Alice McDermott is an American writer and university professor. For her 1998 novel Charming Billy she won an American Book Award and the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. McDermott is Johns Hopkins University’s Richard A. Macksey Professor of the Humanities. Born in Brooklyn, New York, McDermott attended St. Boniface School in Elmont, New York, on Long Island (1967), Sacred Heart Academy in Hempstead (1971), and the State University of New York at Oswego, receiving her BA in 1975. She received her MA from the University of New Hampshire in 1978. She has taught at UCSD and American University, has been a writer-in-residence at Lynchburg College and Hollins College in Virginia, and was lecturer in English at the University of New Hampshire. Her short stories have appeared in Ms., Redbook, Mademoiselle, The New Yorker and Seventeen. She has also published articles in the New York Timesand Washington Post. Ms. McDermott lives outside Washington, D.C. with her husband, a neuroscientist, and three children.
Peter Ho Davies is the author of the novel The Welsh Girl and the story collections The Ugliest House in the World and Equal Love. His work has appeared in Harpers, The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Guardian, Independent, Washington Post and Chicago Tribune, among others. His short fiction has been widely anthologized, including selections for Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 1998 and Best American Short Stories 1995, 96 and 2001. In 2003 Granta named him among its twenty “Best of Young British Novelists.” The Welsh Girl was ‘long-listed’ for the Man Booker Prize 2007, and short-listed for The Galaxy British Book Awards ‘Richard and Judy’ Best Read in 2008. Davies is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He is a 2008 recipient of the PEN/Malamud award. Born in Britain in 1966 to Welsh and Chinese parents, Davies now makes his home in the US. He has taught at the University of Oregon and Emory University and is now on the faculty of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Poet, Marilyn Churchill will be reading from her new book Memory Stones. “All of life is her material. She takes the everyday and shapes it into a mix of humor and quicksilver.” (Mary Koral)
Marilyn has a BFA from U of M and a Masters in Creative Writing from EMU. She is a visual artist and poet, and part-owner of the West Side Book Shop in Ann Arbor. The event begins with an open mic session when area poets can share their own work or that of a favorite author. Signing to follow.
Featured readers include Jennifer Allen, Harish Batra, Julia Byers, Cameron Finch, Hannah Levine, Sydney Morgan-Green, and Molly Reitman.
Michigan Notable Book Author Mardi Jo Link will discuss her memoirs, Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass on a Northern Michigan Farm and The Drummond Girls, as well as some of her new projects and the craft of writing.
Mardi’s memoir, “Bootstrapper: From Broke to Badass On a Northern Michigan Farm” was an Indie Next pick, was given the 2013 Booksellers Choice Award from the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association, an Elle magazine’s Reader’s Prize, the Housatonic Book Award for Nonfiction, and was named a Michigan Notable Book. Film rights have been sold to Academy Award-winning actress, Rachel Weisz.
She has also written the true crime books, When Evil Came to Good Hart, Isadore’s Secret:Sin, Murder, and Confession in a Northern Michigan Town, and Wicked Takes the Witness Stand:A Tale of Murder and Twisted Deceit in Northern Michigan, which were each Heartland bestsellers. Her essays have appeared in Bellingham Review, Bear River Review, Creative Nonfiction, the Detroit Free Press, Publishers Weekly, Terrain, and Traverse Magazine, among other places.
Mardi Jo Link was born in Detroit and grew up in Bay City and studied journalism and agriculture at Michigan State University. She was a founder of the magazine, ForeWord Reviews, in Traverse City, Michigan, and earned her master’s degree in creative writing from Queens University of Charlotte, in North Carolina.
She is the mother of three grown sons and lives in Traverse City, Michigan, with her husband, Pete, and their dog, Gretchen.
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
Detroit children’s book writer Jean Alicia Elster, author the African American coming-of-age tale The Colored Car, discusses the art of writing and presents awards to the winners of the AADL short story contest for 3rd-5th graders. Refreshments.
2-3 p.m., AADL multipurpose room
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
