Literati is pleased to welcome Paul Dimond and Martha Buhr Grimes in support of their novel, The Belle of Two Arbors.
Born at the turn of the twentieth century in Glen Arbor, near the dunes of Northern Michigan, young Belle is the first child of a gruff stove works boss and a crippled mother who weaned Belle on the verse of Emily Dickenson. When a natural disaster results in her mother’s death and nearly takes the life of her younger brother Pip, Belle creates a fierce, almost ecstatic farewell song. Thus begins her journey to compose a perfect Goodbye to Mama.
At 21, Belle ventures south to Ann Arbor for university, with teenaged Pip in tow. There, she befriends Robert Frost, Ted Roethke and Wystan Auden and finds that her poetry stands alongside theirs, and even with that of her hero, Dickinson. Her lyrics capture the sounds, sights, and rhythms of the changing seasons in the northern forests, amidst the rolling dunes by the shores of the Great Lake.
Despite the peace she finds, Belle also struggles in both homes. Up north, she battles her father who thinks a woman can’t run the family business; and clashes against developers who would scar the natural landscape. In Ann Arbor, she challenges the status quo of academic pedants and chauvinists.
Belle’s narrative brings these two places to life in their historic context: a growing Midwestern town driven by a public university, striving for greatness; and a rural peninsula seeking prosperity while preserving its natural heritage. Through the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Post-War Boom, Belle’s story is hard to put down. Her voice and songs will be even harder to forget.
For more than 70 years Paul Dimond has split most of his time between Ann Arbor, home of the University of Michigan, and Glen Arbor, amidst Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Prior to researching and writing The Belle of Two Arbors, Paul Dimond served as the Director of the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights under Law, tried several major race cases that challenged a divided Supreme Court, became a Professor Law, and served as Special Assistant to President Clinton for Economic Policy. He has also practiced law, chaired a national real estate firm and continues to spend his time between his two Arbors. Currently, he works on behalf of several non-profits in Michigan so the heart of the Great Lakes can once again become a thriving home for fresh water and fresh ideas. He is the author of numerous articles and three books on policy, law and history, including Beyond Busing, recipient of the Ralph J. Bunche Book of the Year in 1986, as well as the author of three novels, including the youth title North Coast Almanac. He is an alumnus of Amherst College and the University of Michigan Law School.
Martha (Marty) Buhr Grimes, a lifelong resident of Ann Arbor, also summered at her family cottage up north near Lake Michigan. She taught English, creative writing and poetry at secondary schools for 24 years, co-authored Summerskills language arts workbooks, and shared many hundreds of poems with her Paper Kite poetry group. Marty earned a BA in English and an MA in English and Education from the University of Michigan.
Literati is delighted to welcome Stephanie Burgis back to Michigan in support of her latest children’s novel, The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart. Stephanie will be joined by Merrie Haskell, Jim C. Hines, and Patrick Samphire for a conversation about writing fantasy for children and adults alike.
Stephanie Burgis grew up in East Lansing, Michigan, but now lives in Wales with her husband and two sons, surrounded by mountains, castles and coffee shops. She is the author of four MG fantasy adventures, including The Dragon with a Chocolate Heart (Bloomsbury 2017) and the Kat, Incorrigible trilogy (published in the UK as The Unladylike Adventures of Kat Stephenson). She has also published two historical fantasy novels for adults, Masks and Shadows and Congress of Secrets(Pyr Books 2016) and nearly forty short stories for adults and teens in various magazines and anthologies. Her first book, A Most Improper Magick (a.k.a. Kat, Incorrigible in the US), won the 2011 Waverton Good Read Children’s Award for the Best Début Children’s Novel by a British Author.
Merrie Haskell grew up half in North Carolina, half in Michigan. She wrote her first story at age seven. She attended the University of Michigan, graduating from the Residential College with a degree in biological anthropology. She works in a library with over 7.5 million bound volumes. Her first three books are The Princess Curse, Handbook for Dragon Slayers, and The Castle Behind Thorns. She won the Schneider Family Book Award (Middle Grades) and the DetCon1 Middle Grade Speculative Fiction award, and she was twice a finalist for the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. Merrie lives in Saline, Michigan.
Jim C. Hines is the author of twelve fantasy novels, including the Magic ex Libris series, the Princess series of fairy tale retellings, the humorous Goblin Quest trilogy, and the Fable Legends tie-in Blood of Heroes. He’s an active blogger, and won the 2012 Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer. He lives in mid-Michigan with his family.
Patrick Samphire started writing when he was fourteen years old and thought it would be a good way of getting out of English lessons. It didn’t work, but he kept on writing anyway. He has lived in Zambia, Guyana, Austria and England. He now lives with his wife and two children in Wales, U.K. He has published almost twenty short stories. Secrets of the Dragon Tomb is his first novel.
Literati is pleased to welcome Kristina Riggle and Jacquelyn Vincenta in support of their recent novels.
About Kristina’s Vivian in Red: Famed Broadway producer Milo Short may be eighty-eight but that doesn’t stop him from going to the office every day. So when he steps out of his Upper West Side brownstone on one exceptionally hot morning, he’s not expecting to see the impossible: a woman from his life sixty years ago, cherry red lips, bright red hat, winking at him on a New York sidewalk, looking just as beautiful as she did back in 1934.
The sight causes him to suffer a stroke. And when he comes to, the renowned lyricist discovers he has lost the ability to communicate. Milo believes he must unravel his complicated history with Vivian Adair in order to win back his words. But he needs help—in the form of his granddaughter Eleanor— failed journalist and family misfit. Tapped to write her grandfather’s definitive biography, Eleanor must dig into Milo’s colorful past to discover the real story behind Milo’s greatest song Love Me, I Guess, and the mysterious woman who inspired an amazing life.
A sweeping love story, family mystery and historical drama set eighty years apart, Vivian in Red will swell your heart like a favorite song while illuminating Broadway like you’ve never seen before.
Kristina Riggle lives and writes in West Michigan. Her debut novel, Real Life & Liars, was a Target “Breakout” pick and a “Great Lakes, Great Reads” selection by the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association. Her other novels have been honored by independent booksellers, including an IndieNext Notable designation for The Life You’ve Imagined. Kristina has published short stories in the Cimarron Review, Literary Mama, Espresso Fiction, and elsewhere, and is a former co-editor for fiction at Literary Mama. Kristina was a full-time newspaper reporter before turning her attention to creative writing. She likes to run and read, though not at the same time.
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About Jacquelyn’s The Lake and the Lost Girl: On a stormy night in 1939, Mary Stone Walker disappears from her home in White Hill, Michigan. Everyone knew the talented poet was desperate to escape her demons, but when Mary goes missing without a trace, one question lingers in the small town: Did Mary successfully break free of her troubled past and flee, or did her life end that night?
Sixty years later, Lydia Carroll’s husband is still fixated on the local mystery. English Professor Frank Carroll has invested years in the search for local poet Mary Stone Walker and her lost works, sacrificing his family, his reputation, and even Lydia for the ever-more unlikely discovery. As Frank’s behavior grows more erratic, Lydia sees that his interest in Mary has evolved into an obsession-one that threatens to destroy the family they have built together, and which can only be undone by solving the mystery of what happened to Mary on that rainy night in 1939.
The Lake and the Lost Girl tells the riveting story of secrets from the past unraveling one family from the inside out, and two women, separated by sixty years of history, determined to pursue their dreams.
Jacquelyn Vincenta spent her childhood in the suburbs of Washington, DC where she discovered the alchemy of language and imagination at a young age. After graduating from the University of Iowa with a B.A. in English Literature she started her writing life as a police beat reporter for a daily newspaper near New Orleans. While raising a family in Texas and Michigan she worked as managing editor of the publishing company she and her then-husband owned, wrote magazine articles, and became involved with non-profit organizations dedicated to the arts and environmental issues. Jacquelyn works part-time for a translation company based in Prague, and devotes herself to her writing. She lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she is currently at work on her next novel.
Literati is delighted to celebrate the publication of Discriminating Taste: How Class Anxiety Created the American Food Revolution by S. Margot Finn.
For the past four decades, increasing numbers of Americans have started paying greater attention to the food they eat, buying organic vegetables, drinking fine wines, and seeking out exotic cuisines. Yet they are often equally passionate about the items they refuse to eat: processed foods, generic brands, high-carb meals. While they may care deeply about issues like nutrition and sustainable agriculture, these discriminating diners also seek to differentiate themselves from the unrefined eater, the common person who lives on junk food.
Discriminating Taste argues that the rise of gourmet, ethnic, diet, and organic foods must be understood in tandem with the ever-widening income inequality gap. Offering an illuminating historical perspective on our current food trends, S. Margot Finn draws numerous parallels with the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, an era infamous for its class divisions, when gourmet dinners, international cuisines, slimming diets, and pure foods first became fads.
Examining a diverse set of cultural touchstones ranging from Ratatouille to The Biggest Loser, Finn identifies the key ways that “good food” has become conflated with high status. She also considers how these taste hierarchies serve as a distraction, leading middle-class professionals to focus on small acts of glamorous and virtuous consumption while ignoring their class’s larger economic stagnation. A provocative look at the ideology of contemporary food culture, Discriminating Taste teaches us to question the maxim that you are what you eat.
“Finn’s compelling argument about the role of class in today’s food culture is sure to have a major impact on how both scholars and foodies think about the food revolution.”–Charlotte Biltekoff, author of Eating Right in America: The Cultural Politics of Food and Health
“Finn offers an engaging and compelling explanation for the rise of the modern food movement. It’s one that the leaders of the movement will no doubt find unsettling.”–Jayson Lusk, author of Unnaturally Delicious and The Food Police
S. Margot Finn is a lecturer in literature, science, and the arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Literati is pleased to welcome Danya Kukafka in celebration of her debut novel, Girl in Snow, named a Best Beach Read of 2017 by Elle, Yahoo, and Refinery 29.
When a beloved high schooler named Lucinda Hayes is found murdered, no one in her sleepy Colorado suburb is untouched—not the boy who loved her too much; not the girl who wanted her perfect life; not the officer assigned to investigate her murder. In the aftermath of the tragedy, these three indelible characters—Cameron, Jade, and Russ—must each confront their darkest secrets in an effort to find solace, the truth, or both. In crystalline prose, Danya Kukafka offers a brilliant exploration of identity and of the razor-sharp line between love and obsession, between watching and seeing, between truth and memory.
Compulsively readable and powerfully moving, Girl in Snow offers an unforgettable reading experience and introduces a singular new talent in Danya Kukafka.
“From its startling opening line right through to its stunning conclusion, Girl in Snow is a perfectly paced and tautly plotted thriller. Danya Kukafka’s misfit characters are richly drawn, her prose is both elegant and eerie—this is an incredibly accomplished debut.”—Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train and Into the Water
Danya Kukafka is a graduate of New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She currently works as an assistant editor at Riverhead books. Girl in Snow is her first novel.
Literati is delighted to welcome Thomas J. Kitson, translator for the novel Rapture by Iliazd
About Rapture
The draft dodger Laurence yearns to take control of his destiny. Having fled to the highlands, he asserts his independence by committing a string of robberies and murders. Then he happens upon Ivlita, a beautiful young woman trapped in an intricately carved mahogany house. Laurence does not hesitate to take her as well. Determined to drape his young bride in jewels, he plots ever more daring heists. Yet when Laurence finds himself casting bombs alongside members of a revolutionary cell, he must again ask: is he a free man or a pawn of history?
Rapture is a fast-paced adventure-romance and a literary treat of the highest order. The author, Iliazd, entertains, with a deceptively light hand, questions that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann once faced. How does the individual balance freedom and necessity, love and death, creativity and sterility? What is the role of violence in human history and culture? How does language both comfort and fail us in our postwar, post-Christian world?
Censored for decades in the Soviet Union, Rapture was a novel nearly lost to Russian and Western audiences. This English-language translation rescues Laurence’s surreal journey from the oblivion he, too, faces as he as he tries to outrun fate.
Thomas J. Kitson is a freelance translator in New York City.
Literati is pleased to welcome Sherry Stanfa-Stanley in support of her memoir, Finding My Badass Self: A Year of Truths and Dares.
Fighting midlife inertia, Sherry Stanfa-Stanley chose to stare down fear through The 52/52 Project: a year of weekly new experiences designed to push her far outside her comfort zone. These ranged from visiting a nude beach with her seventy-five-year-old mother in tow to taking a road trip with her ex-husband–and then another one with his girlfriend. She also went on a raid with a vice squad and SWAT team, exfoliated a rhinoceros (inadvertently giving him an erection), and crashed a wedding (where she accidentally caught the bouquet). While finding her courage in the most unlikely of circumstances, Sherry ultimately found herself.
For midlifers, fatigued parents, and anyone who may be discontent with their life and looking to shake things up, try new things, or just escape, Finding My Badass Self is proof it’s never too late to reinvent yourself–and that the best bucket list of all may be an unbucket list.
Sherry Stanfa-Stanley is a writer, humorist, and squeamish adventurer. She writes about her midlife escapades and other topics on Facebook (The 52 at 52 Project) and also blogs at www.sherrystanfa-stanley.com. By day, Sherry attempts to respectably represent her alma mater as a communication director at The University of Toledo. An empty nester after raising Son #1 and Son #2, she now indulges a menagerie of badly behaved pets.
Literati is pleased to welcome Chuck Carlise and Susanna Lang for the latest installment of Poetry at Literati.
Chuck Carlise is the author of the brand new collection, In One Version of the Story (New Issues Press 2016), as well as the chapbooks, A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs (winner of the Concrete Wolf Poetry Series 2011) and Casual Insomniac (Bateau, winner of the Boom Chapbook Prize 2011). His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets in both 2012 and 2014. He is currently a Lecturer in writing, rhetoric, and cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
In One Version of the Story is a lyric exploration of the ways human beings confront desire, loss and absence by creating stories. Its narrative situation begins with from the French folk legend of “l’Inconnue de la Seine”—the unidentified young woman who drowned herself in Paris in the 1880s, and whose (unauthorized) death mask was eventually cast as the face of Resusci-Anne CPR training dummies—but eventually the book encompasses a chronicle of personal loss, a history of photography, a study of the mechanics of breathing, and a solo climb to the rim of a Mediterranean volcano.
The book is a hybrid of narrative history, lyric meditation, and journalistic investigation, often implicating the speaker (and reader) in the act of mythmaking itself. It is story-making itself which is interrogated here, however the book seeks not to recreate narratives, but rather to understand why they matter—why and how we give them the meaning that we do.
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Susanna Lang was born in New York and raised in college towns where her father taught in Kansas, Michigan and Connecticut. Her first collection of poems, Even Now, was published by The Backwaters Press in 2008, and her chapbook, Two by Two, came out with Finishing Line Press in 2011. A full-length collection, Tracing the Lines, was published by Brick Road Poetry Press in spring 2013. Words in Stone, her translation of poems by Yves Bonnefoy, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1976; The Origin of Language, prose poems by Yves Bonnefoy, was published by George Nama in 1979. She won a 1999 Illinois Arts Council Award and the Inkwell Poetry Competition in 2009, was a 2010 and 2015 Hambidge Fellow, and received an 2011 Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. A longtime educator in the Chicago area, she has taught literacy and literature in grades 5-12, and led adult poetry workshops in public libraries and for organizations such as the Illinois Writing Project, Northwest Cultural Council, and others. Her most recent book is Travel Notes from the River Styx (Terrapin, 2017).
In the earnest and beautiful Travel Notes from the River Styx, Susanna Lang peers into the tiny mirrors of a river’s current, the mirror her father cannot see himself in, the rearview mirror in which she spies sandhill cranes on an afternoon drive as she interrogates the natural and, at times, unnatural world. The result is a collection of double images: the moon a “copper coin with the sheen worn off,” “the flag [that] slips down the pole,” the country where her grandmother was born once called Russia, now Ukraine. As clear in its language as it is rich in argument, there’s something for everyone in Travel Notes, for travelers are exactly what this poet proclaims we are. It’s impossible to read this collection without wondering what doubles wait/lurk/reside beneath the skin of our bodies and of our world.
—Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
We are thrilled to host a panel discussion of contributors for the new collection And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017
About And Here:
Upper Peninsula literature has traditionally been suppressed or minimized in Michigan anthologies and Michigan literature as a whole. Even the Upper Peninsula itself has been omitted from maps, creating a people and a place that have become in many ways “ungeographic.” These people and this place are strongly made up of traditionally marginalized groups such as the working class, the rural poor, and Native Americans, which adds even more insult to the exclusion and forced oppressive silence. And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917–2017, gives voice to Upper Peninsula writers, ensuring that they are included in Michigan’s rich literary history. Ambitiously, And Here includes great U.P. writing from every decade spanning from the 1910s to the 2010s, starting with Lew R. Sarett’s (a.k.a. Lone Caribou) “The Blue Duck: A Chippewa Medicine Dance” and ending with Margaret Noodin’s “Babejianjisemigad” and Sally Brunk’s “KBIC.” Taken as a whole, the anthology forcefully insists on the geographic and literary inclusion of the U.P.—on both the map and the page.
Ronald Riekki is an award-winning poet, novelist, and playwright. Since 2010, he has headed the U.P./MI Book Tour, which has scheduled literary events throughout the state of Michigan, particularly in rural communities.
Sue Harrison is the author of six critically acclaimed bestselling novels. Mother Earth Father Sky, My Sister the Moon, and Brother Wind make up The Ivory Carver Trilogy, an epic adventure set in prehistoric Alaska. Song of the River, Cry of the Wind, and Call Down the Stars comprise The Storyteller Trilogy. Sue has also written a young adult book, SISU, released by Thunder Bay Press.
Gordon Henry is an Anishinabe poet and novelist, and an enrolled member of the White Earth Chippewa Tribe of Minnesota. His poetry has been published in anthologies such as Songs From This Earth On Turtle’s Back: Contemporary American Indian Poetry (1983) and Returning the Gift: Poetry and Prose from the First Native American Writers (1994). His novel, The Light People (1994), was awarded The American Book Award in 1995. He has also co-authored the textbook, The Ojibway (2004), to which he contributed a number of essays on Native American culture. He currently teaches at Michigan State University.
M.L. Liebler is an award-winning poet, literary arts activist, and professor. He is the author of several books of poetry, including I Want to Be Once (Wayne State University Press, 2016), and editor of the anthology Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams(Coffee House Press, 2010). He is also co-editor of Bob Seger’s House and Other Stories (Wayne State University Press, 2016). He has taught at Wayne State University since 1980.
William Olsen is the author of six poetry collections, four of them published by Northwestern University Press: Sand Theory(2011), Avenue of Vanishing (2007), Trouble Lights (2002), and Vision of a Storm Cloud (1996). Olsen teaches at Western Michigan University and Vermont College. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Phillip Sterling is the author of Mutual Shores and three chapbook-length series of poems: Abeyance (winner of the Frank Cat Press Chapbook Award 2007), Quatrains, and Significant Others. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, two Fulbright Lectureships, and a P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Award, he is also the editor of Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange and founding coordinator of the Literature in Person (LIP) Reading Series at Ferris State University, where he has taught writing and literature since 1987. His new collection of poems, And Then Snow, is now available from Main Street Rag Publishing.
Keith Taylor teaches at the University of Michigan. He has published many books over the years: collections of poetry, a collection of very short stories, co-edited volumes of essays and fiction, and a volume of poetry translated from Modern Greek.
Literati is excited to be a part of Rasa Festival! Tonight we are hosting readings from poets Ashwini Bhasi, Tarfia Faizullah, and Ambalila Hemsell
Ashwini Bhasi is from Kerala, India and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She writes poems to make sense of the mind-body connection of trauma and chronic pain, and the duality of her experiences as a genomic data analyst and poet. Her poems have appeared in Room Magazine, Rogue Agent, Bear River Review, Yellow Chair Review, The Feminist Wire, and Driftwood Press among others. She was nominated for a Pushcart prize for a poem she wrote about the 2016 presidential election.
Tarfia Faizullah is a poet, editor, and educator from Brooklyn, NY and raised in West Texas. She received an MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University and is the author of Seam (SIU 2014), which US poet laureate Natasha Trethewey calls “beautiful and necessary,” as well as Registers of Illuminated Villages, (forthcoming from Graywolf 2017).
Ambalila Hemsell is a writer, educator, and musician from Colorado. She holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Wrtiers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she is currently a Zell Fellow. She was a 2015/2016 Writer-in-Residence at InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit. Her poetry can be found in Riprap and is forthcoming in The American Literary Review.
