Oct. 12: All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share. Hosted by local poets and former college English teachers Joe Kelty and Ed Morin.
All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell.
C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of The Day Underneath the Day (TriQuarterlyBooks, 2001), The Second Person (Four Way Books, 2007), Torn (Four Way Books, 2011) and The Halo (Four Way Books, 2016). He is a previous winner of the Grolier Prize, both the Stanley P. Young Fellowship, and Amanda Davis Fellowship from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He lives in San Francisco with the biologist and composer, Jacob Bertrand, his spouse.
Meet the winner of the Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of American First novel award, John Keyse-Walker. He’ll be talking about his Caribbean set bookSun, Sand, Murder. John will be joined by Greg Jolley, author of Murder in a Very Small Town.
Local teacher and writer Dawn Richberg reads from her new chapbook of poems about teaching and transformation. The program begins with a brief open mike for poets, who are welcome to read their own work or a favorite poem by another writer.
7 p.m., Bookbound, 1729 Plymouth, Courtyard Shops.
Storytellers Guild members present a program of old tales and personal stories for grownups.
Free; donations accepted. annarborstorytelling.org, facebook.com/annarborstorytellers. 665-2757.
RC Creative Writing alumnus Nicholas Petrie will be Writer in Residence at the RC October 12-13, and will read in Benzinger Library on the 13th. He is the author of The Drifter (2016) and Burning Bright (January 2017). Nicholas won a Hopwood for short fiction in 1991; he received his MFA in fiction from the University of Washington. 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.
Literati is pleased to welcome Jordan Zandi, reading from his collection Solarium. UM Zell Fellows in Poetry Amanda Rybin Koob and Hannah Webster will also read.
“Solarium is a completely original gem of a book. I have never met Jordan Zandi, but I would like to, for there is a sweet spirit haunting his guileless poems. His inner world is always interacting with the outer world, and as a result everything seems to be shining. ‘Walking across the binary field, / what does the young man see?’ Zandi asks, searching for signs with his subtle eyes. The answer seems to be the great opium of simply being content within oneself—with a heart that receives and watches (if a heart watches), while resisting the systems that hurt us—and remaining awake to experience.”—Henri Cole, from the Foreword
Jordan Zandi is the author of Solarium (Sarabande Books), which was chosen by Henri Cole as the winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize. The New Yorker named it one of the twelve best poetry-related books of 2015, calling it, “A first book made eventful by the weirdness and clarity of Zandi’s mind.” He holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Boston University, where he was an Elizabeth Leonard Fellow and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellow to Bolivia, and his poems have appeared in The New Republic, Little Star, and Verse Daily, among others. He is founder and co-editor of Prodigal, an independent print and online journal of poetry and prose and currently lives in Indianapolis with his wife and their two rabbits.
Award-winning journalist Tom Carr discusses his lavishly illustrated new book.
Literati is delighted to be the bookseller for one of our favorite authors, Mary Roach, who’ll discuss her latest book, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, at the downtown branch of the Ann Arbor District Library.
Much of military science is necessarily preoccupied with the study of violence, the development of strategy, of weapons and armaments, of warfare. But not all the battles of war involve drone technology and Bradley Personnel Vehicle. On a daily basis, soldiers also fight more esoteric battles against less considered adversaries—for example, exhaustion, shock, panic, disease, extreme heat, cataclysmic noise, gastrointestinal distress, and assorted waterfowl. In Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War, America’s favorite science writer Mary Roach explores those aspects of war that no one makes movies about–not the killing but the keeping alive.
Grunt salutes the scientists and surgeons running along in the wake of combat, lab coats flapping and celebrates the courage of people like Navy flight surgeon Angus Rupert, who flew blindfolded and upside down to test a vibrating suit designed to help pilots fly by feel should they become blinded or disoriented, and Captain Herschel Flowers of the Army Medical Research Laboratory, who injected himself with cobra venom to test the possibility of building immunity. With her characteristic sense of humor, her indefatigable enthusiasm, and her sharp eye for telling detail, Roach, as always, proves to be the ideal tour guide. When it comes to military history, not all heroes carry guns, and not all heroism happens in a burst of cinematic glory. In Grunt, the heroes engage in dizzying flights of unorthodox thinking. They experiment with flame-resistant textiles, zippers, earplugs, shark repellent, and erectile tissue. If necessary, they lob chickens at airplanes.
Mary Roach is the New York Times best-selling author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex, Packing For Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, and Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal. She lives in Oakland, California.
