We are thrilled to welcome three wonderful poets to Literati as part of our Poetry at Literati series! Donald Dunbar, Christine Hume, and Becky Winn will be reading poems for their latest collections.
About Safe Word:
Safe Word, Donald Dunbar’s second collection of poetry, acts as a tonic against spiritual death. This book is the kompromat of the undersoul, the blotter paper in the plea deal, a crystal jutting out of the center of an otherwise-innocent forehead. Dunbar chops, screws, solders, and sutures forms of thought and feeling into abominations you might just fall in love with, and be consumed by. Never be bored again.
About Shot:
In alternating currents of prose and verse, SHOT reaches beyond the tradition of the nocturne to illuminate contradictory impulses and intensities of night. SHOT inhabits the sinister, visionary, intimate, haunted, erotic capacities to see and hear things at night, in the fertile void containing our own psychological and physical darkness. Via Levinas who locates self-knowledge and ethical contract in insomnia, this darkness is one “stuck full of eyes.” Here the insomniac falls into a Beckettian pattern of waiting, in an inextricable dialogue with a selfhood that cannot settle down. In a perpetual play between empirical and abstract knowledge, tantrum and meditation, SHOT creates torque that drives beyond material experience.
Donald Dunbar lives in Portland, OR, and is the author of SAFE WORD and EYELID LICK, winner of the 2012 Fence Modern Poets Series prize, as well as a number of chapbooks. In 2016 he co-founded Eyedrop, a virtual reality design studio. He has helped run If Not For Kidnap: a PDX Poetry Concern, The Poetry Data Project, and has contributed to a number of other worthy projects.
Christine Hume is the author of Shot (Counterpath Press, 2010); Alaskaphrenia (New Issues, 2004), winner of the Green Rose Award and Small Press Traffic’s 2005 Best Book of the Year Award; and Musca Domestica (Beacon Press, 2000), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She currently serves as the coordinator of the creative writing program at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where she also lives. Her latest collection of poetry is entitled Questions Like a Face.
Becky Winn is a poet and designer living in Portland, Oregon. She is a contributing editor for Gramma Poetry and the founder of ĐIỆN, an artist collective and clothing brand.
Readings by U-M creative writing grad students, including fiction writers Michelle Cheever and poet Colin Walker.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 764-6330
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.
We are excited to welcome author Helen Benedict who will be reading and discussing her new novel Wolf Season
About Wolf Season
After a hurricane devastates a small town in upstate New York, the lives of three women and their young children are irrevocably changed. Rin, an Iraq War veteran, tries to protect her blind daughter and the three wolves under her care. Naema, a widowed doctor who fled Iraq with her wounded son, faces life-threatening injuries. Beth, who is raising a troubled son, waits out her Marine husband’s deployment in Afghanistan, equally afraid of him coming home and of him never returning at all. As they struggle to maintain their humanity and find hope, their war-torn lives collide in a way that will affect their entire community.
“No one writes with more authority or cool-eyed compassion about the experience of women in war both on and off the battlefield than Helen Benedict. In Wolf Season, she shows us the complicated ways in which the lives of those who serve and those who don’t intertwine and how—regardless of whether you are a soldier, the family of a soldier, or a refugee—the war follows you and your children for generations. Wolf Season is more than a novel for our times; it should be required reading.” —Elissa Schappell, author of Use Me and Blueprints for Building Better Girls
Helen Benedict, a professor at Columbia University, writes frequently about justice, women, soldiers, and war. She is the author of seven novels, including Wolf Season (forthcoming from Bellevue Literary Press) and Sand Queen, a Publishers Weekly “Best Contemporary War Novel.” A recipient of both the Ida B. Wells Award for Bravery in Journalism and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism, Benedict is also the author of five works of nonfiction and the play The Lonely Soldier Monologues: Women at War in Iraq. She lives in New York.
All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share. Hosted by local poets and former college English teachers Joe Kelty and Ed Morin.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is proud to be partnering with the Helen Zell Writers Program to host writers Mark Doty and Fernanda Eberstadt at the University of Michigan Museum of Art Helmut Stern Auditorium.
Mark Doty is the author of eight previous books of poetry and four books of prose. His many honors include the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, and, in the UK, the T. S. Eliot Prize. He is a professor at Rutgers University and lives in New York City.
Fernanda Eberstadt is the author of four previous novels and one book of nonfiction. Her essays and criticism have appeared in “The New Yorker,” “The New York Times Magazine,” “Vogue,” “Vanity Fair,” and “Commentary.” She lives in London with her husband and two children.
Literat is excited to welcome history professor Rita Chin who will be sharing her latest book The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe: A History
About The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe:
In 2010, the leaders of Germany, Britain, and France each declared that multiculturalism had failed in their countries. Over the past decade, a growing consensus in Europe has voiced similar decrees. But what do these ominous proclamations, from across the political spectrum, mean? From the influx of immigrants in the 1950s to contemporary worries about refugees and terrorism, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe examines the historical development of multiculturalism on the Continent. Rita Chin argues that there were few efforts to institute state-sponsored policies of multiculturalism, and those that emerged were pronounced failures virtually from their inception. She shows that today’s crisis of support for cultural pluralism isn’t new but actually has its roots in the 1980s.
Chin looks at the touchstones of European multiculturalism, from the urgent need for laborers after World War II to the public furor over the publication of The Satanic Verses and the question of French girls wearing headscarves to school. While many Muslim immigrants had lived in Europe for decades, in the 1980s they came to be defined by their religion and the public’s preoccupation with gender relations. Acceptance of sexual equality became the critical gauge of Muslims’ compatibility with Western values. The convergence of left and right around the defense of such personal freedoms against a putatively illiberal Islam has threatened to undermine commitment to pluralism as a core ideal. Chin contends that renouncing the principles of diversity brings social costs, particularly for the left, and she considers how Europe might construct an effective political engagement with its varied population.
Challenging the mounting opposition to a diverse society, The Crisis of Multiculturalism in Europe presents a historical investigation into one continent’s troubled relationship with cultural difference.
Rita Chin is associate professor of history at the University of Michigan. She is the author of The Guest Worker Question in Postwar Germany and the coauthor of After the Nazi Racial State.
About Fight Songs
Fight Songs exposes the rusted underbelly of the American Midwest, as experienced by young men, brutal cops, suicide cases, junkies, lovers, and minorities seeking justice. At turns as stark and thrilling as a Stooges track, as brutally desolate as a burnt-out Detroit factory, this is also an elegy for Michigan’s vast and gorgeous wilderness. Freeman’s poetry is unsparingly lyrical, and ethically limned with ecological, political, and local concerns. This is the riposte to Trump’s vision we never expected–one that hails from the same husked landscape that elevated him, but this time, yearning for justice, hopeful of beauty among the bruised fighters leaning on frayed ropes.
Cal Freeman was born and raised in Detroit, MI. He is the author of the book Brother Of Leaving (Marick Press) and the pamphlet Heard Among The Windbreak (Eyewear Publishing). His writing has appeared in many journals including New Orleans Review, Passages North, The Journal, Commonweal, Drunken Boat and The Poetry Review. He is a recipient of The Devine Poetry Fellowship (judged by Terrance Hayes); he has also been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes in both poetry and creative nonfiction. He regularly reviews collections of poetry for the radio program, Stateside, on Michigan Public Radio.
FRUIT is an independent, community-led reading and dialogue series for and by marginalized voices, hosted in Literati Bookstore. This month’s readers are Alise Alousi, Kamelya Youssef and Tariq Luthun.
FRUIT is a moment and a movement of reclamation. It is a space of and for literary artists representing the marginalized: the colored, the queer, the silenced, and the unseen. Each event showcases the work of fresh, revolutionary artists and features a conversation around their lives and their crafts. In this space, FRUIT strives to serve as a carefully curated reading and dialogue series for those who live at intersections ignored. This experience exists both physically and digitally in order to help those marginalized voices reclaim their flesh and plant their roots through short-form literature. Our goal is to create an experience that is intentional in its centering of the historically othered. Through this exploration of identity and craft, we hope to cultivate a platform in which the growth and sharing of radical joy— both encumbered and despite— happens in the presence of solidarity and healthy community.
Alise Alousi’s poetry has appeared in several journals and anthologies including, We are Iraqis: Aesthetics and Politics in a Time of War, Inclined to Speak: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Poetry, and I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You. In 2014, she was a Knight Arts Challenge Detroit awardee for From Detroit to Baghdad: Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here, a five month exhibit, workshop, and performance series commemorating the bombing of Baghdad’s centuries old street of booksellers. Alousi is the Associate Director of the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, a nationally recognized writing program for K-12 students in metro Detroit.
Kamelya Youssef is a Detroit-based poet, organizer, student, and teacher. She is a member of the Z Collective and a board member of the Radius of Arab American Writers Inc (RAWI). Her poetry and essays have been published in Mizna and Bitch Magazine and she has shared her work on stages across the US. You can find her on Fridays hosting open mic nights at The Bottom Line Coffeehouse right near what will always be called the Cass Corridor. She’s a daughter of Lebanese immigrants with a special love for 90s freestyle and she makes a mean pecan pie.
Tariq Luthun is a Palestinian-American data strategist, community organizer, and Emmy Award-winning poet from Detroit, MI. He is currently an MFA candidate for poetry in the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Amidst other things, Luthun is the Social Director of Organic Weapon Arts Press and a co-founder of the PoC-dedicated literary arts series FRUIT. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Vinyl Poetry, The Offing, Winter Tangerine Review, and Button Poetry, among other credentials. He is a deep dish pizza evangelist, and can best be described as the end-result of Drake falsetto-rapping Edward Said’s Orientalism.
Literati is excited to welcome author Lynn Comella who will be discussing her book Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure. Lynn will be joined by University of Michigan Professor Katherine Sender
About Vibrator Nation:
Lynn Comella tells the fascinating history of how feminist sex-toy stores such as Eve’s Garden, Good Vibrations and Babeland raised sexual consciousness, redefined the adult industry, provided educational and community resources, and changed the way sex was talked about, had, and enjoyed.
In the 1970s a group of pioneering feminist entrepreneurs launched a movement that ultimately changed the way sex was talked about, had, and enjoyed. Boldly reimagining who sex shops were for and the kinds of spaces they could be, these entrepreneurs opened sex-toy stores like Eve’s Garden, Good Vibrations, and Babeland not just as commercial enterprises, but to provide educational and community resources as well. In Vibrator Nation Lynn Comella tells the fascinating history of how these stores raised sexual consciousness, redefined the adult industry, and changed women’s lives. Comella describes a world where sex-positive retailers double as social activists, where products are framed as tools of liberation, and where consumers are willing to pay for the promise of better living—one conversation, vibrator, and orgasm at a time.
Lynn Comella is Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and coeditor of New Views on Pornography: Sexuality, Politics, and the Law.
Katherine Sender is professor of media and sexuality in Communication Studies at the University of Michigan.
Literati is thrilled to host author Daniel Wolff who will be sharing his new book Grown-up Anger. Daniel will be joined in conversation with fellow music writer David Marsh and there will be a special musical performance from Chris Buhalis!
About Grown-up Anger:
A tour de force of storytelling years in the making: a dual biography of two of the greatest songwriters, Bob Dylan and Woody Guthrie, that is also murder mystery and a history of labor relations and socialism, big business and greed in twentieth-century America—all woven together in one epic saga that holds meaning for all working Americans today
When thirteen-year-old Daniel Wolff first heard Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” it ignited a life-long interest with understanding the rock poet’s anger. When he later discovered “Song to Woody,” Dylan’s tribute to his hero, Woody Guthrie, Wolff believed he’d uncovered one source of Dylan’s rage. Sifting through Guthrie’s recordings, Wolff found “1913 Massacre”—a song which told the story of a union Christmas party during a strike in Calumet, Michigan, in 1913 that ended in horrific tragedy.
Following the trail from Dylan to Guthrie to an event that claimed the lives of seventy-four men, women, and children a century ago, Wolff found himself tracing the history of an anger that has been passed down for decades. From America’s early industrialized days, an epic battle to determine the country’s direction has been waged, pitting bosses against workers, big business against the labor movement. In Guthrie’s eyes, the owners ultimately won; the 1913 Michigan tragedy was just one example of a larger, lost history purposely distorted and buried in time.
In this magnificent cultural study, Wolff braids three disparate strands—Calumet, Guthrie, and Dylan—together to create a devastating revisionist history of twentieth-century America. Grown-Up Anger chronicles the struggles between the haves and have-nots, the impact changing labor relations had on industrial America, and the way two musicians used their fury to illuminate economic injustice and inspire change.
Daniel Wolff is the author of The Fight for Home: How (Parts of) New Orleans Came Back; How Lincoln Learned to Read; 4th of July/Asbury Park; and You Send Me: The Life and Times of Sam Cooke, which won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. He has been nominated for a Grammy and was named Literary Artist of 2013 for Rockland County, New York. A poet, songwriter, and essayist, he has helped produce a number of documentary films with director Jonathan Demme. He lives in Nyack, New York.
Dave Marsh is the author of the bestselling Bruce Springsteen biographies, Born to Run and Glory Days, and over a dozen other books, including Before I Get Old: The Story of the Who, Louie, Louie: The History and Myth, and The New Book of Rock Lists. A former editor of Creem and Rolling Stone, he currently edits the newsletter Rock & Roll Confidential.
Chris Buhalis is a singer and songwriter from Ann Arbor, MI
