The Mark Webster Reading Series showcases work by second-year MFA students in the Helen Zell Writers’ Program.
Usually held on Friday evenings, Webster Readings present two readers (most often one poet and one fiction writer), each introduced by a fellow poet or fiction writer also in the graduating cohort.As the culminating event for students of the program, Webster Readings are hosted in partnership with the University of Michigan Museum of Art and held in Helmut Stern Auditorium. An opportunity to hear from emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting, these readings are free and open to the public.
The Mark Webster Reading Series remembers the poetry and life of Mark Webster. Webster’s work is available in the Hopwood Room.
Today: Ian Burnette and Carl Lavigne
The Webster Readings are organized by second-year students, and feature their poetry and prose. Post-graduate Zell fellows are regularly invited to introduce and/or open for writers scheduled to visit local bookstore Literati.
Today: Katarina Bishop and Thea Chacamaty.
All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell.
2-4 p.m., Ann Arbor District Library 3rd fl. Freespace, 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free. annarborstorytelling.org .
Harmful rhetoric towards journalists and the press casts doubt about the future of a free press and the safety of reporters. This was evident following the murders of five staff members at the Capital Gazette and Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. As democratic nations fall short in protecting press freedom, what are the implications for journalists of all nations? In an alarming numbers, reporters around the world are persecuted, jailed, exiled and even killed for exposing the truth.
Knight-Wallace international journalists Elena Milashina of Novaya Gazeta, Itai Anghel of Israeli TV, and Jawad Sukhanyar of The New York Times will discuss how threats and state censorship impact their work. In a discussion led by the University’s media law and First Amendment scholar Professor Leonard Niehoff, they will share their experiences reporting from Eastern Europe, the Middle East, South Asia and Africa and discuss what can be done to protect journalists and foster press freedom around the world.
The Eisendrath Symposium honors Charles R. Eisendrath, former director of Wallace House, and his lifelong commitment to international journalism.
About the Speakers
Elena Milashina was a 2010 Knight-Wallace Fellow and is an award winning investigative journalist for Russia’s independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta. After the killing of Anna Politkovskaya in 2006, Milashina became the key source of information about grave rights abuses in Chechnya. She investigates and brings to attention accounts of enforced disappearances, arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial executions, torture, and persecution of relatives of alleged insurgents, women’s rights in Chechnya and beyond. She also plays a key role in the independent investigation into the murder of Chechen human rights defender Natalia Estemirova. Milashina exposed a major crackdown on gay men in Chechnya in spring 2017, has investigated the catastrophe of the Kursk submarine, and hostage crises in Moscow (Nord–Ost) and Beslan. She has documented atrocities committed by both sides during the 2008 Russia-Georgia conflict and pressed for an end to impunity. She has repeatedly received death threats from the Chechen authorities.
Itai Anghel is a 2019 Knight-Wallace Fellow and a correspondent and documentary filmmaker for UVDA, a weekly investigative current affairs and documentary program on Israeli TV, Channel 2, where he also worked as a senior foreign affairs correspondent. Previously, he was a correspondent and chief editor of foreign affairs at Galatz (GLZ) Radio Station. He received the Sokolov Award, the highest award for outstanding journalism in Israel, in 2017, and he is a five-time recipient of the “Best TV Documentary in Israel” award from the Israeli Forum of Documentary Filmmakers.
Jawad Sukhanyar is a 2019 Knight-Wallace Fellow and a reporter for The New York Times in Afghanistan. He joined the Times in 2011 and is now the longest serving reporter in the paper’s Kabul bureau. Sukhanyar covers human rights and women’s issues and also covered the 2014 disputed Afghan presidential election. He worked as a researcher on a book about a couple who escaped an Afghan honor killing for the author Rod Nordland. Until 2011, he was a freelance reporter and researcher for various foreign news organizations. He also served as interpreter and researcher on a biography of former Afghan president Hamid Karzai for the author Bette Dam.
About the Moderator
Leonard Niehoff is a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, where he teaches courses in Media Law, First Amendment, and the history of banned books, among other things. He is the author of more than one-hundred articles, many in the field of free speech, and is currently at work on a book about the First Amendment. He has also practiced media and First Amendment law for over thirty years, representing numerous print publications, broadcasters, online media, and journalists. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School.
Free and open to the public.
For questions about the event email: WallaceHouseEvents@umich.edu
This event is produced with support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Michigan Radio and the Center for Russian, East European & Eurasian Studies are co-sponsors of the event.
This local writer reads from and discusses You’d Be Mine, her debut romance novel about the relationship between a sweet country music heiress and a country superstar with a bad boy image who convinces her to join his tour. Signing.
7 p.m., Nicola’s, Westgate shopping center. Free. 662-0600
This lecture asks how the spatial politics of migration have been inflected by histories of colonialism. Using the example of the Anglo-Caribbean island of Barbados and its majority African-descended population, Osayimwese examines migration to the Global North as a response to the inequitable structure of plantation society. She shows that migration fundamentally transformed the structure of Barbadian society by enabling property acquisition through remittances. The remittance landscape that ensued, however, encompassed both land and houses on the island and property purchased in receiving countries, which remain connected by particular Afro-Caribbean approaches to land ownership and modes of dwelling.
Itohan Osayimwese is an architectural and urban historian. She is assistant professor of history of art and architecture at Brown University. She engages with theories of modernity, postcoloniality, and globalization to analyze German colonial architecture, urban design, and visual culture; modern architecture in Germany; African and African diaspora material cultural histories; and the architecture of development in Africa. Another research interest is the architectural and urban lives of religious cults.
Tom Brzezina has had work in Chiron, Rusty Truck, Red Fez, Third Wednesday, Peninsula Poets, and The 5-2. His poems draw heavily upon drug experiences of his youth, the underbelly of society, and growing up in Detroit. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife, dog, and way too many books.
Lynn Gilbert is a founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and currently associate editor of Third Wednesday in Ann Arbor. Her poems have been published in The Texas Observer, Kansas Quarterly, Exquisite Corpse, Southwestern American Literature, Peninsula Poets, and Water Music: The Great Lakes State Poetry Anthology, which she co-edited.
Crazy Wisdomn Bookstore and Tea Room, 114 S. Main St. Free. 7346652757.info@crazywisdom.net www.crazywisdom.net
ONE PAUSE POETRY SALON is (literally) a greenhouse for poetry and poets, nurturing an appreciation for written art in all languages and encouraging experiments in creative writing.
We meet every Weds in the greenhouse at Argus Farm Stop on Liberty St. The poems we read each time are unified by form (haiku, sonnet, spoken word), poet, time / place (Tang Dynasty, English Romanticism, New York in the 70s) or theme / mood (springtime, poems with cats, protest poems). We discuss the poems and play writing games together, with time for snacks and socializing in between.
Members are encouraged to share their own poems or poems they like – they may or may not relate to the theme of the evening. This is not primarily a workshop – we may hold special workshop nights, but mostly we listen to and talk about poems for the sake of inspiring new writing.
Whether you are a published poet or encountering poetry for the first time, we invite you to join us!
$5 suggested donation for food, drinks and printing costs.
8-10 p.m., Argus Farm Stop greenhouse, 325 W. Liberty. $5 suggested donation. onepausepoetry.org, 707-1284.
“Beyond Solidarity” traces a genealogy of rebel care work. Without imposing a future, what political, cultural and social questions emerge when we center dignity in thinking beyond solidarity? Specifically with regards to the complimentary, contested and contradictory relationships between the university and the prison, who produces and benefits from the creation and production of knowledge? What is considered knowledge?
What is the role of Ethnic Studies in how we imagine and create a society not centered and organized around the idea that vengeance is justice, that punishment should only mean exile and imprisonment? What is the role of the university in the after-life of incarceration and the after-life of detention, for the communities that students come from, or in relation to policy or pedagogy? How does/can the university reproduce and undue the prison as a total institution? (Strike for print material)
Alan Eladio Gómez is a historian, Southwest Borderlands Scholar and associate professor of justice and social inquiry in the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. He is also an affiliated faculty member with the School of Transborder Studies and the Herberger Institute of Design and the Arts. Gómez is the author of The Revolutionary Imaginations of Greater Mexico: Chicana/o Radicalism, Solidarity Politics & Latin American Social Movements (University of Texas Press, 2016)
