Literati is thrilled to welcome poets Sam Sax and Franny Choi who will be reading from their latest collections Madness and Death By Sex Machine.
About Madness:
“An “astounding” (Terrance Hayes) debut collection of poems – Winner of the 2016 National Poetry Series Competition In this —powerful debut collection, sam sax explores and explodes the linkages between desire, addiction, and the history of mental health. These brave, formally dexterous poems examine antiquated diagnoses and procedures from hysteria to lobotomy; offer meditations on risky sex; and take up the poet’s personal and family histories as mental health patients and practitioners. Ultimately, Madnessattempts to build a queer lineage out of inherited language and cultural artifacts; these poems trouble the static categories of sanity, heterosexuality, masculinity, normality, and health. sax’s innovative collection embodies the strange and disjunctive workings of the mind as it grapples to make sense of the world around it”
About Death By Sex Machine:
“Franny Choi’s poetry has the extraordinary ability to solder with tender focus one moment, then rage like electrical fire in the next.” — francine j. harris
“These poems—sparking with the deep, connective work of persona and genre—helped me to look at the world once more, and to glimpse a world worth dreaming of… When the future might feel simply cold, Franny Choi gifts us complex fire.” — Lo Kwa Mei-En
Sam Sax is a queer Jewish writer and educator. He’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lambda Literary, The MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, and the Michener Center for Writers. He’s the winner of the 2016 Iowa Review Award and his poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, Poetry, and other journals.
Franny Choi is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of Floating, Brilliant, Gone (Write Bloody, 2014) and the chapbook Death by Sex Machine (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2017). She has been a finalist for multiple national poetry slams, and her poems have appeared in Poetry Magazine, American Poetry Review, the New England Review, and elsewhere. She is a Kundiman Fellow, Senior News Editor for Hyphen, co-host of the podcast VS, and member of the Dark Noise Collective. Her second collection, Soft Science, is forthcoming from Alice James
Literati is honored to welcome back poet Tarfia Faizullah who will be sharing her latest collection Registers of Illuminated Villages. She will joined by poet Keith Taylor for a post-reading conversation.
About Registers of Illuminated Villages:
Registers of Illuminated Villages is Tarfia Faizullah’s highly anticipated second collection, following her award-winning debut, Seam. Faizullah’s new work extends and transforms her powerful accounts of violence, war, and loss into poems of many forms and voices–elegies, outcries, self-portraits, and larger-scale confrontations with discrimination, family, and memory. One poem steps down the page like a Slinky; another poem responds to makeup homework completed in the summer of a childhood accident; other poems punctuate the collection with dark meditations on dissociation, discipline, defiance, and destiny; and the near-title poem, “Register of Eliminated Villages,” suggests illuminated texts, one a Qur’an in which the speaker’s name might be found, and the other a register of 397 villages destroyed in northern Iraq. Faizullah is an essential new poet whose work only grows more urgent, beautiful, and–even in its unsparing brutality–full of love.
Tarfia Faizullah is the author of Seam, winner of a VIDA Award and a Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. She teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Detroit.
Join us for a special event as we celebrate the release of Notes from a Public Typewriter!
About Notes from a Public Typewriter:
When Michael Gustafson and his wife Hilary opened Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they put out a typewriter for anyone to use. They had no idea what to expect. Would people ask metaphysical questions? Write mean things? Pour their souls onto the page? Yes, no, and did they ever.
Every day, people of all ages sit down at the public typewriter. Children perch atop grandparents’ knees, both sets of hands hovering above the metal keys: I LOVE YOU. Others walk in alone on Friday nights and confess their hopes: I will find someone someday. And some leave funny asides for the next person who sits down: I dislike people, misanthropes, irony, and ellipses … and lists too.
In Notes from a Public Typewrite Michael and designer Oliver Uberti have combined their favorite notes with essays and photos to create an ode to community and the written word that will surprise, delight, and inspire.
Michael Gustafson is the co-owner of Literati Bookstore, an independent bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and Literati Bookstore co-owner, Hilary.
Oliver Uberti is an award-winning graphic designer and was Senior Design Editor at National Geographic before turning to books. He is the co-author and designer of two books published by Penguin in the UK, London: The Information Capital (2014) and Where the Animals Go (2016). He lives in Los Angeles.
In celebration of Literati Bookstore’s Fifth Birthday, please join us for a reading of poetry and prose by booksellers past and present!
Literati is pleased to welcome author Simon Jacobs who will be sharing his latest novel Palaces.
About Palaces:
John and Joey are a young couple immersed in their local midwestern punk scene, who after graduating college sever all ties and move to a perverse and nameless northeastern coastal city. They drift in and out of art museums, basement shows, and derelict squats seemingly unfazed as the city slowly slides into chaos around them. Late one night, forced out of their living space, John and Joey are driven to take shelter in a chain pharmacy before emerging to a city in full-scale riot. They find themselves the only passengers on a commuter train headed north, and exit at the final stop to discover the area entirely devoid of people. As John and Joey negotiate their future through bizarre, troubling manifestations of the landscape and a succession of abandoned mansions housing only scant clues to their owners’ strange and sudden disappearance, they’re also forced to confront the resurgent violence and buried memories of their shared past.
Simon Jacobs is the author of Saturn (Spork Press), a collection of David Bowie stories, and of Masterworks (Instar Books), a short story collection. His other fiction has appeared in Tin House, Black Warrior Review, Joyland, and Paper Darts. He lives in New York City. Palaces is his first novel.
Literati is pleased to welcome author Leah Stewart who will be sharing her latest novel What You Don’t Know About Charlie Outlaw. Leah will be joined by fellow author Eileen Pollack for a discussion after the reading.
About What You Don’t Know About Charlie Outlaw:
After a series of missteps in the face of his newfound fame, actor Charlie Outlaw flees to a remote island in search of anonymity and a chance to reevaluate his recent breakup with his girlfriend, actress Josie Lamar. But soon after his arrival on the peaceful island, his solitary hike into the jungle takes him into danger he never anticipated.
As Charlie struggles with gaining fame, Josie struggles with its loss. The star of a cult TV show in her early twenties, Josie has spent the twenty years since searching for a role to equal that one, and feeling less and less like her character, the heroic Bronwyn Kyle. As she gets ready for a reunion of the cast at a huge fan convention, she thinks all she needs to do is find a part and replace Charlie. But she can’t forget him, and to get him back she’ll need to be a hero in real life.
Leah Stewart is the critically acclaimed author of The New Neighbor, The History of Us, Husband and Wife, The Myth of You and Me, and Body of a Girl. She received her BA from Vanderbilt University, and her MFA from the University of Michigan. The recipient of a Sachs Fund prize and an NEA Literature Fellowship, she teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Cincinnati and lives in Cincinnati with her husband and two children.
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.
Literati is pleased to welcome author Michael Ferro who will be reading and discussing his debut novel, Title 13.
About Title 13:
A timely investigation into the heart of a despotic government, TITLE 13 is a darkly comic cautionary tale of mental illness and unconventional love. The novel deftly blends satirical comedy aimed at the hot-button issues of modern society with the gut-wrenching reality of an intensely personal descent into addiction.
Young Heald Brown might be responsible for the loss of highly classified TITLE 13 government documents–and may have hopelessly lost himself as well. Since leaving his home in Detroit for Chicago during the recession, Heald teeters anxiously between despondency and bombastic sarcasm, striving to understand a country gone mad while clinging to his quixotic roots.
Trying to deny the frightening course of his alcoholism, Heald struggles with his mounting paranoia, and his relationships with concerned family and his dying grandmother while juggling a budding office romance at the US government’s Chicago Regional Census Center.
Michael A. Ferro‘s debut novel, TITLE 13, was published by Harvard Square Editions in February 2018. He has received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train for their New Writers Award, won the Jim Cash Creative Writing Award for Fiction, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Michael’s writing has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including Crack the Spine, Entropy, Amsterdam Quarterly, Yale University’s Perch Journal, Duende, The Nottingham Review, Splitsider, Potluck Magazine, and elsewhere. Born and bred in Detroit, Michael has lived, worked, and written throughout the Midwest; he currently resides in rural Ann Arbor, Michigan
JOINT POETRY & PROSE READING AND BOOKSIGNING
Ruth Padel is a British poet, novelist and non-fiction author, known for her nature writing and connections with music, science, Greece and conservation. Padel has won the UK National Poetry Competition and published six collections of poetry, celebrated for glittering imagery, and for “passion, wit, music, texture and elegance.” Her collection Voodoo Shop (2002) was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot and Whitbread Prizes. “Visual, sensuous and highly seductive, as if Wallace Stevens had hijacked Sylvia Plath with a dash of punk Sappho thrown in,” said the Times Literary Supplement. She is a great great grand-daughter of Charles Darwin and a Fellow of The Zoological Society of London. She currently lives in London, where she teaches poetry at King’s College.
Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko (Feb 2017) was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction, a New York Times 10 Best Books of 2017, a USA Today Top 10 Books of 2017, and an American Booksellers Association’s Indie Next Great Reads. Min Jin went to Yale College where she was awarded both the Henry Wright Prize for Nonfiction and the James Ashmun Veech Prize for Fiction. She attended law school at Georgetown University and worked as a lawyer for several years in New York prior to writing full time. She has received the NYFA Fellowship for Fiction, the Peden Prize from The Missouri Review for Best Story, and the Narrative Prize for New and Emerging Writer. Her fiction has been featured on NPR’s Selected Shorts and has appeared most recently in One Story.
Literati is thrilled to partner with the Neutral Zone to celebrate the book release of Ann Arbor Youth Poet Laureate Zaphra Stupple! Zaphra will be reading from their debut collection There Will Still Be The Body.
Zaphra Stupple is a poet and multimedia artist living in Michigan. They are the 2017 Ann Arbor youth poet laureate and the 2017 Ann Arbor poetry slam champion. They were a feature in the Neutral Zone’s annual poetry show, Poetry Night In Ann Arbor, and are one third of the accompanying book, Joy, Despite. Their work has been published in The Offing, HEArt Journal, |tap| magazine, and Vinyl, among others. Find them at toothcage.wordpress.com.
Literati is thrilled to host poet (and former Literati bookseller!) Russell Brakefield who will be sharing his new collection Field Recordings
About Field Recordings:
Firmly rooted in the dramatic landscapes and histories of Michigan, Field Recordings uses American folk music as a lens to investigate themes of personal origin, family, art, and masculinity. The speakers of these poems navigate Michigan’s folklore and folkways while exploring more personal connections to those landscapes and examining the timeless questions that occupy those songs and stories. With rich musicality and lyric precision, the poems in Field Recordings look squarely at what it means to be a son, a brother, an artist, a person.
Inspired by the life and writings of famous ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, Field Recordings is divided into three sections. It is anchored by a long poem that tracks Alan Lomax on his 1938 journey through Michigan collecting music for the Library of Congress. This poem speaks to the complex process of recording the voices and stories of working-class musicians in Michigan in the early part of the twentieth century. It is rich with the pleasures of music and storytelling and is steeped in history. Like the rest of the collection, it also speaks to the questions and anxieties that, like music, transcend time and technology.
In poems alternately elegiac and rhapsodic, Field Recordings explores the way art is produced and translated, the line between innovation and appropriation, and the complex, beautiful stories that are passed between us. From poetry readers to poets, music fans to musicians, this collection will undoubtedly appeal to a wide audience.
Russell Brakefield received his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. His work has appeared in the Indiana Review, New Orleans Review, Poet Lore, Crab Orchard Review and elsewhere. He has received fellowships from the University of Michigan Musical Society, the Vermont Studio Center, and the National Parks Department.
