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.
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 excited to welcome poet Rae Paris who will be reading from her new collection The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory
About The Forgetting Tree:
Rae Paris began writing The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory in 2010, while traveling the United States, visiting sites of racial trauma, horror, and resistance. The desire to do this work came from being a child of parents born and raised in New Orleans during segregation, who ultimately left for California in the late 1950s. After the death of her father in 2011, the fiction Paris had been writing gave way to poetry and short prose, which were heavily influenced by the questions she’d long been considering about narrative, power, memory, and freedom. Paris is driven by the familial and historical spaces and by what happens when we remember seemingly disparate images and moments. A blending of prose, poetry, and images, The Forgetting Tree: A Rememory is a necessary collection that argues for a deeper understanding of past and present so we might imagine a more hopeful, sustaining, and loving future for Black lives.
Rae Paris is from Carson, California with roots extending to New Orleans. Her work has been supported by a NEA Literature Fellowship, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, Hedgebrook, Hambidge Center, and Atlantic Center for the Arts, and VONA. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Washington.
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.
Tom Grace is the internationally bestselling author of Undeniable, The Liberty Intrigue, The Secret Cardinal, Fatal Orbit, Dark Ice, Quantum and Spyder Web. His books have been translated into eight languages and sold in over twenty-five countries. They have collectively appeared for one hundred weeks on USA Today and Associated Press bestseller lists, primarily in the top ten.
In addition to fascinating characters, intricately woven plots and breakneck pacing, Tom Grace novels are infused with technology on the cutting edge or just over the horizon. His fascination with science and technology is drawn from his real-world experience designing state-of-the-art research facilities. In the early 1990s, Tom designed the world’s first human applications laboratory for genetic therapy.
Tom was born and raised in Michigan, where he resides with his family. He divides his professional life between writing and a private practice in architecture. Tom is also a member of the International Thriller Writers.
Undeniable, the sixth Nolan Kilkenny thriller from international bestselling author Tom Grace, takes Nolan into the brave new world of reproductive technology, where the building blocks of life are manipulated in a Petri dish, women lease their wombs like rental properties, and money trumps morality. In an age of rapid advances in human genetics, cloning and stem cell research, what seemed impossible just a few years ago is now a reality. DNA has been reduced from a miraculous molecule into a data storage device, and the information it contains is as easy to hack as any computer file. Undeniable is a novel that steps beyond the traditional parent-child relationship into a chilling new reproductive reality.
Literati is excited to welcome cardiologist and clinical professor Dr. Joel Kahn to share with us his new book The Plant-Based Solution
About The Plant-Based Solution:
Each of us has access to the most powerful source of preventative medicine on the planet—a whole-foods, plant-based diet. With The Plant-Based Solution, leading cardiologist Dr. Joel Kahn explores how a vegan diet can help us prevent and reverse our most common chronic diseases, supported with decades of scientific research. Includes a 21-day meal plan with over 60 easy and delicious recipes from Kahn’s popular health food restaurant, the GreenSpace Café.
A passionate, compelling, and scientific argument for plant-based nutrition
Are you ready to feel better, look better, and heal the planet at the same time? Then it’s time to revolutionize your health from the inside out. With The Plant-Based Solution, leading cardiologist Dr. Joel Kahn shows how everyone can cultivate optimal well-being with a whole-foods, plant-based diet.
Known as America’s Healthy Heart Doc, Dr. Kahn has already helped thousands of people prevent and reverse heart disease. But what about other chronic conditions, such as adult diabetes, obesity, gut health, osteoporosis, autoimmune disease, and even low sex drive? It turns out that all these conditions and more can be improved with a plant-based diet—and Dr. Kahn has the evidence to prove it.
Drawing from decades of experience, Dr. Kahn brings together a wealth of scientific research and in-depth case studies to clearly demonstrate how you can take charge of your own health. Highlights include:
- Learn how you can lose weight, get off medication, reduce your risk of cancer, and reverse diabetes with a plant-based diet
- Myth-busting—why most people get it wrong when it comes to calcium, protein, carbs, and more
- The surprising links between a vegan diet and your sex drive, gut health, and brain chemistry
- Why plants might hold the key to better aging
- Understand exactly what’s happening inside your body, so you can decide for yourself what to eat and why
Joel Kahn, MD, is one of the world’s leading cardiologists, a bestselling author, and a popular lecturer who inspires others to think scientifically and critically about the body’s ability to heal through proper nutrition. Dr. Kahn serves as Clinical Professor of Medicine at the Wayne State University School of Medicine in Detroit and is founder of the Kahn Center for Cardiac Longevity. His first book, The Whole Heart Solution, was the basis of a national public TV special. Dr. Kahn lives with his wife and three children in the Detroit area, where he has recently opened the popular health food restaurant, the GreenSpace Café.
Rescheduled from November. Widely published Cleveland performance poet Siaara Freeman, who rose to national prominence in 2014 at the Rustbelt Regional Poetry Slam in Detroit with a searing performance of her autobiographical poem “The Drug Dealer’s Daughter,” reads from her debut collection Good Morning, Hood Warning. Many of her poems are in the voice of a persona called “Urban Girl.” The program begins with open mike readings.
7-8:30 p.m., Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663
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.
