Literati is thrilled to be the bookseller for the Zell Visiting Writers Series at the University of Michigan. More information about the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, including a full calendar of visiting writers, can be found here. The September 15th installment of ZVWS will feature John Freeman and Valeria Luiselli.
John Freeman was the editor of Granta until 2013. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Tales of Two Cities: The Best of Times and Worst of Times in Today’s New York. He is an executive editor at the Literary Hub, founder of the annual literary journal Freeman’s, and teaches at the New School. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Paris Review.
Valeria Luiselli was born Mexico City in 1983 and grew up in South Africa. She is the author of two novels, The Story of My Teeth and Faces in the Crowd, as well as the essay collection Sidewalks. Her work has been translated into many languages and has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, Granta, and McSweeney’s. In 2014, Faces in the Crowd was the recipient of the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction and the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 award.
Literati Bookstore is thrilled to welcome Olympic gold medalist Anthony Ervin and author Constantine Markides to discuss Ervin’s memoir, Chasing Water. More event details to come, stay tuned.
Chasing Water tells the dramatic, surprising, and sometimes provocative path that Anthony Ervin has taken to become one of those captivating Olympic heroes. Not your typical sports memoir, Chasing Water also contains arresting black-and-white drawings and a graphic story extra, as well as an inventive and mercurial narrative style that morphs chapter by chapter to reflect Ervin’s restless, multifaceted life. Ervin won a gold medal at the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games at the age of nineteen. He is an athlete branded with a slew of titles including being the first US Olympic swimmer of African American descent, along with Jewish heritage, who also grew up with Tourette’s syndrome. He shocked the sporting world by retiring soon after claiming two world titles following the 2000 Olympics. Auctioning off his gold medal for charity, he set off on a part spiritual quest, part self-destructive bender that involved Zen temples, fast motorcycles, tattoo parlors, and rock ’n’ roll bands. Then Ervin resurfaced in 2012 to not only make the US Olympic team twelve years after his first appearance, but to continue his career by swimming faster than ever before, and faster than anyone else. He is currently training for the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
“Here Ervin and swim trainer and journalist Markides combine talents to create a biography that is part first-hand narrative by Ervin, with Markides filling in the details and providing context. The formula works, pulling readers into Ervin’s experience of the thrill of victory and search for meaning….Featuring more depth, breadth, truth, and the effects of reckless choices than found in traditional athlete biographies, this gripping account is just in time for the gear up to the Rio 2016 Olympics. Readers will understand the psyche and life of elite athletes as never before, then cheer Ervin on in his attempt to make another Olympic team.”-–Library Journal
“A celebrated Olympian recounts how he rose to the top of his sport, crashed, and found redemption….This book, which tells his story through a narrative that interweaves the former gold medalist’s memories with commentary by his friend and colleague Markides, reveals the extreme highs and lows that characterized Ervin’s remarkable life and career….The author never flinches at revealing his less-than-perfect past, and the humility he demonstrates at coming to terms with his own egotism and personal shortcomings makes the book frequently compelling. A provocative and refreshingly honest redemption memoir.”–Kirkus Reviews
“Markides smartly combines his own journalistic account with a parallel narrative in which Ervin…explains his life and style. Some talents simply defy explanation, however, and Ervin may be in that category….The story of his comeback at 31 (ancient for a swimmer) is rendered more amazing by the contrast with what went before.”–Booklist
“Most memoirs from Olympians are puff pieces, ghost-written so blandly you fall asleep trying to make it to the end of the first chapter. Chasing Water is the opposite of that, an intimate, visceral experience you will appreciate.”–SwimSwam
“A refreshingly unexpected athlete biography void of eye-rolling, cliched, self help propaganda bullshit.”–Gary Hall, Jr., swimmer, ten-time Olympic medalist
Anthony Ervin is an American Olympian who resides in Los Angeles, where he continues to pursue his career as a professional swimmer, speaker, and coach. As the oldest competitor at the 2014 national championships, he won the title in the men’s 50-meter freestyle. He is currently training for the 2016 Olympic team.
Reading by this Indiana University creative writing professor, an acclaimed poet whose collection Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude was a finalist for the 2015 National Book Award for Poetry. “Gay’s praise is Whitmanesque, full of manure, mulberry-stained purple bird poop, dirty clothes and hangovers but also the pleasure of bare feet, of pruning a peach tree, of feeding a neighbor,” says an All Things Considered review.Book-signing and reception to follow with White Lotus Farms pizza for sale!
7-9 p.m., White Lotus Farms flower garden, 7217 W. Liberty. Free. onepausepoetry.org, 707-1284
Literati is pleased to welcome Dr. Jeffrey Kutcher and journalist Joanne Gerstner for a discussion of Back in the Game: Why Concussion Doesn’t Have to End Your Athletic Career.
Back in the Game, co-authored by pioneering sports neurologist Jeffrey S. Kutcher and award-winning sports journalist Joanne C. Gerstner, is the definitive guide to sports and concussion for youth parents, coaches and athletes. The topic of concussion in youth sports was relatively unheard of 10 years ago. Today, concerned parents are considering removing their children from participation in contact sports such as football or soccer. Back in the Game is a real-world based discussion of concussion and youth sports, with Dr. Kutcher’s clinical expertise blended with Gerstner’s reporting. World Cup and Olympic champion Kate Markgraf, X Games superstar Ellery Hollingsworth, former NFL quarterback Eric Hipple and an array of today’s youth coaches, parents and athletes honestly discuss concussion.
Jeffrey S. Kutcher MD is an internationally recognized sports neurologist and pioneering physician researcher. He is a graduate of the Tulane University School of Medicine and the University of Michigan Neurology Residency program. He founded the American Academy of Neurology’s Sports Neurology Section and was the neurologist for Team USA at the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics. Kutcher is the national division chief of The Sports Neurology Clinic at The CORE Institute.
Joanne C. Gerstner is an award-winning multimedia sports journalist, who focuses on sports and medicine. Her work has appeared on ESPN.com, in the The New York Times, USA Today, Detroit News, and other publications. She is a graduate of the Medill School at Northwestern University, a 2012 University of Michigan Knight-Wallace Fellow, and 2015 Jacobs Foundation Neuroscience Fellow. Gerstner is a professor of sports journalism in the School of Journalism at Michigan State University.
This 2-time Olympic gold medalist soccer player discusses her new memoir, Forward. Signing.
7 p.m., Rackham. $10 ($30 includes the book) in advance at literatibookstore.com. 585-5567.
Literati is delighted to celebrate the publication of Blood in the Water by UM professor Heather Ann Thompson.
Blood in the Water is the first definitive account of the infamous 1971 Attica prison uprising, the state’s violent response, and the victims’ decades-long quest for justice–including information never released to the public–published to coincide with the forty-fifth anniversary of this historic event.
On September 9, 1971, nearly 1300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment. Holding guards and civilian employees hostage, during the next four long days and nights the inmates negotiated with state officials for improved living conditions. On September 13, the state abruptly ended talks and sent many hundreds of heavily armed state troopers and corrections officers to retake the prison by force. In the ensuing gunfire, thirty-nine men were killed–hostages as well as prisoners–and close to one hundred were severely injured. Over the following hours, days, and weeks, troopers and officers brutally retaliated against the prisoners. For decades afterward, instead of charging any state employee who had committed murder or carried out egregious human rights abuses, New York officials only prosecuted the prisoners and failed to provide necessary support to the hostage survivors or the families of any of the men who’d been killed.
Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century, exploring every aspect of the uprising and its legacy from the perspectives of all of those involved in this forty-five year fight for justice: the prisoners, the state officials, the lawyers on both sides, the state troopers and corrections officers, and the families of the slain men.
Heather Ann Thompson is an award-winning historian at the University of Michigan. She has written on the history of mass incarceration as well as its current impact for The New York Times, Time Magazine, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and The Huffington Post. She served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States and has given Congressional Staff briefings on this subject. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit: Politics, Labor and Race in a Modern American City and editor of Speaking Out: Protest and Activism in the 1960s and 1970s.
Literati is pleased to welcome poets Leila Chatti and Tracey Knapp.
Leila Chatti is a Tunisian-American poet. She holds a BA from Michigan State University and an MFA from North Carolina State University. The recipient of a fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center, a scholarship from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop, and prizes from Narrative Magazine’s 30 Below Contest, the Gregory O’Donoghue International Poetry Prize, and the Academy of American Poets, her poems appear in Best New Poets, Narrative, Boston Review, North American Review, The Missouri Review, TriQuarterly, Gulf Coast, and elsewhere. www.leilachatti.com
The poems in Tracey Knapp’s Mouth are about the world of the mouth and its many satellites. Words, especially. And when you’re lucky, another mouth. The poems address the beautiful failures of language to mean what it says, and to be less than the physical. At the end of the day, you are left with only the words in your head, the mouth on your face.
“Quotidian, weird, intimate, witty, and skittery, Knapp’s poems are refractions through a funhouse mirror. They’re self-conscious without being self-important. The wounded heart is everywhere apparent; we of that tribe can be grateful for one more of us to voice it, brilliantly. MOUTH is a charmer of a first book. Read it and weep over your nachos and wine; it will leave you wanting more.”—Kim Addonizio
“…part Frank O’Hara, part Robert Herrick …it’s a book that hurts, and a book that flirts… It’s also part of the least self-important, and therefore the most important, tradition of lyric, the tradition of trying to make the tiny moments, their delights and disappointments, last.”–Stephen Burt, Slate
“Deliciously irreverent, Knapp’s poems welcome us into a weird urban landscape full of airports, broken hearts, wine and spilled dog chow. …[She] delves into the shadow and still finds glimpses of light.”–San Francisco Chronicle
Tracey Knapp‘s first full-length collection of poems, Mouth, won the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award and was published in 2015. Tracey has received scholarships from the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fund. Her work has been anthologized in Best New Poets 2008 and 2010, The Cento: A Collection of Collage Poems (Red Hen Press), and has appeared in Poetry Daily, Five Points, Ink Node (as a featured poet),The National Poetry Review, Red Wheelbarrow Review, The New Ohio Review, The Minnesota Review, and elsewhere.
Reading by this U-M creative writing grad student, author of the poetry collections[insert] boy and Don’t Call Us Dead. The program begins with open mike readings.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Eileen Pollack back to the store in support of her latest book, A Perfect Life.
Love and science converge in Eileen Pollack’s luminous new novel, A Perfect Life. With singular insight and narrative grace, Pollack explores the moral complexities of scientific discovery through the story of a brilliant research biologist facing heartrending decisions about her personal life and the fate that genetics may have preordained for her.
Jane Weiss is a young post doc at MIT who is obsessed with finding the genetic marker for Valentine’s disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that killed her mother. With the clear vision of a scientist, she knows that she and her sister each stand a fifty percent chance of inheriting the disease, and her research is fueled by a need to discover if they are genetic carriers. Having witnessed the devastating effect that Valentine’s had on her parents’ marriage, Jane has vowed to steer clear of love unless she is sure she is free of the disease, refusing to become a burden on anyone else. But that determination is upended when she meets and falls in love with Willie, whose own father died of Valentine’s. Suddenly, with the very real possibility of their relationship ending in tragedy, her research takes on a new ferocity.
“A Perfect Life probes how we live in the face of uncertainty and the ways risk can both disable and empower us. Eileen Pollack has crafted a tender exploration of family love that is as smart and thought-provoking as it is moving.”–Celeste Ng, author of Everything I Never Told You
“Like Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations and Allegra Goodman’s Intuition, Eileen Pollack’s compelling novel offers an intimate portrait of scientists engaged in research with the potential to change all our lives—and equally engaged in relationships that change their own lives.”–Andrea Barrett, author of Ship Fever and Servants of the Map
“A tense scientific mystery propels this gripping novel, but what resonates most powerfully are the keenly observed discoveries Jane makes about even deeper mysteries: the risks and pleasures of being human, and the nuances—as well as the costs—of love.”–Kim Edwards, author of The Memory-Keeper’s Daughter
With both an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a BS in physics from Yale,Eileen Pollack is uniquely positioned to have written A Perfect Life, bringing both a fiction-writer’s sensibility and a scientific background to the novel. She is the author of two previous novels, two story collections, and two books of nonfiction, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Michener Foundation and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Her work has been included in both the Best American Short Stories and the Best American Essays series. Pollack has been a professor at the Helen Zell MFA Program at the University of Michigan since 1999, and was a director of the program for five years. She now divides her time between Ann Arbor and Manhattan.
Nisi Shawl is a writer of science fiction and fantasy short stories and a journalist. She is the co-author (with Cynthia Ward) of “Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction.” Her short stories have appeared in “Asimov’s SF Magazine,” “Strange Horizons,” and numerous other magazines and anthologies.
