Calendar

Sep
24
Tue
Fiction at Literati: J. Ryan Stradal: The Lager Queen of Minnesota @ Literati
Sep 24 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome J. Ryan Stradal back to Literati for a reading in support of his latest, widely acclaimed novel, The Lager Queen of Minnesota, as part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati series. Free and open to the public, book signing to follow.

About the book: A novel of family, Midwestern values, hard work, fate and the secrets of making a world-class beer, from the bestselling author of Kitchens of the Great Midwest.

 

[The Lager Queen of Minnesota has] complex female characters, sudden tragedies, culinary descriptions that awaken all your senses.” –Entertainment Weekly

 

J. Ryan Stradal is a contributing editor at TASTE Magazine. His bestselling debut, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, won the 2016 American Booksellers Association Indie’s Choice Award for Adult Debut Book of the Year and also the 2016 Midwest Booksellers Choice Award for debut fiction. Born and raised in Minnesota, he now lives in Los Angeles.

Skazat! Poetry Series: Natasha T Miller @ Sweetwaters
Sep 24 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Skazat! is back, and have we got a season lined up for you! Join us at Sweetwaters Coffee & Tea Washington St. on September 24 to celebrate with fabulous poetry and tasty treats. 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
This month’s feature: NATASHA T MILLER

Natasha T Miller is a Detroit, MI native, Kresge Artist Fellow, performance poet, LGBTQ activist, film producer, and founder of the “Artists Inn Detroit”. Natasha has been a member of four national slam teams, starred in a national sprite commercial, a Shinola CNN ad, and she is a Women of the World Poetry Slam 3-time- top five finalist. She has awed audiences across the world at more than a hundred universities, and venues, performing in stadiums for as many as thirty thousand people. She has been featured in magazines such as Vogue, Elle, entrepreneur magazine, and many more. She’s had poems featured on sites like The Shaderoom, the offing magazine, afterellen and many more. Just recently she opened up for the famous band Mumford and Sons in front of the first sold out crowd at the Little Caesars Arena in Detroit. Natasha currently tours the world using her words to enlighten, create equality, and most importantly spread truth, and forgiveness in the tradition of so many great leaders before her.

NEXT MONTH: BRYAN THAO WORRA!

Sep
25
Wed
Fiction at Literati: Peg Alford Pursell: A Girl Goes Into the Forest, and in conversation with Polly Rosenwaike @ Literati
Sep 25 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome Peg Alford Pursell to the store to read from her collection of hybrid stories and fables, A Girl Goes Into the Forest, as part of our ongoing Fiction at Literati series. Following a reading, she’ll be in conversation with fellow author Polly Rosenwaike (Look How Happy I’m Making You). Free and open to the public, book signing to follow. 

About the book: Following her acclaimed debut, Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, award-winning author Peg Alford Pursell explores and illuminates love and loss in 78 hybrid stories and fables. A Girl Goes into the Forest immerses readers in the complex desires, contradictions, and sorrows of daughters, wives, and husbands, artists, siblings, and mothers.

In forests literal and metaphorical, the characters try, fail, and try again to see the world, to hear each other, and to speak the truth of their longings. Powerful, lyrical, and precise, Pursell’s stories call up a world at once mysterious and recognizable.

A Girl Goes into the Forest invites fans of Lydia Davis and Helen Oyeyemi into a world where “no one can deter a person from her mistakes.”

Peg Alford Pursell is the author of is the author of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, a collection of hybrid with praise from Peter Orner, Joan Silber, Antonya Nelson, Glen David Gold, and others, and featured by Poets & Writers magazine’s second annual 5 over 50, December 2017. Her work has appeared in Permafrost, the Los Angeles Review, Joyland Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. She is the founder and director of the national reading series Why There Are Words and of WTAW Press. She lives in Northern California.

Polly Rosenwaike has published stories, essays, and reviews in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013The New York Times Book ReviewGlimmer TrainNew England ReviewThe Millions, and the San Francisco Chronicle. The fiction editor for Michigan Quarterly Review, she lives in Ann Arbor with the poet Cody Walker and their two daughters.

Poetry and the Written Word: Jennifer DeBellis @ Crazy Wisdom
Sep 25 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Crazy Wisdom Poetry Series hosted by Joe Kelty, Ed Morin, and David Jibson • Second and Fourth Wednesdays, 7-9 p.m. in the Crazy Wisdom Tea Room • Second Wednesdays are poetry workshop nights. All writers welcome to share and discuss their own poetry and short fiction. Sign up for new participants begins at 6:45 p.m.

Fourth Wednesdays have a featured reader for 50 minutes and then open mic for an hour. All writers welcome to share. Sign up begins at 6:45 p.m. Free. Contact Ed at 668-7523; eacmorso@sbcglobal.net or cwpoetrycircle.tumblr.com.

September 25 – Jenifer DeBellis, M.F.A., is author of the poetry collection Blood Sisters, founding director of aRIFT Warrior Project, and editor of  Pink Panther Magazine. She directs the Detroit Writers’ Guild. A former Meadow Brook Writing Project fellow, she teaches writing for Saginaw Valley State University and Macomb Community College.

 

 

Poetry Salon: One Pause Poetry @ Argus Farm Stop
Sep 25 @ 8:00 pm – 10:00 pm

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.

 

 

 

The Moth Michigan GrandSLAM @ The Ark
Sep 25 @ 8:00 pm – 9:30 pm

*Tickets for this event are available two weeks before the show, at 3pm ET athttp://themoth.org

*Seating is not guaranteed and is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please be sure to arrive at least 10 minutes before the show. Admission is not guaranteed for late arrivals. All sales final.

“It is brilliant and quietly addictive,” says London’s Guardian newspaper. “New York’s hottest and hippest literary ticket” raves the Wall Street Journal. The Moth is an acclaimed not-for-profit organization dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. It is a celebration of both the raconteur, who breathes fire into true tales of ordinary life, and the storytelling novice, who has lived through something extraordinary and yearns to share it. At the center of each performance is, of course, the story—and The Moth’s directors work with each storyteller to find, shape and present it. Since its launch in 1997, The Moth has presented thousands of stories, told live and without notes, to standing-room-only crowds worldwide. Moth shows are renowned for the great range of human experience they showcase. Each show starts with a theme, and the storytellers explore it, often in unexpected ways. Since each story is true and every voice authentic, the shows dance between documentary and theater, creating a unique, intimate, and often enlightening experience for the audience. Moth stories dissolve socio-economic barriers, expose vulnerabilities, and quietly suggest ways to overcome challenges and see with new eyes. Tonight’s Moth show is the Moth Michigan GrandSLAM Championship—The Moth at its best!

Sep
26
Thu
Carl Phillips and A. Van Jordan: Poetry in the Garden @ White Lotus Farms
Sep 26 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Join us for an evening of poetry in the garden! Enjoy a free and public reading featuring celebrated poets Carl Phillips and A. Van Jordan surrounded by the serene White Lotus Farms Gardens. There will a book signing held after the event.

This event is made possible by the generous Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs Grant and other donors.

Marty Makary: The Price We Pay @ Literati
Sep 26 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome New York Times-bestselling author Marty Makary in support of his latest, The Price We Pay: What Broke American Health Care–And How to Fix It. Free and open to the public, book signing to follow. 

About the book: One in five Americans now has medical debt in collections and rising health care costs today threaten every small business in America. Dr. Makary, one of the nation’s leading health care experts, travels across America and details why health care has become a bubble. Drawing from on-the-ground stories, his research, and his own experience, The Price We Pay paints a vivid picture of price-gouging, middlemen, and a series of elusive money games in need of a serious shake-up. Dr. Makary shows how so much of health care spending goes to things that have nothing to do with health and what you can do about it. Dr. Makary challenges the medical establishment to remember medicine’s noble heritage of caring for people when they are vulnerable.

The Price We Pay offers a roadmap for everyday Americans and business leaders to get a better deal on their health care, and profiles the disruptors who are innovating medical care. The movement to restore medicine to its mission, Makary argues, is alive and well–a mission that can rebuild the public trust and save our country from the crushing cost of health care.

Marty Makary, MD, MPH, is a surgeon and Professor of Health Policy at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Unaccountable. A leading voice for physicians in the Wall Street Journal and USA Today, he was the lead author of the articles introducing a surgical checklist, later adapted by the W.H.O. and has published extensively on health care costs, vulnerable populations, and quality science. He served in leadership at the W.H.O. Safe Surgery Saves Lives project and has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine. He lives in the Washington DC area.

Sep
30
Mon
Brittney Morris: SLAY @ Nicola's Books
Sep 30 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

‘We are different ages, genders, tribes, tongues, and traditions … but tonight we all SLAY’

Entertainment Weekly has called it “ The YA Debut we’re most excited for this year.” Ready Player One meets The Hate U Give in this dynamite debut novel that follows a fierce teen game developer as she battles a real-life troll intent on ruining the Black Panther–inspired video game she created and the safe community it represents for Black gamers. Author, Brittney Morris with join us to share her highly anticipated debut novel, SLAY.  Prepare to be slain.

About the Book

By day, seventeen-year-old Kiera Johnson is an honors student, a math tutor, and one of the only Black kids at Jefferson Academy. But at home, she joins hundreds of thousands of Black gamers who duel worldwide as Nubian personas in the secret multiplayer online role-playing card game, SLAY. No one knows Kiera is the game developer, not her friends, her family, not even her boyfriend, Malcolm, who believes video games are partially responsible for the “downfall of the Black man.”

But when a teen in Kansas City is murdered over a dispute in the SLAY world, news of the game reaches mainstream media, and SLAY is labeled a racist, exclusionist, violent hub for thugs and criminals. Even worse, an anonymous troll infiltrates the game, threatening to sue Kiera for “anti-white discrimination.”

Driven to save the only world in which she can be herself, Kiera must preserve her secret identity and harness what it means to be unapologetically Black in a world intimidated by Blackness. But can she protect her game without losing herself in the process?

About the Author

Brittney Morris is the author of SLAY. She holds a BA in Economics from Boston University because back then, she wanted to be a financial analyst. (She’s now thankful that didn’t happen). She spends her spare time reading, playing indie video games, and enjoying the Seattle rain from her apartment. She lives with her husband Steven who would rather enjoy the rain from a campsite in the woods because he hasn’t played enough horror games. Brittney is the founder and former president of the Boston University Creative Writing Club, a four-time NaNoWriMo winner and a 2018 Pitch Wars mentor.

Poetry at Literati: Khaled Mattawa: Mare Nostrum @ Literati
Sep 30 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome acclaimed poet Khaled Mattawa in support of his latest collection, Mare Nostrum.

About the book: “On the bridges to those slippery worlds, we are wrapped in gold foil, disease free. Who is saving whom? The question’s not stated, only implied.” In 2013, the Italian government implemented Mare Nostrum, an operation intended to limit immigration from Africa and the Middle East to European countries. For the refugees, the journeys were harrowing, often ending in shipwrecks or imprisonment, and the arrivals were wracked with uncertainty. Here, the poet Khaled Mattawa conjures a pointed, incantatory account of the refugee experience in the Mediterranean. In reclaiming the operation’s name Mare Nostrum (our sea in Latin), he renders us culpable for the losses, and responsible to those risking their lives in pursuit of hope and respite from oppression. The voices are many, and the lyrics ritualistic, as if Mattawa has stirred ghosts from the wreckage. Part narrative, part blessing, this chapbook begs of its readers: Do you remember? Mattawa’s writing is a lighthouse for politics of the twenty-first century, and this chapbook a stunning memorial.

 

Acclaimed poet Khaled Mattawa conjures a pointed, incantatory account of the refugee experience during Operation Mare Nostrum.

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