June 16 & 17. Adults & kids of all ages invited to meet more than 50 top area cartoonists and participate in workshops on making web comics, writing and drawing minicomics, creating video games, and much more. Kids can also vote in the 6th annual Kids’ Comics Awards. Winners announced during a ceremony featuring puppets, super villains, and more. At 7 p.m. on June 15, Maris Wicks, whose science-themed work is on display this month (see Galleries), discusses “Gorillas, Guts, and Gastropods.” See a2caf.com/programming for full schedule.
11 a.m.-6 p.m. (Sat.) & 12:30-5:30 p.m. (Sun.), AADL Downtown. Free. 327-4200.
Celebration of Chelsea-area authors with brief talks by children’s writers Marilyn Kuehl and David Brzezinski, teen writer S.D. Grimm, nonfiction writers Alex Weddon, Kate Bancroft, and Patrice Johnson, poets Jennifer Burd and Katherine Edgren, and fiction writers Harold Fischel, Lakota Grace, Doris Lemcke, & Patricia Stebelton. Signings.
12:30-3 p.m., CDL, 221 S. Main, Chelsea. Free admission. 475-8732.
June 16 & 17. Adults & kids of all ages invited to meet more than 50 top area cartoonists and participate in workshops on making web comics, writing and drawing minicomics, creating video games, and much more. Kids can also vote in the 6th annual Kids’ Comics Awards. Winners announced during a ceremony featuring puppets, super villains, and more. At 7 p.m. on June 15, Maris Wicks, whose science-themed work is on display this month (see Galleries), discusses “Gorillas, Guts, and Gastropods.” See a2caf.com/programming for full schedule.
11 a.m.-6 p.m. (Sat.) & 12:30-5:30 p.m. (Sun.), AADL Downtown. Free. 327-4200.
Performance to be determined!
7 p.m. Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry.
Debbie Taylor’s Over In Motown! is an energetic picture book celebrating the musical genres and rhythms of the industry that fueled Detroit in the Motown era. Based on the Over In The Meadow rhyme, this counting book features beautiful illustrations by Keisha Morris.
Join us as Debbie Taylor reads from and discusses the creation of this new book published by the library’s Fifth Avenue Press imprint and chosen as a Junior Library Guild 2020 selection!
The event includes a simple craft for children.
Debbie Taylor is also the author of Sweet Music in Harlem.
This event is part of AADL’s Black History Month series and will include a signing with books for sale.
Talk by local writer Beverly Jenkins, recipient of the 2017 Romance Writers of America Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award. She sets her African American historical romance novels in the decades after emancipation to emphasize black history after slavery.
7-8:30 p.m., AADL Malletts Creek, 3090 E. Eisenhower (between Stone School & Packard). Free. 327-4200.
Local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal host an open house for writers to connect with one another and/or work on their projects.
Literati is honored and especially excited to host author, bookseller, and number one human being Lillian Li who will be sharing her debut novel, Number One Chinese Restaurant.
About Number One Chinese Restaurant:
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2018 by The Millions and Cosmopolitan
An exuberant and wise multigenerational debut novel about the complicated lives and loves of people working in everyone’s favorite Chinese restaurant.
The Beijing Duck House in Rockville, Maryland, is not only a beloved go-to setting for hunger pangs and celebrations; it is its own world, inhabited by waiters and kitchen staff who have been fighting, loving, and aging within its walls for decades. When disaster strikes, this working family’s controlled chaos is set loose, forcing each character to confront the conflicts that fast-paced restaurant life has kept at bay.
Owner Jimmy Han hopes to leave his late father’s homespun establishment for a fancier one. Jimmy’s older brother, Johnny, and Johnny’s daughter, Annie, ache to return to a time before a father’s absence and a teenager’s silence pushed them apart. Nan and Ah-Jack, longtime Duck House employees, are tempted to turn their thirty-year friendship into something else, even as Nan’s son, Pat, struggles to stay out of trouble. And when Pat and Annie, caught in a mix of youthful lust and boredom, find themselves in a dangerous game that implicates them in the Duck House tragedy, their families must decide how much they are willing to sacrifice to help their children.
Generous in spirit, unaffected in its intelligence, multi-voiced, poignant, and darkly funny, Number One Chinese Restaurant looks beyond red tablecloths and silkscreen murals to share an unforgettable story about youth and aging, parents and children, and all the ways that our families destroy us while also keeping us grounded and alive.
Lillian Li received her BA from Princeton and her MFA from the University of Michigan. She is the recipient of a Hopwood Award in Short Fiction, as well as Glimmer Train‘s New Writer Award. Her work has been featured inGuernica, Granta , and Jezebel. She is from the D.C. metro area and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Number One Chinese Restaurant is her first novel.
June 5 & 19. Open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. June themes: “Endings” (June 5) & “Impostor” (June 19). The 3-person judging teams are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Space limited, so it’s smart to arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), Greyline, 100 N. Ashley. $8. 764-5118.
Petra Kuppers will read from her short story collection Ice Bar at Aut Bar/Common Language Bookstore. Visit with post-apocalyptic science fiction and psychedelic fantasy, featuring a cast of queer, vulnerable, beautiful characters. Disability becomes an invitation to new lives, new stories, new opportunities.
Advance Praise for Ice Bar:
Ice Bar’s tales, like the best myths, both chill us and warm us as they expose our as-yet unexamined psyches, and reinventing our time, place, and positions in it. This book’s insights are offered up by a rare talent, a serious and generous intelligence. These are the stories we have been waiting to read, by the writer we’ve long needed.
–Laura Kasischke
The worlds of Kuppers’ stories are worlds with not only mermaids, ghosts and other non-human beings, but also worlds full of disabled people, queer people, and people of color whose narratives are not about their disability, sexuality, gender, or race alone.
–Sami Schalk
Aut Bar Patio/Common Language Bookstore, 315 Braun Ct, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48104. Free. 7342392634. petra@umich.edu http://www.spuytenduyvil.net/ice-bar.html
