This local poet reads from Technical Solace, her new collection of poems that “explore the struggles of growing up, growing older, of being in solitude and with others, along with birds and history, children and dying, Supreme Court decisions, the Holocaust, and artichokes,” says writer Alex Chambers. Light refreshments. Signing.
7 p.m., Bookbound, 1729 Plymouth, Courtyard Shops. Free. 369-4345.
Talk on some aspect of MLK’s legacy by this renowned actor and author of several best-selling books, most recently Letters to an Incarcerated Brother: Encouragement, Hope, and Healing for Inmates and Their Loved Ones.
10-11:30 a.m., Hill Auditorium. Free. 764-7522.
Literati is proud to partner with the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design to host artist Shawn Martinbrough for a talk entitled “Continuing the Legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Through the Art of Storytelling”
Shawn Martinbrough is the author of How to Draw Noir Comics: The Art and Technique of Visual Storytelling, published by Random House and reprinted in several languages. He is a critically acclaimed creator/artist whose DC, Marvel and Dark Horse Comics projects include Batman: Detective Comics, Luke Cage Noir, Captain America, The Black Panther and Hellboy: Secret Nature. Currently, Martinbrough is the artist of Thief of Thieves, the acclaimed crime series written by Robert Kirkman, creator of the AMC television series, The Walking Dead and award winning author Andy Diggle.
Martinbrough has co-created characters featured in the blockbuster 20th Century Fox feature film, Deadpool, the animated Batman: Gotham Knights and the FOX television series, GOTHAM and The GIFTED.
Shawn’s work has been covered by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, The Hollywood Reporter, Entertainment Weekly, BET, ESSENCE, EBONY, The New York Daily News, USA Today, AOL, Publisher’s Weekly, and SIRIUS/XM Radio.
Jan 2 & 16. Monthly open mike storytelling competition sponsored by The Moth, the NYC-based nonprofit storytelling organization that also produces a weekly public radio show. Each month 10 storytellers are selected at random from among those who sign up to tell a 3-5 minute story on the monthly theme. The 3 teams of judges are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Space limited, so it’s smart to arrive early.
7:30-9 p.m. (doors open and sign-up begins at 6 p.m.), Greyline, 100 N. Ashley. $8. 764-5118.
Literati is thrilled to welcome back poet Raymond McDaniel who will read from his new collection Cataracts
About Cataracts:
Poetry as Escher: shifting perspective, a landscape that doesn’t stand still, and questions that fold in on themselves.
“A registering, a remembering, a naming, a seeing behind and beyond seeing: The Cataracts is a book of blindness and insight, offering a tenderly, sometimes painfully, scrutinized world. With gorgeous catalogs, reticulated narratives, and aphoristic summings-up, McDaniel offers a mode of neo-Stoic inquiry into ethics and epistemology, of ‘logopoeia, ‘ the dance of the intellect. Here too are sharpened senses, alert to ‘the emerald blur’ of a richly greened world, to ‘the sea the stupid wall exists to stop, ‘ to trip-wired words and moonlit reflections. McDaniel is an astute, generous poet of human stupidity and longing, and his is a mature, ramifying sensibility, alive to the profound tension between the many and the one, the pressure of multitudes and the requirement to declare oneself. These poems both name the wounds and refuse easy balm. As the title of one stunning long poem has it, ‘This Is Going to Hurt.'” –Maureen McLane
“Raymond McDaniel has always been the most brilliant of poets–razor sharp in intellect, take-no-prisoners in form. What is new in The Cataracts is a broader, more hospitable ease with the legible forms of feeling, with even–remarkable!–the partial lineaments of narrative. Make no mistake: this is narrative-with-leverage; the poet’s dazzling mind-play is perfectly intact. Among the other gifts these poems have to offer is a penetrating inquiry into the physics, the metaphysics, and the brutal socioeconomics of sight. From its ravishing title poem to its most excoriating political critiques, this is a book for which I am profoundly grateful.” –Linda Gregerson
Raymond McDaniel is the author of Special Powers and Abilities, Saltwater Empire and Murder (a violet), a National Poetry Series selection. Born in Florida, McDaniel now lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, teaches at the University of Michigan, and writes for The Constant Critic.
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. 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.
This week’s reading features Sam Krowchenko and Kyle Hunt.
Sam Krowchenko’s writing has appeared in Salon, Full-Stop, and Michigan Quarterly Review, among other venues. A bookseller at Literati, he also hosts Shelf Talking, the store’s official podcast.
Kyle Hunt is a poet from West Texas and Middle Tennessee. He has work published with Toe Good, previously known as Toe Good Poetry.
Zingerman’s Bakehouse co-owners Frank Carollo and Amy Emberling discuss their new cookbook, which features 65 of their most popular recipes.
3-5 p.m., AADL Malletts Creek. Free. 327-8301.
Literati is pleased to partner with the University of Michigan School of Social Work to host Adrienne Maree Brown, author of Emergent Strategy, for a MLK Symposium lecture entitled “From Theory to Practice: Engaging Intersectional Organizing for Structual Transformation.”
About Emergent Strategy:
Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is radical self-help, society-help, and planet-help designed to shape the futures we want to live. Change is constant. The world is in a continual state of flux. It is a stream of ever-mutating, emergent patterns. Rather than steel ourselves against such change, this book invites us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us in order to better understand and influence them as they happen. This is a resolutely materialist “spirituality” based equally on science and science fiction, a visionary incantation to transform that which ultimately transforms us.
adrienne maree brown, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction from Social Justice Movements, is a social justice facilitator, healer, and doula living in Detroit.
Literati is proud to partner with the University of Michigan Law School to host Judge Raymond Kethledge for a discussion of his new book Lead Yourself First at the UM Law’s Hutchins Hall
About Lead Yourself First:
To inspire and lead others, you must first lead yourself: a powerful and invaluable guide to productive time spent alone.
Famous leaders have long used solitude as means for inspiration. Solitude is a state of mind, a space in which to focus on one’s own thoughts without distraction, with a unique power to bring mind and soul together in clear-eyed conviction. In our time-challenged world today, such space is ever more important to leaders, and increasingly difficult to find. We are losing solitude without even realizing it.
Lead Yourself First will inspire leaders to spend time alone. Through firsthand interviews with a wide range of contemporary leaders in politics, business, sports, the military, and family life, as well as through illuminating historical accounts of Abraham Lincoln, Jane Goodall, Pope John Paul II, Aung San Suu Kyi, and others, leadership experts Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin show how solitude can improve clarity and bolster creativity; generate the emotional balance needed to sustain certainty and the moral courage required to challenge convention; and strengthen a leader’s ability to make courageous decisions in the face of adversity and criticism. In years past, leaders used solitude subconsciously; today it takes a conscious choice to unplug from one’s daily life. Introduced by Jim Collins (author of the bestseller Good to Great), Lead Yourself First is a crucial and timely guide, a rallying cry for how leaders can reclaim the power of solitude in today’s over-connected world.
Raymond M. Kethledge, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, formerly served as a law clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy. He lives near Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Keith Taylor is Coordinator of English’s Undergraduate Creative Writing Program, and Director of the Bear River Writers Conference. He has written or edited some thirteen books or chapbooks, including Marginalia for a Natural History, Ghost Writers (co-edited with Laura Kasischke), If the World Becomes So Bright and Guilty at the Rapture. His work has appeared widely in journals, magazines, anthologies and newspapers in the United States and in Europe. He has received a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and support from the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs.
