On the second Wednesday of the month, we hold a relaxed and informal poetry workshop. Anyone is welcome to participate. At a workshop, you are encouraged to present a poem you are working on for positive and constructive comment by your peers. Please bring about 6 copies of the work you are presenting.
Your Poetry Circle Coordinators are Edward Morin, Joseph Kelty, and David Jibson.
Literati is honored to welcome back poet Clayton Eshelman who will be reading from his new collection Pollen Aria.
About Pollen Aria:
That Clayton Eshleman has not ceased from exploration over a career spanning more than 60 years is witnessed by the bulk, range, and diversity of his prior work. Now in his 80’s Eshleman presents us with a last collection of his poems-mostly recent, a few older. That he has sought to open up his life and work, to entwine and entangle it with others, through observation and vision, research and scholarship, translation and editing, and collaboration and conversation, all of this reflects Eshleman’s life commitment, indeed a commitment to life in writing poetry.
Clayton Eshleman has had published roughly 100 books and chapbooks of original poetry, translations, and nonfiction writings, and edited seventy issues of magazines and journals, including the ground-breaking Caterpillar and Sulfur. His writings have appeared in over 500 literary magazines and journals around the world and his books and writings have been translated into over a dozen languages. He has won many poetry awards, fellowships, and translation awards for his works through the years. It is undoubtedly unnecessary to observe that he made and has fulfilled a life commitment to poetry. Now in his 80’s he resides with his wife Caryl in Ypsilanti, MI.
All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell.
We welcome author Sharon McRill, president of The Betty Brigade based in Ann Arbor, in support of her new book Downsizing the Silver Tsunami: Who to Call and Where Does the Stuff Go?
About the book: This is the moving reference you’ve been waiting for! Downsizing the Silver Tsunami is the compilation of years of working with thousands of clients and helping them resolve the moving problems and logistical and vendor questions that come up everyda, a comprehensive reference tool that you can refer to over and over to help you navigate the difficult pathways of estate sales, consignment dealers, picking the right real estate agent, why a trust or will are important and so many other moving and downsizing questions.
About the author: Sharon McRill is owner and president of The Betty Brigade, a relocation and organization company based in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her mission is to help people live more organized and less stressful lives.
Laid off from a corporate marketing job in 2003, McRill turned the setback into an opportunity. As a busy professional herself, she wanted to help other busy people get organized and stay that way. She’s now done so successfully for 15 plus years. McRill, a graduate from Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses, has expanded her brand’s influence through strategic marketing and sales reaching 100k plus on social media daily. Her highly trained team of 12 is comprised of handymen, organizing experts and logistical wizards.
McRill has done scores of television and radio interviews and has been featured in such media outlets as Detroit Free Press, Detroit News, Crain’s Detroit Business, Forbes.com and The Ann Arbor Observer. Additionally, she won awards from the ATHENA foundation, Tuck School of Business, and Women Business Owners of Southeast Michigan.
Crazy Wisdom Poetry Series hosted by Joe Kelty, Ed Morin, and David Jibson • Second and Fourth Wednesdays, 7-9 p.m. in the Crazy Wisdom Tea Room • Second Wednesdays are poetry workshop nights. All writers welcome to share and discuss their own poetry and short fiction. Sign up for new participants begins at 6:45 p.m.
Fourth Wednesdays have a featured reader for 50 minutes and then open mic for an hour. All writers welcome to share. Sign up begins at 6:45 p.m. Free. Contact Ed at 668-7523; eacmorso@sbcglobal.net or cwpoetrycircle.tumblr.com.
All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell, at the AASG monthly meeting.
Cozine Welch is managing editor of Michigan Review of Prisoner Creative Writing. The program begins with open mike readings.
We welcome the eight participants from Literati’s first Fiction Writing Workshop, reading original prose as a culmination and celebration of the eight-week course run by Literati bookseller and Creative Programs Manager, Gina Balibrera Amyx. Free and open to the public.
About Literati’s Fiction Writing Workshop: Literati Bookstore’s Fiction Writing Workshop is an 8-week writing intensive to be held in May and June 2019. The workshop will focus on elements of prose–narrative structure, context, and especially, voice. The arc of this course will be shaped by the curiosities and obsessions of the group. Each writer will be workshopped by the group, and will write and receive in-depth, typed critiques of work from other participants and the instructor. At the conclusion of the session, participants will receive two craft texts, as well as three texts selected personally for them by the instructor, to complement and inform their writing, a one-on-one conference with the instructor, and the opportunity to give a public reading of original work. The workshop is taught by Gina Balibrera Amyx, graduate of University of Michigan’s Helen Zell MFA program in Prose, and currently, Creative Programs Manager at Literati. Her writing has been featured in the Boston Review, Ploughshares, Michigan Quarterly Review, and The Wandering Song, an anthology of the Central American diaspora.
We welcome authors Joe Sacksteder and Matt Kirkpatrick in support of their latest, Make/Shift: Stories and The Ambrose J. and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art, respectively, as part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati series. A book signing will follow the reading. The event is free and open to the public.
Situated in the absurd and pop-culture, the stories in Make/Shift land athletes, actors, musicians, and grievers at the center of more dire spectacles than they’d anticipated.
A strange museum, an even stranger curator, the deceased artist who haunts him, and the mystery surrounding the museum founders’ daughter, lost at sea as a child . . . The Ambrose J. and Vivian T. Seagrave Museum of 20th Century American Art is by turns a dark comedy, a ghost story, a romance, a whodunit, a family saga, and an exhibition catalog
Joe Sacksteder is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Utah. Fugitive Traces, his album of Werner Herzog audio collages, will be available from Punctum Books. His writing has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Florida Review, The Literary Review, Passages North, Hobart, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He is currently a visiting instructor at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan.
Matthew Kirkpatrick is a writer and associate professor of creative writing at Eastern Michigan University.
We welcome the world’s preeminent writer of comics and graphic novels about science back to our store in support of his latest, Hawking. Signing to follow. Free and open to the public.
About the book: From his early days at the St Albans School and Oxford, Stephen Hawking’s brilliance and good humor were obvious to everyone he met. A lively and popular young man, it’s no surprise that he would later rise to celebrity status.
At twenty-one he was diagnosed with ALS, a degenerative neuromuscular disease. Though the disease weakened his muscles and limited his ability to move and speak, it did nothing to limit his mind. He went on to do groundbreaking work in cosmology and theoretical physics for decades after being told he had only a few years to live. He brought his intimate understanding of the universe to the public in his 1988 bestseller, A Brief History of Time. Soon after, he added pop-culture icon to his accomplishments by playing himself on shows like Star Trek, The Simpsons, and The Big Bang Theory, and becoming an outspoken advocate for disability rights.
In Hawking, writer Jim Ottaviani and artist Leland Myrick have crafted an intricate portrait of the great thinker, the public figure, and the man behind both identities.
Jim Ottaviani (Feynman, Primates) is the world’s preeminent writer of comics and graphic novels about science. Notable works include a biography of Niels Bohr and the fast-paced tale of the desperate lives of early paleontologists and T-Minus: The Race to the Moon, from Aladdin books. He has worked as a nuclear engineer and is currently employed as a reference librarian in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
