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
Reading by Ferris State University writing professor Jamie Thomas, a widely published poet whose debut collection, Etch and Blur, is praised by a Poets’ Quarterly review for its “wordplay and cleverness, the irony of which offers up moving turns when the poems brush against genuine introspective emotionality.” Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is proud to be partnering with the Helen Zell Writers Program to bring poet Jane Hirshfield and novelist Brit Bennett at University of Michigan Museum Helmut Stern Auditorium.
JANE HIRSHFIELD is the author of eight books of poetry, including The Beauty; Come, Thief; After; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She has edited and cotranslated four books presenting the work of poets from the past and is the author of two major collections of essays, Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry and Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. Her books have been finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T. S. Eliot Prize; they have been named best books of the year by The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon, and Financial Times; and they have won the California Book Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Hirshfield has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, Poetry, Orion, Discover, The American Poetry Review, McSweeney’s, the Pushcart Prize anthology, and eight editions of The Best American Poetry. A resident of Northern California since 1974, she is a current chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Born and raised in Southern California, Brit Bennett graduated from Stanford University and later earned her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan, where she won a Hopwood Award in Graduate Short Fiction as well as the 2014 Hurston/Wright Award for College Writers. Her work is featured in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review, and Jezebel. She is one of the National Book Foundation’s 2016 5 Under 35 honorees.
Literati is thrilled to welcome poets Katherine Edgren and Jennifer Burd for a reading of their new books The Grain Beneath the Gloss and Day’s Late Blue.
Katherine Edgren grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan and was first published at the age of seventeen under her maiden name: Kathy Kool. In 2004, she was awarded first place for the Writer’s Digest non-rhyming poetry contest, and appeared in The Year’s Best Writing in 2005. Her poems have been published in the Christian Science Monitor, the Birmingham Poetry Review, Barbaric Yawp, Main Channel Voices, Oracle, Bear Creek Haiku, the Coe Review, and the Evening Street Review. They also appear in Writers Reading at Sweetwaters, An Anthology, 2007, and the Poetry Society of Michigan Anthology 2016. While Katherine is now retired, in her work life she served as a City Councilmember in Ann Arbor, Michigan, raised money for the ACLU, was a project manager on research and intervention projects in Detroit addressing asthma and air quality, and managed a department at University Health Service, the University of Michigan. Her two chapbooks were published by Finishing Line Press: “Transports,” and “Long Division.” In addition to writing, she loves to bike, garden, hike, swim, sing, and walk her dog. She lives in Dexter with her husband, and has two grown children and two grandchildren.
Jennifer Burd has had poetry published in numerous print and online journals. She is author of two full-length books of poetry, Days’ Late Blue (2017; Cherry Grove Collections) and Body and Echo (2010; PlainView Press), a chapbook with CD of original poems set to music by Laszlo Slomovits, Receiving the Shore(2016, Little Light Publications), and a book of creative nonfiction, Daily Bread: A Portrait of Homeless Men & Women of Lenawee County, Michigan (2009; Bottom Dog Press). She is co-author of a children’s play based on Patricia Polacco’s book I Can Hear the Sun, which was produced by Wild Swan Theatre of Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 2015. She is also the recipient of the 2017-2018 Picture Book Mentorship from the Society for Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI), Michigan chapter. Burd received her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Washington in Seattle. She currently teaches writing and literature classes at Jackson Community College, as well as creative writing classes online through The Loft Literary Center (Minneapolis).
First-Year MFA Poetry and Prose Readings.
2-4 p.m., Trinity Lutheran Church, 1400 W. Stadium. Free. annarborstorytelling.org, 997-5388.
Robin Coste Lewis, the winner of the National Book Award for Voyage of the Sable Venus, is the poet laureate of Los Angeles. She is the writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California, a Cave Canem fellow, and a fellow of the Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities. She received her BA from Hampshire College, her MFA in poetry from New York University, an MTS in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature from the Divinity School at Harvard University, and a PhD in poetry and visual studies from the University of Southern California. Lewis was born in Compton, California; her family is from New Orleans.
Elif Batuman has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010. She is the author of the novel, The Idiot, and The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her stories have been anthologized in the 2014 Best American Travel Writing and the 2010 Best American Essays collections. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a Paris Review Terry Southern Prize for Humor. Batuman holds a doctoral degree in comparative literature from Stanford University. From 2010 to 2013, she was writer-in-residence at Koç University, in Istanbul. She lives in New York.
About Across the Waves:
In 1931, the United States and France embarked on a broadcasting partnership built around radio. Over time, the transatlantic sonic alliance came to personify and to shape American-French relations in an era of increased global media production and distribution. Drawing on a broad range of American and French archives, Derek Vaillant joins textual and aural materials with original data analytics and maps to illuminate U.S.-French broadcasting’s political and cultural development. Vaillant focuses on the period from 1931 until France dismantled its state media system in 1974. His analysis examines mobile actors, circulating programs, and shifting governmental and other institutions shaping international radio’s use in times of war and peace. He explores the extraordinary achievements, the miscommunications and failures, and the limits of cooperation between America and France as they shaped a new media environment. Throughout, Vaillant explains how radio’s power as an instantaneous mass communications tool produced, legitimized, and circulated various notions of states, cultures, ideologies, and peoples as superior or inferior
Derek Vaillant is an associate professor of communication studies at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Sounds of Reform: Progressivism and Music in Chicago, 1873-1935 .
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 Graham Cotten and Clayton Wickham.
Graham Cotten is from Birmingham, Alabama. Before entering the MFA Program here, he clerked for Chief Judge Blackburn in the Northern District of Alabama, and worked as a litigator. His short stories have appeared in American Short Fiction and on NPR.org.
Clayton Wickham is a fiction writer from Richmond, VA. He currently lives in Ann Arbor.
University of Michigan Museum of Art, 525 South State Street Ann Arbor, MI, 48109. Free. 734.764.0395. http://umma.umich.edu/events/4270/mark-webster-reading-series
About A Village with My Name:
In A Village with My Name, acclaimed journalist Scott Tong merges memoir and history, offering an account of regular people living through defining moments in modern China from the start of the 20th century to the present, including the toppling of the monarchy, occupation and war crimes during WWII, mass death, famine, and witch hunts under Communism, the secret expansion of prison labor camps, market reforms, and the dawn of the One Child Policy. In this lively and accessible book, Tong brings the long backstory of China’s quest to go global to an American audience, painting a compelling portrait of the often traumatic ways that world historical events rippled through Chinese society. Each character Scott profiles is a Chinese window to the outside world: a pioneer exchange student, a rare American-educated girl born in the closing days of the Qing Dynasty, an abandoned toddler from World War II who later rides the wave of China’s global export boom, a young professional climbing the ladder at a multinational company, and an orphan (the author’s daughter) adopted in the middle of a baby-selling scandal fueled by foreign money. The style is light and at times irreverent, but Tong explores dramatic moments with the depth and sensitivity of a grandson of China seeking to understand the country and its people before memories of the tumultuous 20th century fade.
Scott Tong is a correspondent for the American Public Media program “Marketplace,” with a focus on energy, environment, resources, climate, supply chain, and the global economy. He is former China bureau chief. Tong has reported from more than a dozen countries.
