Literati is pleased to be partnering with Donia Human Rights Center at the University of Michigan to welcome Catharine MacKinnon at Rackham Amphitheatre. Literati will have copies of Professor MacKinnon’s latest book Butterfly Politics available for purchase.
Professor Catharine A. MacKinnon will address the politics and law of sexual harassment, focusing on its violation of equality rights, in light of the #MeToo movement, exploring those developments in light of the theory of her most recent book, “Butterfly Politics: Changing the World for Women.”
About Butterfly Politics:
Under certain conditions, the right small simple actions can produce large and complex “butterfly effects,” as the #MeToo movement has shown. Thirty years after Catharine A. MacKinnon won the U.S. Supreme Court case establishing sexual harassment in law, this timely collection captures MacKinnon in action: the creative and transformative activism of an icon. Butterfly Politics provides the grounding for #MeToo, explains its momentum, and proposes more legal interventions that could have further butterfly effects on women’s rights.
Catharine A. MacKinnon is Elizabeth A. Long Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School and the James Barr Ames Visiting Professor of Law (Long-Term) at Harvard Law School.
Reception for the artists. The show continues at the RC Art Gallery through the end of Winter term.
In celebration of National Poetry Month and student poets at U-M, an informal, open-mic reading featuring U-M undergraduate students reading their original poetry. All undergraduates invited to read their original poetry. Arrive and leave as necessary. All welcome to attend and listen. Refreshments will be served
Perfect for this new, fresh, sweet springtime: For the April edition of the Motor Signal Reading Series, two innovative, multi-genre writers are going to crack us open and help us imagine what’s possible.
Motor Signal, now in its sixth season, jolts the typical literary reading out of its traditional form. An activity of co-creation connects the featured writers with the audience in a unique way. In celebration of the beauty of text, an artist at Signal-Return makes a handset, limited-edition broadside of the writers’ work for event attendees. And we proudly pay writers for their time and talent.
Hosted by RC writing alumna Anna Clark.
ELIZABETH SCHMUHL is a multidisciplinary artist–writer, dancer, and painter– and the author of Premonitions (Wayne State University Press). She illustrates essays for The Rumpus, has taught writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and worked in digital development at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts. She is currently Shamel Pitts’ Marketing and Campaign Manager and works at U-M; she is also an RC writing alum.
KELLY FORDON’S work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Kenyon Review (KRO), Rattle and various other journals. Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, was chosen as a 2016 Michigan Notable Book among other awards. On the Street Where We Live, a one-act play adapted from her poetry was chosen for the 2018 Dream Up Festival in New York. She is the author of three award-winning poetry chapbooks and a full-length poetry collection, Goodbye Toothless House (Kattywompus Press 2019). www.kellyfordon.com
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.
Student directors from RC Drama Major course RC Hums 482 present their own final projects with the students of RC Hums 281.
DR. CHLOE PREEDY, UNIVERSITY OF EXETER
Hosted by the Animal Studies & Environmental Humanities RIW. Please RSVP to lageiger@umich.edu or cvfair@umich.edu
The Civil War began as a battle to save the union but it ended as a struggle to abolish slavery and usher in “a new birth of freedom.” No aspect of society was left unchanged by the years of war and its effects continue to resonate more than one hundred and fifty years later. Dr. Louis Masur is Distinguished Professor of American Studies and History at Rutgers University. A graduate of the University at Buffalo and Princeton University, he is a cultural historian who has written on a variety of topics. His most recent work is Lincoln’s Last Speech: Wartime Reconstruction & The Crisis of Reunion (2015), Lincoln’s Hundred Days: The Emancipation Proclamation and the War for the Union (2012), and The Civil War: A Concise History (2011). Register online.
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.
