Book Signing and Talk with Diane Burney, author of Spiritual Balancing: A Guidebook for Living in the Light
Apr. 6, 7 p.m. in the Crazy Wisdom Tea Room
A free author event that will include an overview of Burney’s book, situations that create auric weaknesses, ways to increase your vibrations, and spiritual protection.
Saadia Faruqi is a Pakistani American writer of fiction and nonfiction. She writes for a number of publications including Huffington Post and The Islamic Monthly about the global contemporary Muslim experience and about interfaith dialogue. She has trained law enforcement on cultural sensitivity issues and offers community college classes on a variety of topics related to Islam and Muslims. She is editor-in-chief of Blue Minaret, a magazine for Muslim art, poetry and prose. Her short stories have been published in several American literary journals and magazines such as Catch & Release, On the Rusk, In Flight and The Great American Literary Magazine. “Brick Walls: Tales of Hope & Courage from Pakistan” is her debut fiction book. She is currently working on a novel based in Pakistan and the U.S. as well as a children’s book series.
Literati is the bookseller for the Zell Visiting Writers Series at the University of Michigan and the 2016 Sarah Marwil Lamstein Children’s Literature Lecture, presented by R.J. Palacio.
R.J. Palacio is the author of New York Times #1 Bestseller Wonder, a novel about a young boy born with a facial deformity entering the fifth grade. A former art director and book jacket designer, Palacio lives in New York City with her husband, two sons, and two dogs.
Bryan Burrough is a special correspondent at Vanity Fair magazine and the author of six books, including the No. 1 New York Times Best-Seller Barbarians at the Gate and his latest, Days of Rage. He is also a three-time winner of the prestigious Gerald Loeb Award for Excellence in Financial Journalism.
Born in 1961, Bryan was raised in Temple, Texas, and graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1983. From 1983 to 1992 he was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, where he reported from Dallas, Houston, Pittsburgh and, during the late 1980s, covered the busy mergers and acquisitions beat in New York. He has written for Vanity Fair since 1992.
In 1990 Bryan and John Helyar co-authored Barbarians, the story of the fight for control of RJR Nabisco. The book, which spent 39 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has been hailed as one of the most influential business narratives of all time. Bryan joined Vanity Fair in 1992, where he has reported from locales as diverse as Hollywood, Nepal, Moscow, Tokyo and Jerusalem.
local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal discuss the difference between traditional and self-publishing and examine the benefits and drawbacks of each path. For adult and teen (grade 6 & up) fiction and nonfiction writers.
Literati is pleased to welcome Christopher Bakken, David Blair, and Cody Walker to kick off our celebration of National Poetry Month.
Christopher Bakken is department chair and Frederick F. Seeley Professor of English at Allegheny College. He is the author of the poetry collections After Greece and Goat Funeral. He is also co-translator of The Lions’ Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios, and the author of Honey, Olives, Octopus: Adventures at the Greek Table. Of Eternity & Oranges, Adam Zagajewski says: “This is a beautiful collection of poems: half-cryptic, half-open; half based on ancient myths, half on actual life. There’s almost always Greece as the backdrop, olives and the sea but also a human drama. Christopher Bakken proves that what’s ancient is also modern and vice versa. We live between times; only poetry can make it palpable.”
David Blair is the author of two previous poetry collections. He teaches at the New England Institute of Art. Another book, Arsonville, is forthcoming. Of his most recent work, Friends with Dogs, Tom Sleigh says: “What gives weight and density to David Blair’s remarkable poems is their almost Hardyish sense of regret and loss. So many of his poems are little dramas of what wasn’t said when it should have been said, or of the way celebratory instincts get undermined by the pressures of day-to-day life. I admire the quick shifts in voicing, the way a whole social world becomes revealed in some small characteristic gesture, and how alert Blair is to other people. Very few poets ever achieve this kind of fellow feeling and write about it with such tact and intelligent sympathy.”
Cody Walker is the author of Shuffle and Breakdown and the co-editor of Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest. His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Parnassus, Slate, Poetry Northwest, The Hecht Prize Anthology, and the 2007 and 2015 editions of The Best American Poetry; his essays have appeared online in The New Yorker and The Kenyon Review. He lives with his family in Ann Arbor, where he teaches English at the University of Michigan. Of his latest, Mary Jo Salter says: “In Cody Walker’s The Self-Styled No-Child, the poet-father sings to his new baby (read ‘Cradle Song’ or ‘Small Suite’ for perfect little servings of delight), but his childlike playfulness has an internal source, too. The light verses in Walker’s new collection often have dark edges to them (see ‘The Garden’ or ‘We Hated Our Lives’), and his social and political satires are unflinching. Still, this word-wizard with a genius for rhyme reminds us of how irrepressibly joy remains.”
Melissa Grunow is the author of Realizing River City: A Memoir (Tumbleweed Books, 2016). Her writing has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, River Teeth, New Plains Review, Blue Lyra Review, Temenos, and Yemassee, among many others. She is also a live storyteller who competes in Detroit’s The Moth StorySLAM.
An award-winning writer, Melissa was a semi-finalist for the 2015 DISQUIET International Literary Lisbon Writing Program, a Pushcart Prize nominee for her essay “Home,” a two-time recipient of the Detroit Working Writers creative nonfiction prize, and is featured in Poets & Writers Directory of Writers.
She is a volunteer reader for Creative Nonfiction magazine, screening general submissions for publication and and editor for Grey Wolfe Publishing. She is a member of Detroit Working Writers, Michigan Writers, and the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP).
Melissa holds a Bachelor of Science in English-creative writing and journalism from Central Michigan University, a Master of Arts in English from New Mexico State University, and a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing with distinction from National University.
Literati is pleased to welcome Sarah Messer and Suzanne Wise as part of our celebration of National Poetry Month.
Sarah Messer has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Mellon Foundation, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Michigan Council for the Arts and others. She is the author of four books: two poetry collections, Bandit Letters and Dress Made of Mice, a history/memoir Red House, and a book of translations, Having Once Paused, Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu. In 2008-2009, she was a Poetry Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. For many years she taught in the MFA program at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington. Currently she runs One Pause Poetry (onepausepoetry.org) in Ann Arbor, Michigan and works at White Lotus Farms.
Suzanne Wise is the author of the poetry collection The Kingdom of the Subjunctive and a chapbook, Talking Cure. Recent poems have appeared in Bomb, Guernica, Ploughshares, Bone Bouquet, Catch Up, Green Mountains Review, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing at Middlebury College in Vermont, and Pratt Institute and Poets House in New York City.
Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. McDermott is Johns Hopkins University’s Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities. Born in Brooklyn, New York, McDermott attended St. Boniface School in Elmont, New York, on Long Island (1967), Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead (1971), and the State University of New York at Oswego, receiving her BA in 1975. She received her MA from the University of New Hampshire in 1978. She has taught at UCSD and American University, has been a writer-in-residence at Lynchburg College and Hollins College in Virginia, and was lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire. Her short stories have appeared in Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker, and Seventeen. She has also published articles in the New York Times and Washington Post. Ms. McDermott lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband, a neuroscientist, and three children.
Literati is delighted to welcome Brian Blanchfield in support of his collection Proxies: Essays Near Knowing.
Past compunction, expressly unbeholden, these twenty-four single-subject essays train focus on a startling miscellany of topics —Foot Washing, Dossiers, Br’er Rabbit, Housesitting, Man Roulette, the Locus Amoenus—that begin to unpack the essayist himself and his life’s rotating concerns: sex and sexuality, poetry and poetics, subject positions in American labor (not excluding academia), and his upbringing in working-class, Primitive Baptist, central-piedmont North Carolina. In Proxies an original constraint, a “total suppression of recourse to authoritative sources,” engineers Brian Blanchfield’s disarming mode of independent intellection. The “repeatable experiment” to draw only from what he knows, estimates, remembers, and misremembers about the subject at hand often opens onto an unusually candid assessment of self and situation. The project’s driving impulse, courting error, peculiar in an era of crowd-sourced Wiki-knowledge, is at least as old as the one Montaigne had when, putting all the books back on the shelf, he asked, “What do I know?”
“Into what some are calling a new golden age of creative nonfiction lands Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies, which singlehandedly raises the bar for what’s possible in the field. This is a momentous work informed by a lifetime of thinking, reading, loving, and reckoning, utterly matchless in its erudition, its precision, its range, its daring, and its grace. I know of no book like it, nor any recent book as thoroughly good, in art or in heart.” —Maggie Nelson
Brian Blanchfield is the author of two books of poetry, Not Even Then and A Several World, which received the 2014 James Laughlin Award and was a longlist finalist for the National Book Award. Recent essays and poems have appeared in Harper’s, BOMB, Brick, Guernica, The Nation, Chicago Review, The Brooklyn Rail, A Public Space, Lana Turner, The Paris Review, and The Awl. He has taught as core faculty in the graduate writing programs of Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles and at the University of Montana, Missoula, where he was the 2008 Richard Hugo Visiting Poet. Since 2010 he has been a poetry editor of Fence. With his partner John, he lives out past the streetlights in Tucson, where is the host of Speedway and Swan on KXCI 91.3.
