Come with questions, a work in progress, or an empty notebook. All writers are welcome in this casual, supportive environment. This month, author Alex Kourvo will be joined by Molly Raynor, who specializes in poetry. Both authors will answer questions, share resources, and provide private, one-on-one critiques if you choose to have them read your work. Sharing your writing with other attendees is not required and is completely voluntary.
The Emerging Writers Meet-Up is an excellent opportunity to meet your fellow Ann Arbor writers and get feedback from published authors. This monthly meet-up welcomes all writers to ask questions, connect with other writers, or simply have a dedicated time and place to work on their projects. Do you have a completed manuscript? Consider submitting it to the library’s new imprint, Fifth Avenue Press.
We welcome poet and scholar Adam Falkner in support of his debut full-length collection, The Willies.
About the collection: The Willies, poet and scholar Adam Falkner’s first full-length collection, offers a sharp and vulnerable new portrait of the journey into queerhood in America. In a voice that Dr. Cornel West heralds as “prophetic in bleak times,” Falkner departs from a more familiar coming out narrative to center the stories of several dueling selves. Masquerading white boy. Child of an addict. Closeted varsity athlete. Grief-struck friend. Through snapshots of “Willies” both tragic and humorous, merciless and humane, Falkner offers powerful new ways of understanding the intersectional linkage that binds queer shame to cultural appropriation. The Willies traverses Wu-Tang Clan listening parties to pine forests in the Catskill Mountains to rehab waiting rooms to depict the various costumes we hide within toward navigating the legacies of toxic masculinity, and the many interior tensions synonymous with queer life. At it’s core, The Willies asks us to consider not Who will we become if we give name to that which scares us? but rather Who might we become if we do not?
Dr. Adam Falkner is a poet, educator and arts & culture strategist. He is the author of Adoption (Winner of the 2017 Diode Editions Chapbook Award) and The Willies (Button Poetry, 2020), and his work has appeared in a range of print and media spaces including on programming for HBO, NBC, NPR, BET, in the New York Times, and elsewhere. A former high school English teacher in New York City’s public schools, Adam is the Founder and Executive Director of the pioneering diversity consulting initiative, the Dialogue Arts Project, and Special Projects Director for Urban Word NYC.
Join local author Anna Krushelnitskaya for a discussion of her new book Cold War Casual – a collection of transcribed oral testimonies and interviews gathered from American and Russian citizens who lived during the Cold War. Cold War Casual delves into the impact of the conflict—including the government propaganda—on the attitudes of regular citizens on both sides of the Iron Curtain.
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.
Catherine Lacey’s short story collection, Certain American States (FSG, 2018), portrays Americans tortured by the mundanity of their lives. The Chicago Tribune calls it “exactly what you would expect from Lacey: perfect sentences, penetrating insights, devastating epiphanies.”
Lacey is also the author of The Answers (FSG, 2017), a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2017, and Nobody is Ever Missing (FSG, 2014), a New Yorker Best Book of 2014. She has won a Whiting Award, was a finalist for the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award, was named one of Granta Magazine’s Best Young American Novelists, and has been compared to both Don DeLillo and Margaret Atwood.
Writing about The Answers, The Los Angeles Times said, “Like the work of Clarice Lispector or Rachel Cusk, Lacey’s novels seem to be on the verge of inventing a new genre somewhere between prose poem and fugue state.” Discussing The Answers with Interview Magazine, Lacey notes, “I want things to be both beautiful and readable. I’m not trying to alienate a reader, or make someone think they can’t read it because they like more commercial things. I hope that there’s room for any sort of mind to encounter the book.”
Her work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and German. With Forsyth Harmon, she co-authored a nonfiction book, The Art of the Affair. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, The Atlantic, and others.
This event is free and open to the public.
The Zell Visiting Writers Series brings outstanding writers to campus each semester. The Series is made possible through a generous gift from U-M alumna Helen Zell (BA ’64, LLDHon ’13). For more information, please visit the Zell Visiting Writers Program webpage: https://lsa.umich.edu/writers
Catherine Lacey’s short story collection, Certain American States (FSG, 2018), portrays Americans tortured by the mundanity of their lives. The Chicago Tribune calls it “exactly what you would expect from Lacey: perfect sentences, penetrating insights, devastating epiphanies.”
Lacey is also the author of The Answers (FSG, 2017), a New York Times Top 10 Book of 2017, and Nobody is Ever Missing (FSG, 2014), a New Yorker Best Book of 2014. She has won a Whiting Award, was a finalist for the NYPL’s Young Lions Fiction Award, was named one of Granta Magazine’s Best Young American Novelists, and has been compared to both Don DeLillo and Margaret Atwood.
Writing about The Answers, The Los Angeles Times said, “Like the work of Clarice Lispector or Rachel Cusk, Lacey’s novels seem to be on the verge of inventing a new genre somewhere between prose poem and fugue state.” Discussing The Answers with Interview Magazine, Lacey notes, “I want things to be both beautiful and readable. I’m not trying to alienate a reader, or make someone think they can’t read it because they like more commercial things. I hope that there’s room for any sort of mind to encounter the book.”
Her work has been translated into French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch and German. With Forsyth Harmon, she co-authored a nonfiction book, The Art of the Affair. Her work has appeared in McSweeney’s Quarterly, The Believer, The Paris Review Daily, The Atlantic, and others.
This event is free and open to the public. Onsite book sales will be provided by Literati Bookstore.
We welcome clinical assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, Willaim Lopez, in support of his book Separated.
About the book:
In Separated, 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, implicitly racist, and profoundly violent.
Lopez uses this single home raid to show what immigration law enforcement looks like from the perspective of the people who actually experience it. Drawing on in-depth interviews with twenty-four individuals whose lives were changed that day in 2013, as well as field notes, records obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and his own experience as an activist, Lopez combines rigorous research with narrative storytelling. Putting faces and names to the numbers behind deportation statistics, Separated urges readers to move beyond sound bites and consider the human experience of mixed-status communities in the small everyday towns that dot the interior of the United States.
William D. Lopez is a clinical assistant professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health and the faculty director of public scholarship at the National Center for Institutional Diversity.
Whether you’re a page poet, slammer, performance artist or refuse a label, we want to hear your new stuff on our open mic. We look forward to sharing great poetry (and great coffee) with you and invite you to join this free open mic and monthly reading series!
Sign up! 7:00 p.m.
7:15 p.m. – Open mic
8:00 p.m. – Featured Reader
Laura Apol is a faculty member at Michigan State University and the author of four full-length collections: Falling into Grace; Crossing the Ladder of Sun; Requiem, Rwanda; and Nothing but the Blood. She is a two-time winner of the Oklahoma Book Award and a finalist for the Independent Publishers Award for poetry, and she currently serves as the poet laureate of the Lansing area in mid-Michigan. Her most recent work, which centers around therapeutic writing and poetic inquiry, is titled Poetry, Poetic Inquiry and Rwanda: Engaging with the Lives of Others, and will be published by Springer International later this year.
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.
We welcome poets Tracy Zeman and John McCarthy to read from their most recent collections, Empire and Scared Violent Like Horses.
Tracy Zeman’s first full-length collection of poems, Empire, examines the European settlement and ecological devastation of the North American prairie. Her ecology-based serial poems employ collage, borrowed text and fractured narrative to probe the connections of humans to the natural world through the lens of culture, history and personal experience. Zeman uses image, juxtaposition and fragment to tell the story of a savage and intricate landscape, once conquered and now imperiled by forces such as climate change, invasive species and contemporary agricultural and land practices. Empire is a journey through an endangered world where beauty is enshrined and the lost, human and animal, is elegized.
Tracy Zeman’s poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Chicago Review, TYPO and other journals, and her book reviews have been published in Kenyon Review Online and Colorado Review. She has earned residencies from the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, Ox-Bow, and The Wild. She lives outside Detroit, Michigan, with her husband and daughter. Empire is her first full-length collection.
“Scared Violent Like Horses is the story of a ‘lost boy with a quiet ache’–a story about a boy and a young man who grows up amid the landscape of a vast yet specific Midwest filled with switchgrass, scarecrows, dead leaves, dirt, factories, and family and childhood people. It’s the people the speaker is really writing about–the speaker’s connection and disconnection with those who populate the landscape and the feeling of being different or not fully belonging. John McCarthy’s impulse is narrative but this impulse is struck by the lightning of his linguistic powers, as in the poem, ‘Switchgrass’ ‘A mangled cat mats the crankshaft and fan belt, / fur-shredded and soaked.’ Unusual images and figurative language are in abundance: ‘The cornfield’s tassels are wicks burning toward the sky and the fields / are sutured by utility poles marching like a procession of crosses . . .’ Ultimately, what the reader is left with is a stunning overlap of lost boy and lost landscape glimpsed through the lens of a gifted poet’s magical linguistic and storytelling abilities.” –Victoria Chang
John McCarthy is the author of one previous collection, Ghost Country, which was named a Best Poetry Book of 2016 by the Chicago Review of Books. McCarthy is the 2016 winner of The Pinch Literary Award in Poetry, and his work has appeared in Best New Poets 2015, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Passages North, Sycamore Review, Zone 3, and in anthologies such as New Poetry from the Midwest 2017. He received an MFA in Creative Writing from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and serves as an editor of RHINO magazine and the Quiddity international literary journal and public radio program.
