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.
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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
