Toastmasters is an international group devoted to helping each other grow in our abilities to give speeches. The Sweetwaters Toastmasters Club meets twice monthly. We are a fun and friendly group! Toastmasters also helps you develop leadership skills if you wish to do that. Come as many times as you want for free, and decide later if you want to join. In the meantime, come make new friends and have fun!
Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea on Washington Street, 123 West Washington Street. Free. 323-286-3999. https://www.facebook.com/groups/TMSweet/
Join us as we are excited to hear authors Cindy Milstein and Jeff Clark share the book Rebellious Mourning, a look at grief’s power for social transformation
About Rebellious Mourning:
We can bear almost anything when it is worked through collectively. Grief is generally thought of as something personal and insular, but when we publicly share loss and pain, we lessen the power of the forces that debilitate us, while at the same time building the humane social practices that alleviate suffering and improve quality of life for everyone. Addressing tragedies from Fukushima to Palestine, incarceration to eviction, AIDS crises to border crossings, and racism to rape, the intimate yet tenacious writing in this volume shows that mourning can pry open spaces of contestation and reconstruction, empathy and solidarity. With contributions from Claudia Rankine, Sarah Schulman, David Wojnarowicz, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, David Gilbert, and nineteen others.
Cindy Milstein is the author of Anarchism and Its Aspirations, co-author of Paths toward Utopia: Graphic Explorations of Everyday Anarchism, and editor of the anthology Taking Sides: Revolutionary Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism.
Jessica Shattuck is the award-winning author of The Hazards of Good Breeding, which was a New York Times Notable Book and finalist for the PEN/Winship Award, and Perfect Life. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New Yorker, Glamour, Mother Jones, Wired, and The Believer, among other publications. A graduate of Harvard University, she received her MFA from Columbia University. She lives with her husband and three children in Brookline, Massachusetts.
Laura Hulthen Thomas’s short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany, and Witness. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
Join our triple header on Sunday, January 13 at 2, when we welcome book club favorite and RC creative writing alumna Carrie Smith, who has a new Claire Codella novel out, Unholy City; C.M. Gleason, who is joining the mystery community with her first mystery Murder in the Lincoln White House; and popular teacher and poetry slammer, Jeff Kass, whose first mystery Takedown was just published by the new press at the Ann Arbor District Library.
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.
Yale Law School constitutional law professor James Forman Jr., a former Washington, D.C., public defender, discusses his book. In 1997, Forman founded the Maya Angelou Public Charter School, an alternative school for dropouts and youth who had previously been arrested. Signing.
4-5:30 p.m., 1225 South Hall, 701 S. State. Free. 764-4705.
Spoken word pioneer Black Ice headlines an evening of poetry readings by several award-winning International Writers Guild members, including Bayan Founas, Justin Gordon, Candace Jackson, Mikhaella Norwood, Xiao Bin Pan, Darius Simpson, Micah Smith, and Mariah Smith.
6-8 p.m., Rackham Amphitheater. Free. (269) 364-5576
Literati is thrilled to host novelist Chloe Benjamin in support of her latest book The Immortalists, a story of four siblings struggling with fate and family following a psychic’s mysterious prophecy.
About The Immortalists:
If you knew the date of your death, how would you live your life?
It’s 1969 in New York City’s Lower East Side, and word has spread of the arrival of a mystical woman, a traveling psychic who claims to be able to tell anyone the day they will die. In search of one thing they can know for sure, the Gold children—four adolescents on the cusp of self-awareness—sneak out to hear their fortunes.
Though the siblings keep the dates secret from one another, their prophecies inform their next five decades. Golden-boy Simon escapes to the West Coast, searching for love in ’80s San Francisco. Dreamy Klara becomes a Las Vegas magician, obsessed with blurring reality and fantasy; eldest son Daniel seeks security as an army doctor post-9/11, hoping to control fate; and bookish Varya throws herself into longevity research, where she tests the boundary between science and immortality.
A sweeping novel of remarkable ambition and depth, The Immortalists probes the line between destiny and choice, reality and illusion, this world and the next. It is a deeply moving testament to the power of story, the nature of belief, and the unrelenting pull of familial bonds.
Chloe Benjamin is the author of the novel The Anatomy of Dreams, which received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was longlisted for the 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize. She is a graduate of Vassar College and holds an MFA in fiction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her fiction, poetry, and essays have been published in The Millions, PANK, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. She lives with her husband in Madison, Wisconsin.
