We welcome award-winning author Aaron Hamburger as part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati series, in support of his latest novel Nirvana is Here. Book signing to follow. Free and open to the public.
About the book: When his ex-husband is accused of sexual harassment in the #metoo era, history professor Ari Silverman is forced to confront long-buried trauma from his childhood, where he and his high school crush bonded over the raw emotion of Kurt Cobain’s lyrics in the segregated suburbs of 1990s Detroit.
“A tender self-reckoning, Nirvana Is Here brings the past full circle. Hamburger deftly reveals how incidents recede–even if they leave their mark–to bring new hopes into focus.” –Foreword Reviews
“Deft characterization of a person who seeks to close the space between the past and present self.” –Lambda Literary Review
“Hamburger is tender and provocative in his examinations of sexual abuse, racial strife in ’90s Detroit, and the way that discovering Nirvana changes everything about Ari’s world. The complexities of this novel are deftly handled by Hamburger, whose sensitive and observant prose is a pure joy to read on every page.” –Electric Literature
Aaron Hamburger is the author of a story collection titled The View from Stalin’s Head (Random House), winner of the Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His second book, the novel Faith for Beginners (Random House), was nominated for a Lambda Literary Award. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, O, the Oprah Magazine, Details, The Village Voice, Poets & Writers, Tin House, Out, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Forward and numerous other publications. In addition, he has also won fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation as well as first prize in the Dornstein Contest for Young Jewish Writers. He has taught creative writing at Columbia University, the George Washington University, New York University, Brooklyn College, and the Stonecoast MFA Program. He currently resides in Washington, D.C.
It’s coming for us! 2019 Fierce Reads Tour is headed our way October 3. This is your opportunity to meet four fabulous YA authors – Sara Faring, L.L. McKinney, Margaret Owen, and Katy Rose Pool. They will be on a panel hosted by Lucy Shramm from Ann Arbor District Library.
About the Books
The Tenth Girl Simmering in Patagonian myth, The Tenth Girl is a gothic psychological thriller with a haunting twist.
A Blade So Black The first time the Nightmares came, it nearly cost Alice her life. Now she’s trained to battle monstrous creatures in the dark dream realm known as Wonderland with magic weapons and hardcore fighting skills. Yet even warriors have a curfew.
The Merciful Crow One way or another, we always feed the crows.
There Will Come a Darkness Leigh Bardugo’s Six of Crows meets Kristin Cashore’s Graceling, with a dash of Winter is Coming, in this showstopping debut YA fantasy!
About the Authors
Sara Faring was born in Los Angeles, and is a multilingual Argentine-American fascinated by literary puzzles. After working in investment banking at J.P. Morgan, she worked at Penguin Random House. She holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania in International Studies and from the Wharton School in Business. The Tenth Girl is her debut book.
L.L. McKinney is a writer, a poet, and an active member of the kidlit community. She’s an advocate for equality and inclusion in publishing, and the creator of the hashtag #WhatWoCWritersHear. She’s spent time in the slush by serving as a reader for agents and participating as a judge in various online writing contests. She’s also a gamer girl and an adamant Hei Hei stan. A Blade So Black is her debut novel.
Margaret Owen was born and raised at the end of the Oregon Trail, and now lives and writes in Seattle while negotiating a long-term hostage situation with her two monstrous cats. In her free time, she enjoys exploring ill-advised travel destinations and raising money for social justice nonprofits through her illustrations. She resides in Seattle, WA. You can find her on Twitter @what_eats_owls. Visit her at www.margaret-owen.com.
Katy Rose Pool was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. After graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in history, Katy spent a few years building websites by day and dreaming up prophecies by night. Currently, she resides in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she can be found eating breakfast sandwiches, rooting for the Golden State Warriors, and reading books that set her on fire. There Will Come a Darkness is her first novel.
About our Conversationalist
Lucy Schramm has worked at the Ann Arbor District Library for 6 years, where she currently creates and hosts programs for children, teens and adults. She sings and shares stories at story time and baby playgroups, and meets with school groups to help spread the word about all the library has to offer. She loves to promote the joy of reading and is a lifelong book nerd who especially enjoys middle grade, young adult, and adult fiction.
Fri, Oct 4, 5:30 PM
CREES Distinguished Lecture and Film. “From the Soviet Gulag to Franco’s Spain: Historical Fiction’s Power for Global Dialogue.” Ruta Sepetys, author. Lecture followed at 7 PM by a screening of Ashes in the Snow. Marius A. Markevicius, director (98 min., 2018), based on the novel Between Shades of Gray, by Ruta Sepetys. Sponsor: CREES. Michigan Theater, 603 E. Liberty.
We welcome author Sarah Miller in support of her nonfiction book for young readers, The Miracle & Tragedy of the Dionne Quintuplets. A book signing will follow the event. The event is free and open to the public.
About the book: In this riveting, beyond-belief true story from the author of The Borden Murders,meet the five children who captivated the entire world. When the Dionne Quintuplets were born on May 28, 1934, weighing a grand total of just over 13 pounds, no one expected them to live so much as an hour. Overnight, Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie Dionne mesmerized the globe, defying medical history with every breath they took. In an effort to protect them from hucksters and showmen, the Ontario government took custody of the five identical babies, sequestering them in a private, custom-built hospital across the road from their family–and then, in a stunning act of hypocrisy, proceeded to exploit them for the next nine years. The Dionne Quintuplets became a more popular attraction than Niagara Falls, ogled through one-way screens by sightseers as they splashed in their wading pool at the center of a tourist hotspot known as Quintland. Here, Sarah Miller reconstructs their unprecedented upbringing with fresh depth and subtlety, bringing to new light their resilience and the indelible bond of their unique sisterhood.
Sarah Miller is the author of the historical fiction novels Miss Spitfire: Reaching Helen Keller, which was called “an accomplished debut” in a starred review from Booklist and was named an ALA–ALSC Notable Children’s Book, and The Lost Crown, a novel hailed as “fascinating” in a starred review from Kirkus Reviews and named an ALA–YALSA Best Book for Young Adults
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 Nishanth Injam and Monica Rico.
Nishanth Injam is a fiction writer from Telangana, India. He currently lives in Ann Arbor.
Monica Rico is a second generation Mexican-American from Saginaw, MI and a 2019 CantoMundo Fellow. She works for the Bear River Writers’ Conference.
Join Maureen Muldoon, founder of Voice Box Stories and SpeakEasy Spiritual Community, in Ann Arbor for a powerful evening of creativity, community, and the healing power of story.
We will be sharing and workshopping stories in this safe and intimate community. Bring a story to share or come to just listen.
Maureen Muldoon is a powerful, entertaining and impactful speaker. She creates memorable talks and workshops that are packed with information and inspiration. Her refreshing humor and spot-on storytelling honed during her twenty years in TV and film makes her an audience favorite. She has delivered keynotes to audiences as large as seven thousand. Maureen is the author of three books, including her latest, Spiritual Vixen Guide to an Unapologetic Life. (available for purchase)
Maureen and her work has been featured in HBO, Fox TV, CBS, Parade, PopSugar, She Writes Press and many others. She is the founder of VoiceBox, a storytelling show with a twist that has been running monthly in the Chicago area for the past six years. She is the founder of SpeakEasy Spiritual Community and a regular contributor to ACIM Gather, Miracles LIVE 365, along with hosting her own podcast and Youtube channel.
Join author Karin Risko and photographer Rodney Arroyo as they share highlights of their book, A History Lover’s Guide to Detroit, an intimate tour of the city that put the world on wheels. Discover an amazing history of innovation, philanthropy, social justice, and culture.
This event includes a signing with books for sale.
Celebrating our common humanity uniting us all.
On September 22, 29, and October 6, 7:00 pm, the theatre company, Apollo’s Troupe, will stage the theatre adaptation of the critically-acclaimed epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, written by Michigan poet Frederick Glaysher and published in 2012 by Earthrise Press. Fresh from performing in May at Wayne State University’s Studio Theatre, this stage adaptation of Mr. Glaysher’s epic work in verse keeps intact much of the beautiful poetry that exemplifies this spectacular book while seeking to reach a new audience with its message of how poetry and artistry from all times and cultures can elevate the world and redefine our lives for the better.
Glaysher studied with Robert Hayden during the last year of his life, worked for him as a secretary, and editing his Collected Prose for the University of Michigan Press and his Collected Poems for Liveright. Glaysher holds two degrees from U of M, the latter a Master’s in English. When it came time for writing his epic poem, Glaysher knew he had to include Robert Hayden to try to honor his former teacher, mentor, and friend.
Taking place on the moon at the Apollo 11 landing site, a lone poet finds himself charged by Don Quixote and “The Parliament of Poets” to spread a new message of beauty, unity, and love to all nations of our fractured modern world. He is then sent to meet with the great poets, myths, and characters from history, East and West, to be mentored on his quest towards enlightenment and understanding.
The cast is comprised of the poet himself, as a persona, The Poet of the Moon, as well as five talented actors playing multiple roles including Don Quixote, Merlin the Magician, Jane Austen, Ann Arbor Poet Robert Hayden, Leo Tolstoy, the Biblical prophet-poet Job, the great Chinese poet Du Fu, the African Queen Sogolon, and many more. These actors are Dennis Kleinsmith as Don Quixote and Tolstoy (Theatre Nova, JET, Shakespeare in Detroit, etc.), Krystle Dellihue as Robert Hayden and Queen Sogolon from the Mali epic Sundiata (Shakespeare In Detroit, Matrix Theatre, Redbud, PTD), Alexander Sloan, also as Robert Hayden and Jorge Luis Borges (Open Book, Water Works, Hope College), Marley Boone, as the Fairy Queen and the Chinese Tang poet Du Fu (Williamston, St. Dunstan’s, several Philadelphia theatres), Patrick Grimes, as the African Flying Tortoise Mbeku, Merlin, Virgil, and William Blake (Redbud, Morris, Young People’s Theatre). The stage manager is Briana O’Neal, the new resident stage manager at Theatre Nova (Eastern MSU, Ann Arbor Civic Theatre).
In the canto with Robert Hayden, he invokes the passage from Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body about one day there would be an American black poet who would sing for his people. Hayden then calls forth the fairies and magical beings from around the world, throughout time, to carry him and his “charge,” the Poet of the Moon, heavenward to the Apollo 11 landing site.
Based on staging by Jeff Thomakos, of the Michigan Michael Chekhov Studio, the show is a unique blend of poetry reading, protest play, and performance art with a powerful message of peace, love, and humanity on the tiny, blue marble floating in space that we all share together.
“I am very honored to try to bring this critically-acclaimed work, from one of Michigan’s most talented poets to life. I think it will be a unique and moving experience,” says Mr. Thomakos.
The show will be a Guest Production at Theatre Nova, 410 West Huron Street. Performances will take place 7:00 – 9:00 pm on Sunday evenings September 22, 29, and October 6. Tickets are at the door and online under Guest Productions, https://www.theatrenova.org/guest-productions $22 general, $15 students. Go to TheatreNova.org or EarthrisePress.Net for more information. Or call 248-453-4220. The Parliament of Poets can be purchased at Crazy Wisdom Bookstore.
David joins us for a night of poetry. His title, Night Manual, is a survival guide for life—all the messy, wonderful, grieving, and self-doubting parts of life. David Hornibrook’s debut poetry collection is a book of hours that keeps time through anguish and explores the ineffable borderland of existence.
About the Book
Night Manual is a survival guide for life—all the messy, wonderful, grieving, and self-doubting parts of life. David Hornibrook’s debut poetry collection is a book of hours that keeps time through anguish and explores the ineffable borderland of existence. These are poems that seek to get at what cannot be described through a process of negation—to delineate the shape of an absence by writing the things around it.
Night Manual is divided into four sections loosely inspired by the four seasons. Each section explores the theme of absence from a slightly different proximity; as a whole, the book progresses from grief to gratitude. A major task of Hornibrook’s is to communicate the gravity and perplexity of loss while at the same time charting out a kind of liturgy of joy and wonder at the cycle of life in an ever-changing world. With lines like “My eyes are pulled to the monitor / where a universe expands or contracts, I can’t tell which” (from “The Ultrasound”) to “Facebook keeps showing Miley with her mouth open / & I keep finding little things wrong with everything” (from “Self Portrait w/ Wrecking Ball”), Hornibrook has created instructions for moving through a world suddenly disoriented by loss, a world with starlings, water birds and aliens, robots and deer, Miley Cyrus and God, black holes, and the quiet morning strangeness of a house when all the people you love are still asleep.
About the Author
David Hornibrook grew up in the suburbs of Detroit where he worked for many years as a caregiver and non-profit administrator. His poems have won multiple awards, including a Pushcart Prize. Hornibrook holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Writer’s Program at the University of Michigan.
Praise
David Hornibrook’s Night Manual experiments with the white spaces and stanza forms like faults and cleavages in the geology of language, the ledges and layers of image, the seismic divides of the everyday and existential. Individual poems are like cairns raised out of the near to hand. As a collection, the work achieves the sumptuously monumental.
– Thomas Lynch, The Sin Eater: A Breviary
Among the many realizations David Hornibrook offers in the unsettling comfort of his Night Manual is that structure as much as language discloses how the power of the presence of absence reveals. Hornibrook’s exploration recognizes the irrelevance today of that gnawed-on philosophical trope, ‘Who am I?’ In poems that move on the rhythms of anguish he enables us to realize the question to ask now is ‘Where am I?’ Each poem reveals the answer: whomever and whatever I am with, thus transforming ‘How then should I live?’ into ‘How then should I live with what and who are left?’ In his poem ‘Dire Country,’ Hornibrook writes, ‘It’s hard to stay safe.’ I recommend joining this gently fierce poet when he writes, ‘Instead, I sing/the names/of everyone I love . . .’ This first collection reads as the latest work by a brave and seasoned poet.
– Jack Ridl, author of Practicing to Walk Like a Heron (Wayne State University Press, 2013) and Saint Peter and the Goldfinch (Wayne State University Press, 2019)
In Hornibrook’s lush poetry, shadows fall like silk, and words come to recover their bodies. Flora, fauna, earth and sky penetrate the skin to flourish in an ethereal symbiosis. Like O’Keeffe’s magnificent flowers, his lyrical imagery invites you to slow down, look closer, consider the veins of a leaf where ‘the wind grew a tongue / & spoke / through trees.’
– Diane DeCillis, author of Strings Attached (Wayne State University Press, 2014)
Time, space, God, nature, and wilderness is rendered in shimmering images as ‘worlds break apart’ or merge in these stunning poems. The eye is microscope, telescope, and mirror examining salvation, terror, the biblical, the quotidian. Hornibrook’s luminous work compels us to see ‘once more the first dawn.’
– Zilka Joseph, author of Sharp Blue Search of Flame (Wayne State University Press, 2016), What Dread, and Lands I Live In
Hornibrook’s poetry is that powerful combination of the cerebral and the visceral.
– Glen Young, Petoskey News
Social media is here to stay, and every writer should have some kind of online presence. But hard-sell techniques are so last-century, and savvy writers can do better. In this workshop, Alex Kourvo and Bethany Neal will show you how to make genuine connections online, interact with readers, and get your name out there in a low-stress way.
This is part of the monthly Emerging Writers Workshops, which offer support, learning, and advice for local authors. Each month, two weeks after the workshop, there is a meet-up where the instructors will read samples of your work and offer advice and assistance in a casual, supportive atmosphere.
Do you have a completed manuscript? Consider submitting it to the library’s imprint Fifth Avenue Press.
