Calendar

Nov
8
Wed
Prechter Lecture: Marya Hornbacher @ Kahn Auditorium
Nov 8 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

*Featured Speaker Marya Hornbacher
*Panel discussion about the present and future of research in bipolar disorder
*Reception
The University of Michigan Psychiatry Department is an approved provider with the Michigan Social Work Continuing Education Collaborative. 2 CE Clock Hours for social workers are available for continuing education for this event. Approved provider number for social work: MICEC-0063.
This event is free and open to the public – but pre-registration is required: http://www.prechterprogram.org/lecture/
If you are unable to attend in person, you can join via live webcast at 6:00 p.m. EST on 11/8/2017 using this link: michmed.org/Erapv
The book will be available for purchase at the event. Marya will sign books during the reception.
Sponsored By:
The Bruce C. Abrams Foundation
Holbrook’s Roofing
Kahn Auditorium, A. Alfred Taubman Biomedical Science Research Building, 109 Zina Pitcher Place, Ann Arbor, MI 48109. Free. kbergman@umich.edu.kbergman@umich.edu http://www.prechterprogram.org/lecture/

Nov
9
Thu
Art Spiegelman: Comics is the Yiddish of Art @ Michigan Theater
Nov 9 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Art Spiegelman has helped bring comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. In 1992, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust narrative MAUS- which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. MAUS II continued the remarkable story of his parents’ survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America. His comics are best known for their shifting graphic styles, formal complexity, and controversial content. His presentation will take his audience on a chronological tour of the evolution of comics while explaining the value of this medium and why it should not be ignored.
 Free. 734.615.8503. 

Nov
12
Sun
Lecture: Tiya Miles: Examining the Experiences of the Unfree in the Frontier Outpost of Detroit @ Rackham Amphitheater
Nov 12 @ 12:19 pm – 1:19 pm

Literati is proud to partner with the Clements Library and the Detroit School to host author and professor Tiya Miles for a lecture on her latest book Dawn of Detroit at the Rackham Amphitheater.

About Dawn of Detroit:
Most Americans believe that slavery was a creature of the South, and that Northern states and territories provided stops on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. In this paradigm-shifting book, celebrated historian Tiya Miles reveals that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest’s iconic city: Detroit.

In this richly researched and eye-opening book, Miles has pieced together the experience of the unfree—both native and African American—in the frontier outpost of Detroit, a place wildly remote yet at the center of national and international conflict. Skillfully assembling fragments of a distant historical record, Miles introduces new historical figures and unearths struggles that remained hidden from view until now. The result is fascinating history, little explored and eloquently told, of the limits of freedom in early America, one that adds new layers of complexity to the story of a place that exerts a strong fascination in the media and among public intellectuals, artists, and activists.

A book that opens the door on a completely hidden past, The Dawn of Detroit is a powerful and elegantly written history, one that completely changes our understanding of slavery’s American legacy.

Tiya Miles is the recipient of a 2011 MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and is a professor at the University of Michigan in the departments of American culture, Afro-American and African studies, history, women’s studies, and in the Native American Studies Program. She lives in Ann Arbor.

Event date:
Friday, December 8, 2017 – 4:15pm
Event address:
915 E. Washington
Ann ArborMI 48109
Nov
13
Mon
Trans Awareness Week Keynote Speech: Z Nicolazzo @ School of Social Work Bldg
Nov 13 @ 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm

Join us in welcoming Z Nicolazzo (pronouns: ze/hir) to campus. Ze will join us for Transgender Awareness Week on Monday, November 13th. Ze is an assistant professor in the Adult and Higher Education program, and a faculty associate in the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, both at Northern Illinois University. Hir research focuses on mapping gender across college contexts, with a particular emphasis on affirmative and resilience-based research alongside trans* students. Ze recently published a book titled Trans* in College: Transgender Students’ Strategies for Navigating Campus Life and the Institutional Politics of Inclusion.

Co-sponsored with Women’s Studies, U-M Libraries, Counseling and Psychological Services, Center for the Education of Women, the Residential College, Center for the Study of Higher and Post-secondary Education, Michigan Community Scholars Program, Institute for Research on Gender and Women, Institute for the Humanities, School of Social Work TBLG Matters and Housing Diversity and Inclusion.

Nov
14
Tue
CWPS Faculty Lecture Series: Amy Chavasse @ 1405 EQ, RC
Nov 14 @ 6:00 pm – 7:30 pm

Professor Chavasse presents research from her travels to the Malta Festival in Poznan, Poland, and to Berlin, Germany where she created a new dance work for Tanz Tangente. In Poznan, the panoply of dance, music and theater events focused on the festival theme– The Balkans Platform, (Platforma Blakany), with the title of “We The People”, analogous to our “not my president” protests. Chavasse will discuss the highly politicized works she witnessed as an audience member, posing questions about gender politics and social inequality and autocracy. She will also discuss the genesis of a new dance created with Tanz Tangente in Berlin, called “Little Monsters,” in which the movement exploration is centered around pulsing, agitation, manipulation and absence.

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.

If you are a person with a disability who requires an accommodation to participate in this event, please contact Center for World Performance Studies, at 734-936-2777, at least one week in advance of this event. Please be aware that advance notice is necessary as some accommodations may require more time for the University to arrange.

Dec
5
Tue
Seager Inaugural Lecture: Laura Kasischke: Where Now, New and Selected Poems @ Rackham Amphitheater
Dec 5 @ 4:00 am – 5:30 am

Laura Kasischke’s most recent book, from which she will read, brings new poems together with work from her previous nine collections of poetry, published over the last twenty-five years. The citation for the National Book Critics Circle Award, which she received in 2011, reads: “No poet alive has worked harder to depict the contemporary American life course: she has shown herself, in sharply vivid poems, as a girl, as a wayward teen, as a young adult, as a passionate and worried mother with a baby, a child, and now a teenaged son…And no poet now at work does better than Kasischke in finding ways to depict not just how we feel about life stages and the people in them but also how we change as those stages go by…Kasischke stands for many among us.” Her collection of new and selected poems gathers together the breadth of this vision, and Kasischke will offer readings from both her earliest and most recent work.

For questions, contact Julie Sparkman at jmallard@umich.edu

Jan
15
Mon
Hill Harper @ Hill Auditorium
Jan 15 @ 10:00 am – 11:30 am

Talk on some aspect of MLK’s legacy by this renowned actor and author of several best-selling books, most recently Letters to an Incarcerated Brother: Encouragement, Hope, and Healing for Inmates and Their Loved Ones.
10-11:30 a.m., Hill Auditorium. Free. 764-7522.

Shawn Martinbrough @ Stamps Auditorium
Jan 15 @ 2:30 pm – 4:00 pm

Literati is proud to partner with the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design to host artist Shawn Martinbrough for a talk entitled “Continuing the Legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Through the Art of Storytelling”

Shawn Martinbrough is the author of How to Draw Noir Comics: The Art and Technique of Visual Storytelling, published by Random House and reprinted in several languages. He is a critically acclaimed creator/artist whose DC, Marvel and Dark Horse Comics projects include Batman: Detective ComicsLuke Cage NoirCaptain AmericaThe Black Panther and Hellboy: Secret Nature.  Currently, Martinbrough is the artist of Thief of Thieves, the acclaimed crime series written by Robert Kirkman, creator of the AMC television series, The Walking Dead and award winning author Andy Diggle.

Martinbrough has co-created characters featured in the blockbuster 20th Century Fox feature film, Deadpool, the animated Batman: Gotham Knights and the FOX television series, GOTHAM and The GIFTED.

Shawn’s work has been covered by The New York TimesThe Washington Post, NPR, The Hollywood ReporterEntertainment Weekly, BET, ESSENCEEBONYThe New York Daily NewsUSA Today, AOL, Publisher’s Weekly, and SIRIUS/XM Radio.

Jan
24
Wed
Lecture: Adrienne Maree Brown @ School of Social Work Bldg
Jan 24 @ 12:00 pm – 1:30 pm

Literati is pleased to partner with the University of Michigan School of Social Work to host Adrienne Maree Brown, author of Emergent Strategy, for a MLK Symposium lecture entitled “From Theory to Practice: Engaging Intersectional Organizing for Structual Transformation.”

About Emergent Strategy:
Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.

adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit.

Feb
5
Mon
Gregory Boyle: Barking to the Choir @ Michigan Union Rogell Ballroom
Feb 5 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Literati is pleased to welcome Gregory Boyle to Ann Arbor! He will be speaking at the Rogel Ballrom in the Union on topics from his new book Barking to the Choir: The Power of Radical Kinship.

About Barking to the Choir:
In his first book, Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion, Gregory Boyle introduced us to Homeboy Industries, the largest gang-intervention program in the world Critics hailed that book as an “astounding literary and spiritual feat” ( Publishers Weekly) that is “destined to become a classic of both urban reportage and contemporary spirituality” ( Los Angeles Times). Now, after the suc-cessful expansion of Homeboy Industries, Boyle returns with Barking to the Choir to reveal how com-passion is transforming the lives of gang members.

In a nation deeply divided and plagued by poverty and violence, Barking to the Choir offers a snapshot into the challenges and joys of life on the margins. Sergio, arrested at nine, in a gang by twelve, and serving time shortly thereafter, now works with the substance-abuse team at Homeboy to help others find sobriety. Jamal, abandoned by his family when he tried to attend school at age seven, gradually finds forgive-ness for his schizophrenic mother. New father Cuco, who never knew his own dad, thinks of a daily adventure on which to take his four-year-old son. These former gang members uplift the soul and reveal how bright life can be when filled with unconditional love and kindness.

This book is guaranteed to shake up our ideas about God and about people with a glimpse at a world defined by more compassion and fewer barriers. Gently and humorously, Barking to the Choir invites us to find kinship with one another and reconvinces us all of our own goodness.

Gregory Boyle is the founder of Homeboy Industries in Los Angeles, CA. Now in its 30th year, Homeboy traces its roots to when Boyle, a Jesuit priest with advanced degrees in English and theology, served as pastor of Dolores Mission Church, then the poorest Catholic parish in Los Angeles, which also had the highest concentration of gang activity in the city. Homeboy has become the largest gang-intervention, rehabilitation, and reentry program in the world, and employs and trains gang members and felons in a range of social enterprises, as well as provides critical services to thousands of men and women each year who walk through its doors seeking a better life. Father Boyle has received the California Peace Prize, the James Beard Foundation Humanitarian of the Year Award, and the University of Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal. He was inducted into the California Hall of Fame and named a 2014 Champion of Change by the White House. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Tattoos on the Heart: The Power of Boundless Compassion.

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