Reading by Marlin Jenkins, a Detroit poet (and U-M creative writing grad) whose poems often come off as fragments of a visionary spiritual autobiography. The program begins with open mike readings.
7-8:30 p.m., Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663
Ann Arbor Storytellers Guild members host a storytelling program. Audience members are encouraged to bring a 5-minute story to tell.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom Tea Room, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
About The Bible of Dirty Jokes:
When Ketzel Weinrach’s beloved brother Potsie goes missing in Las Vegas, she not only must try to find him, she must confront her family’s shady history and their ties to the legendary Jewish mob, Murder, Inc., as well as her troubling relationship to her cousin Perry (who runs a strip club on the outskirts of Vegas), her long and apparently not-so-loving marriage to her recently departed husband Morty Tittelman (a self-styled professor of dirty jokes and erotic folklore), and her own failed career as a stand-up comic.
Eileen Pollack is the award-winning author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction, including Breaking and Entering (Four Way Books 2012) and In The Mouth (Four Way Books 2008). She lives in Manhattan and Ann Arbor and teaches on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program in creative writing at the University of Michigan.
All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is thrilled to partner with the University of Michigan History Department to showcase fifteen recent publications by fourteen U-M History faculty members.
Authors and editors include:
Rita Chin is associate professor of history at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany and the coauthor of After the Nazi Racial State.
Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History and Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan, USA. He is the author of Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (2002), A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005) and Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945 (2013).
Susan Juster is Rhys Isaac Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is author of Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution and coeditor of Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, both available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Valerie A. Kivelson is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books, including Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2013) and Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2006). She is the editor of Witchcraft Casebook: Magic in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, 15th-21st Centuries [ Russian History/Histoire russe vol. 40, nos. 3-4 (2013)], and co-editor, with Joan Neuberger, of Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (2008).
Deborah Dash Moore has provided a magisterial history of the Jews of New York. A hub of both American and Jewish innovation, New York’s bustling metropolis became home to millions of Jews. New York gave Jewish life a distinct character, even as Jews helped to shape the essence of the city. This fascinating study explores the streets, synagogues, politics, and organizations of New York Jewry as well as its diverse cultural expressions. Moore’s mastery of New York Jewish history and deep knowledge of the urban rhythms of the city shine through on every page.-Beth S. Wenger, Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Dario Gaggio is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds a PhD in History from Northwestern University and is the author of In Gold We Trust: Social Capital and Economic Change in the Italian Jewelry Towns (2007). His research has pioneered the integration of cultural change and political economy from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining historical methodologies with the theoretical insights of sociology, anthropology and human geography.
Joel D. Howell is a physician, medical historian at the University of Michigan
Powel H. Kazanjian, MD, PhD is a professor and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Internal Medicine, at the University of Michigan Medical Center and a professor in the department of history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Derek R. Peterson is Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan
Helmut Puff is Professor of German and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
LaKisha Michelle Simmons is assistant professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Michigan.
Scott Spector is Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan. He is author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siecle.
Ronald Grigor Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and Senior Researcher at the National Research University-Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg.
Melanie S. Tanielian is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
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.
Readings by 2 U-M creative writing grad students, fiction writer Nell David and poet Franny Choi.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 615-3710
Literati is pleased to partner with the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing and WCBN Radio for the latest installment of Writer to Writer, a series which puts a UM professor and member of the Sweetland faculty in conversation about writing.
Sweetland Center for Writing’s Writer to Writer series lets you hear directly from University of Michigan professors about their challenges, processes, and expectations as writers and also as readers of student writing. Each semester, Writer to Writer pairs one esteemed University professor with a Sweetland faculty member for a conversation about writing.
This month Writer to Writer welcomes Susan Scott Parrish. Susan Scott Parrish is a Professor in the English Department and the Program in the Environment at UM. Her research addresses the interrelated issues of the environment, race and knowledge-making in the Atlantic world from the seventeenth century up through the present, with a particular emphasis on southern and Caribbean plantation zones. Her new book, The Flood Year 1927: A Cultural History (Princeton UP, 2017), examines how the most devastating, and publicly absorbing, US flood of the twentieth century took on meaning as it moved across media platforms, across sectional divides and across the color line. Her first book, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (UNCP, 2006), is a study of how people in England and in British-controlled America conceived of—and made knowledge about—American nature within Atlantic scientific networks. This book won both Phi Beta Kappa’s Emerson Award and the Jamestown Prize.
Writer to Writer takes place at the Literati bookstore and are broadcast live on WCBN radio. These conversations offer students a rare glimpse into the writing that professors do outside the classroom. You can hear instructors from various disciplines describe how they handle the same challenges student writers face, from finding a thesis to managing deadlines. Professors will also discuss what they want from student writers in their courses, and will take questions put forth by students and by other members of the University community. If there’s anything you’ve ever wanted to ask a professor about writing, Writer to Writer gives you the chance.
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.
Readings by 2 U-M creative writing grad students, fiction writer Callie Collins and poet Clare Hogan.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 615-3710.
Literati is honored to welcome back poet Tarfia Faizullah who will be sharing her latest collection Registers of Illuminated Villages. She will joined by poet Keith Taylor for a post-reading conversation.
About Registers of Illuminated Villages:
Registers of Illuminated Villages is Tarfia Faizullah’s highly anticipated second collection, following her award-winning debut, Seam. Faizullah’s new work extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voices–elegies, outcries, self-portraits, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, family, and memory. One poem steps down the page like a Slinky; another poem responds to makeup homework completed in the summer of a childhood accident; other poems punctuate the collection with dark meditations on dissociation, discipline, defiance, and destiny; and the near-title poem, “Register of Eliminated Villages,” suggests illuminated texts, one a Qur’an in which the speaker’s name might be found, and the other a register of 397 villages destroyed in northern Iraq. Faizullah is an essential new poet whose work only grows more urgent, beautiful, and–even in its unsparing brutality–full of love.
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam, winner of a VIDA Award and a Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. She teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Detroit.
Join us for a special event as we celebrate the release of Notes from a Public Typewriter!
About Notes from a Public Typewriter:
When Michael Gustafson and his wife Hilary opened Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they put out a typewriter for anyone to use. They had no idea what to expect. Would people ask metaphysical questions? Write mean things? Pour their souls onto the page? Yes, no, and did they ever.
Every day, people of all ages sit down at the public typewriter. Children perch atop grandparents’ knees, both sets of hands hovering above the metal keys: I LOVE YOU. Others walk in alone on Friday nights and confess their hopes: I will find someone someday. And some leave funny asides for the next person who sits down: I dislike people, misanthropes, irony, and ellipses … and lists too.
In Notes from a Public Typewrite Michael and designer Oliver Uberti have combined their favorite notes with essays and photos to create an ode to community and the written word that will surprise, delight, and inspire.
Michael Gustafson is the co-owner of Literati Bookstore, an independent bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and Literati Bookstore co-owner, Hilary.
Oliver Uberti is an award-winning graphic designer and was Senior Design Editor at National Geographic before turning to books. He is the co-author and designer of two books published by Penguin in the UK, London: The Information Capital (2014) and Where the Animals Go (2016). He lives in Los Angeles.
