Each week will feature different Detroit-based speakers and guests who will explore the given topic and engage the students through a combination of formal remarks, presentations, and public discussion. Light dinner provided; free transportation from Ann Arbor to Detroit; public welcome and encouraged to attend.
Join us for an evening of laughter and fun as the Ann Arbor Women’s Group brings you some of the best comedians from around the country. All proceeds will be used to keep A2WG women’s recovery event’s free, low-cost and/or scholarship based, and provide funding for our free childcare program. So bring your friends and family and join us to Laugh for a Cause!
Performers:
Billy Ray Bauer (Headliner)-
From skewed descriptions of growing up in Detroit in the sixties, to the gory details of raising four boys in the new millennium, Billy Ray will leave you laughing and exhausted from his ordeal.
Add to the mix some off the wall impressions and dialects, and you have an idea of an evening with Billy Ray.
Billy Ray has been a repeat guest on the Bob and Tom Show heard across America. He’s also been heard on the Dick Purtan radio show in Detroit and Billy Ray was named best local comedian of the year by Hour Detroit magazine for 2017. Billy Ray’s jokes have appeared in Reader’s Digest and one was among their top 50 jokes for 2005. Billy Ray has appeared with Drew Carey, Tim Allen, The Smothers Brothers, Lewis Black, Doug Stanhope, and many other great comedians! (website)
Kate Brindle (Opening Act)-
Described as “smart,” “original,” and “hilarious,” Kate Brindle is a unique breath of fresh air on the comedy scene.
Kate has performed her sarcastic yet upbeat and spunky style of comedy on the Canadian Broadcast Channel, Cox Cable, and Comcast Cable. She advanced in the California’s Funniest Female Contest, and was featured in the Oddball Comedy Festival and International Great Plains Comedy Festival. She’s also opened for Louie Anderson, Dave Attell, Bill Burr, Kevin Nealon, Kevin Pollak, and Sarah Silverman.
An audience favorite, Kate brings to the stage her quick wit and impeccable timing. Whether she’s talking about her family or making quirky observations of everyday life, Kate continues to charm crowds with her witty and sassy brand of humor.
Catch this rising star while you can! (website)
Recovery Speaker:
Elizabeth Reader, Milford, MI (Recovery Speaker)- Liz is a person in long-term recovery. She got sober 10-11-01 working a 12 step program. She describes herself as, “fun, a little insane, friendly, helpful and a great friend.”
Liz is very active in the recovery community, an inspiring speaker, and will open the show by sharing her recovery story with us.
The Ann Arbor Women’s Group strengthens women’s sobriety through fun and informative events, workshops and retreats. We help women in recovery connect with other recovering women in Washtenaw County, Michigan. We are not a rehab, detox or transitional housing organization. A2WG is unique in our mission.
April 13 at 8pm, April 14 at 2pm
Back Office Studio
$7 General Admission
PURCHASE TICKETS
For this Neighborhood Theatre Group fundraiser, we will transform the Back Office Studio into a coffeehouse. Join us for an evening of poetry and music from some of Ypsilanti’s most talented performers.
Directed and conceived by Dianne Bernick
Starring R. Darrow Bernick, Eric Hohnke, Maegan Murphy, Emily Rogers-Driskell, and Craig VanKempen
Featuring Tom Hett on piano and bass and Rudy Bernick on accordion
A special Saturday night pre-show with Paul Keller on bass and Rudy Bernick on accordion
Where
Pittsfield Branch: Program Room
For Whom
Age 2-5 Years
Description
Come to a singing and storytelling event where Arabic teacher and storyteller Heba Abdelaal, will lead us in songs and storytelling in Arabic!
April 13 at 8pm, April 14 at 2pm
Back Office Studio
$7 General Admission
PURCHASE TICKETS
For this Neighborhood Theatre Group fundraiser, we will transform the Back Office Studio into a coffeehouse. Join us for an evening of poetry and music from some of Ypsilanti’s most talented performers.
Directed and conceived by Dianne Bernick
Starring R. Darrow Bernick, Eric Hohnke, Maegan Murphy, Emily Rogers-Driskell, and Craig VanKempen
Featuring Tom Hett on piano and bass and Rudy Bernick on accordion
A special Saturday night pre-show with Paul Keller on bass and Rudy Bernick on accordion
Student directors from RC Drama Major course RC Hums 482 present their own final projects with the students of RC Hums 281.
Open-mic storytelling competitions. Open to anyone with a five-minute story to share on the night’s theme. Come tell a story, or just enjoy the show!
6:30pm Doors Open | 7:30pm Stories Begin
BURNED: Prepare a five-minute story about getting burned. Blistered by love, scalded by the powers that be, scorched by karma or just over-tanned. Tell us about the things that leave you smoldering. Sunscreen anyone?
*Tickets for this event are available one week before the show, at 3pm ET.
*Seating is not guaranteed and is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please be sure to arrive at least 10 minutes before the show. Admission is not guaranteed for late arrivals. All sales final.
Media Sponsor: Michigan Radio.
RC Singers presents, “Let the River Run,” conducted by Joseph Kemper. The concert will include ensemble singing, soloists, speakers, instrumentalists, and visual projections. This will be a benefit concert for “We the People of Detroit”, a local non-profit supporting water rights.
Please join us as we celebrate the winners of the 2018-19 Hopwood Awards.
Following the announcement of the awards, there will be a lecture from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hilton Als and a light reception. Free to attend and open to all!
Hilton Als began contributing to The New Yorker in 1989, writing pieces for ‘The Talk of the Town,’ he became a staff writer in 1994, theatre critic in 2002, and lead theater critic in 2012. Week after week, he brings to the magazine a rigorous, sharp, and lyrical perspective on acting, playwriting, and directing. With his deep knowledge of the history of performance—not only in theatre but in dance, music, and visual art—he shows us how to view a production and how to place its director, its author, and its performers in the ongoing continuum of dramatic art. His reviews are not simply reviews; they are provocative contributions to the discourse on theatre, race, class, sexuality, and identity in America.
Before coming to The New Yorker, Als was a staff writer for the Village Voice and an editor-at-large at Vibe. Als edited the catalogue for the 1994-95 Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition “Black Male: Representations of Masculinity in Contemporary American Art.” His first book, The Women, was published in 1996. His book, White Girls, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2014 and winner of the 2014 Lambda Literary Award for Non-fiction, discusses various narratives of race and gender. He is author of the introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of The Early Stories of Truman Capote. He is also guest editor for the 2018 Best American Essays (Mariner Books, October 2, 2018). He also wrote Andy Warhol: The Series, a book containing two previously unpublished television scripts for a series on the life of Andy Warhol.
In 1997, the New York Association of Black Journalists awarded Als first prize in both Magazine Critique/Review and Magazine Arts and Entertainment. He was awarded a Guggenheim for creative writing in 2000 and the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism for 2002-03. In 2016, he received Lambda Literary’s Trustee Award for Excellence in Literature, in 2017 Als won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and in 2018 the Langston Hughes Medal.
In 2009, Als worked with the performer Justin Bond on “Cold Water,” an exhibition of paintings, drawings, and videos by performers, at La MaMa Gallery. In 2010, he co-curated “Self-Consciousness,” at the VeneKlasen/Werner gallery, in Berlin, and published “Justin Bond/Jackie Curtis.” In 2015, he collaborated with the artist Celia Paul to create “Desdemona for Celia by Hilton,” an exhibition for the Metropolitan Opera’s Gallery Met. In 2016, his debut art show “One Man Show: Holly, Candy, Bobbie and the Rest” opened at the Artist’s Institute. In 2017 he curated “Alice Neel, Uptown” at the David Zwirner Gallery in New York City.
Als is an associate professor of writing at Columbia University’s School of the Arts and has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan, and Smith College. He lives in New York City.
Literati is excited to welcome poet Sue William Silverman in celebration of her new poetry collection If the Girl Never Learns: Poems. Sue will be joined by fellow poets Keith Taylor, Elizabeth Schumhl, and Marc Sheehan who will be reading from their own work.
About If the Girl Never Learns:
From the opening lines, it’s clear The Girl at the center of these poems is damaged–which is another way to say she’s a survivor. If the Girl Never Learns moves from the personal to the mythic to the apocalyptic, because The Girl would do anything, even go to hell, to save her soul. So, she resists, takes action to overturn society’s suffocating ideal of Good Girldom. The poems’ sense of breathlessness reflects The Girl’s absolute need to control her own destiny, to outrun her past, while at the same time chasing a future she alone has envisioned and embodied. Because The Girl is, above all else, a badass.
Sue William Silverman’s first poetry collection is Hieroglyphics in Neon. She is also the author of four books of creative nonfiction. Her most recent book, The Pat Boone Fan Club: My Life as a White Anglo-Saxon Jew, was a finalist in Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Book of the Year Award. Her memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, won the AWP Award, and Love Sick: One Woman’s Journey through Sexual Addiction is also a Lifetime TV original movie. Her craft book is Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir, and she teaches in the MFA in Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts.
The poet Marc Sheehan is a life-long Michigan resident. He has earned degrees from Western Michigan University, Central Michigan University and the University of Michigan, where he received a Major Hopwood Award in Poetry. His honors also include grants from the Michigan Council for the Arts and Humanities, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has served as Writer Center Coordinator at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids, and has reviewed books for both the Lansing Capital Times and On the Town.
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.
