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 November 3rd installment of ZVWS will feature alumni Donovan Hohn and Rachel Richardson.
Donovan Hohn is the recipient of the Whiting Writers’ Award, A National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Knight-Wallace Fellowship. His work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New York Times Magazine, and Outside, among other publications. His book, Moby-Duck, was a finalist for the Helen Bernstein Prize for Excellence in Journalism, and runner-up for both the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. A former features editor of GQ and contributing editor of Harper’s, Hohn now teaches creative writing at Wayne State University and lives with his family in Ann Arbor, where he is working on his second book.
Rachel Richardson is the author of two books of poetry, Copperhead (2011) andHundred-Year Wave (2016), both selections in the Carnegie Mellon Poetry Series. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Wallace Stegner Program at Stanford University. Her poetry and prose have appeared in The New York Times, Guernica, New England Review, Kenyon Review Online, the Poetry Foundation website, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Richardson is a contributing editor at Memorious and directs poetry programming for the Bay Area Book Festival. She lives with the writer David Roderick and their two children in Berkeley, California.
Literati is pleased to welcome Julia Sonnevend in support of her book Stories without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event. Julia will be joined in conversation by Professor William Uricchio.
How do stories of particular events turn into global myths, while others fade away? What becomes known and seen as a global iconic event? In Stories without Borders, Julia Sonnevend considers the ways in which we recount and remember news stories of historic significance. Focusing on journalists covering the fall of the Berlin Wall and on subsequent retellings of the event in a variety of ways – from Legoland reenactments to slabs of the Berlin Wall installed in global cities – Sonnevend discusses how certain events become built up so that people in many parts of the world remember them for long periods of time. She argues that five dimensions determine the viability and longevity of international news events. First, a foundational narrative must be established with certain preconditions. Next, the established narrative becomes universalized and a mythical message developed. This message is then condensed and encapsulated in a simple phrase, a short narrative, and a recognizable visual scene. Counter-narratives emerge that reinterpret events and in turn facilitate their diffusion across multiple media platforms and changing social and political contexts. Sonnevend examines these five elements through the developments of November 9, 1989 – what came to be known as the fall of the Berlin Wall. Stories Without Borders concludes with a discussion of how global iconic events have an enduring effect on individuals and societies, pointing out that after common currencies, military alliances, and international courts have failed, stories may be all that we have to bring hope and unity.
Julia Sonnevend is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Michigan. She was a Lady Davis Fellow at the Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace in Israel in 2014 and a Leibniz Fellow at the Center for Contemporary History in Germany in 2015. She is co-editor of Education and Social Media: Toward a Digital Future (forthcoming with MIT Press in 2016). She is author and co-author of articles published in journals including Journalism Studies, Columbia Journalism Review and The New Everyday. Her work also appears in edited collections including Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (Ed. Benjamin Peters, Princeton University Press, forthcoming in 2016),Iconic Power: Materiality and Meaning in Social Life (Eds. Jeffrey C. Alexander et al, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and Theorizing Visual Studies: Writing Through the Discipline (Eds. James Elkins et al, Routledge, 2012). She received her Ph.D. in Communications from Columbia University, her Master of Laws degree from Yale Law School and her Juris Doctorate and Master of Arts degrees in German Studies and Aesthetics from Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest.
William Uricchio revisits the histories of old media when they were new; explores interactive and participatory documentary; writes about the past and future of television; thinks a lot about algorithms and archives; and researches cultural identities and the question of “Americanization” in the 20th and 21st centuries. He is Professor of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, Principal Investigator of the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and faculty director of the MISTI-Netherlands Program. He is also Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and has held visiting professorships at the Freie Universität Berlin, Stockholm University, the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Lichtenberg-Kolleg), China University of Science and Technology, and in Denmark where he was DREAM professor. He has been awarded Guggenheim, Humboldt and Fulbright fellowships and the Berlin Prize; and is currently Holtzbrinck Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. His publications include Reframing Culture (Princeton); We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (Chicago/Intellect); Media Cultures(Heidelberg); hundreds of essays and book chapters … and, timed to coincide with the Batman-Superman big screen face-off, a forthcoming collection entitled Many More Lives of the Batman (BFI/Palgrave). He is currently completing a book on new forms of documentary; and another on games and playing with history and historiography after post-structuralism.
Literati is pleased to welcome Randa Jarrar in support of her recent story collection Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. Randa will be joined by Michigan writers Tariq Luthun and Kamelya Youssef.
Award-winning novelist Randa Jarrar’s new story collection moves seamlessly between realism and fable, history and the present, capturing the lives of Muslim women and men across myriad geographies and circumstances. With acerbic wit, deep tenderness, and boundless imagination, Jarrar brings to life a memorable cast of characters, many of them “accidental transients”—a term for migratory birds who have gone astray—seeking their circuitous routes back home. Fierce and feeling, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali is a testament to survival in the face of love, loss, and displacement.
Randa Jarrar is an award-winning novelist, short story writer, essayist, and translator. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved to the U.S. after the first Gulf War. Her novel A Map of Home, was published in six languages and won a Hopwood Award, an Arab-American Book Award, and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes & Noble Review. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, The Rumpus, The Oxford American, Ploughshares, Five Chapters, and other venues. She’s received fellowships and residencies from the Lannan Foundation at Marfa, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, Hedgebrook, Caravansarai, and Eastern Frontier. In 2010, the Hay Festival and Beirut UNESCO’s world capital of the book named Jarrar one of the most gifted writers of Arab origin under the age of 40.
Tariq Luthun is a Palestinian-American writer & strategist from Detroit, MI. He is currently an MFA candidate for poetry at Warren Wilson College’s Program for Writers. Among other things, Luthun is the Social Director of Organic Weapon Arts, an advisory board member of the Detroit‐based nonprofit Write A House, and is Director of the Ann Arbor Poetry Slam. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Offing, Winter Tangerine Review, and Button Poetry, among others.
Kamelya Youssef is a poet, teacher, and organizer. A graduate of the University of Michigan, she is currently an M.A. candidate in English at Wayne State University in Detroit.
Literati is pleased to welcome poet Scott Beal and poet and translator Mariela Griffor in support of their recent work.
Scott Beal is the author of Wait ‘Til You Have Real Problems and the chapbook The Octopus. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, and other journals, and have received awards including a 2014 Pushcart Prize. He serves as writer-in-the-schools for Dzanc Books in Ann Arbor and teaches in the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan.
Mariela Griffor was born in the city of Concepción in southern Chile and attended the University of Santiago and the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. In 1985, she left Chile for an involuntary exile in Sweden, and now lives in the United States, in Washington DC and Michigan, where she is Honorary Consul of Chile. She holds a BA in Journalism from Wayne State University and a MFA in Creative Writing from New England College. She is founder of Marick Press and author of three books of poems, Exiliana, House, and The Psychiatrist.
Literati is pleased to welcome Maya Barzilai and Rachel Seelig in support of their most recent works.
In the twentieth century the golem became a figure of war. It represented the chaos of warfare, the automation of war technologies, and the devastation wrought upon soldiers bodies and psyches. Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monstersdraws on some of the most popular and significant renditions of this story in order to unravel the paradoxical coincidence of wartime destruction and the fantasy of artificial creation. Due to its aggressive and rebellious sides, the golem became a means for reflection about how technological progress has altered human lives, as well as an avenue for experimentation with the media and art forms capable of expressing the monstrosity of war.
Maya Barzilai is assistant professor of Hebrew literature and Jewish culture at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2009. Her new book, Golem: Modern Wars and Their Monsters (NYU Press), explores how the infamous monster of clay became a metaphor of war and its destructive technologies across German, Israeli, and American cultures. Barzilai also researches Hebrew-German translation, Hebrew writing on World War I, and Jewish comics.
Berlin in the 1920s was a cosmopolitan hub where for a brief, vibrant moment German-Jewish writers crossed paths with Hebrew and Yiddish migrant writers. Working against the prevailing tendency to view German and East European Jewish cultures as separate fields of study, Strangers in Berlin is the first book to present Jewish literature in the Weimar Republic as the product of the dynamic encounter between East and West. Whether they were native to Germany or sojourners from abroad, Jewish writers responded to their exclusion from rising nationalist movements by cultivating their own images of homeland in verse, and they did so in three languages: German, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Author Rachel Seelig portrays Berlin during the Weimar Republic as a threshold between exile and homeland in which national and artistic commitments were reexamined, reclaimed, and rebuilt. In the pulsating yet precarious capital of Germany s first fledgling democracy, the collision of East and West engendered a broad spectrum of poetic styles and Jewish national identities.
Rachel Seelig is a fellow at the Frankel Institute for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Michigan. A native of Vancouver, Canada, she received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2011 and has taught German Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Her articles have appeared in various journals, including Prooftexts, Modern Language Notes, and The Jewish Quarterly Review. Rachel is currently co-editing a volume with Amir Eshel entitled The German-Hebrew Dialogue: Studies of Encounter and Exchange, which will be published by De Gruyter in 2017. Strangers in Berlin is her first book.
All writers welcome to share and discuss their poetry and short fiction. Sign up for new participants begins at 6:45 p.m.
Literati is thrilled to welcome Dave Eggers back to Ann Arbor for a book signing! Please note the special time for this event: Dave will be available to chat and sign books from noon until 1:30pm. All of Dave’s books, including the recently published Heroes of the Frontier, will be available for sale and signing.
Dave Eggers grew up near Chicago and graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an independent publishing house in San Francisco that produces books, a quarterly journal of new writing (McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern), and a monthly magazine, The Believer. McSweeney’s publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises around the world. In 2002, he cofounded 826 Valencia, a nonprofit youth writing and tutoring center in San Francisco’s Mission District. Sister centers have since opened in seven other American cities under the umbrella of 826 National, and like-minded centers have opened in Dublin, London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Birmingham, Alabama, among other locations. His work has been nominated for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has won the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, France’s Prix Médicis, Germany’s Albatross Prize, the National Magazine Award, and the American Book Award. Eggers lives in Northern California with his family.
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 November 10th installment of ZVWS will feature alumna and bestselling novelist Celeste Ng.
Celeste Ng is the author of the novel Everything I Never Told You, which was a New York Times bestseller, a New York Times Notable Book of 2014, Amazon’s #1 Best Book of 2014, and named a best book of the year by over a dozen publications.Everything I Never Told You was also the winner of the Massachusetts Book Award, the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, the ALA’s Alex Award, and the Medici Book Club Prize. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere, and she is a recipient of the Pushcart Prize.
Literati is pleased to partner with One Pause Poetry to celebrate the recent work of Rochelle Hurt and Sarah Rose Nordgren.
Rochelle Hurt is the author of two collections of poetry: In Which I Play the Runaway (2016), winner of the Barrow Street Book Prize, and The Rusted City (2014), published in the Marie Alexander Series from White Pine Press. Her writing has been included in the Best New Poets anthology series and awarded prizes from Crab Orchard Review, Arts & Letters, Hunger Mountain, Poetry International, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fund. She is a PhD student at the University of Cincinnati.
Sarah Rose Nordgren is the author of the poetry collections Best Bones (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014), winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize, and Darwin’s Mother, which is forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh in fall 2017. Her poems and essays appear widely in journals such as Ploughshares, American Poetry Review, Agni, The Kenyon Review Online, and Copper Nickel. Among her awards are two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council, and fellowships and scholarships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Conferences, the Vermont Studio Center, and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. Native to North Carolina, Nordgren is currently a doctoral student in poetry at the University of Cincinnati and Associate Editor at 32 Poems.
A founding editor of both LVNG and Flood Editions, Michael O’Leary works as a structural engineer and lives with his family in Chicago.
Critically acclaimed novelist Justin Torres called ASHLEY WHITAKER a “Real Texan Charmer.” The editors of Glimmer Train typed her name on their website one time. She lives alone with her cat, Catwoman.
MOLLY DICKINSON is a poet hailing from the West Coast. Her work can be found in Jerk Poet, on Tin House’s The Open Bar, and on The Nervous Breakdown. Molly graduated from Lewis & Clark College in 2012, where she was the recipient of the American Academy of Poets Prize.
The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends – a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
