George Washington University law professor and National Constitution Center CEO Jeffrey Rosen on Louis Brandeis: American Prophet, his new book about the hugely influential Supreme Court justice.
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.
FRUIT is an independent, community-led reading and dialogue series for and by marginalized voices, hosted in Literati Bookstore. More information about this month’s installment forthcoming.
FRUIT is a moment and a movement of reclamation. It is a space of and for literary artists representing the marginalized: the colored, the queer, the silenced, and the unseen. Each event showcases the work of fresh, revolutionary artists and features a conversation around their lives and their crafts. In this space, FRUIT strives to serve as a carefully curated reading and dialogue series for those who live at intersections ignored. This experience exists both physically and digitally in order to help those marginalized voices reclaim their flesh and plant their roots through short-form literature. Our goal is to create an experience that is intentional in its centering of the historically othered. Through this exploration of identity and craft, we hope to cultivate a platform in which the growth and sharing of radical joy— both encumbered and despite— happens in the presence of solidarity and healthy community.
Seating will be open beginning at 7pm. The event will start at 7:30pm.
