We welcome three incredible poets–Oliver Baez Bendorf, Suzi F. Garcia, & David Hornibrook–as part of our ongoing Poetry at Literati Series. A book signing will follow. The event is free and open to the public.
Oliver Baez Bendorf’s debut full-length collection, The Spectral Wilderness (Kent State U.) was selected by Mark Doty for the Stan & Tom Wick Poetry Prize. His second book, Advantages of Being Evergreen, won CSU Poetry Center’s Open Book Poetry Competition and will be published September 10, 2019. His poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry, BOMB, Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day, Troubling the Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and elsewhere. He has been a featured reader at New Orleans Poetry Festival, The White House, Smith College, and Woodland Pattern. A recipient of honors and fellowships from CantoMundo, Lambda Literary, Vermont Studio Center, and University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Institute for Creative Writing, he is an assistant professor of creative writing at Kalamazoo College in Michigan. https://www.oliverbaezbendorf.com/
Suzi F. Garcia is the author of the chapbook, Dear Dorothy: A Home Grown Fairytale, Skull + Wind Press, 2020. The daughter of a Peruvian immigrant, raised in Arkansas, she has an MFA in Creative Writing with minors in Screen Cultures and Gender Studies. Suzi is an Executive Editor at Noemi Press, where she has worked with authors such as the Blunt Research Group, Jennifer Tamayo, Roberto Tejada, Thirii Myint, and Vanessa Villarreal. Suzi is a CantoMundo Fellow, a Macondista, and participated in the first-ever Poetry Incubator at the Poetry Foundation. She is teaching a 2019 Telluride Association Summer Program seminar. Her writing has been featured or is forthcoming from the Offing, Vinyl, Fence Magazine, and more. She has presented at PCA/ACA, AWP, and Console-ing Passions, among other national conferences.
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.
We welcome award-winning author Jac Jemc as part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati series in support of her latest short story collection, False Bingo. A Book signing to follow. Free and open to the public.
About the book: The mundane becomes sinister in a disquieting story collection from the author of The Grip of It. In Jemc’s dislocating second story collection, sinister forces–some supernatural, some of this earth, some real and some not–work their ways into everyday life.
Jac Jemc is the author of My Only Wife, a finalist for the 2013 PEN / Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award, and A Different Bed Every Time. She has been the recipient of two Illinois Arts Council Professional Development Grants, and in 2014 was named one of 25 Writers to Watch by the Guild Literary Complex and one of Newcity’s Lit 50 in Chicago. She recently completed a stint as the writer in residence at the University of Notre Dame and currently teaches at Northeastern Illinois University and StoryStudio Chicago, as well as online at Writers & Books and the Loft Literary Center, and she is the web nonfiction editor for Hobart.
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 Karolina Letunova and Mariya Zilberman.
Born and raised in a Siberian coal town, Karolina Letunova writes fiction. She is working on her first novel.
Mariya Zilberman is an Ann Arbor-based poet. She immigrated to the United States from Minsk, Belarus and grew up in Maryland.
Celebrate the new YpsiWrites and the National Day on Writing. Try out writing activities, learn from area writers and authors, and share your own writing experiences. There will be giveaways from local businesses. For more information, contact ypsiwrites@gmail.com
Mystery and suspense author D.M. Pulley discusses her new book No One’s Home, a dark tale of a mansion haunted by a legacy of tragedy and a family trapped by lies that is sure to appeal to fans of The Haunting of Hill House.
Margot and Myron Spielman move to a new town, looking for a fresh start and an escape from the long shadow of their past. But soon after they buy Rawlingswood, a foreclosed mansion rumored to be haunted, they realize they’re in for more of the same…or worse. As tensions build between the family members, the home’s dark history threatens to repeat itself. Margot and Myron must confront their own ghosts and Rawlingswood’s buried past before the house becomes their undoing.
D.M. Pulley lives in northeast Ohio with her husband, her two children, and a dog named Hobo. Before becoming a full-time writer, she worked as a Professional Engineer rehabbing historic structures and conducting forensic investigations of building failures. Pulley’s structural survey of a vacant building in Cleveland inspired her debut novel, The Dead Key, the winner of the 2014 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award.
This event is in partnership with Aunt Agatha’s. The event includes a signing and books will be for sale.
The book, Sacrifices Not Forgotten was written by Vietnam Veteran John Kinzinger to honor the 76 Washtenaw County servicemen who were missing or killed in action in Vietnam. This will be a heart-to-heart conversation about the Ypsilanti Memorial dedicated to their service and the book that tells their stories The Memorial is on the grounds of the Ypsilanti Township Civic Center, at 7200 South Huron River Drive. This program is free and open to the public. Bring a friend.
Award-winning filmmaker and author Bridgett M. Davis grew up in Detroit with a secret—one she continued to safeguard into her adult years. Her family’s livelihood was entirely dependent on her mother’s business— a hugely successful underground lottery known as The Numbers, which her mother ran for over three decades from her dining room table.
Davis has written an exquisite memoir of her mother in The World According To Fannie Davis: My Mother’s Life in the Detroit Numbers. Join us as she discusses her mother, the family secret, and this critically-acclaimed new memoir.
Bridgett M. Davis is a Professor of Journalism and the Writing Professions at Baruch College, CUNY, where she teaches creative, film, and narrative writing. A graduate of Spelman College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, she is the director of the award-winning feature film Naked Acts and the author of two novels, Into the Go-Slow and Shifting Through Neutral.
This event includes a signing with books for sale.
Literati Bookstore is pleased to be on hand to sell books as OLLI Reads, in Collaboration with Michigan Humanities’ Great Michigan Read, presents Mona Hanna-Attisha, MD, discussing her Book What the Eyes Don’t See – A Story of Crisis, Resistance, and Hope in an American City.
What the Eyes Don’t See is the inspiring story of how Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha, alongside a team of researchers, parents, friends, and community leaders, discovered that the children of Flint, Michigan, were being exposed to lead in their tap water—and then battled her own government and a brutal backlash to expose that truth to the world. Paced like a scientific thriller, What the Eyes Don’t See reveals how misguided austerity policies, broken democracy, and callous bureaucratic indifference placed an entire city at risk. And at the center of the story is Dr. Mona herself—an immigrant, doctor, scientist, and mother whose family’s activist roots inspired her pursuit of justice.
Mona Hanna-Attisha, MD, is the founder and director of the Michigan State University and Hurley Children’s Hospital Pediatric Public Health Initiative, an innovative and model public health program in Flint. Currently an associate professor of pediatrics and human development at the MSU College of Human Medicine, she has been named one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World for her role in uncovering the Flint water crisis and leading recovery efforts. She was one of the first to question whether lead was leaching from the city’s water pipes after an emergency manager switched the city’s water supply to the Flint River in 2014.
OLLI Reads invites OLLI members to read together and discuss two books a year, non-fiction in the fall, fiction in the spring. This fall we are collaborating with Great Michigan Read, and other community partners, to enjoy participating in a wider project. Michigan Humanities’ Great Michigan Read creates a statewide discussion each year on the humanities themes of a selected book. Through partnerships with libraries, schools, book clubs, and a wide range of other non-profit organizations, the Great Michigan Read facilitates statewide reading and programs to bridge communities with a common conversation.
9:30am Coffee
10:00-11:00am Discussion with Mona Hanna-Attisha, followed by Q&A
11:00am-Noon Light Lunch and Book Signing
This event is free and open to the public; advanced registration is required and seating is limited. To register for this event or for more information, please contact olli.info@umich.edu or call 734-998-9351.
In The Poison Squad: One Chemist’s Single-Minded Crusade for Food Safety at the Turn of the Twentieth Century, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and New York Times-bestselling author Deborah Blum explores the alarming state of food production in early 20th-century America and the titanic battle to make food safe.
At the end of the nineteenth century, food in the United States often contained dangerous, even lethal, ingredients. Then, in 1883, chemistry professor Dr. Harvey Washington Wiley was named chief chemist of the U.S. agriculture department, and under his leadership, the agency began methodically investigating food and drink safety through scientific experiments. Unchecked by government guidelines, basic safety, or even labeling requirements, food manufacturers brazenly sold adulterated products, from expired meats to brown sugar laced with ground insects. In the face of this rampant corruption, the courageous and fascinating Dr. Wiley was determined to take on powerful corporations and political interests in pursuit of food safety legislation. Over the next thirty years, he campaigned indefatigably for consumer protection, even conducting shocking human tests on groups of young men who came to be known as, “The Poison Squad.” This remarkable story underscores the importance of food and drug safety, Harvey Washington Wiley’s work reminds us of the need for citizen crusaders who are unafraid to defend the systems that protect consumers.
Deborah Blum is director of the Knight Science Journalism Program at MIT, and editor of Undark magazine, (undark.org). In 1992, she won the Pulitzer Prize for a series on primate research, which she turned into a book, The Monkey Wars. Her other books include The Poisoner’s Handbook, Ghost Hunters, Love at Goon Park, and Sex on the Brain. She has written for publications including The New York Times, Wired, Time, Discover, Mother Jones, The Guardian and The Boston Globe. Blum is a past president of the National Association of Science Writers, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a lifetime associate of the National Academy of Sciences.
