Nicola’s Books proudly presents author Paula Hawkins In Conversation with Author Nick Petrie on Wednesday, May 17 at 7:30 PM. Included in the evening Ms. Hawkins will read excerpts from her new novel, Into the Water (which is being released May 2), take part in an audience Q&A, and sign copies of the book in her only Michigan stop on the book tour.
With over 8.5 million copies sold in the United States since its publication two years ago, and 20 million sold worldwide, Paula Hawkins’ debut The Girl on the Trainhas broken nearly every publishing record in the books. It has spent over 100 weeks and counting on the New York Times Bestseller list, including 40 weeks at #1, making it the top selling book in America for two straight years in a row, and was made into a major motion picture starring Emily Blunt. The Girl on the Train introduced Paula Hawkins as a bold, unforgettable voice in psychological literary suspense.
Now, with Into the Water, Hawkins proves that her work reaches far beyond definitions of category, delivering an urgent story that is as much about relationships and human instincts as it is about a crime. When a single mother and a teenage girl each turn up dead at the bottom of the river, just weeks apart, the ensuing investigation dredges up a complicated history, threatening to undo everyone in the close-knit community. Suspicions shift from character to character, escalating the tension until the very last page.
Nick Petrie received his MFA in fiction from the University of Washington, won a Hopwood Award for short fiction while an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, and his story “At the Laundromat” won the 2006 Short Story Contest in the The Seattle Review, a national literary journal. A husband and father, he runs a home-inspection business in Milwaukee. Burning Bright is the follow-up to his debut The Drifter.
**If you purchased a ticket through Ticketmaster or Nicola’s Books for the original venue site (The Michigan Theater) please contact the store at 734-662-0600 for more information.
Celebrate spring with the fresh crop of books from the Wayne State University Press! A panel of local authors will be on hand to read from their new publications and sign copies, including Laura Thomas and Keith Taylor. Light refreshments will be served. Registration is recommended. Register online (http://gplib.evanced.info/signup/EventDetails?EventId=51672&backTo=Calendar&startDate=2017%2F05%2F01) or in person, beginning Wednesday, April 26.
Books will be available for purchase and signing.
Refreshments for this event are sponsored by the Grosse Pointe Library Foundation, as part of the ongoing Write On Pointe programming series.
The authors will discuss how their fiction transforms home into character. How do writers use assumptions about familiar places to find the unexpected and surprising? When is a hometown the whole trouble, and also the last, best hope for change? The authors will also talk about how the unique landscape of the upper Midwest inspires their fiction.
Kelly Fordon’s work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Kenyon Review (KRO), Rattle and various other journals. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks. The first one, On the Street Where We Live, won the 2012 Standing Rock Chapbook Award and the latest one, The Witness, won the 2016 Eric Hoffer Award for the Chapbook and was shortlisted for the Grand Prize. Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, was chosen as a Michigan Notable Book, a 2016 Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist in the short story category. She works for The College for Creative Studies, Springfed Arts and The InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit.
Laura Hulthen Thomas is the author of the short fiction collection, States of Motion, published by Wayne State University Press. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany and Witness. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
The Hummingbird Global Writers’ Circle is an international reading series started by Dr. Debotri Dhar, CEW Visiting Scholar (2015-17) and Lecturer in Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. The aim of this literary initiative is to bring writers and communities together in different parts of the world to foster a love of books, to discuss the craft of writing, and to promote creative dialogue and global understanding in small ways. The name was inspired by the tiny hummingbird which builds its home with just a few drops of nectar, a root here, a leaf there, and a little bit of sky.
The Circle’s themed readings by established and emerging writers are free and open to the community. The theme for the first event of the Circle is feminism/ gender, to be held on Monday August 21 (3-5 pm) at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
The writer-speakers for this session are Linda Gregerson, Laura Hulthen Thomas, Mike Ferro and Debotri Dhar (writer bios below), who will read from their poetry and fiction, followed by conversation /Q&A.
Light refreshments will be served. All members of the community are welcome to attend, however, RSVP is required. If you wish to hear our speakers read from their work, share tips, and engage in conversation, please RSVP to debotri@umich.edu.
A U-M Residential College creative writing alumna, Laura Hulthen Thomas heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
A U-M Residential College creative writing alumna, Laura Kasischke’s book of poems, Space, in Chains, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches writing at U-M English and the Residential College.
Set in Michigan small towns both real and fictional, the stories in Laura Hulthen Thomas’s State of Motion take place against a backdrop of economic turmoil and the domestic cost of the war on terror. As familiar places, privilege, and faith disappear, what remains leaves these broken characters wondering what hope is left.
Laura Kasischke’s Where Now: New and Selected Poems showcases her probing vision that subverts the so-called “normal.” A lover of fairy tales, Kasischke’s command of the symbolic includes a keen attention to sound in her exploration of the everyday—whether reflections on loss or the complicated realities of childhood and family.
Many RC creative writing alums will read.
Alisa Solomon, RC ’78, Drama and Philosophy, Professor and Director, Arts and Culture Concentration in the M.A. Program, Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia University
Laura Kasischke’s most recent book, from which she will read, brings new poems together with work from her previous nine collections of poetry, published over the last twenty-five years. The citation for the National Book Critics Circle Award, which she received in 2011, reads: “No poet alive has worked harder to depict the contemporary American life course: she has shown herself, in sharply vivid poems, as a girl, as a wayward teen, as a young adult, as a passionate and worried mother with a baby, a child, and now a teenaged son…And no poet now at work does better than Kasischke in finding ways to depict not just how we feel about life stages and the people in them but also how we change as those stages go by…Kasischke stands for many among us.” Her collection of new and selected poems gathers together the breadth of this vision, and Kasischke will offer readings from both her earliest and most recent work.
For questions, contact Julie Sparkman at jmallard@umich.edu
Jessica Shattuck is the award-winning author of The Hazards of Good Breeding, which was a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award, and Perfect Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones, Wired, and The Believer, among other publications. A graduate of Harvard University, she received her MFA from Columbia University. She lives with her husband and three children in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Laura Hulthen Thomas’s short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany, and Witness. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
Join our triple header on Sunday, January 13 at 2, when we welcome book club favorite and RC creative writing alumna Carrie Smith, who has a new Claire Codella novel out, Unholy City; C.M. Gleason, who is joining the mystery community with her first mystery Murder in the Lincoln White House; and popular teacher and poetry slammer, Jeff Kass, whose first mystery Takedown was just published by the new press at the Ann Arbor District Library.
