Talk by this Maltese American cartoonist and journalist who’s best known for his graphic historical novel Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza, a collection of oral histories from elderly Palestinians who witnessed a mass murder in the 1956 Suez War.
5 p.m., Michigan Theater. Free. 668-8463.
Literati is thrilled to be the bookseller for the Zell Visiting Writers Series, presented by the Helen Zell Writers’ Program, which brings world-renowned poets and fiction writers to Helmut Stern Auditorium in the University of Michigan Museum of Art.
Kelly Link, our Winter Distinguished Writer in Residence, is the author of the collections Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and Get in Trouble. Her short stories have been published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The Best American Short Stories, and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Steampunk!and Monstrous Affections. She is the co-founder of Small Beer Press and co-edits the occasional zine Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet. Link was born in Miami, Florida. She currently lives with her husband and daughter in Northampton, Massachusetts.
Claire Vaye Watkins was born in Bishop, California in 1984. She was raised in the Mojave Desert, first in Tecopa, California and then across the state line in Pahrump, Nevada. A graduate of the University of Nevada Reno, Claire earned her MFA from the Ohio State University, where she was a Presidential Fellow. Her stories and essays have appeared in Granta, Tin House, The Paris Review, One Story, Glimmer Train, Best of the West, Best of the Southwest, The New York Times and many others. A recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, Claire was also one of the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35.”
2-4 p.m., Ann Arbor District Library Freespace (3rd floor), 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free. 971-5763.
Local short story writer Alex Kourvo and young adult novelist Bethany Neal host an open house for writers to connect with one another and/or work on their projects.
Literati is delighted to be the bookseller for the Ann Arbor District Library‘s event with National Book Award finalist Heather Ann Thompson.
Award-winning U-M historian Heather Ann Thompson discusses her critically-acclaimed book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. This groundbreaking book is the first definitive account of the infamous 1971 Attica prison uprising, the state’s violent response, and the victims’ decades-long quest for justice.
Published to coincide with the forty-fifth anniversary of the uprising, Blood in the Water finally reveals the full story of what really happened at Attica and will completely reshape our understanding of this historic event. Heather Ann Thompson sheds new light on one of the most important civil rights stories of the last century, exploring every aspect of the uprising and its legacy from the perspectives of all of those involved in this long fight for justice: the prisoners, the state officials, the lawyers on both sides, the state troopers and corrections officers, and the families of the slain men.
Despite facing resistance from New York State officials, Thompson spent over ten years researching Attica, working her way through oral histories, letters, newspaper articles, memoirs, and extensive interviews. As a result the book reveals, for the first time, the crimes committed during the uprising and its aftermath, who committed them, and how they were covered up.
Heather Ann Thompson is an award-winning historian at the University of Michigan. She has written on the history of mass incarceration, as well as its current impact, for The New York Times, Time, The Atlantic, Salon, Dissent, New Labor Forum, and The Huffington Post. Thompson is also the author of Whose Detroit?: Politics, Labor, and Race in a Modern American City.
Literati is delighted to be the bookseller for Margot Lee Shetterly’s visit to Ann Arbor in support of her book, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race. Margot will speak at Rackham Auditorium (915 E. State Street) at 4pm, and then participate in a fireside chat at Stamps Auditorium on North Campus at 6:30pm, with a signing to follow.
Audiences of all backgrounds will be captivated by the phenomenal true story of the black “human computers” who used math to change their own lives—and their country’s future. Set against the rich backdrop of World War II, the Space Race, the Civil Rights Era, and the burgeoning fight for gender equality, this talk brings to life the stories of Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, Katherine Johnson, and Christine Darden, who worked as mathematicians at NASA during the golden age of space travel. Teaching math at segregated schools in the South, they were called into service during the WWII labor shortages. Suddenly, these overlooked math whizzes had jobs worthy of their skills at the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, in Hampton, Virginia. Even as Jim Crow laws segregated them from their white counterparts, the women of this all-black “West Computing” group helped America achieve a decisive victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War. They were part of a group of hundreds of black and white women who, over the decades, contributed to some of NASA’s greatest successes.
In this keynote, Margot Lee Shetterly talks about race, gender, science, the history of technology, and much else. She shows us the surprising ways that women and people of color have contributed to American innovation while pursuing the American Dream. In sweeping, dramatic detail, she sheds light on a forgotten but key chapter in our history, and instills in us a sense of wonder, and possibility.
Margot Lee Shetterly grew up in Hampton, Virginia, where she knew many of the women in her book Hidden Figures. She is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellow and the recipient of a Virginia Foundation for the Humanities grant for her research on women in computing. She lives in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Reading by Detroit-bred poet Nandi Comer, a U-M grad who won the 2016 Detroit Write A House Fellowship. The program begins with open mike readings.
Peter Ho Davies, U-M English professor, reads from his new book, followed by a conversation with Douglas Trevor, U-M English professor, Q & A with the audience, and book signing.
Inhabiting four lives, three inspired by real historical characters, “The Fortunes” captures and capsizes more than a century of our history, recasting the story of America through the lives of Chinese Americans. It brilliantly reimagines the multigenerational novel, looking through the prismatic fractures of immigrant experience, and showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive as much through love as blood.
Literati is pleased to welcome acclaimed photographer Camilo José Vergara in celebration of his latest work, Detroit Is No Dry Bones: The Eternal City of the Industrial Age.
“Vergara is especially alert to changes in the urban landscape . . . perhaps more people will take a second, closer look at the wealth of native folk art we have all over town. And Vergara deserves thanks for recording them and offering a serious critical appraisal.”
—Detroit Metro Times
Readings by WSU English professor Caroline Maun, a widely published poet whose collections include The Sleeping and What Remains, and Cruel Garters journal editor Glen Armstrong, an Oakland University writing professor who has published several chapbooks. Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
