ToastMasters at SweetWaters is an opportunity to practice your personal and/or professional speaking as well as Leadership in a fun friendly atmosphere.
The club is open to everyone. Attendees have the opportunity to speak, give and receive feedback about speaking, presentations and current events.
We typically have 2-4 prepared speeches followed by (Kind and constructive evaluations) to provide feedback and growth. Attendees will have an opportunity for impromptu speaking as well.
Sweetwaters Cafe, 123 W Washington. johnsonest121314@gmail.com.johnsonest121314@gmail.com
Literati is thrilled to welcome back author R.J. Fox who will be sharing his new novel Awaiting Identification. R.J. will be in conversation with fellow novelist Michael Ferro.
About Awaiting Identification:
Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office, Detroit, Michigan: October 31, 1999.
Five unidentified bodies lie in the Wayne County morgue on Halloween night. Although each character was on a separate journey, fate leads each of the five victims to cross paths on the streets of Detroit en route to their tragic demise. Set against the backdrop of a Devil’s Night party at legendary Detroit concert venue and nightclub, Saint Andrew’s Hall, Awaiting Identification details the final night on earth for five lost souls. NYC Girl: a former dancer arrives back home from New York City to make amends with her mother and begin to rebuild her life. Leaf Man: a musician and part-time DJ is on the cusp of his big break with one final, unexpected drug deal to complete before he can go totally straight. R.I.P.: a career criminal must come up with a large sum of money to pay for his father’s medical expenses, despite his yearning for a crime-free life. The Zealot: a religious fanatic on a mission from God to rid the city of filth. Cat Man: a kind and trusting homeless man wanders the city looking for new friends. Like the city in which it takes place, Awaiting Identification is a story of hope, identity, and above all, redemption.
R.J. Fox is an English and video production teacher who uses his own dream of making movies to inspire his students to follow their dreams. He has previously worked in public relations and as a journalist. He is the author of Love & Vodka. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Michael A. Ferro‘s debut novel, TITLE 13, was published by Harvard Square Editions in February 2018. He has received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train for their New Writers Award, won the Jim Cash Creative Writing Award for Fiction, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Michael’s writing has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Crack the Spine, Entropy, Amsterdam Quarterly, Yale University’s Perch Journal, Duende, The Nottingham Review, Splitsider, Potluck Magazine, and elsewhere. Born and bred in Detroit, Michael has lived, worked, and written throughout the Midwest; he currently resides in rural Ann Arbor, Michigan
In Black Opera: History, Power, Engagement (published May 4, 2018), Naomi André draws on the experiences of performers and audiences to explore this music’s resonance with today’s listeners. Interacting with creators and performers, as well as with the works themselves, André reveals how black opera unearths suppressed truths. These truths provoke complex, if uncomfortable, reconsideration of racial, gender, sexual, and other oppressive ideologies. Opera, in turn, operates as a cultural and political force that employs an immense, transformative power to represent or even liberate.
In Dance Me a Song: Astaire, Balanchine, Kelly, and the American Film Musical (published June 27, 2018), Beth Genné traces Astaire’s, Balanchine’s, and Kelly’s collaborations with composers and film-makers, crossing stylistic and class boundaries to develop a truly modern dance style and genres for the film musical. She contextualizes their work within the history of dance, music, and film and its roots in the diverse dance and music cultures of jazz age America’s nation of immigrants. She demonstrates how concepts and visual-musical devices derived from dance-making would give entire films, both musical and non-musical, the rhythmic flow and feeling of dance.
Naomi André is Associate Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies, Women’s Studies, and the Associate Director for Faculty at the Residential College at the University of Michigan. Her earlier books, Voicing Gender: Castrati, Travesti, and the Second Woman in Early Nineteenth-Century Italian Opera (2006) and Blackness in Opera (2012, co-edited collection) focus on opera from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries and explore constructions of gender, race and identity.
Beth Genné is Professor of Dance History and Art History in the Dance Department and the Arts and Ideas concentration of the Residential College. She has written numerous book chapters on British ballet and dance in film (including Gene Kelly and Vincente Minnelli) and articles in such journals as Dance Research, Dance Chronicle, and Art Journal. Her first book, The Making of a Choreographer, was on the early training and choreographic development of Ninette de Valois, founder of the Royal Ballet.
Nov. 10 & 17. All adults and teens in grade 9 & up invited to work on their novel for this nonprofit promotion (also known as National Novel Writing Month) challenging teens and adults to write a 50,000-word novel by the end of November.
1-3 p.m., AADL Westgate. Free. 327-4200.
Marlin M. Jenkins was born and raised in Detroit. His poetry and fiction have been given homes by Indiana Review, Waxwing, Iowa Review, and Forward: 21st Century Flash Fiction, among others. He has worked as a teaching artist with Inside Out Literary Arts teaching poetry to middle schoolers in Detroit Public Schools, and is the Short Story Advisor at the Neutral Zone. He teaches writing and literature at University of Michigan, where he earned his MFA in poetry.
Performance by this RC Prison Creative Arts Project instructor, who was incarcerated at age 17 and released just last year, after serving 18 years. His free verse poems explore the dehumanization of mass incarceration and poverty.
7 p.m. Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry.
Local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal host an open house for writers to connect with one another and/or work on their projects.
7-8:45 p.m., AADL Westgate. Free. 327-4200.
Nov. 6 & 20. 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 themes of “Distance” (Nov. 6) & “Fear” (Nov. 20). The 3-person judging teams are recruited from the audience. Monthly winners compete in a semiannual Grand Slam. Seating 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. General admission tickets $10 in advance only at themoth.org beginning a week before each event. 764-5118.
Reading by this award-winning local poet whose work often frames dark themes in plainspoken, imaginatively whimsical language. Preceded by an open mike.
7-8:30 p.m. Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663.
Literati is pleased to partner with the University of Michigan’s Sweetland Center for Writing and WCBN Radio for the latest installment of Writer to Writer, a series which puts a UM professor and member of the Sweetland faculty in conversation about writing.
This month, Writer to Writer welcomes Heather Ann Thompson, author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy
About Blood in the Water:
THE FIRST DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF THE INFAMOUS 1971 ATTICA PRISON UPRISING, THE STATE’S VIOLENT RESPONSE, AND THE VICTIMS’ DECADES-LONG QUEST FOR JUSTICE
On September 9, 1971, nearly 1,300 prisoners took over the Attica Correctional Facility in upstate New York to protest years of mistreatment. Holding guards and civilian employees hostage, the prisoners negotiated with officials for improved conditions during the four long days and nights that followed.
On September 13, the state abruptly sent hundreds of heavily armed troopers and correction officers to retake the prison by force. Their gunfire killed thirty-nine men–hostages as well as prisoners–and severely wounded more than one hundred others. In the ensuing hours, weeks, and months, troopers and officers brutally retaliated against the prisoners. And, ultimately, New York State authorities prosecuted only the prisoners, never once bringing charges against the officials involved in the retaking and its aftermath and neglecting to provide support to the survivors and the families of the men who had been killed.
Drawing from more than a decade of extensive research, historian Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on every aspect of the uprising and its legacy, giving voice to all those who took part in this forty-five-year fight for justice: prisoners, former hostages, families of the victims, lawyers and judges, and state officials and members of law enforcement. Blood in the Water is the searing and indelible account of one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century.
HEATHER ANN THOMPSON is an award-winning historian at the University of Michigan. Her most recent book, Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy, won the Pulitzer Prize in History, the Bancroft Prize, the Ridenhour Book Prize, and the J. Willard Hurst Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other accolades. She is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City and the editor of Speaking Out: Activism and Protest in the 1960s and 1970s. She served on a National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States and has given congressional staff briefings on the subject. She has written on the history of mass incarceration and its current impact for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, Salon, Newsweek, NBC, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and The Huffington Post, as well as for various top scholarly publications.
