Literati is excited to welcome author Brad Felver and poet F. Daniel Rzicznek who will be reading and discussing their latest work The Dogs of Detroit and Settlers.
About The Dogs of Detroit:
Winner of the 2018 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for short fiction
The 14 stories of The Dogs of Detroit each focus on grief and its many strange permutations. This grief alternately devolves into violence, silence, solitude, and utter isolation. In some cases, grief drives the stories as a strong, reactionary force, and yet in other stories, that grief evolves quietly over long stretches of time. Many of the stories also use grief as a prism to explore the beguiling bonds within families. The stories span a variety of geographies, both urban and rural, often considering collisions between the two.
About Settlers:
Settlers inhabits the hidden, wild places of the American Midwestern landscape. The idea of “settling”-that a landscape can be tamed, that a human consciousness can fall back into immobility-is one these poems grapple with and resist, all the while charting the cathartic effects of the natural world on a collective imagination.
Brad Felver is a fiction writer, essayist, and teacher of writing. His honors include the O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize special mention, and the Zone 3 Fiction Prize. His fiction and essays have appeared widely in magazines such as One Story, New England Review, Hunger Mountain, and Colorado Review. Currently he serves as Lecturer and Associate Chair of the English Department at Bowling Green State University. He lives with his wife and kids in northern Ohio.
F. Daniel Rzicznek‘s previous collections of poetry are Divination Machine (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press) and Neck of the World (Utah State University Press), as well as four chapbooks, most recently Live Feeds (Epiphany Editions). He is coeditor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry: Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice (Rose Metal Press). Rzicznek teaches writing at Bowling Green State University in Bowling Green, Ohio.
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.
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.
Jonathan’s new Lincoln & Speed Mystery, Final Resting Place, was published by Crooked Lane Books in New York in July 2018.
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.
Literati Bookstore is thrilled to welcome Jonathan Franzen to Zingerman’s Greyline as he reads from his new essay collection, The End of the End of the Earth.
Tickets are general admission and include a hardcover copy of The End of the End of the Earth, to be picked up at Zingerman’s Greyline the evening of the event. Literati Bookstore will have additional copies of Jonathan Franzen’s titles available for sale.
About The End of the End of the Earth:
A sharp and provocative new essay collection from the award-winning author of Freedom and The Corrections
In The End of the End of the Earth, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes—both human and literary—that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York, or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we’ve come to expect from Franzen.
Taken together, these essays trace the progress of a unique and mature mind wrestling with itself, with literature, and with some of the most important issues of our day, made more pressing by the current political milieu. The End of the End of the Earth is remarkable, provocative, and necessary.
About Jonathan Franzen: Jonathan Franzen is the author of five novels, including Freedom and The Corrections, and five works of nonfiction and translation, including The Kraus Project and Farther Away, all published by FSG. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the German Akademie der Künste, and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.
Literati is so excited to welcome poet Kristen Tracy who will be reading from her new collection Half-Hazard.
About Half-Hazard:
Half-Hazard is the Winner of the Emily Dickinson First Book Award from the Poetry Foundation for a debut by an American poet over forty.
Half-Hazard is a book of near misses, would-be tragedies, and luck. As Kristen Tracy writes in the title poem, “Dangers here. Perils there. It’ll go how it goes.” The collection follows her wide curiosity, from growing up in a small Mormon farming community to her exodus into the forbidden world, where she finds snakes, car accidents, adulterers, meteors, and death-marked mice. These wry, observant narratives are accompanied by a ringing lyricism, and Tracy’s knack for noticing what’s so funny about trouble and her natural impulse to want to put all the broken things back together. Full of wrong turns, false loves, quashed beliefs, and a menagerie of animals, Half-Hazard introduces a vibrant new voice in American poetry, one of resilience, faith, and joy.
Kristen Tracy is a poet and the acclaimed author of more than a dozen novels for young readers. Her poems have been published in Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and The Threepenny Review, among other magazines. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and son
Literati Bookstore is thrilled to welcome Pete Souza to Ann Arbor for a visual presentation of his latest book, Shade: A Tale of Two Presidents.
Tickets are general admission and include a hardcover copy of Shade to be picked up at the venue the evening of the event. Books will be pre-signed.
PLEASE NOTE: Due to Rackham’s unique seating chart and as this event entails a photo presentation, we have restricted available seating in the venue to improve sightlines. Seating is general admission, so we encourage arriving early.
About Shade: From Pete Souza, the #1 New York Timesbestselling author of Obama: An Intimate Portrait, comes a powerful tribute to a bygone era of integrity in politics.
As Chief Official White House Photographer, Pete Souza spent more time alongside President Barack Obama than almost anyone else. His years photographing the President gave him an intimate behind-the-scenes view of the unique gravity of the Office of the Presidency–and the tremendous responsibility that comes with it.
Now, as a concerned citizen observing the Trump administration, he is standing up and speaking out.
Shade is a portrait in Presidential contrasts, telling the tale of the Obama and Trump administrations through a series of visual juxtapositions. Here, more than one hundred of Souza’s unforgettable images of President Obama deliver new power and meaning when framed by the tweets, news headlines, and quotes that defined the first 500 days of the Trump White House.
What began with Souza’s Instagram posts soon after President Trump’s inauguration in January 2017 has become a potent commentary on the state of the Presidency, and our country. Some call this “throwing shade.” Souza calls it telling the truth.
In Shade, Souza’s photographs are more than a rejoinder to the chaos, abuses of power, and destructive policies that now define our nation’s highest office. They are a reminder of a President we could believe in, and a courageous defense of American values.
About Pete Souza: Pete Souza was the Chief Official White House Photographer for President Obama and the Director of the White House Photo Office. Previously Souza was an Assistant Professor of Photojournalism at Ohio University, the national photographer for the Chicago Tribune, a freelancer for National Geographic, and an Official White House Photographer for President Reagan. His books include the New York Times bestsellers Obama: An Intimate Portraitand The Rise of Barack Obama. Souza is currently a freelance photographer based in Washington, D.C., and a Professor Emeritus at Ohio University’s School of Visual Communication.
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.
