rendered with precision and profound empathy, this extraordinary gallery of lives in shards shows us that “our memories are local, acute, and unrelenting.”
Diane Seuss is the author of three previous poetry collections, including Four-Legged Girl, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Wolf Lake, White Gown Blown Open, winner of the Juniper Prize. She lives in Michigan.
Laura Kasischke is a poet and novelist whose fiction has been made into several feature-length films. Her book of poems, Space, in Chains, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Chelsea, Michigan.
June 7-10, 14-17, & 21-24. U-M Residential College drama lecturer Kate Mendeloff directs students and local actors in an alfresco production of Shakespeare’s vividly poetic love story, a romantic tragedy about “star-crossed lovers” defying their feuding families. Initially lightheartedly comic, then dire, this perennially popular drama is the heart-wrenching tale of 2 impetuous young lovers destroyed by the intransigence of their feuding families, their own mistakes, and some incredibly bad timing. The RC’s annual Shakespeare in the Arb productions have become a hugely popular local summer tradition. Director Mendeloff takes special care to make the shifting Arb environments an active force in the performance. Bring a blanket or portable chair to sit on; dress for the weather.
6:30 p.m., meet at the Peony Garden entrance at 1610 Washington Heights. $20 (Friends of Matthaei Botanical Gardens & Nichols Arboretum, $15; students, $15; seniors age 62 & over, $17; youth under age 18, $10; kids under 5, free) at the gate only. Tickets go on sale at 5:30 p.m. Space limited; come early. 998-9540.
June 7-10, 14-17, & 21-24. U-M Residential College drama lecturer Kate Mendeloff directs students and local actors in an alfresco production of Shakespeare’s vividly poetic love story, a romantic tragedy about “star-crossed lovers” defying their feuding families. Initially lightheartedly comic, then dire, this perennially popular drama is the heart-wrenching tale of 2 impetuous young lovers destroyed by the intransigence of their feuding families, their own mistakes, and some incredibly bad timing. The RC’s annual Shakespeare in the Arb productions have become a hugely popular local summer tradition. Director Mendeloff takes special care to make the shifting Arb environments an active force in the performance. Bring a blanket or portable chair to sit on; dress for the weather.
6:30 p.m., meet at the Peony Garden entrance at 1610 Washington Heights. $20 (Friends of Matthaei Botanical Gardens & Nichols Arboretum, $15; students, $15; seniors age 62 & over, $17; youth under age 18, $10; kids under 5, free) at the gate only. Tickets go on sale at 5:30 p.m. Space limited; come early. 998-9540.
