Featured readers include Jennifer Allen, Harish Batra, Julia Byers, Cameron Finch, Hannah Levine, Sydney Morgan-Green, and Molly Reitman.
Literati is pleased to welcome Tamar Boyadjian, Tarfia Faizullah, & Airea D. Matthews to the store in celebration of National Poetry Month.
Tamar Boyadjian is the author of it is what it is and the vineyard of mirrors. Her poetic and academic work has been included in a number of literary journals and creative anthologies around the world including the United States, Turkey, Armenia, parts of Europe and the Middle East. Tamar teaches medieval literature (and the literature of other people and cultures) as well as creative writing at Michigan State University, and is involved with the Armenian Studies Program at the University of Michigan.
Poet, editor, and educator Tarfia Faizullah was born in 1980 in Brooklyn, NY and raised in west Texas. She received an MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University and is the author of Seam, which U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey calls “beautiful and necessary,” as well asRegister of Eliminated Villages (forthcoming from Graywolf in 2017).
Airea D. Matthews is a 2015 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow and the executive editor of The Offing. She is currently the Assistant Director of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where she earned her MFA. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Best American Poetry 2015, American Poet,The Missouri Review, The Baffler, Callaloo, Indiana Review, WSQ and elsewhere. Her performance work has been featured at the Cannes Lions Festival, PBS’ RoadTrip Nation and NPR. She lives in Detroit with her husband and their four children.
Women Writers of Ann Arbor/Ypsi meet four times a year to read their works in all genres.
Visitors and new members welcome to our Spring Read on April 16. Ask for information, RSVP or signup as member atwwaaygroup@gmail.com Website: www.wwaay.com
SAVE THE DATE
WORKSHOPS AND PEER CRITIQUES OCTOBER 15, 2016
Check website for more details
3222 Angell Hall, 435 S. State Street. Donation. 734 545-0586.wwaaygroup@gmail.com www.wwaay.com
Literati is thrilled to welcome Amy Gustine in support of her acclaimed debut collection, You Should Pity Us Instead.
You Should Pity Us Instead explores some of our toughest dilemmas: the cost of Middle East strife at its most intimate level, the likelihood of God considered in day-to-day terms, the moral stakes of family obligations, and the inescapable fact of mortality. Amy Gustine exhibits an extraordinary generosity toward her characters, instilling them with a thriving, vivid presence.
“Gustine excels at dramatizing the cunning of the human animal—a creature renowned for its skill at self-sabotage—as well as celebrating the freakish grace that can sometimes strike an ordinary life. You Should Pity Us Instead is a devastating, funny, and astonishingly frank collection.” –Karen Russell
Amy Gustine’s fiction has appeared in several journals, including The Kenyon Review, The Alaska Quarterly Review, The Cimarron Review, and the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal. Her work has also received Pushcart Prize Special Mention.
Reading by local poet Susan Hutton, author of The Vanishing of Large Creatures. The program begins with open mike readings.
7-8:30 p.m., Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea, 123 W. Washington. Free. 994-6663.
In lines both supple and brittle, Kreiger surrounds her private experiences with startling images whose collisions bang into the heart. The rose, nearby crows, even the fog and snow are ominous, foreboding, and irresistible. There’s brutality and betrayal here, and the growing knowledge that to survive is, in some ways, to name. Title aside, these moving poems are finally not about falling but about the courageous power of holding on.
Barbara Hurd, The Singer’s Temple
Georgia Kreiger’s Falling is a tightrope walk in verse, held taut by the tension between “what cannot [and] (what must) be told.” Unrelentingly confessional and deeply personal, the book’s revelations arise from the very act of falling. But the fall is defiant, fierce, and born of “a longing so urgent / it can pull other worlds / through walls.” To overcome the horrors of her childhood the poet must face a father who “came into my room to touch the part of me I could not hide,” a mother who “told me / to swallow all of the secrets / and hold them inside / because // what-others-don’t-know-can’t-hurt-us,” and a nightmarish memory revealed like a headline: “Ten-Year-Old Girl / Raped in Backyard Shed.” It is through the poetic act that the poet reclaims her life from the throes of childhood trauma, from a history that did its best to leave her “with no tongue to cry out to the milk-gray sky.” But cry out she does, and in this formidable, lyric, subversive collection Kreiger writes a “memoir in verse” that emboldens reader and poet alike, proving that there is as much power in falling as in rising again.
Sivan Butler-Rotholz, Editor, Saturday Poetry Series As It Ought To Be
Monica Swanson Tesler is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School, and is an attorney in Boston, where she lives with her family. Her book, Bounders, is in the tradition of Michael Vey and The Unwanteds. Twelve-year-old Jasper and his friends are forced to go up against an alien society in this first book in a brand-new adventure series
Thirteen years ago, Earth Force a space-military agency discovered a connection between brain structure and space travel. Now they’ve brought together the first team of cadets, called Bounders, to be trained as high-level astronauts.
Jim Ottaviani (“Feynman”, “Primates”) is the world s preeminent writer of comics and graphic novels about science. Notable works include a biography of Niels Bohr and the fast-paced tale of the desperate lives of early paleontologists and “T-Minus: The Race to the Moon”, from Aladdin books. He has worked as a nuclear engineer and is currently employed as a reference librarian in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Award winning authors Jim Ottaviani and Leland Purvis present a historically accurate graphic novel biography of English mathematician and scientist Alan Turing in “The Imitation Game.”
English mathematician and scientist Alan Turing (1912 1954) is credited with many of the foundational principles of contemporary computer science. “The Imitation Game” presents a historically accurate graphic novel biography of Turing’s life, including his groundbreaking work on the fundamentals of cryptography and artificial intelligence. His code breaking efforts led to the cracking of the German Enigma during World War II, work that saved countless lives and accelerated the Allied defeat of the Nazis. While Turing’s achievements remain relevant decades after his death, the story of his life in post-war Europe continues to fascinate audiences today.
Award-winning duo Jim Ottaviani (the #1 “New York Times “bestselling author of “Feynman “and “Primates”) and artist Leland Purvis (an Eisner and Ignatz Award nominee and occasional reviewer for the “Comics Journal”) present a factually detailed account of Turing’s life and groundbreaking research as an unconventional genius who was arrested, tried, convicted, and punished for being openly gay, and whose innovative work still fuels the computing and communication systems that define our modern world. Computer science buffs, comics fans, and history aficionados will be captivated by this riveting and tragic story of one of the 20th century’s most unsung heroes.
Literati is pleased to welcome three authors from Wayne State University Press’s Made in Michigan series: Michael Delp, Zilka Joseph, and M.L. Liebler.
Michael Delp recently retired from the Interlochen Arts Academy, where he was the director of creative writing for many years. He is the author of numerous collections of prose and poetry, with his most recent collection of short stories being As If We Were Prey. He is also the mentor and advisor to the Front Street Writers Program in Traverse City, which operates under the auspices of the National Writers Series. He lives in Interlochen with his wife, Claudia, and splits his time between there and Reeling Waters, his cabin on the Boardman River.
Zilka Joseph teaches creative writing and is an independent editor and manuscript coach. Her chapbooks, Lands I Live In and What Dread, were nominated for a PEN America and a Pushcart award, respectively. She was awarded a Zell Fellowship, a Hopwood Prize, and the Elsie Choy Lee Scholarship (Center for the Education of Women) from the University of Michigan.
M. L. Liebler is an award-winning poet, literary arts activist, and professor. He is the author of several books of poetry, including Wide Awake in Someone Else’s Dream, and an editor of the anthology Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams. He is also co-editor of Bob Seger’s House and Other Stories. He has taught at Wayne State University since 1980.
This award-winning local writer reads from Love & Vodka: My Surreal Adventures in the Ukraine, his memoir about how he dropped everything to pursue a romance with a Ukrainian woman. “The reader … will walk away shaky-legged, enlightened, and undoubtedly able to correctly pronounce Dnipropetrovsk,” says local writer Jeff Kass.
Signing.
7 p.m., Bookbound, 1729 Plymouth, Courtyard Shops. Free. 369-4345.
