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.
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.
Literati is honored to partner with the University Musical Society and the Penny Stamps Speaker Series to host author Claudia Rankine at the Michigan Theater for a conversation with editor P. Carl entitled Theatre Matters; Activism, Imagination, Citizenship. This event is the keynote for the No Safety Net series.
Claudia Rankine is the author of five books, including the highly praised collection Citizen: An American Lyric. She currently is a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and teaches at Pomona College.
About Citizen:
A provocative meditation on race, Claudia Rankine’s long-awaited follow up to her groundbreaking book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine’s bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV–everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive. Our addressability is tied to the state of our belonging, Rankine argues, as are our assumptions and expectations of citizenship. In essay, image, and poetry, Citizen is a powerful testament to the individual and collective effects of racism in our contemporary, often named “post-race” society.
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.
U-M English professor Aida Levy-Hussen reads from her new book and discusses it with U-M English and women’s studies professor Victor Mendoza.
5:30-7 p.m., 100 U-M Hatcher Grad Library Gallery, enter from the Diag. Free.
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.
