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
This event will take place on Literati’s main floor.
Literati and the University of Michigan’s Rackham Graduate School are pleased to welcome Rackham alumna Melanie Sinche to discuss her latest book, Next Gen PhD: A Guide to Career Paths in Science.
For decades, top scientists in colleges and universities pursued a clear path to success: enroll in a prestigious graduate program, conduct research, publish papers, complete the PhD, pursue postdoctoral work. With perseverance and a bit of luck, a tenure-track professorship awaited at the end. In today’s academic job market, this scenario represents the exception. As the number of newly conferred science PhDs keeps rising, the number of tenured professorships remains stubbornly stagnant. Only 14 percent of those with PhDs in science occupy tenure-track positions five years after completing their degree.
Next Gen PhD provides a frank and up-to-date assessment of the current career landscape facing science PhDs. Nonfaculty careers once considered Plan B are now preferred by the majority of degree holders, says Melanie Sinche. An upper-level science degree is a prized asset in the eyes of many employers, and a majority of science PhDs build rewarding careers both inside and outside the university. A certified career counselor with extensive experience working with graduate students and postdocs, Sinche offers step-by-step guidance through the career development process: identifying personal strengths and interests, building work experience and effective networks, assembling job applications, and learning tactics for interviewing and negotiating—all the essentials for making a successful career transition.
Sinche profiles science PhDs across a wide range of disciplines who share proven strategies for landing the right occupation. Current graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, mentors, and students considering doctoral and postdoctoral training in the sciences will find Next Gen PhD an empowering resource.
Melanie V. Sinche is Director of Education at the Jackson Laboratory for Genomic Medicine.
Readings by U-M creative writing grad students, including Rwandan fiction writer Clarisse Baleja Saidi, who writes about homes and faithfulness, and Academy of American Poets Prize winner Courtney Faye Taylor.
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.
All invited to listen to guild members swap stories or bring their own to tell.
Literati is thrilled to welcome artist Michele Oka Doner in support of her most recent work, Into the Mysterium, a book that reveals the wondrous marine creatures deep in the heart of the endangered oceans that cover most of our planet.
With the oceans covering over 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, our planet can be called a marine planet. Beneath the waves are millions of remarkable creatures—beautiful big whales, dangerous jellyfish, legions of phytoplankton—but also, perhaps least known, are the marine invertebrates who make up an essential part of marine life. At the University of Miami, Florida, one museum is devoted to the study of Atlantic and Eastern Pacific marine invertebrates—over 93,000 specimens. Many of them were pulled from the Gulf of Panama, throughout the Caribbean, the Florida Keys, and the eastern Pacific over the last fifty years. They represent creatures that may never be seen again as the oceans grow ever more polluted and as global warming wreaks havoc on these ecosystems. Here, in lavishly beautifully photographs, nearly 100 of the rarest, most wondrous, mystifying, and entrancing specimens are brought into the light. From rare seahorses to now extinct corals, these invertebrates leave one gasping again at the extraordinary beauty and mystery of our world.
Michele Oka Doner is an internationally renowned artist whose career spans four decades. The breadth of her artistic production encompasses sculpture, furniture, jewelry, public art, functional objects, video, as well as costume and set design. She is well-known for creating numerous public art installations throughout the United States, including Radiant Site at New York’s Herald Square subway, Flight at Washington’s Reagan International Airport, and A Walk on the Beach at the Miami International Airport. Her artwork can be found in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Louvre, the Yale Art Gallery, the Princeton University Art Museum, and many others. (Author photo: Bruce Weber.)
Oct. 26: Readings by Kalamazoo Valley Community College English teacher Robert Haight, the author of 3 poetry collections, and Joy Gaines-Friedler, a widely published Detroit-area poet who has released 2 collections, Followed by a poetry and short fiction open mike.
Literati is pleased to welcome poets Troy Jollimore and Heather Altfeld for a reading and signing.
Troy Jollimore’s most recent collection of poetry, Syllabus of Errors, was chosen by the New York Times as one of the best poetry books of 2015. His previous poetry books are At Lake Scugog (2011) and Tom Thomson in Purgatory, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry for 2006. He teaches philosophy at California State University, Chico, and is the author of two philosophical works,Love’s Vision and On Loyalty. He has been the recipient of fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim Foundation.
Heather Altfeld is the author of The Disappearing Theatre, chosen by Stephen Dunn for the Poets at Work prize. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in Narrative Magazine, ZYZZYVA, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, The Literary Review, Cimarron Review, Watershed, and others, and she has written essays for North American Review, Superstition Review, and Poetry Northwest. Her research and areas of interest include Children’s Literature, Anthropology and Poetry, Waldorf Education for K-12, and things that have vanished. She has taught in Juvenile Hall, California Poets-in the Schools, Teachers and Writers Collaborative in New York City, and various campuses in the North State.
Literati welcomes Bill Ayers to Ann Arbor in support of his latest book, Demand the Impossible!: A Radical Manifesto.
Demand the Impossible! is a manifesto for movement-makers. In an era defined by mass incarceration, endless war, economic crisis, catastrophic environmental destruction, and a political system offering more of the same, radical social transformation has never been more urgent. Demand the Impossible! urges us to imagine a world beyond what this rotten system would have us believe is possible. In critiquing the world around us, insurgent educator and activist Bill Ayers uncovers cracks in the system, raising our sights for radical change, and envisioning strategies for building a movement to create a more humane, balanced, and peaceful world.
Bill Ayers is a social justice activist, teacher, Distinguished Professor of Education (retired) at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and author of two memoirs, Fugitive Days and Public Enemy.
Literati is pleased to host Anne Carson for a special event celebrating her latest work, FLOAT.
Due to space limitations at our store and expected demand, Literati will be ticketing this event. The ticket can be redeemed for $5 dollars off a hardcover copy of the book.
Currently, Literati plans on hosting this event in our second floor events space, which is only accessible by staircase. If you wish to attend but cannot traverse the stairs, please let us know by reaching out to events@literatibookstore.com, and we will make main floor arrangements.
From the renowned classicist and MacArthur Prize winner: a new collection that explores myth and memory, beauty and loss, all the while playing with–and pushing–the limits of language and form.
Anne Carson consistently dazzles with her inventive, shape-shifting work and the vividness of her imagination. FLOAT reaches an even greater level of brilliance and surprise.
Presented in an arrestingly original format–individual chapbooks that can be read in any order, and that float inside a transparent case–this collection conjures a mix of voices, time periods, and structures to explore what makes people, memories, and stories “maddeningly attractive” when observed in spaces that are suggestively in-between.
One can begin with Carson contemplating Proust on a frozen Icelandic plain, or on the art-saturated streets of downtown New York City. Or journey to the peak of Mount Olympus, where Zeus ponders his own afterlife. Or find a chorus of Gertrude Steins performing an essay about falling–a piece that also unearths poignant memories of Carson’s own father and great-uncle in rural Canada. And a poem called “Wildly Constant” piercingly explores the highs and lows of marriage and monogamy, distilled in a wife’s waking up her husband from the darkness of night, and asking him to make them eggs for breakfast.
Exquisite, heartbreaking, disarmingly funny, FLOAT kaleidoscopically illuminates the uncanny magic that comes with letting go of expectations and boundaries. It is Carson’s most intellectually electrifying, emotionally engaging book to date.
Anne Carson was born in Canada and has been a professor of Classics for over thirty years. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations.
Literati is delighted to welcome Matt Bell back to Ann Arbor in support of his most recent work, A Tree or a Person or a Wall.
Here we have Matt Bell at his most inventive and uncanny: parents and children, murderers and monsters, wild renditions of the past, and stunning visions of the present, all of which build to a virtuoso reimagining of our world. A 19th-century minister builds an elaborate motor that will bring about the Second Coming. A man with rough hands locks a boy in a room with an albino ape. An apocalyptic army falls under a veil of forgetfulness. The story of Red Riding Hood is run through a potentially endless series of iterations. A father invents an elaborate, consuming game for his hospitalized son. Indexes, maps, a checkered shirt buried beneath a blanket of snow: they are scattered through these pages as clues to mysteries that may never be solved, ingering evidence of the violence and unknowability of the world. A Tree or a Person or a Wall brings together Bell’s previously published shorter fiction—the story collection How They Were Found and the acclaimed novella Cataclysm Baby—along with seven dark and disturbing new stories, to create a collection of singular power.
“These fables plumb the depths of human longing… a collection that resonates like a tuning fork, lingering after the book is closed.”—Publishers Weekly
“A clutch of stories with a flavor of the experimental, the apocalyptic, and often both…Admirable efforts to strip familiarity and sentiment from stories of humanity at its worst.”—Kirkus Reviews
“Told in a mythic, omniscient voice, some of these pieces read like cruel fairy tales… Imagine a tale from Lydia Davis on a bad trip… smart and edgy.”—Library Journal
Matt Bell is the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, which was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, a Michigan Notable Book, and an Indies Choice Adult Debut Book of the Year Honor Recipient, as well as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award. His writing has appeared in Best American Mystery Stories, Tin House, The New York Times, Conjunctions, Gulf Coast, The American Reader, and many other publications. Born in Michigan, he now teaches creative writing at Arizona State University.
