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/
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.
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.
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.
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).
Have you ever pulled a ratatouille and found a rat on your head? Do you ever question the larger impact of a cup of coffee? Have you gotten fed up with constantly being kidnapped? Ever daydream about America’s history if women were the founders?
Do you enjoy question leads that ultimately serve as clickbait in order to intrigue potential audience members?
Then we are the place for you! RC Players is hosting our semi-annual comedic Evening of Scenes performance Friday, Jan. 26 and Saturday, Jan. 27 at 8 p.m. in the Keene Theater, located in the basement of our dear East Quad. As always, our production is as free as the wind beneath my wings!
Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your parents, tell your dogs and cats and lizards and rats (they can find themselves in the subject matter of one of the scenes)! Feel free to share this event, or invite people who would love a good laugh in a theater.
First-Year MFA Poetry and Prose Readings.
Literati is thrilled to welcome magician Nate Staniforth to Ann Arbor’s Circus Bar in support of Here is Real Magic, an extraordinary memoir about finding wonder in everyday life.
About Nate and the book:
“A vivid, deeply compelling, startlingly personal account of life on the far side of the illusion.” –Lev Grossman, New York Times bestselling author of the Magicians Trilogy
Nate Staniforth has spent most of his life and all of his professional career trying to understand wonder–what it is, where to find it, and how to share it with others. He became a magician because he learned at a young age that magic tricks don’t have to be frivolous. Magic doesn’t have to be about sequins and smoke machines–rather, it can create a moment of genuine astonishment.
But after years on the road as a professional magician, crisscrossing the country and performing four or five nights a week, every week, Nate was disillusioned, burned out, and ready to quit. Instead, he went to India in search of magic. Here Is Real Magic follows Nate Staniforth’s evolution from an obsessed young magician to a broken wanderer and back again. It tells the story of his rediscovery of astonishment–and the importance of wonder in everyday life–during his trip to the slums of India, where he infiltrated a three-thousand-year-old clan of street magicians. Here Is Real Magic is a call to all of us–to welcome awe back into our lives, to marvel in the everyday, and to seek magic all around us.
Have you ever pulled a ratatouille and found a rat on your head? Do you ever question the larger impact of a cup of coffee? Have you gotten fed up with constantly being kidnapped? Ever daydream about America’s history if women were the founders?
Do you enjoy question leads that ultimately serve as clickbait in order to intrigue potential audience members?
Then we are the place for you! RC Players is hosting our semi-annual comedic Evening of Scenes performance Friday, Jan. 26 and Saturday, Jan. 27 at 8 p.m. in the Keene Theater, located in the basement of our dear East Quad. As always, our production is as free as the wind beneath my wings!
Tell your friends, tell your neighbors, tell your parents, tell your dogs and cats and lizards and rats (they can find themselves in the subject matter of one of the scenes)! Feel free to share this event, or invite people who would love a good laugh in a theater.
2-4 p.m., Trinity Lutheran Church, 1400 W. Stadium. Free. annarborstorytelling.org, 997-5388.
