RC alum Alyson Foster will read from her debut novel, God is an Astronaut. Set in the immediate future of civilian space tourism, the novel unfolds through the emails of one woman whose marriage is crumbling beneath her.
October’s theme is Horror/ The Weird. Readers include Zell Fellows Dan Hornsby and Rose Miller with guests, Literati booksellers and Zell Writers’ program alum, Russ Brakefield and John Ganiard.
Stephen Schottenfeld will read from his debut novel, Bluff City Pawn. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his stories have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Iowa Review, New England Review, and other journals. Stephen received special mention in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies. Schottenfeld teaches English at the University of Rochester.
Local indie press Short Flight/Long Drive‘s Marry, F*ck, Kill, (Cuddle) Tour features five writers:
Chloe Caldwell is the author of the forthcoming novella, Women, (SF/LD Books, October 2014) and the essay collection Legs Get led Astray (Future Tense Books, April 2012). Chloe’s work has appeared in Salon.com, The Rumpus, Thought Catalog, Nylon, The Nervous Breakdown, xoJane, The Frisky, The Sun Magazine, SMITH, Jewcy, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Freerange Nonfiction, The Faster Times, The Fix, and Men’s Health.
Elizabeth Ellen‘s stories have appeared in numerous online and print journals over the last ten years, including elimae, Quick Fiction, Hobart, Lamination Colony, Muumuu House, HTMLGIANT, and many others. She is the author of the chapbook Before You She Was a Pit Bull (Future Tense) and her collection of flash fictions, Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix, was included in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: four chapbooks of short short fiction by four women (Rose Metal Press). Fast Machine is a collection of her best work from the last decade. She was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize for her story “Teen Culture” which appeared in American Short Fiction in 2012. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she co-edits Hobart and oversees Hobart’s book division, Short Flight/Long Drive Books.
Mira Gonzalez‘s work has been featured on VICE, Thought Catalog, Muumuu House, Hobart, and in various other places online and in print.Her debut poetry collection I will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together was published by Sorry House in 2013. It was a finalist for Goodread’s Choice Awards, coming out ahead of Poet Laureate Billy Collins, and losing to J.R.R. Tolkien.
Chelsea Martin was 23 when she published her first collection, Everything Was Fine until Whatever (2009), a genre-blurring book of short fiction, nonfiction, prose, poetry, sketches, and memoir. She is also the author, most recently, of The Real Funny Thing about Apathy (2010) and Even Though I Don’t Miss You (2013).
Rae Paris is from Carson, California. Her poetry and fiction appear or are forthcoming in Dismantle: an Anthology of Writing from the VONA/ VOICES Writers Workshop, Solstice, Blackberry, Guernica, Feminist Studies, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by an NEA Literature Fellowship, and writing residencies from the Hambidge Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA), and Norcroft. Her poem “The Forgetting Tree” was nominated for Best of the Net 2013. Her short story “The Girl Who Ate Her Own Skin” was a recommended story in the 2009 O. Henry Prize Stories, and her collection was a finalist for the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction. She recently completed a young adult novel titled You, excerpts of which were finalists for the Summer Literary Seminars and the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards.
Literati is pleased to help launch issue 5.5 of literary journal Harlequin Creature with a very special listening party. That’s because issue 5.5 of the journal is, in fact, a viynl record.
Tickets can be purchased online at http://bit.ly/NZPNAA14
This all-female a cappella ensemble performs a wide variety of popular songs, from love ballads to classic rock songs, to a new twist on a popular rap song.
8 p.m. (doors open at 7:30 p.m.), Free, but $5 donation encouraged.
RC theater students present a program of short plays TBA.
Feb. 27 & 28 (different programs). Performances for adults (Sat.) & families (Sun.) by top-notch storytellers from around the country and the state. Headliners are 2 storytellers whose commentaries have been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered. Kevin Kling is a Minneapolis storyteller who specializes in autobiographical tales about everything from growing up in Minnesota and eating things before knowing what they are to hopping freight trains and getting his play banned in Czechoslovakia. Bill Harley is a Massachusetts songwriter and storyteller with an off-center point of view whose stories paint vibrant and hilarious pictures of growing up, schooling, and family life. Opening act is Yvonne Healy, a Brighton-based raconteur named Top Irish Storyteller in the USA whose repertoire includes weird Irish legends, outrageous family tales, and more.
7:30 p.m. (Sat.) & 1 p.m. (Sun.), The Ark, 316 S. Main. Tickets $20 (Sat.) & $10 (Sun. family concert) in advance at the Michigan Union Ticket Office (mutotix.com) &theark.org, and at the door. To charge by phone, call 763-TKTS.