Literati is pleased to welcome Rebecca J. Kinney and Stephen M. Ward for a discussion of their recent books about Detroit and the people who form its heart.
What is the “new Detroit” that everyone keeps talking about? In Beautiful Wasteland: The Rise of Detroit as America’s Postindustrial Frontier, Rebecca J. Kinney reveals that the contemporary story of Detroit’s rebirth is an upcycled version of the American Dream, which has long imagined access to work, home, and upward mobility as race-neutral projects. She tackles key questions about the future of postindustrial America, and shows how the narratives of Detroit’s history are deeply steeped in material and ideological investments in whiteness.
Rebecca J. Kinney, who grew up in metropolitan Detroit, is assistant professor in the School of Cultural and Critical Studies at Bowling Green State University.
In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs details both the personal and the political dimensions of the Boggses’ lives, highlighting the vital contributions these two figures made to black activist thinking. At once a dual biography of two crucial figures and a vivid portrait of Detroit as a center of activism, Ward’s book restores the Boggses, and the intellectual strain of black radicalism they shaped, to their rightful place in postwar American history.
Stephen Ward is associate professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies (DAAS) and the Residential College at the University of Michigan. He is also a board member of the James and Grace Lee Boggs Center to Nurture Community Leadership in Detroit.
Creative Writing Faculty read from their works:
Lolita Hernandez, Lecturer, RC Creative Writing and Literature
Laura Kasischke, RC ’84, Lecturer, RC Creative Writing and Literature Christopher Matthews, Lecturer, RC Creative Writing and Literature
Ken Mikolowski, Lecturer Emeritus, RC Creative Writing and Literature
Laura Thomas, RC ’88, Lecturer and Program Head, RC Creative Writing and Literature
2-4 p.m., Ann Arbor District Library Freespace (3rd floor), 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free. 971-5763.
$10 Suggested Donation
ÆPEX Contemporary Performance is excited to open its third season by bringing Hungarian-American violinist Hajnal Pivnick to Ann Arbor’s beloved Literati Bookstore.
Based in New York City, Pivnick will make her Ann Arbor debut with a solo program featuring internationally recognized composers Georg Friedrich Haas, Peter Eövös, Chrysanthe Tan, Kaija Saariaho, and Anahita Abbasi alongside poetry readings by local award-winning poet Adina Schoem (Midwestern Gothic, Palooka Press) and graduate students at the University of Michigan.
Pivnick’s performance will also feature an improvisation, which will accompany one of Schoem’s readings. This offering will expose concertgoers to the intimacy of musical creation, as Pivnick’s extemporaneous composition will be inspired by Schoem’s poem and tailored to the concert’s unique atmosphere.
You do not want to miss this special interdisciplinary presentation that brings local and national artists together in one of Ann Arbor’s most iconic cultural spaces!
ÆPEX Contemporary Performance is a concert presenting organization dedicated to presenting the music of underrepresented and rarely performed twentieth and twenty-first century composers to audiences across Michigan. Since our debut in December 2015, ÆPEX has produced fourteen concerts and community music events at venues in Ann Arbor, Ypsilanti, Detroit, and Kalamazoo. Learn more about our past and future programs and make a donation to support ÆPEX at aepexcontemporary.org. ÆPEX Contemporary Performance is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
2-4 p.m., Trinity Lutheran Church, 1400 W. Stadium. Free. annarborstorytelling.org, 997-5388.
2-4 p.m., Ann Arbor District Library Freespace (3rd floor). Free. 971-5763.
Join the Dexter District Library in welcoming back professional storytellers, Jane Fink and Steve Daut as they share the wit and wisdom of American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer, Mark Twain and American cartoonist, author, humorist, journalist, playwright, and celebrated wit, James Grover Thurber. This fun filled performance is sure to amuse and entertain. Register at the Adult Service Desk or call the library at 734-426-4477.
Contact: lryan@dexter.lib.mi.us
Location: Dexter District Library – Lower Level
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.
Literati is exited to host poet Elizabeth Schmuhl, an RC Creative Writing alum, who will be reading from her new collection Premonitions. Keith Taylor will give an introduction to the reading and lead a Q&A discussion aftewards.
About Premonitions:
Visceral and brimming with vitality, the poems in Premonitions reverberate with the voice of a woman on a secluded farm, confronting her emotional and physical isolation. Drawing on her own experience as a daughter of a third-generation fruit farmer, Elizabeth Schmuhl gives readers a fresh and powerful perspective on what it means to be alive.
Layering one upon another, the poems blur boundaries and create a volatile state out of which the remarkable and unexpected occur. Embracing chaos, change, and unpredictability, these poems are energetically charged and infused with succinct, imagistic language. They reach beyond the constraints assigned to the female form and examine a place where time, the body, sexuality, and the natural world are not fixed. At times surreal, at others painfully real, the poems in Premonitions are the expression of a human life that merges and melds with the world around it, acting and reacting, loving and despairing, disintegrating and rebuilding. The speaker travels fluidly between strata of the natural world and her own body. Adding to the complexity of her poems, Schmuhl creates additional layers of meaning as the poems and their titles relate to the author’s synesthesia, a sensory phenomenon through which letters and numbers are experienced as colors and emotions.
Premonitions will turn the reader inward, encouraging the examination of the small details of life and a growing acceptance of the perpetual turmoil and uncertainty of existence despite our own desire to find a firm footing. This volume will be prized by lovers of contemporary poetry and literature alike.
Elizabeth Schmuhl is a multidisciplinary artist whose work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Paper Darts, PANK, Hobart, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. She has worked at various nonprofits, including the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and currently works at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Keith Taylor has published many books over the years: collections of poetry, a collection of very short stories, co-edited volumes of essays and fiction, and a volume of poetry translated from Modern Greek.
7 p.m., Literati, 124 E. Washington. Free. 585-5567
This local poet reads from Love Dream with Television, her debut collection, written in Tucson, Arizona, that “wonders through the ways in which television, film, advertising, sporting events, and celebrity culture weave their ways into our lived experiences,” says Ensor. “Tucson and its queers have pushed me to be more in my body, more in conversation with place and spirit and alchemy.” Signing.
7 p.m., Literati, 124 E. Washington. Free. 585-5567
