Reading by the 2016 Ann Arbor Youth Poetry Slam Team, fresh from their performance at the Brave New Voices poetry festival in Washington, D.C. The program begins with open mike readings.
This Nigeria-born U-M creative writing grad reads from The Fishermen, his debut novel, told from the perspective of a 9-year-old Nigerian boy, about 4 brothers who skip school to go fishing. At the nearby forbidden river, they meet a madman who persuades the oldest that he’s destined to be killed by one of his siblings. Signing.
Literati is excited to join author and owner of Motor City Brew Tours, Stephen C. Johnson, for a discussion of Detroit Beer: A History of Brewing in the Motor City. This event will take place next door in the tap room at Arbor Brewing Company, with the bar open for business!
While in recent years Detroit’s craft beer scene has exploded with activity and innovation, brewing has a long history in the Motor City. Small brewers popped up during the mid-1800s to support nearby saloons. Many breweries survived the dry years by producing “near beer,” or non-alcoholic beer, which was quickly abandoned after Prohibition. Consolidation marked the following decades until only Stroh Brewery Company remained. Local brewing returned triumphantly with dozens of breweries opening their doors since the 1990s, including Motor City Brewing Works, Atwater Brewery and Kuhnhenn Brewing Company.
Stephen Johnson is the owner and founder of Motor City Brew Tours, a tour company that provides guided tours to Michigan breweries. He is also an adjunct professor of marketing at Macomb Community College and has worked in both sales and marketing for over twenty years. Stephen earned a bachelor’s in business from Western Michigan University and a master’s of business administration from Walsh College of Business. A Michigan native, Stephen loves to share his knowledge and history of Detroit the beer scene.
This Michigan-born Montana-based writer reads from Vagabond Song, his new poetic travel memoir that recounts 15 years he spent hitchhiking and road tripping through Colorado, Central America, Britain, the badlands, and more. Montana Quarterly calls it a “jazzy, freewheeling, rollicking road trip into the beating heart of the Eternal Now.” Signing.
This Petoskey- and Ann Arbor-based writer reads from Invincible Summers, her novel-in-stories, set in a Detroit suburb in the 1960s and 70s. It follows a young woman over the course of 11 summers, from age 6 to 23. Signing.
This acclaimed Minneapolis novelist reads from Wintering, his new novel about an elderly man with dementia who escapes his sickbed and vanishes into the forbidding wilderness surrounding a northern Minnesota town. “If Jack London’s Yukon tales married William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County’s blood battles, their thematic and geographic offspring would be Peter Geye’s Wintering,” says a Minneapolis Star Tribunereview. Signing.
Literati is delighted to welcome Blair Braverman in support of her memoir, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North. Blair will be joined in conversation by UM MFA alum Mindy Misener.
Blair Braverman fell in love with the North at an early age: By the time she was nineteen, she had left her home in California, moved to Norway to learn how to drive sled dogs, and worked as a tour guide on a glacier in Alaska. By turns funny and sobering, bold and tender, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube charts Blair’s endeavor to become a “tough girl”—someone who courts danger in an attempt to become fearless. As she ventures into a ruthless arctic landscape, Blair faces down physical exhaustion—being buried alive in an ice cave, and driving a dogsled across the tundra through a whiteout blizzard in order to avoid corrupt police—and grapples with both love and violence as she negotiates the complex demands of being a young woman in a man’s land.
Brilliantly original and bracingly honest, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube captures the triumphs and the perils of the journey to self-discovery and independence in a landscape that is as beautiful as it is unforgiving.
Blair Braverman graduated from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program, where she was also an Arts Fellow. She has been a resident fellow at Blue Mountain Center and the MacDowell Colony and her work has appeared in Buzzfeed, The Atavist, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, Orion, AGNI, High Country News, Waging Nonviolence, and on This American Life. She lives in Mountain, Wisconsin.
Vermont freelance food journalist Larry Olmsted is joined by local radio personality Michael Patrick Shiels in a discussion of Olmsted’s new book about recent food frauds, such as Parmesan cheese made from sawdust. Signing. Zingerman’s olive oil tasting.
University of Iowa Chinese literature professor Jennifer Feeley reads from her poetry and her translations of Chinese poetry, including her new book, Not Written Words: Selected Poems of Xi Xi, the 1st book by this prominent contemporary Hong Kong poet to be translated into English. Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
Literati is pleased to welcome Margaret Wappler in support of her debut novel, Neon Green.
It’s the summer of 1994 in suburban Chicago: “Forrest Gump” is still in theaters, teens are reeling from the recent death of Kurt Cobain, and you can enter a sweepstakes for a spaceship from Jupiter to land in your backyard. Welcome to Margaret Wappler’s slightly altered 90s. Everything’s pretty much the way you remember it, except for the aliens. When a flying saucer lands in the Allens’ backyard, family patriarch and environmental activist Ernest is up in arms. According to the company facilitating the visits, the spaceship is 100 percent non-toxic, but as Ernest’s panic increases, so do his questions: What are the effects of longterm exposure to the saucer and why is it really here? The family starts logging the spaceship’s daily fits and starts but it doesn’t get them any closer to figuring out the spaceship’s comically erratic behavior. Ernest s wife Cynthia and their children, Alison and Gabe, are less concerned with the saucer, and more worried about their father s growing paranoia (not to mention their mundane, suburban existences). Set before the arrival of the internet, “Neon Green” will stun, unnerve, and charm readers with its loving depiction of a suburban family living on the cusp of the future.
Margaret Wappler has written about the arts and pop culture for the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Elle, The Believer, The Village Voice, and several other publications. Her work has appeared in Black Clock, Public Fiction, and the anthology Joyland Retro. Neon Green is her first novel. She lives in Los Angeles.
