The Hummingbird Global Writers’ Circle is an international reading series started by Dr. Debotri Dhar, CEW Visiting Scholar (2015-17) and Lecturer in Women’s Studies at the University of Michigan. The aim of this literary initiative is to bring writers and communities together in different parts of the world to foster a love of books, to discuss the craft of writing, and to promote creative dialogue and global understanding in small ways. The name was inspired by the tiny hummingbird which builds its home with just a few drops of nectar, a root here, a leaf there, and a little bit of sky.
The Circle’s themed readings by established and emerging writers are free and open to the community. The theme for the first event of the Circle is feminism/ gender, to be held on Monday August 21 (3-5 pm) at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
The writer-speakers for this session are Linda Gregerson, Laura Hulthen Thomas, Mike Ferro and Debotri Dhar (writer bios below), who will read from their poetry and fiction, followed by conversation /Q&A.
Light refreshments will be served. All members of the community are welcome to attend, however, RSVP is required. If you wish to hear our speakers read from their work, share tips, and engage in conversation, please RSVP to debotri@umich.edu.
Literati is pleased to welcome Danya Kukafka in celebration of her debut novel, Girl in Snow, named a Best Beach Read of 2017 by Elle, Yahoo, and Refinery 29.
When a beloved high schooler named Lucinda Hayes is found murdered, no one in her sleepy Colorado suburb is untouched—not the boy who loved her too much; not the girl who wanted her perfect life; not the officer assigned to investigate her murder. In the aftermath of the tragedy, these three indelible characters—Cameron, Jade, and Russ—must each confront their darkest secrets in an effort to find solace, the truth, or both. In crystalline prose, Danya Kukafka offers a brilliant exploration of identity and of the razor-sharp line between love and obsession, between watching and seeing, between truth and memory.
Compulsively readable and powerfully moving, Girl in Snow offers an unforgettable reading experience and introduces a singular new talent in Danya Kukafka.
“From its startling opening line right through to its stunning conclusion, Girl in Snow is a perfectly paced and tautly plotted thriller. Danya Kukafka’s misfit characters are richly drawn, her prose is both elegant and eerie—this is an incredibly accomplished debut.”—Paula Hawkins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Girl on the Train and Into the Water
Danya Kukafka is a graduate of New York University’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She currently works as an assistant editor at Riverhead books. Girl in Snow is her first novel.
Literati is delighted to welcome Thomas J. Kitson, translator for the novel Rapture by Iliazd
About Rapture
The draft dodger Laurence yearns to take control of his destiny. Having fled to the highlands, he asserts his independence by committing a string of robberies and murders. Then he happens upon Ivlita, a beautiful young woman trapped in an intricately carved mahogany house. Laurence does not hesitate to take her as well. Determined to drape his young bride in jewels, he plots ever more daring heists. Yet when Laurence finds himself casting bombs alongside members of a revolutionary cell, he must again ask: is he a free man or a pawn of history?
Rapture is a fast-paced adventure-romance and a literary treat of the highest order. The author, Iliazd, entertains, with a deceptively light hand, questions that James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Thomas Mann once faced. How does the individual balance freedom and necessity, love and death, creativity and sterility? What is the role of violence in human history and culture? How does language both comfort and fail us in our postwar, post-Christian world?
Censored for decades in the Soviet Union, Rapture was a novel nearly lost to Russian and Western audiences. This English-language translation rescues Laurence’s surreal journey from the oblivion he, too, faces as he as he tries to outrun fate.
Thomas J. Kitson is a freelance translator in New York City.
Literati is pleased to welcome Sherry Stanfa-Stanley in support of her memoir, Finding My Badass Self: A Year of Truths and Dares.
Fighting midlife inertia, Sherry Stanfa-Stanley chose to stare down fear through The 52/52 Project: a year of weekly new experiences designed to push her far outside her comfort zone. These ranged from visiting a nude beach with her seventy-five-year-old mother in tow to taking a road trip with her ex-husband–and then another one with his girlfriend. She also went on a raid with a vice squad and SWAT team, exfoliated a rhinoceros (inadvertently giving him an erection), and crashed a wedding (where she accidentally caught the bouquet). While finding her courage in the most unlikely of circumstances, Sherry ultimately found herself.
For midlifers, fatigued parents, and anyone who may be discontent with their life and looking to shake things up, try new things, or just escape, Finding My Badass Self is proof it’s never too late to reinvent yourself–and that the best bucket list of all may be an unbucket list.
Sherry Stanfa-Stanley is a writer, humorist, and squeamish adventurer. She writes about her midlife escapades and other topics on Facebook (The 52 at 52 Project) and also blogs at www.sherrystanfa-stanley.com. By day, Sherry attempts to respectably represent her alma mater as a communication director at The University of Toledo. An empty nester after raising Son #1 and Son #2, she now indulges a menagerie of badly behaved pets.
Also at 8 pm
Original works by local wordsmiths: short play reading; fiction reading; storytelling; improv comedy
Ann Arbor Civic Theatre Studio, 322 W. Ann St. Donation. $10 suggested. 734-769-6982.
Literati is pleased to welcome Chuck Carlise and Susanna Lang for the latest installment of Poetry at Literati.
Chuck Carlise is the author of the brand new collection, In One Version of the Story (New Issues Press 2016), as well as the chapbooks, A Broken Escalator Still Isn’t the Stairs (winner of the Concrete Wolf Poetry Series 2011) and Casual Insomniac (Bateau, winner of the Boom Chapbook Prize 2011). His poems and essays appear in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets in both 2012 and 2014. He is currently a Lecturer in writing, rhetoric, and cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
In One Version of the Story is a lyric exploration of the ways human beings confront desire, loss and absence by creating stories. Its narrative situation begins with from the French folk legend of “l’Inconnue de la Seine”—the unidentified young woman who drowned herself in Paris in the 1880s, and whose (unauthorized) death mask was eventually cast as the face of Resusci-Anne CPR training dummies—but eventually the book encompasses a chronicle of personal loss, a history of photography, a study of the mechanics of breathing, and a solo climb to the rim of a Mediterranean volcano.
The book is a hybrid of narrative history, lyric meditation, and journalistic investigation, often implicating the speaker (and reader) in the act of mythmaking itself. It is story-making itself which is interrogated here, however the book seeks not to recreate narratives, but rather to understand why they matter—why and how we give them the meaning that we do.
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Susanna Lang was born in New York and raised in college towns where her father taught in Kansas, Michigan and Connecticut. Her first collection of poems, Even Now, was published by The Backwaters Press in 2008, and her chapbook, Two by Two, came out with Finishing Line Press in 2011. A full-length collection, Tracing the Lines, was published by Brick Road Poetry Press in spring 2013. Words in Stone, her translation of poems by Yves Bonnefoy, was published by the University of Massachusetts Press in 1976; The Origin of Language, prose poems by Yves Bonnefoy, was published by George Nama in 1979. She won a 1999 Illinois Arts Council Award and the Inkwell Poetry Competition in 2009, was a 2010 and 2015 Hambidge Fellow, and received an 2011 Emerging Writer Fellowship from The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, MD. A longtime educator in the Chicago area, she has taught literacy and literature in grades 5-12, and led adult poetry workshops in public libraries and for organizations such as the Illinois Writing Project, Northwest Cultural Council, and others. Her most recent book is Travel Notes from the River Styx (Terrapin, 2017).
In the earnest and beautiful Travel Notes from the River Styx, Susanna Lang peers into the tiny mirrors of a river’s current, the mirror her father cannot see himself in, the rearview mirror in which she spies sandhill cranes on an afternoon drive as she interrogates the natural and, at times, unnatural world. The result is a collection of double images: the moon a “copper coin with the sheen worn off,” “the flag [that] slips down the pole,” the country where her grandmother was born once called Russia, now Ukraine. As clear in its language as it is rich in argument, there’s something for everyone in Travel Notes, for travelers are exactly what this poet proclaims we are. It’s impossible to read this collection without wondering what doubles wait/lurk/reside beneath the skin of our bodies and of our world.
—Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum
We are thrilled to host a panel discussion of contributors for the new collection And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017
About And Here:
Upper Peninsula literature has traditionally been suppressed or minimized in Michigan anthologies and Michigan literature as a whole. Even the Upper Peninsula itself has been omitted from maps, creating a people and a place that have become in many ways “ungeographic.” These people and this place are strongly made up of traditionally marginalized groups such as the working class, the rural poor, and Native Americans, which adds even more insult to the exclusion and forced oppressive silence. And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917–2017, gives voice to Upper Peninsula writers, ensuring that they are included in Michigan’s rich literary history. Ambitiously, And Here includes great U.P. writing from every decade spanning from the 1910s to the 2010s, starting with Lew R. Sarett’s (a.k.a. Lone Caribou) “The Blue Duck: A Chippewa Medicine Dance” and ending with Margaret Noodin’s “Babejianjisemigad” and Sally Brunk’s “KBIC.” Taken as a whole, the anthology forcefully insists on the geographic and literary inclusion of the U.P.—on both the map and the page.
Ronald Riekki is an award-winning poet, novelist, and playwright. Since 2010, he has headed the U.P./MI Book Tour, which has scheduled literary events throughout the state of Michigan, particularly in rural communities.
Sue Harrison is the author of six critically acclaimed bestselling novels. Mother Earth Father Sky, My Sister the Moon, and Brother Wind make up The Ivory Carver Trilogy, an epic adventure set in prehistoric Alaska. Song of the River, Cry of the Wind, and Call Down the Stars comprise The Storyteller Trilogy. Sue has also written a young adult book, SISU, released by Thunder Bay Press.
Gordon Henry is an Anishinabe poet and novelist, and an enrolled member of the White Earth Chippewa Tribe of Minnesota. His poetry has been published in anthologies such as Songs From This Earth On Turtle’s Back: Contemporary American Indian Poetry (1983) and Returning the Gift: Poetry and Prose from the First Native American Writers (1994). His novel, The Light People (1994), was awarded The American Book Award in 1995. He has also co-authored the textbook, The Ojibway (2004), to which he contributed a number of essays on Native American culture. He currently teaches at Michigan State University.
M.L. Liebler is an award-winning poet, literary arts activist, and professor. He is the author of several books of poetry, including I Want to Be Once (Wayne State University Press, 2016), and editor of the anthology Working Words: Punching the Clock and Kicking Out the Jams(Coffee House Press, 2010). He is also co-editor of Bob Seger’s House and Other Stories (Wayne State University Press, 2016). He has taught at Wayne State University since 1980.
William Olsen is the author of six poetry collections, four of them published by Northwestern University Press: Sand Theory(2011), Avenue of Vanishing (2007), Trouble Lights (2002), and Vision of a Storm Cloud (1996). Olsen teaches at Western Michigan University and Vermont College. He lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan.
Phillip Sterling is the author of Mutual Shores and three chapbook-length series of poems: Abeyance (winner of the Frank Cat Press Chapbook Award 2007), Quatrains, and Significant Others. The recipient of an NEA Fellowship, two Fulbright Lectureships, and a P.E.N. Syndicated Fiction Award, he is also the editor of Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange and founding coordinator of the Literature in Person (LIP) Reading Series at Ferris State University, where he has taught writing and literature since 1987. His new collection of poems, And Then Snow, is now available from Main Street Rag Publishing.
Keith Taylor teaches at the University of Michigan. He has published many books over the years: collections of poetry, a collection of very short stories, co-edited volumes of essays and fiction, and a volume of poetry translated from Modern Greek.
Readings by featured poets, preceded by a poetry open mike.
Reading by Marlin Jenkins, a Detroit poet (and U-M creative writing grad) whose poems often come off as fragments of a visionary spiritual autobiography.
7-9 p.m. (sign-up begins at 6:30 p.m.), Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry.
Literati is excited to be a part of Rasa Festival! Tonight we are hosting readings from poets Ashwini Bhasi, Tarfia Faizullah, and Ambalila Hemsell
Ashwini Bhasi is from Kerala, India and lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She writes poems to make sense of the mind-body connection of trauma and chronic pain, and the duality of her experiences as a genomic data analyst and poet. Her poems have appeared in Room Magazine, Rogue Agent, Bear River Review, Yellow Chair Review, The Feminist Wire, and Driftwood Press among others. She was nominated for a Pushcart prize for a poem she wrote about the 2016 presidential election.
Tarfia Faizullah is a poet, editor, and educator from Brooklyn, NY and raised in West Texas. She received an MFA in poetry from Virginia Commonwealth University and is the author of Seam (SIU 2014), which US poet laureate Natasha Trethewey calls “beautiful and necessary,” as well as Registers of Illuminated Villages, (forthcoming from Graywolf 2017).
Ambalila Hemsell is a writer, educator, and musician from Colorado. She holds an MFA from the Helen Zell Wrtiers’ Program at the University of Michigan, where she is currently a Zell Fellow. She was a 2015/2016 Writer-in-Residence at InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit. Her poetry can be found in Riprap and is forthcoming in The American Literary Review.
