Carl Cohen is professor of philosophy at U-M. His newest book is A Conflict of Principles: The Battle Over Affirmative Action at the University of Michigan. He is also the author of Affirmative Action and Racial Preference.
RC Lecturer Alumnus Ken Mikolowski is the author of four previous books, Thank You Call Again, little mysteries, Big Enigmas, and Remember Me. His poems have been published in Brooklyn Rail, Hanging Loose, Exquisite Corpse, and Abandon Automobile, A Detroit Anthology, and have been recorded by the Frank Carlberg Group. Along with his wife Ann, Ken was publisher, editor, and printer of The Alternative Press. He lives in Ann Arbor.
Michael Lauchlan’s poems have appeared in many publications and have been anthologized in Abandon Automobile (Wayne State University Press, 2001) and A Mind Apart. His earlier collections are And the Business Goes to Pieces and Sudden Parade.
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.
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.
Created by Midwestern Gothic in partnership with the Residential College, Voices of the Middle West is a festival celebrating writers from all walks of life as well as independent presses and journals that consider the Midwestern United States their home. The Festival will take place on March 12th, starting at 10am, at East Quad. The festival includes panels and a book fair, and is free to the public. Ross Gay is the keynote speaker.
The goal of the festival is to bring together students and faculty of the university, as well as writers and presses from all over the Midwest, in order to provide a perspective of this region and to showcase the magnificent work being produced here, the stories that need to be told…the voices that need to be heard. Truly, this is a celebration of the Midwest voice, and it is the festival’s aim to create an ideal environment for any and all to come and take an active part, to discover and discuss how rich our literary tradition is.
More information at http://midwestgothic.com/voices/
Jennifer Burd has published lyric poetry and haiku in a variety of print and online journals. She is the author of a book of poems, Body and Echo, and a book of creative nonfiction, Daily Bread: A Portrait of Homeless Men & Women of Lenawee County, Michigan. She has co-written (with Laszlo Slomovits) a children’s play based on Patricia Polacco’s picture book I Can Hear the Sun, which was produced in 2015 by Ann Arbor’s Wild Swan Theater. Jennifer received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington, and she teaches online courses through the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. She works as an editor and writer for HighScope Educational Research Foundation in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Laszlo Slomovits is one of the twin brothers in Ann Arbor’s nationally-known children’s folk music duo, Gemini (GeminiChildrensMusic.com). A fine singer and multi-instrumentalist, Laszlo has given concerts throughout the U.S. and a number of his award-winning songs are featured in songbooks music teachers use throughout the country. In addition to his music for children, Laszlo has set to music the work of many poets. His recordings of these song-settings include five CDs of the poetry of ancient Sufi mystics, Rumi and Hafiz as well as “White Picture” by the Holocaust-era Czech poet Jiri Orten and “Cry of Freedom,” the poetry of contemporary American poet Linda Nemec Foster.
Crazy Wisdom Book and Performance Event — Come join the co-authors Greg Jobin-Leeds, Dey Hernández, Jorge Diaz and movement leaders for a multi-media hour of art, theatre and lively conversation. Longtime social activist Greg Jobin-Leeds joins forces with AgitArte-a collective of innovative artists and organizers-to capture the stories, philosophies, tactics, and art of six of today’s most pressing movements: immigrant rights, the LGBTQ movement, the fight for quality public education, the prison justice movement, the struggle for economic power, and the environmental movement.
Recently published by The New Press, WHEN WE FIGHT was highly praised by Noam Chomsky, Amy Goodman and Thom Hartmann.
Literati is thrilled to launch Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein.
Children of the New World introduces readers to a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and frighteningly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster. Children of the New World grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society. Alexander Weinstein is a visionary new voice in speculative fiction for all of us who are fascinated by and terrified of what we might find on the horizon.
“Taken together, these stories present a fully-imagined vision of the future which will disturb you, provoke you, and make you feel alive. Weinstein is brilliant, incisive and fearless.” —Charles Yu, author of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
“In each of the gripping stories in Children of the New World, Alexander Weinstein offers a glimpse into an unnerving, not-so-distant, and all-too-possible future. Weinstein explores what-ifs with both wit and sensitivity, and his cautionary tales demand to be read (before it’s too late).” —Judy Budnitz, author of Nice Big American Baby
Alexander Weinstein is the Director of The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the author of the short story collection Children of the New World (Picador 2016). His fiction and translations have appeared in Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Notre-Dame Review, Pleiades, PRISM International, World Literature Today, and other journals. He is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his fiction has been awarded the Lamar York, Gail Crump, Hamlin Garland, and New Millennium Prize. His stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and appear in the anthologies 2013 New Stories from the Midwest, and the 2014 & 2015 Lascaux Prize Stories. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and a freelance editor, and leads fiction workshops in the United States and Europe.
