We are delighted to host local poets Doug Smith with Jane Bridges for a night of poetry.
About the Book
Selections from This Iris and Ransom Note Poems There are 8 poems that center around life with her husband of 40 years, his sudden death, and her response to it. There are 8 poems that are made with cut-out words from magazines, which she calls ransom note poems. These poems are inspired by classic Japanese haiku, and while they aren’t haiku, they are zen-like.
Social Work and Other Myths These poems emerge from the writer’s long experience as a social worker and community organizer. Doug Smith has worked with low income households, the afflicted, and the homeless for more than forty years. His carefully crafted work reflects that experience and conveys his hard-won insights. Writers, critics, and others have already taken notice of Social Work and Other Myths. Keith Taylor, author of The Bird While (from the Wayne State Press) says: “The poems are right. They sing beautifully, and they remember.” Carol McCabe, founding Director of Avalon Housing, says: (Smith’s) “eye for detail and his heart for the struggle come through with a rare combination of grit and warmth.” Brian Cox, an award-winning Michigan playwright, observes that “Smith is a poet who creates an awareness that burrows into you and changes how you see.” Jill Dearman, editor of Mudfish Anthology, says simply: “Smith has a great collection here. I was truly moved.”
About the Author
Jane Bridges spent her early years were in Texas, New Hampshire and India and all of her adult years in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She studied biology and taught science and English in both public and private schools. Her husband of 40 years died suddenly in 2002 and their two children were adults at that time. Her love of nature has taken her to wild places in the tropics. Crows and butterflies that come to her backyard are of particular interest to her.
She is grateful to many poetry teachers, including Richard Tillinghast, Marge Piercy, Gerry LaFemina, Matthew Lippman, and Zilka Joseph. Members of Paper Kite and Tornado Wine have helped take her poems to wild places. She has won and placed in several national contests, and has been published in The MacGuffin, Paterson Literary Review, Margie, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, Third Wednesday, Mudfish, and elsewhere.
Local poet Douglas Smith is co-editor of Mayapple Press’s In Drought Times: Scenes from Rural and Small Town Life. He was a finalist in the 2016 Mudfish Magazine and the 2017 New Guard Knightville Poetry contests. His poetry has been published in numerous journals and publications. Smith’s latest collection of poems is Social Work and Other Myths. Award-winning Michigan playwright Brian Cox calls this work a “poignant expression of compassion. These poems beseech us to identify with the humanity in the desperate, the afflicted, the abandoned, the evicted and the exiled.. Smith is a poet who creates an awareness that burrows into you and changes how you see.”
We welcome art historian Andrei Pop in support of his latest, A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century. A book signing will follow. The event is free and open to the public.
About the book: A groundbreaking reassessment of Symbolist artists and writers that investigates the concerns they shared with scientists of the period–the problem of subjectivity in particular.
In A Forest of Symbols, Andrei Pop presents a groundbreaking reassessment of those writers and artists in the late nineteenth century associated with the Symbolist movement. For Pop, “symbolist” denotes an art that is self-conscious about its modes of making meaning, and he argues that these symbolist practices, which sought to provide more direct access to viewers and readers by constant revision of its material means of meaning-making (brushstrokes on a canvas, words on a page), are crucial to understanding the genesis of modern art. The symbolists saw art not as a social revolution, but as a revolution in sense and how to conceptualize the world. The concerns of symbolist painters and poets were shared to a remarkable degree by theoretical scientists of the period, who were dissatisfied with the strict empiricism dominant in their disciplines, which made shared knowledge seem unattainable.
The problem of subjectivity in particular, of what in one’s experience can and cannot be shared, was crucial to the possibility of collaboration within science and to the communication of artistic innovation. Pop offers close readings of the literary and visual practices of Manet and Mallarmé, of drawings by Ernst Mach, William James and Wittgenstein, of experiments with color by Bracquemond and Van Gogh, and of the philosophical systems of Frege and Russell–filling in a startling but coherent picture of the symbolist heritage of modernity and its consequences.
Andrei Pop is a member of the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago.
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.
Rumrunners and bootleggers and speakeasies, oh my! Mickey Lyons of DetroitProhibition.com takes us through Detroit’s intoxicating history during the prohibition years, from sloshing the stuff across the Detroit River to raiding the liquor cabinets and speakeasies with a whole lot of intemperance.
Mickey is a Detroit-based author and researcher on Detroit Prohibition history. Her upcoming book, City on a Still: Detroit During Prohibition, is in the works. In the meantime, she spends her days trudging through old bars and buildings and sifting through old newspapers.
This event is in partnership with the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor (CHAA), an organization of scholars, cooks, food writers, nutritionists, collectors, students, and others interested in the study of culinary history and gastronomy. Their mission is to promote the study of culinary history through regular programs open to members and guests, through the quarterly newsletter Repast, and through exchanges of information with other such organizations.
This talk introduces Jacobo Glantz’s 1939 Mexican Yiddish epic poem Kristobal Kolon, arguing that Glantz’s poem is a point of origin for his daughter, historian and writer Margo Glantz’s later feminist reexaminations of the colonial histories of Mexico. Jacobo Glantz’s counter-canonical retelling of the Americas’ most iconic foundational myth relied on Columbus’s journals and the new, more critical histories of Columbus emerging in the 1930s. But Luis de Torres, not Columbus, is at the center of Glantz’s retelling. De Torres was the only Jew on Columbus’s crew, hired by Columbus to serve as an interpreter. Written in a deliberately multilingual Yiddish with Spanish, Taino, Latin and Hebrew borrowings, Glantz’s epic functions as critical counter-history, a wild re-imagining of a history he knew so well. This lecture explores the ways in which the myth of Columbus can be mobilized to unearth “underground” indigenous, African, Muslim and Jewish histories in the New World, and suggests a new geography for American Jewish literature that exceeds the boundaries of English and the United States.
Supported by the Louis and Helen Padnos Fund
The Yiddish Columbus: Critical Counter-History and the Remapping of American Jewish Literature
This talk introduces Jacobo Glantz’s 1939 Mexican Yiddish epic poem Kristobal Kolon, arguing that Glantz’s poem is a point of origin for his daughter, historian and writer Margo Glantz’s later feminist reexaminations of the colonial histories of Mexico. Jacobo Glantz’s counter-canonical retelling of the Americas’ most iconic foundational myth relied on Columbus’s journals and the new, more critical histories of Columbus emerging in the 1930s. But Luis de Torres, not Columbus, is at the center of Glantz’s retelling. De Torres was the only Jew on Columbus’s crew, hired by Columbus to serve as an interpreter. Written in a deliberately multilingual Yiddish with Spanish, Taino, Latin and Hebrew borrowings, Glantz’s epic functions as critical counter-history, a wild re-imagining of a history he knew so well. This lecture explores the ways in which the myth of Columbus can be mobilized to unearth “underground” indigenous, African, Muslim and Jewish histories in the New World, and suggests a new geography for American Jewish literature that exceeds the boundaries of English and the United States.
Supported by the Louis and Helen Padnos Fund
Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof (American culture) and Felix Contreras (host of NPR’s Alt.Latino, https://www.npr.org/people/4607354/felix-contreras) discuss Hoffnung-Garskof’s new book “Racial Migrations New York City and the Revolutionary Politics of the Spanish Caribbean.” Q & A follows the conversation.
In the late nineteenth century, a small group of Cubans and Puerto Ricans of African descent settled in the segregated tenements of New York City. At an immigrant educational society in Greenwich Village, these early Afro-Latino New Yorkers taught themselves to be poets, journalists, and revolutionaries. At the same time, these individuals—including Rafael Serra, a cigar maker, writer, and politician; Sotero Figueroa, a typesetter, editor, and publisher; and Gertrudis Heredia, one of the first women of African descent to study midwifery at the University of Havana—built a political network and articulated an ideal of revolutionary nationalism centered on the projects of racial and social justice. These efforts were critical to the poet and diplomat José Martí’s writings about race and his bid for leadership among Cuban exiles, and to the later struggle to create space for black political participation in the Cuban Republic.
In Racial Migrations, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof presents a vivid portrait of these largely forgotten migrant revolutionaries, weaving together their experiences of migrating while black, their relationships with African American civil rights leaders, and their evolving participation in nationalist political movements. By placing Afro-Latino New Yorkers at the center of the story, Hoffnung-Garskof offers a new interpretation of the revolutionary politics of the Spanish Caribbean, including the idea that Cuba could become a nation without racial divisions.
A model of transnational and comparative research, Racial Migrations reveals the complexities of race-making within migrant communities and the power of small groups of immigrants to transform their home societies.
We welcome Cave Canem Poetry Prize winner Malcom Tariq in support of his collection, Heed the Hollow, as part of our ongoing Poetry at Literati Series, reading with Jonah Mixon-Webster. A Book signing will follow. The event is free and open to the public.
Malcolm Tariq is from Savannah, Georgia, and is the author of Extended Play, winner of the 2017 Gertrude Press Poetry Chapbook Contest. A graduate of Emory University, he has a PhD in English from the University of Michigan. He lives in New York.
Jonah Mixon-Webster is a poet and conceptual/sound artist from Flint, MI. His debut poetry collection, Stereo(TYPE), received the 2017 Sawtooth Poetry Prize from Ahsahta Press, the 2019 PEN America/Joyce Osterweil Award, and was a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry. He is the recipient of fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, The Conversation Literary Festival, ivoh, and Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop. His poetry and hybrid works are featured in various publications including PEN America Poetry Series, Best New Poets 2017, PennSound, and Best American Experimental Writing 2018.
Professor Hottman-Wei, Director of the U-M Residential College’s Chinese Music Ensemble, presents a rare opportunity to hear the bowed stringed instrument considered a symbol of the Mongolian nation. She will also discuss the numerous cultural contexts in which the Morin Khurr is played.
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.
Sweetland’s Writer to Writer series lets you hear directly from University of Michigan professors about their challenges, processes, and expectations as writers and also as readers of student writing. Each semester, Writer to Writer pairs one esteemed University professor with a Sweetland faculty member for a conversation about writing. For this installment, host Shelley Manis will speak with Professor Jennifer Proctor.
Writer to Writer sessions take place at the Literati bookstore and are broadcast live on WCBN radio. These conversations offer students a rare glimpse into the writing that professors do outside the classroom. You can hear instructors from various disciplines describe how they handle the same challenges student writers face, from finding a thesis to managing deadlines. Professors will also discuss what they want from student writers in their courses, and will take questions put forth by students and by other members of the University community. If there’s anything you’ve ever wanted to ask a professor about writing, Writer to Writer gives you the chance.
Jennifer Proctor is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Screen Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and co-founder and director of the inclusive teaching initiative EDIT Media (Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Teaching Media). She is a filmmaker and media artist whose internationally recognized, award-winning found footage work examines the history of experimental film, Hollywood tropes, and the representation of women in cinema. Her recent work, in particular, seeks to blur boundaries between avant-garde film practices and the scholarly video essay. Her 2018 film “Nothing a Little Soap and Water Can’t Fix,” which examines the bathtub as a feminized domestic space, won the Cutters Archival Film Award at the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Top Grit at the Indie Grits Film Festival, and Best Experimental Film at the St. Francis College Women’s Film Festival, in addition to screening at more than forty film festivals around the world. Her recent video, “Am I Pretty?” appropriates the voices of tween girls from YouTube videos to explore the development of self-image and self-esteem in the modern era. In addition to screening at film festivals, including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, “Am I Pretty?” appears in a special issue on audiography in [in]Transition: The Journal of Videographic Film and Moving Image Studies.
