The Detroit Writing Room’s inaugural Holiday Book Fair will feature over a dozen local authors will be selling and signing their book, including RC creative writing alumni Laura Thomas, Elizabeth Schmuhl, and Anna Clark.
Come browse, shop and meet some of the best authors in Michigan!
Admission is free. Please register in advance.
Author Lineup:
– Rosemarie Aquilina, “Triple Cross Killer” (Bowker)
– Angela Berent, “List Your Life: A Modern-Day Memoir” and “Trace Your Travels: An Adventure Journal”
– Anna Clark, “The Poisoned City” and “A Detroit Anthology” (Metropolitan Books / Belt Publishing)
– Kelly Fordon, “Goodbye Toothless House” and “Garden for the Blind” (Kattywompus Press and Wayne State University Press)
– Sylvia Hubbard, “Daddy’s Girl,” “Beautiful” and “Author’s Guide to Writing, Publishing & Marketing” (HubBooks Literary)
– Shaun Manning, “Macbeth: The Red King,” “Hell, Nebraska,” “Interesting Drug” and “Star Wars Adventures” (Lucha Comics/Shooting Star Press)
– Keith Owens, “Detroit Stories Quarterly”
– Ben Pauli, “Flint Fights Back: Environmental Justice and Democracy in the Flint Water Crisis” (MIT Press)
– Craig Rush, “No Time to Hate” (Third Eye Pyramid Publishing)
– Elizabeth Schmuhl, “Premonitions” (Wayne State University Press)
– Syntell Smith, “Call Numbers” (Syntell Smith Publishing)
– Laura Thomas, “States of Motion” (Wayne State University Press)
– Bill Vlasic, “Once Upon A Car” (William Morrow)
Calling all writers! Whether you participated in this year’s National Novel Writing Month or you just love to write, join author Lillian Li for a presentation and discussion on the writing and revising process, getting published, and get your questions answered!
Lillian Li is the author of Number One Chinese Restaurant, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and an NPR Best Book of 2018. Her work has been published in the New York Times, Granta, One Story, Bon Appetit, and Jezebel. Originally from the D.C. metro area, she lives in Ann Arbor.
This program is associated with NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and all aspiring authors are welcome! This event includes a signing with books for sale.
Decluttering and relocation expert Sharon McRill discusses her book Downsizing the Silver Tsunami, a comprehensive reference tool to help people navigate the difficult pathways of estate sales, consignment dealers, picking the right real estate agent, and many other moving and downsizing questions.
This event includes a signing with books for sale.
Join us for a reading, talk, and signing with best-selling local author John U. Bacon for his new book, Overtime: Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan Wolverines at the Crossroads of College Football.
Ticketing Information: NONE
About the Book:
A riveting insider’s chronicle of Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh era, and a deeply reported human portrait of a big-time college football program at the crossroads. For the past year, John U. Bacon has received unprecedented access to Jim Harbaugh’s University of Michigan football team: coaches, players, and staffers, in closed-door meetings, locker rooms, meals, and classes. In Overtime we not only discover what these public figures are like behind the scenes, we learn what the experience means to them as they go through it – the trials, the triumphs, and the unexpected answers to a central question: Is it worth it?
About the Author:
John U. Bacon has worked nearly three decades as a writer, a public speaker, and a college instructor, winning awards for all three.
Bacon earned an honors degree in history (“pre-unemployment”) from the University of Michigan in 1986, and a Master’s in Education in1994. In 2005-06, the Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellowship named him the first recipient of the Benny Friedman Fellowship for Sports Journalism.
He started his journalism career covering high school sports for The Ann Arbor News, then wrote a light-hearted lifestyle column before becoming the Sunday sports feature writer for The Detroit News in 1995. He earned numerous state and national awards for his work, including “Notable Sports Writing” in The Best American Sports Writing in 1998 and 2000.
After Bacon covered the 1998 Nagano Olympics, he moved from the sports page to the Sunday front page, roaming the Great Lakes State finding fresh features, then left the paper in 1999 to free-lance for some two dozen national publications, including stories on Formula One racing in Australia for The New York Times, on Japanese hockey for ESPN Magazine, and on Hemingway’s Michigan summer home for Time.
He has authored ten books on sports, business, health, and history, five of which are New York Times best sellers.
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.
Open-mic storytelling competitions. Open to anyone with a five-minute story to share on the night’s theme. Come tell a story, or just enjoy the show!
6:30pm Doors Open | 7:30pm Stories Begin
*Tickets for this event are available one week before the show, at 3pm ET.
*Seating is not guaranteed and is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please be sure to arrive at least 10 minutes before the show. Admission is not guaranteed for late arrivals. All sales final.
NAMES: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names? Prepare a five-minute story involving a name. Name dropping, name calling and making a name for yourself. Pet names for your lover or nicknames earned by reputation. Fluffy, Hot Lips, Barky, Claude, Spot, Mr. Punctual. Think labels and titles. Designer jeans, sneakers, neighborhoods. “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
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.
Join us in making Zines!
Zines are small booklets made of simple materials and contain text, art, or anything you can put in a book.
Supplies are provided – bring photos, magazine clippings, or other materials if you want to personalize your project!
We’re pleased to welcome the beloved author of The Undertaking in support of his latest, The Depositions: New and Selected Essays on Being and Ceasing to Be. The author will be in conversation with poet Keith Taylor. Signing to follow. Free and open to the public.
About the book:
For nearly four decades, poet, essayist, and small-town funeral director Thomas Lynch has probed relations between the literary and mortuary arts. His life’s work with the dead and the bereaved has informed four previous collections of nonfiction, each exploring identity and humanity with Lynch’s signature blend of memoir, meditation, gallows humor, and poetic precision.
The Depositions provides an essential selection from these masterful collections—essays on fatherhood, Irish heritage, funeral rites, and the perils of bodiless obsequies—as well as new essays in which the space between Lynch’s hyphenated identities—as an Irish American, undertaker-poet—is narrowed by the deaths of poets, the funerals of friends, the loss of neighbors, intimate estrangements, and the slow demise of a beloved dog.
As Alan Ball writes in a penetrating foreword, Lynch’s work allows us “to see both the absurdity and the beauty of death, sometimes simultaneously.” With this landmark collection, he continues to illuminate not only how we die, but also how we live.
Thomas Lynch has authored five collections of poetry, one of stories, and four books of essays. His first, The Undertaking, won the Heartland Prize for Non-Fiction and the American Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Granta, Harper’s Magazine, and the New York Times, among other publications. He works as a funeral director in Milford, Michigan, and teaches at the Bear River Writer’s Conference.
Independent journalist and co-founder of Press On visits the store in support of The View from Somewhere: Undoing the Myth of Journalistic Objectivity. Book signing to follow. Free and open to the public.
About the book: “Wallace asks the right questions and makes a powerful case for a reexamination of what journalism is and how it can best serve the public. American journalists will readily admit, I think, that our industry has let down the broader community in recent years. Wallace posits a new solution for how we might avoid the mistakes of the past and move forward in a productive way. The View from Somewhere is both a fascinating dissection of our political body and a passionate plea for reform. It’s also a darn good read.”–Celeste Headlee, author of We Need to Talk: How to Have Conversations That Matter
Lewis Raven Wallace is an independent journalist, a co-founder of Press On, a southern movement journalism collective, and the host of The View from Somewhere podcast. He previously worked in public radio and is a longtime activist engaged in prison abolition, racial justice, and queer and trans liberation. He is a white transgender person from the Midwest and is now based in North Carolina.
