Calendar

Nov
29
Wed
Current Magazine: Poetry and Fiction Party @ Literati
Nov 29 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Literati is thrilled to partner with Current Magazine for an evening of Poetry and Fiction!

RSVP Here!

Come celebrate the submissions and winners of Current Magazine’s Poetry and Fiction contest.

Meet Current’s editor and contributors, and hear readings from the winners. Special guests Molly Raynor and Anthony Zick will be reading their work as well. If time permits there will be an open mic at the end.

Jan
26
Fri
RC Players: An Evening of Scenes @ Keene Theater
Jan 26 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

Have you ever pulled a ratatouille and found a rat on your head? Do you ever question the larger impact of a cup of coffee? Have you gotten fed up with constantly being kidnapped? Ever daydream about America’s history if women were the founders?

Do you enjoy question leads that ultimately serve as clickbait in order to intrigue potential audience members?

Then we are the place for you! RC Players is hosting our semi-annual comedic Evening of Scenes performance Friday, Jan. 26 and Saturday, Jan. 27 at 8 p.m. in the Keene Theater, located in the basement of our dear East Quad. As always, our production is as free as the wind beneath my wings!

Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your parents, tell your dogs and cats and lizards and rats (they can find themselves in the subject matter of one of the scenes)! Feel free to share this event, or invite people who would love a good laugh in a theater.

Jan
27
Sat
RC Players: An Evening of Scenes @ Keene Theater
Jan 27 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

Have you ever pulled a ratatouille and found a rat on your head? Do you ever question the larger impact of a cup of coffee? Have you gotten fed up with constantly being kidnapped? Ever daydream about America’s history if women were the founders?

Do you enjoy question leads that ultimately serve as clickbait in order to intrigue potential audience members?

Then we are the place for you! RC Players is hosting our semi-annual comedic Evening of Scenes performance Friday, Jan. 26 and Saturday, Jan. 27 at 8 p.m. in the Keene Theater, located in the basement of our dear East Quad. As always, our production is as free as the wind beneath my wings!

Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your parents, tell your dogs and cats and lizards and rats (they can find themselves in the subject matter of one of the scenes)! Feel free to share this event, or invite people who would love a good laugh in a theater.

Apr
13
Fri
Poetry at Literati: Diane Seuss, with Laura Kasischke @ Literati
Apr 13 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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.

Sep
8
Sat
Booktoberfest! @ Thomson-Shore
Sep 8 @ 10:00 am – 4:00 pm

Join us for a celebration of authors, books, art, and bratwurst.

Booktoberfest will feature industry experts from around the country, offering advice and insight for authors, as well as fun and educational activities for the whole family.

Authors can even pitch their books to a panel of experts for a chance to win a publishing package from Thomson-Shore! (Must sign up for the pitch contest ahead of time by visiting thomsonshore.com/booktoberfest.)

Enjoy a day of music, food, and fun, while learning about the ever-changing world of publishing and bookmaking. A portion of proceeds will benefit 826 Michigan.

Oct
2
Tue
Poetry at Literati: Elizabeth Schmuhl: Premonitions @ Literati
Oct 2 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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

Oct
3
Wed
Hannah Ensor: Love Dream with Television @ Literati
Oct 3 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

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

Oct
23
Tue
Poetry at Literati: Phillip Crymble and Sarah Messer @ Literati
Oct 23 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Literati is thrilled to welcome poets Phillip Crymble and Sarah Messer who will be sharing with us some of their latest work.

About Not Even Laughter:
A clearance bin of corner-cut records, remaindered paperbacks, and canisters of faded film, Phillip Crymble’s first full-length collection strives to rescue, celebrate, and preserve the works and sensibilities of those whose ideas and visions and have been long overlooked by posterity. Crymble’s technical acumen, ear for music, and emotional sincerity are the adhesive agents that bring the vernacular ethnographies, high-brow ekphrastics, tender elegies, forlorn love lyrics, and acutely observed accounts of plain and seemingly unremarkable domestic experience together in this formidable debut.

Phillip Crymble is a disabled writer and scholar living in Atlantic Canada. A SSHRC doctoral fellow at UNB Fredericton, he holds a MFA from the University of Michigan and has published poems in The New York Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Hollins Critic, The Literary Review of Canada, Poetry Ireland Review, The Forward Book of Poetry 2017, and elsewhere. In 2016, Not Even Laughter, his first full-length collection, was a finalist for both the New Brunswick Book Award and the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia’s J.M. Abraham Prize.

Poet and Nonfiction writer, Sarah Messer, has received fellowships and grants from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the NEA, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2008-2009 she was a fellow in poetry at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Bunting) at Harvard. She is the author of four books: a hybrid history/memoir, Red House (Viking), a book of translations, Having Once Paused: Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu (University of Michigan Press) and two poetry books, Bandit Letters (New Issues), and Dress Made of Mice (Black Lawrence Press). Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and Ploughshares, among othersFor many years she taught as an Associate Professor in the MFA/BFA program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington.  In 2010, Messer co-founded One Pause Poetry, an on-line audio archive and reading series in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Currently she teaches Creative Writing in the Residential College at the University of Michigan, and is a cheese maker at White Lotus Farms.

Nov
28
Wed
Poetry and the Written Word: Ken Mikolowski @ Crazy Wisdom
Nov 28 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Ken Mikolowski is the author of six books of poetry, most recently THAT THAT. His poems have been recorded by the Frank Carlberg Group and Michael Gould. Mikolowski taught poetry writing at the RC for nearly 40 years. Along with his wife Ann, he was publisher, editor, and printer of The Alternative Press.
All writers welcome to read their own or other favorite poetry or short fiction afterward at open mic.
Hosted by Joe Kelty, Ed Morin, and Dave Jibson
see our blog at Facebook/Crazy Wisdom Poetry Series
Crazy Wisdom Bookstore and Tea Room, 114 S. Main St. Free. 7346652757.info@crazywisdom.net www.crazywisdom.net

 

Dec
9
Sun
RC Drama Concentration: Uncle Vanya @ Keene Theater
Dec 9 @ 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm

U-M drama lecturer Kate Mendeloff directs RC students in scenes from Uncle Vanya, Chekhov’s richly varied ensemble piece about the search for happiness–from love, achievement, or nature–at various stages of life.

lsa logoum logoU-M Privacy StatementAccessibility at U-M