RC Creative Writing alum and professor Laura Kasischke is the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, 2012. Kasischke has published nine novels, three of which have been made into feature films—The Life Before Her Eyes, Suspicious River, White Bird in a Blizzard—and nine books of poetry, most recently The Infinitesimals. She has also published the short story collection If a Stranger Approaches You. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as several Pushcart Prizes and numerous poetry awards and her writing has appeared in Best American Poetry, The Kenyon Review, Harper’s and The New Republic. Laura Kasischke is Allan Seager Collegiate Professor of English Language & Literature at the University of Michigan.
Nicholas Petrie received his MFA in fiction from the University of Washington, won a Hopwood Award for short fiction while an undergraduate at U-M, 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. The Drifter is his first novel.
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From Ernest Hemingway’s rural adventures to the gritty fiction of Joyce Carol Oates, the landscape of the “Third Coast” has inspired generations of the nation’s greatest storytellers.
Join Michigan Notable Author Anna Clark to unveil Michigan’s extraordinary written culture as she discusses Michigan authors and her new book, Michigan Literary Luminaries: From Elmore Leonard to Robert Hayden. The event includes a book signing and books will be for sale.
This fascinating book is a shines a spotlight on this rich heritage of the Great Lakes State with a mixture of history, literary criticism, and original reporting. Discover how Saginaw greenhouses shaped the life of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Theodore Roethke. Compare the common traits of Detroit crime writers like Elmore Leonard and Donald Goines. Learn how Dudley Randall revolutionized American literature by doing for poets what Motown Records did for musicians.
RC Creative Writing alumna Anna Clark is a freelance journalist in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The American Prospect, Grantland, Vanity Fair, the Columbia Journalism Review, Next City, and other publications. She is the director of applications for Write A House and founder of Literary Detroit. Anna also edited A Detroit Anthology, a 2015 Michigan Notable Book.
RC Creative Writing alumna Carrie Smith and three-time Hopwood winner discusses her debut crime novel, Silent City, a police procedural whose lead character, an NYPD detective, is cancer survivor returning to work.
RC Creative Writing alumna Carrie Smith will read from Silent City, her new crime novel. Carrie won three Hopwood Awards (one in 1977 and two in 1979), and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She has been a finalist in Nimrod Magazine’s Katherine Anne Porter prize for fiction, and is the author of a literary first novel, Forget Harry published by Simon & Schuster. Carrie moved to New York City in 1981. By day, she is Senior Vice President and Publisher of Benchmark Education Company. By night, she thinks about murder. She lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her partner and sixteen year old twins.
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/
Pamela Reynolds, Professor Emerita at Johns Hopkins University, is RC Visiting Scholar. She reads from her recent book, War in Worcester: Youth in the Apartheid State. She has received the NOMA Literary Prize.
Literati is proud to be the bookseller for the 2016 Jill Harris Memorial Lecture, presented by the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities.
Laila Lalami is the author of the novels Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award; Secret Son, which was on the Orange Prize longlist, and The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award, and was on the Man Booker Prize longlist. The Moor’s Account was also a finalist for the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Her essays and opinion pieces have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, The Nation, the Guardian, the New York Times, and in many anthologies. She is the recipient of a British Council Fellowship, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Residency Fellowship and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside.
June 16-18. The first of 3 book crawls (see 17 Friday & 18 Saturday kicks off at Cardamom restaurant (1739 Plymouth, Courtyard Shops) with a reading by local poetDawn Richberg. 7 p.m. (Bookbound, Courtyard Shops): Readings by local poetsShutta Crum and Scott Beal. 8 p.m. (location TBA): Readings by local poet and storyteller Charlotte Young Bowens and Michigan writer Monica Rico. The festival also includes a street fair on Saturday.
6-9 p.m., various locations. Free. info@aabookfestival.org.
The 2nd of 3 book crawls (see June 16 & 18) begins at the Ypsilanti District Library (229 W. Michigan Ave.) with storytelling by LaRon Williams (3 p.m.), a talk on ethnic and gender diversity in superheroes by comic ebook creator Jazmin Truesdale(4 p.m.), kids activities, a bookmobile, and more. 5 p.m. (Black Stone Bookstore & Cultural Center, 214 W. Michigan Ave.): Reading by local novelist Tiya Miles. 6 p.m. (Beezy’s Café, 20 N. Washington, Ypsilanti): Readings TBA. 7 p.m. (Chin-Azzaro Gallery, 9 S. Washington): Readings by Tennessee- and Michigan-based memoirist Deedra Climer and local novelist Heather Neff. 8 p.m. (Ypsi Alehouse, 124 Pearl St.):Readings by local memoirist R.J. Fox and Virginia-based mystery writer Tj O’Connor.
3-9 p.m., various Ypsilanti locations. Free admission. info@aabookfestival.org.
