Literati is thrilled to welcome back author Chris McCormick to celebrate the paperback release of his book Desert Boys. He will be joined in conversation with Douglas Trevor, the current director for the Helen Zell Writers Program.
About Desert Boys:
This series of powerful, intertwining stories illuminates Daley Kushner’s world–the family, friends, and community that have both formed and constrained him, and his new life in San Francisco. Back home, the desert preys on those who cannot conform: an alfalfa farmer on the outskirts of town; two young girls whose curiosity leads to danger; a black politician who once served as his school’s confederate mascot; Daley’s mother, an immigrant from Armenia; and Daley himself, introspective and queer. Meanwhile, in another desert on the other side of the world, war threatens to fracture Daley’s most meaningful–and most fraught–connection to home, his friendship with Robert Karinger.
A luminous debut, Desert Boys by Chris McCormick traces the development of towns into cities, of boys into men, and the haunting effects produced when the two transformations overlap. Both a bildungsroman and a portrait of a changing place, the book mines the terrain between the desire to escape and the hunger to belong.
Chris McCormick is the author of the debut story collection Desert Boys, winner of the 2017 Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award. Originally from the California side of the Mojave Desert, he earned his MFA at the University of Michigan, where he was the recipient of two Hopwood Awards. He is currently an assistant professor at Minnesota State University, where he’s at work on his second book, a novel.
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Literati is proud to welcome author Moriel Rotham-Zecher who will be sharing his debut novel Saddness Is A White Bird.
About Saddness Is A White Bird:
In this lyrical and searing debut novel written by a rising literary star and MacDowell Fellow, a young man is preparing to serve in the Israeli army while also trying to reconcile his close relationship to two Palestinian siblings with his deeply ingrained loyalties to family and country. Four days after his nineteenth birthday, Jonathan is sitting in a military jail in Israel. Languishing in the dark cell, he recalls the series of events that led him to this point. It all began when he returned to Israel after being raised and educated in Pennsylvania. He knows that he will soon be drafted as a soldier. He will be called upon to preserve and defend the Jewish state, which includes monitoring the Palestinian territories within its borders but he is conflicted. With an intense drive to know more about the plight of the displaced and occupied Palestinians, he encounters Laith and Nimreen–the twin daughter and son of his mother’s friend. From that summer afternoon on, the three become inseparable: wandering the streets on weekends, piling onto buses en route to new discoveries, laughing uncontrollably. They share joints on the beach, trade private cultural treasures, intimate secrets, resentments, hopes, and dreams, revealing the deepest parts of themselves to each other. But with his draft date rapidly approaching, Jonathan wrestles with the question of what it means to be proud of your heritage while also feeling love for those outside of your own tribal family. And then that fateful day arrives, the one that lands Jonathan in prison and changes his relationship with the twins forever. Unflinching, important, and timely, Sadness Is a White Bird looks into the heart of what occupation and freedom really mean, exploring how one man attempts to find a place for himself, and discovers a beautiful, cross-cultural, against-the-odds love, the kind of love which we can hold up as an ideal in the midst of what seems like an implacable and never-ending conflict.
Moriel Rotham-Zecher is an American-Israeli writer, poet, and novelist. Born in Jerusalem, he graduated from Middlebury College with a degree in Arabic and political science. A recipient of a 2017 MacDowell Colony Fellowship for Literature, his work has been published in The New York Times, Haaretz, and elsewhere. Moriel lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio with his wife, Kayla, and their dog, Silly Department.
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Ann Arbor Storytellers Guild members host a storytelling program. Audience members are encouraged to bring a 5-minute story to tell.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom Tea Room, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
This Ohio-based American-Israeli writer reads from Sadness Is a White Bird, his debut novel about a young man preparing to serve in the Israeli army while trying to reconcile his close relationship to 2 Palestinian siblings with his deeply ingrained loyalty to family and country. Signing.
About The Bible of Dirty Jokes:
When Ketzel Weinrach’s beloved brother Potsie goes missing in Las Vegas, she not only must try to find him, she must confront her family’s shady history and their ties to the legendary Jewish mob, Murder, Inc., as well as her troubling relationship to her cousin Perry (who runs a strip club on the outskirts of Vegas), her long and apparently not-so-loving marriage to her recently departed husband Morty Tittelman (a self-styled professor of dirty jokes and erotic folklore), and her own failed career as a stand-up comic.
Eileen Pollack is the award-winning author of nine books of fiction and nonfiction, including Breaking and Entering (Four Way Books 2012) and In The Mouth (Four Way Books 2008). She lives in Manhattan and Ann Arbor and teaches on the faculty of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program in creative writing at the University of Michigan.
About When History Is Personal:
When History Is Personal contains the stories of twenty-five moments in Mimi Schwartz’s life, each heightened by its connection to historical, political, and social issues. These essays look both inward and outward so that these individualized tales tell a larger story—of assimilation, the women’s movement, racism, anti-Semitism, end-of-life issues, ethics in writing, digital and corporate challenges, and courtroom justice.
A shrewd and discerning storyteller, Schwartz captures history from her vantage as a child of German-Jewish immigrants, a wife of over fifty years, a breast cancer survivor, a working mother, a traveler, a tennis player, a daughter, and a widow. In adding her personal story to the larger narrative of history, culture, and politics, Schwartz invites readers to consider her personal take alongside “official” histories and offers readers fresh assessments of our collective past.
Mimi Schwartz is an award-winning, socially conscious memoirist and essayist who crafts personal experiences into compelling narratives. Her recent books include When History Is Personal (2018); Good Neighbors, Bad Times- Echoes of My Father’s Germany Village (2008); Thoughts from a Queen-Sized Bed (2002); and Writing True, the Art and Craft of Creative Nonfiction, co-authored with Sondra Perl. Her short work has appeared in Agni, Creative Nonfiction, The Writer’s Chronicle, Calyx, Prairie Schooner, Tikkun, The New York Times and The Missouri Review, among others. A recipient of a Foreword Book of the Year Award in Memoir and the New Hampshire Outstanding Literary Nonfiction Award, Schwartz’s essays have been widely anthologized and nine have been Notables in the Best American Essays Series. She is Professor Emerita in writing at Richard Stockton University and gives talks and creative writing workshops nationwide and abroad.
All invited to read and discuss their poetry or short stories. Bring about 6 copies of your work to share.
7-9 p.m., Crazy Wisdom, 114 S. Main. Free. 665-2757
Literati is thrilled to partner with the University of Michigan History Department to showcase fifteen recent publications by fourteen U-M History faculty members.
Authors and editors include:
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.
Geoff Eley is Karl Pohrt Distinguished University Professor of Contemporary History and Professor of German Studies at the University of Michigan, USA. He is the author of Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (2002), A Crooked Line: From Cultural History to the History of Society (2005) and Nazism as Fascism: Violence, Ideology, and the Ground of Consent in Germany, 1930-1945 (2013).
Susan Juster is Rhys Isaac Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is author of Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution and coeditor of Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, both available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Valerie A. Kivelson is Thomas N. Tentler Collegiate Professor and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is the author of several books, including Desperate Magic: The Moral Economy of Witchcraft in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2013) and Cartographies of Tsardom: The Land and Its Meanings in Seventeenth-Century Russia (2006). She is the editor of Witchcraft Casebook: Magic in Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, 15th-21st Centuries [ Russian History/Histoire russe vol. 40, nos. 3-4 (2013)], and co-editor, with Joan Neuberger, of Picturing Russia: Explorations in Visual Culture (2008).
Deborah Dash Moore has provided a magisterial history of the Jews of New York. A hub of both American and Jewish innovation, New York’s bustling metropolis became home to millions of Jews. New York gave Jewish life a distinct character, even as Jews helped to shape the essence of the city. This fascinating study explores the streets, synagogues, politics, and organizations of New York Jewry as well as its diverse cultural expressions. Moore’s mastery of New York Jewish history and deep knowledge of the urban rhythms of the city shine through on every page.-Beth S. Wenger, Moritz and Josephine Berg Professor of History, University of Pennsylvania
Dario Gaggio is a Professor in the Department of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He holds a PhD in History from Northwestern University and is the author of In Gold We Trust: Social Capital and Economic Change in the Italian Jewelry Towns (2007). His research has pioneered the integration of cultural change and political economy from an interdisciplinary perspective, combining historical methodologies with the theoretical insights of sociology, anthropology and human geography.
Joel D. Howell is a physician, medical historian at the University of Michigan
Powel H. Kazanjian, MD, PhD is a professor and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases, Department of Internal Medicine, at the University of Michigan Medical Center and a professor in the department of history at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Derek R. Peterson is Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan
Helmut Puff is Professor of German and History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
LaKisha Michelle Simmons is assistant professor of history and women’s studies at the University of Michigan.
Scott Spector is Professor of History and Germanic Languages and Literature at the University of Michigan. He is author of Prague Territories: National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siecle.
Ronald Grigor Suny is the William H. Sewell Jr. Distinguished University Professor of History at the University of Michigan and Senior Researcher at the National Research University-Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg.
Melanie S. Tanielian is Assistant Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
Erin Adair-Hodges is visiting assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Toledo and is the co-creator and curator of the Bad Mouth Reading Series. Her poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, theGeorgia Review, Boulevard, and Green Mountains Review, among other venues. Winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, she has also been a Bread Loaf Rona Jaffe scholar, and has received awards from the Rockland Residency and The Writer’s Hotel.
Jenny Molberg, originally from Texas, earned her BA at Louisiana State University, her MFA at American University, and her PhD at the University of North Texas. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Missouri Review, Best New Poets, Poetry International, North American Review, Copper Nickel, and other publications. She teaches at the University of Central Missouri and is Co-editor for Pleiades
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. 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.
Readings by 2 U-M creative writing grad students, fiction writer Nell David and poet Franny Choi.
7 p.m., UMMA Auditorium, 525 S. State. Free. 615-3710
