Stephen Schottenfeld will read from his debut novel, Bluff City Pawn. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his stories have appeared in the Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, StoryQuarterly, the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Iowa Review, New England Review, and other journals. Stephen received special mention in both the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies. Schottenfeld teaches English at the University of Rochester.
Local indie press Short Flight/Long Drive‘s Marry, F*ck, Kill, (Cuddle) Tour features five writers:
Chloe Caldwell is the author of the forthcoming novella, Women, (SF/LD Books, October 2014) and the essay collection Legs Get led Astray (Future Tense Books, April 2012). Chloe’s work has appeared in Salon.com, The Rumpus, Thought Catalog, Nylon, The Nervous Breakdown, xoJane, The Frisky, The Sun Magazine, SMITH, Jewcy, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Freerange Nonfiction, The Faster Times, The Fix, and Men’s Health.
Elizabeth Ellen‘s stories have appeared in numerous online and print journals over the last ten years, including elimae, Quick Fiction, Hobart, Lamination Colony, Muumuu House, HTMLGIANT, and many others. She is the author of the chapbook Before You She Was a Pit Bull (Future Tense) and her collection of flash fictions, Sixteen Miles Outside of Phoenix, was included in A Peculiar Feeling of Restlessness: four chapbooks of short short fiction by four women (Rose Metal Press). Fast Machine is a collection of her best work from the last decade. She was recently awarded a Pushcart Prize for her story “Teen Culture” which appeared in American Short Fiction in 2012. She lives in Ann Arbor, where she co-edits Hobart and oversees Hobart’s book division, Short Flight/Long Drive Books.
Mira Gonzalez‘s work has been featured on VICE, Thought Catalog, Muumuu House, Hobart, and in various other places online and in print.Her debut poetry collection I will never be beautiful enough to make us beautiful together was published by Sorry House in 2013. It was a finalist for Goodread’s Choice Awards, coming out ahead of Poet Laureate Billy Collins, and losing to J.R.R. Tolkien.
Chelsea Martin was 23 when she published her first collection, Everything Was Fine until Whatever (2009), a genre-blurring book of short fiction, nonfiction, prose, poetry, sketches, and memoir. She is also the author, most recently, of The Real Funny Thing about Apathy (2010) and Even Though I Don’t Miss You (2013).
Rae Paris is from Carson, California. Her poetry and fiction appear or are forthcoming in Dismantle: an Anthology of Writing from the VONA/ VOICES Writers Workshop, Solstice, Blackberry, Guernica, Feminist Studies, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. Her work has been supported by an NEA Literature Fellowship, and writing residencies from the Hambidge Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Hedgebrook, Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA), and Norcroft. Her poem “The Forgetting Tree” was nominated for Best of the Net 2013. Her short story “The Girl Who Ate Her Own Skin” was a recommended story in the 2009 O. Henry Prize Stories, and her collection was a finalist for the 2008 Flannery O’Connor Award for Fiction. She recently completed a young adult novel titled You, excerpts of which were finalists for the Summer Literary Seminars and the Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards.
U-M alum (and former NELP professor) Diane Cook who will read from her debut story collection Man V. Nature. Diane’s fiction has been published in Harper’s Magazine, Granta, Tin House, Zoetrope, One Story,Guernica, and elsewhere. Her nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and on This American Life, where she worked as a radio producer for six years. She earned an MFA from Columbia University, where she was a Teaching Fellow. She lives in Oakland, California.
Literati is pleased to help launch issue 5.5 of literary journal Harlequin Creature with a very special listening party. That’s because issue 5.5 of the journal is, in fact, a viynl record.
Tickets can be purchased online at http://bit.ly/NZPNAA14
RC Writing Alum and U-M Professor of English Laura Kasischke will participate in a live broadcast of Word Squared with T Hetzel.
Sweetland Center for Writing’s Word Squared lets you hear directly from U-M professors about their challenges, processes, and expectation as writers and also as readers of student writing. Word Squared pairs on esteemed University professor with Sweetland faculty member and WCBN Living Writers T Hetzel for a conversation about writing. These conversations offer a rare glimps into the writing that professors do outside the classroom and how they handle the same challenges student writers face.
Laura Kasischke is the Allan Seager Collegiate Professor of English at U-M, where she has won a number of awards for her teaching, including the Henry Russel Award, 1923 Memorial Teaching Award, and a Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award.
She has published nine collections of poetry and nine novels. Her fiction has been translated into many languages, and her last four novles habe been international best-sellers. For her eighth book of poetry she received the National Book Critics Circle Award. The collection was also a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.
Local poet Scott Beal, an award-winning U-M creative writing grad, reads from his recently published debut collection, which deploys familiar characters from Rapunzel to Perseus and whimsically surreal tall tales to explore the varied and violent forces that shape human identities. MacArthur-winning poet and former U-M English professor Alice Fulton praises Beal’s “revelatory” tales for their “surprising linguistic and narrative moves [that] elicit the unbidden traumas and dazzling weirdness of lived experience. Refreshments. Signing.
8-9 p.m., Neutral Zone, 310 E. Washington.
Children’s book author Chris Van Allsburg will give a presentation and sign in support of his latest work, The Misadventures of Sweetie-Pie.
Van Allsburg is a Michigan native and U-M alum. He is the winner of two Caldecott Medals, for Jumanji and The Polar Express, as well as the recipient of a Caldecott Honor Book for The Garden of Abdul Gasazi. He has also been awarded the Regina Medal for lifetime achievement in children’s literature. In 1982, Jumanji was nominated for a National Book Award and was made into a popular feature film, as was its sequel, Zathura. Van Allsburg was formerly an instructor at the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives in Rhode Island with his wife and two children.
Seating will be limited. Details forthcoming from literatibookstore,com
Katie Hartsock is the author of a poetry chapbook, Hotels, Motels, and Extended Stays, published by Toadlily Press in their 2014 Quartet Series. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Crab Orchard Review, DIAGRAM, Massachusetts Review, Measure, Michigan Quarterly Review, RHINO, and Southwest Review; and in the anthology Down to the Dark River: Poems about the Mississippi River (Louisiana Literature Press, 2015). She holds a MFA from the University of Michigan and will receive a PhD in Comparative Literary Studies from Northwestern University in summer 2015. Her full-length manuscript has been a finalist for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and the New Criterion Poetry Prize.
RC Writing alumna and U-M professor Laura Kasischke has published eight collections of poetry and eight novels. Her novels include Suspicious River (1996), White Bird in a Blizzard (1999), and The Life Before Her Eyes(2002). They have been translated widely, and adapted for film. She has been the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the DiCastagnola Award from the Poetry Society of America, several Pushcart Prizes, the Bobst Award for Emerging Writers, and the Beatrice Hawley Award. Her other collections of poetry include Space, in Chains, Lilies, Without, Gardening in the Dark, Wild Brides, Housekeeping in a Dream, Fire and Flower and What It Wasn’t. Her poems and stories have been published in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, The New Republic , The Kenyon Review, Poetry, The Iowa Review and elsewhere.
Note: rescheduled from February 11
Poet and fiction writer Stuart Dybek will be the RC’s 2015 Artist in Residence, March 19-21, 2015. He will also be keynote speaker at the second annual Voices of the Middle West conference, at the RC on March 21st.
