Geraldine Markel, PhD, a board certified executive coach, enhances leadership and workplace productivity. As principal of Managing Your Mind Coaching & Seminars, Geri provides systematic processes to enhance business performance and profits. Geri helps leaders, entrepreneurs and business owners cut to core issues and apply practical strategies to move from good intentions to cost-effective actions. Her style of providing feedback using compassionate candor leads to accelerated learning and change.
Dr. Markel is an educational psychologist and served as faculty in the School of Education and as seminar leader of the Instructional Design Workshop at the Executive Education Center, School of Business, University of Michigan. For over 15 years, she helped develop instructor-led and self-directed learning materials to enhance performance, productivity and effectiveness for corporate, governmental and educational organizations. As a consultant and trainer, Geri worked with companies such as Ford Motor Company, Disney Corporation, and Department of Agriculture. As a speaker, she has worked at corporate offices of VIACOM, Time Warner, Merrill Lynch, and TIAA-CREF; educational institutions such as University of Michigan, Wayne State University and Michigan State University; and law firms such as Weil, Gotshal & Manges and Kelly, Drye & Warren.
She is an award winning author; her most recent books are:
Actions Against Distractions: Managing Your Scattered, Distracted and Forgetful Mind
Defeating the 8 Demons of Distraction: Proven Strategies to Increase Productivity and Reduce Stress
Finding Happiness with Aristotle as Your Guide: Action Strategies Based on 10 Timeless Ideas
Finding Your Focus: Practical Strategies for the Everyday Problems Facing Adults with ADD
On October 21st, Literati is thrilled to welcome Margaret Atwood to Ann Arbor (at Rackham Auditorium) in celebration of her most recent novel, Hag-Seed, part of the Hogarth Shakespeare project. Click the button below to purchase a ticket.
About Hag-Seed
Hag-Seed is a re-visiting of Shakespeare’s play of magic and illusion, The Tempest, and will be the fourth novel in the Hogarth Shakespeare series.
In Margaret Atwood’s novel take on Shakespeare’s original, theater director Felix has been unceremoniously ousted from his role as Artistic Director of the Makeshiweg Festival. When he lands a job teaching theater in a prison, the possibility of revenge presents itself–and his cast find themselves taking part in an interactive and illusion-ridden version of The Tempest that will change their lives forever.
There is a lot of Shakespearean swearing in this new Tempest adventure–but also a mischief, curiosity and vigor that is entirely Atwood.
About Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is the author of more than forty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. Her latest book of short stories is Stone Mattress: Nine Tales (2014). Her MaddAddam trilogy–the Giller and Booker prize-nominated Oryx and Crake (2003),The Year of the Flood (2009), and MaddAddam (2013)–is currently being adapted for HBO. The Door is her latest volume of poetry (2007). Her most recent non-fiction books are Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth (2008) and In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination (2011). Her novels include The Blind Assassin, winner of the Booker Prize; Alias Grace, which won the Giller Prize in Canada and the Premio Mondello in Italy; and The Robber Bride, Cat’s Eye, The Handmaid’s Tale–coming soon as a TV series with MGM and Hulu–and The Penelopiad. Her new novel, The Heart Goes Last, was published in September 2015. Forthcoming in 2016 are Hag-Seed, a novel revisitation of Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, for the Hogarth Shakespeare Project, and Angel Catbird–with a cat-bird superhero–a graphic novel with co-creator Johnnie Christmas (Dark Horse.) Margaret Atwood lives in Toronto with writer Graeme Gibson.
About the Event
This event will take place at Rackham Auditorium on the campus of The University of Michigan on October 21st, 2016, at 7pm. Doors for seating will open at 6:15. Tickets are $30, and include a hardcover copy of the novel to be picked up at the venue the day of the event. Other titles by Margaret Atwood will be available to purchase in the lobby. Ticket holders may also have books signed. Due to venue time constraints, the signing will be limited. Those wishing to have more than 3 titles signed are asked to wait until the end of the signing. Books may be personalized.
Elizabeth Diller is a founding partner of Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R), an interdisciplinary design studio that works at the intersection of architecture, the visual arts, and the performing arts. With Ricardo Scofidio, Diller was the first in the field of architecture to receive the “genius” award from the MacArthur Foundation, which stated “their work explores how space functions in our culture and illustrates that architecture, when understood as the physical manifestation of social relationships, is everywhere, not just in buildings.”
DS+R established its identity through independent, theoretical, and self-generated projects before coming to international prominence with two of the most important planning initiatives in New York: the High Line, and the redesign of the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts campus. In addition to the recently openend Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center at Columbia University, and The Broad museum in downtown Los Angeles, Diller is Principal-in-Charge of The Shed, a new center for artistic invention, and the renovation and expansion of MoMA, both in New York. Diller graduated from the Cooper Union School of Architecture in 1979, and taught at the school from 1981-1990. She is a Professor of Architecture at Princeton University.
Diller is a recipient of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Design Award, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Design, and the Brunner Prize from the American Academy of the Arts and Letters. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and International Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2013, Diller was awarded the Barnard Medal of Distinction, and DS+R was presented a Centennial Medal of Honor from the American Academy in Rome. Diller was selected by Time magazine as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.”
The John Dinkeloo Memorial Lecture was established to recognize John Dinkeloo’s extraordinary contributions to architecture, to honor his distinguished professional work and to pay tribute to this highly respected alumnus of the Architecture Program at the University of Michigan.
Lecture by this nationally recognized advocate for people with disabilities, author ofWhat Matters: Reflections on Disability, Community and Love.
Noon, 100 Hatcher Grad Library Gallery, enter from the Diag. Free.
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 pleased to continue our partnership with TEDxUofM as the on-site bookseller for the conference. The 8th annual TEDxUofM conference will be held on Wednesday, February 8th from 6-9pm at the Power Center for the Performing Arts. Join us for an evening filled with unique stories and revolutionary ideas as we celebrate “ideas worth spreading” from across the University of Michigan community.
Learn more and buy your ticket today at tedxuofm.com/attend. Student tickets are available for $12, non-student tickets are available for $20.
Literati is thrilled to be the bookseller for staff-favorite Rebecca Solnit’s visit to Ann Arbor. Rebecca Solnit will deliver the Jill S. Harris memorial lecture related to her book Hope in the Dark, followed by a question and answer period with the audience. ASL interpretation will be provided.
In Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit has written about hope as not optimism, the belief that everything will be fine, but as uncertainty: as an uncertain future that leaves us room to act, as the possibility that we can shape that future in some way. Drawing from histories of popular power and civil society, of forgotten victories and remarkable campaigns, she has made the case for remembering our power, for using it, and for not assuming we know what will happen—the case against the certainty that underlie both optimism and pessimism. In her book A Paradise Built in Hell, she looked at how ordinary people are often resourceful, altruistic, and empathic in disaster, forming fleeting democracies and finding purpose and meaning. In this talk she’ll look at the state of hope in the present moment and what disasters like 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina can tell us about political crises and civil society, drawing on both books and more recent political events.
Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of eighteen or so books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, including a trilogy of atlases and the books Men Explain Things to Me; The Faraway Nearby; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a columnist at Harper’s.
Literati is thrilled to be the bookseller for the annual Wallenberg Lecture, featuring Just Mercy author Bryan Stevenson.
Bryan Stevenson is committed to serving the legal needs of the poor in the American deep south. He has represented death row prisoners since 1985 when he was a staff attorney with the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, Georgia. He is the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), an organization he founded in 1989 that focuses on social justice and human rights in the context of criminal justice reform in the United States. EJI litigates on behalf of condemned prisoners, juvenile offenders, people wrongly convicted or charged, poor people denied effective representation, and others whose trials are marked by racial bias or prosecutorial misconduct. Under Stevenson’s direction, EJI has handled hundreds of cases and spared the lives of 125 death row prisoners. Stevenson’s arguments have convinced the U.S. Supreme Court that juveniles in non-homicide cases may not be sentenced to life without parole. He is creating a memorial in Montgomery, Alabama to commemorate the more than 4,000 persons who were lynched in twelve southern states between 1871 and 1950.
Stevenson is an inspirational professor of law at New York University where he prepares students to consider the legal needs of those in resource-deprived regions. He has been a visiting professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School. He is the author of the prize-winning book Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption and has won numerous awards and honors, including the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award Prize, the ACLU National Medal of Liberty, the Olaf Palme Prize for international human rights, the Gruber Prize for International Justice, and the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award.
For a quarter century, the Wallenberg Medal and Lecture program has honored individuals who, through their lived commitment to human rights and humanitarian principles, reflect the legacy of Raoul Wallenberg. A 1935 graduate of the University of Michigan’s College of Architecture, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg saved the lives of tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews near the end of World War II. In 1944, at the request of Jewish organizations and the American War Refugee Board, the Swedish Foreign Ministry sent Wallenberg on a rescue mission to Budapest. Over the course of six months, Wallenberg issued thousands of protective passports and placed many thousands of Jews in safe houses throughout the besieged city. He repeatedly risked his life to confront Hungarian and German forces, securing the release of Jews and placing them under the protection of the Swedish government.
Talk by U-M English professor Linda Gregerson, an award-winning poet. The Russel Award is the U-M’s highest honor, awarded annually to a faculty member who is especially distinguished in his or her field. Reception follows.
4:30-5:30 p.m., Rackham Amphitheater. Free. 615-0520.
Literati is pleased to be the bookseller for the second annual Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr. Lecture in Native American Studies, featuring author Joy Harjo.
Joy Harjo is an internationally known poet, writer, and performer of the Mvskoke Creek nation. Her work has won many awards including the 2015 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, among many others. Harjo has written eight books of poetry, including How We Became Human: New and Selected Poems and She Had Some Horses. Her recent collection, Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (W.W. Norton, 2015), was shortlisted for the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize and added to ALA’s 2016 Notable Books List. Harjo’s memoir Crazy Brave (W.W. Norton, 2012) won several awards including the PEN USA Literary Award for Creative Non-Fiction and the American Book Award. Joy Harjo is also a renowned musician. She plays her saxophone internationally, both solo and with her bands Arrow Dynamics and Poetic Justice, and has set her poetry to music in melodic spoken-word form. She has five CDs of music and poetry including the award-winning album, Red Dreams, A Trail Beyond Tears. Her album, Winding Through the Milky Way won a Native American Music Award (NAMMY) for Best Female Artist of the Year in 2009. Paul Winter, Grammy award winning saxophonist, has hailed Harjo as “a poet of music just as she is a poet of words.”
This event is free and open to all. A catered reception and booksigning will follow the event.
