Calendar

Jose Antonio Vargas comes to Ann Arbor to discuss his new memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, the 2020 Washtenaw Reads selection.

Vargas was born in the Philippines and when he was twelve years old his mother sent him to the United States to live with her parents. While applying for a driver’s permit, he found out his papers were fake. More than two decades later, he is still here illegally, with no clear path to American citizenship. To some people, he is the “most famous illegal” in America. But for Jose, he is only one of an estimated 11 million human beings whose uncertain fate is under threat in a country he calls home.

Dear America is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book—at its core—is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but about the unsettled, unmoored psychological state in which undocumented immigrants find themselves. This book is about lying and being forced to lie to get by; about passing as an American and as a contributing citizen; about families, keeping them together, and having to make new ones when you can’t. This book is about what it means to not have a home.

This event includes a signing with books for sale. Doors will open at 6 pm to offer the opportunity to connect with community agencies and representatives who will be staffing information tables in the lobby.

Jose Antonio Vargas is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, Emmy-nominated filmmaker, and theatrical producer. A leading voice for the human rights of immigrants, he founded the non-profit media and culture organization Define American, named one of the World’s Most Innovative Companies by Fast Company. His best-selling memoir, Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen, was published by HarperCollins in 2018. Most recently, he co-produced Heidi Schreck’s acclaimed play What the Constitution Means to Me, which opened on Broadway in spring 2019.

This event is part of the 2020 Washtenaw Read. The Washtenaw Reads program is a community initiative to promote reading and civic dialogue through the shared experience of reading and discussing a common book. Participating libraries include Ann Arbor, Chelsea, Dexter, Milan, Saline, and Ypsilanti. For more information about Washtenaw Reads and previous years’ reads, go to wread.org.

Literati is pleased to be on hand as a bookseller for the University of Michigan LSA Honors Program’s Leland Stowe Memorial Lecture, delivered by author Anu Partanen. 

The lecture celebrates the best in journalism, broadly understood. Stowe was a Pulitzer Prize winner in 1930 and one of the early American journalists to raise concerns about Hitler’s rise to power. During World War II, he was a war correspondent. He was a Professor of Journalism at the University of Michigan 1956–1969 and died in 1994.

Anu Partanen’s work has appeared in the New York Times and the Atlantic. A journalist in Helsinki for many years, she has also worked at Fortune magazine as a visiting reporter through the Innovation Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University. She lives in New York City.

Jim Ottaviani comes to the library to launch (no pun intended) his new book : Astronauts: Women on the Final Frontier. In this graphic novel Ottaviani and illustrator Maris Wicks capture the great humor and incredible drive of Mary Cleave, Valentina Tereshkova, and the first women in space.

The U.S. may have put the first man on the moon, but it was the Soviet space program that made Valentina Tereshkova the first woman in space. It took years to catch up, but soon NASA’s first female astronauts were racing past milestones of their own. The trail-blazing women of Group 9, NASA’s first mixed gender class, had the challenging task of convincing the powers that be that a woman’s place is in space, but they discovered that NASA had plenty to learn about how to make space travel possible for everyone.

This event is in partnership with Literati Bookstore and includes a signing with books for sale.

In Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid, local author William D. Lopez examines the lasting damage done by this daylong act of collaborative immigration enforcement in Washtenaw County, Michigan.

Exploring the chaos of enforcement through the lens of community health, Lopez discusses deportation’s rippling negative effects on families, communities, and individuals. Focusing on those left behind, Lopez reveals their efforts to cope with trauma, avoid homelessness, handle worsening health, and keep their families together as they attempt to deal with a deportation machine that is militarized, traumatic and implicitly racist.

This event includes a signing with books for sale, and is part of the 2020 Washtenaw Read.  For more information about Washtenaw Reads and previous years’ reads, visit wread.org.

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.

Literati is pleased to be on hand as a bookseller as the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Michigan presents Jennifer Hirsch and Shamus Khan, authors of Sexual Citizens: A Landmark Study of Sex, Power and Assault on Campus. 

The fear of campus sexual assault has become an inextricable part of the college experience. But why is sexual assault such a common feature of college life? And what can be done to prevent it? Drawing on the Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (SHIFT) at Columbia University, the most comprehensive study of sexual assault on a campus to date, Jennifer S. Hirsch and Shamus Khan’s new book presents an entirely new framework that emphasizes sexual assault’s social roots, transcending current debates about consent, predators in a “hunting ground,” and the dangers of hooking up.

Based on years of research interviewing and observing college life―with students of different races, genders, sexual orientations, and socioeconomic backgrounds―Hirsch and Khan’s study reveals the social ecosystem that makes sexual assault so predictable, explaining how physical spaces, alcohol, peer groups, and cultural norms influence young people’s experiences and interpretations of both sex and sexual assault.

Book sales and signing will follow the discussion.

Cosponsors: Sexual Assault Prevention and Awareness Center (SAPAC), Departments of American Culture, Sociology, Women’s Studies, School of Education

Time Magazine journalist, professor, farmer, and inventor Charles Eisendrath reads from his new memoir Downstream From Here, retracing a life lived in many worlds, from interviewing Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet on the morning after the coup, to extracting maple syrup on the shores of Lake Charlevoix. Free and open to the public!

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.

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.

2020 marks the 150th anniversary of the admission of women to U-M. Andrea Turpin, associate professor of history at Baylor University and author of the recent award-winning book, A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837-1917, will speak on the struggle for women’s admission at U-M and the experiences of women students here during the early decades of coeducation. This lecture is part of a new monthly series on the history of the University, sponsored by the Bentley Historical Library.

Dr. Andrea L. Turpin is Associate Professor of History at Baylor University. Her first book, A New Moral Vision: Gender, Religion, and the Changing Purposes of American Higher Education, 1837-1917 (Cornell, 2016) explores how the entrance of women into U.S. colleges and universities shaped changing ideas about the moral and religious purposes of higher education in unexpected ways, and in turn profoundly shaped American culture. The book has won three awards: the 2018 biennial Linda Eisenmann Prize from the History of Education Society for the best first book on the history of higher education, the 2017 Lilly Fellows Program Biennial Book Award for scholarship from any field related to religion and higher education, and Baylor University’s 2016 Guittard Book Award for Historical Scholarship. Dr. Turpin has also published several peer-reviewed articles in journals including the History of Education Quarterly, Perspectives in the History of Higher Education, and The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Her second book project, tentatively entitled A Debate of Their Own: Educated Women in the Fundamentalist-Modernist Controversy, positions college-educated women as key players in the narrative of the Protestant fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the early twentieth century, the split between theological and social liberals and conservatives which many credit with giving birth to the modern culture wars. Dr. Turpin is co-chair of the Higher Education affinity group of the History of Education Society and serves on the Council of the American Society of Church History. She contributes to the group blog The Anxious Bench and tweets @AndreaLTurpin.