RC creative writing alumna and Detroit freelance journalist Anna Clark discusses her new book on the Flint water crisis.
7-8:30 p.m., AADL Downtown multipurpose rm., 343 S. Fifth Ave. Free. 327-4200.
Join us for a panel presentation featuring accomplished authors from the state of Michigan! Detroit author Michael Ferro is celebrating the release of his debut novel Title 13, named a “Most Anticipated Small Press Book of 2018” by literary blog Big Other. Kelly Fordon is a former writer-in-residence at InsideOut LIterary arts in Detroit, whose collection of interconnected stories, Garden for the Blind, was named a Michigan Notable book. Joining them will be University of Michigan creative writing professor Laura Hulthen Thomas, speaking about her acclaimed short story collection States of Motion
Michael A. Ferro‘s fiction and essays have appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies. He won the Jim Cash Creative Writing Award for Fiction, received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train for their New Writers Award, and been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Born and bred in Detroit, Michael has lived, worked, and written throughout the Midwest; he currently resides in rural Ann Arbor, Michigan. TITLE 13 is his first novel.
Prior to writing fiction and poetry, Kelly Fordon worked at the NPR member station in Detroit and for National Geographic magazine. Her fiction, poetry, and book reviews have appeared in The Boston Review, The Florida Review, Flashquake, The Kenyon Review, and various other journals. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks, On the Street Where We Live, which won the 2011 Standing Rock Chapbook Contest, and Tell Me When It Starts to Hurt, which was published by Kattywompus Press in 2013. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Queens University of Charlotte and worked for InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit as a writer-in-residence.
Laura Hulthen Thomas’s work has appeared in The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany and Witness. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
Shakespeare Scenes in the Arb has come again! Every year, veterans of Ann Arbor’s Shakespeare in the Arb come together for a free, casual performance of a variety of scenes from our favorite Shakespearean plays, in a tour of some less-seen spots in the beautiful Nichols Arboretum.
Shows begin at 6:30 PM on Friday, July 27th, and Saturday, July 28th. Audiences should collect outside the Arb’s Reader Center, and will be led on the path of the show. This year, we’ve got scenes from Julius Caesar, Richard III, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, and King Lear!
The show should run about an hour. Be prepared for some short walks, and standing or sitting on the ground to view various scenes. You are welcome to bring blankets to sit on, as long as you don’t mind carrying them from scene to scene!
Shakespeare Scenes in the Arb has come again! Every year, veterans of Ann Arbor’s Shakespeare in the Arb come together for a free, casual performance of a variety of scenes from our favorite Shakespearean plays, in a tour of some less-seen spots in the beautiful Nichols Arboretum.
Shows begin at 6:30 PM on Friday, July 27th, and Saturday, July 28th. Audiences should collect outside the Arb’s Reader Center, and will be led on the path of the show. This year, we’ve got scenes from Julius Caesar, Richard III, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, and King Lear!
The show should run about an hour. Be prepared for some short walks, and standing or sitting on the ground to view various scenes. You are welcome to bring blankets to sit on, as long as you don’t mind carrying them from scene to scene!
Readings by these 2 poets. An is a Thailand-based queer poet (and Midwest native) whose 2016 book, Naming the No-Name Woman, mythologizes her experiences as a Chinese-American woman with various overlapping identities. U-M social work grad student Kime writes freeform poetry with queer and activist themes. Kime is also an RC creative writing alum!
7 p.m. Espresso Royale, 324 S. State. $5 suggested donation. facebook.com/AnnArborPoetry.
Literati is exited to host poet Elizabeth Schmuhl, an RC Creative Writing alum, who will be reading from her new collection Premonitions. Keith Taylor will give an introduction to the reading and lead a Q&A discussion aftewards.
About Premonitions:
Visceral and brimming with vitality, the poems in Premonitions reverberate with the voice of a woman on a secluded farm, confronting her emotional and physical isolation. Drawing on her own experience as a daughter of a third-generation fruit farmer, Elizabeth Schmuhl gives readers a fresh and powerful perspective on what it means to be alive.
Layering one upon another, the poems blur boundaries and create a volatile state out of which the remarkable and unexpected occur. Embracing chaos, change, and unpredictability, these poems are energetically charged and infused with succinct, imagistic language. They reach beyond the constraints assigned to the female form and examine a place where time, the body, sexuality, and the natural world are not fixed. At times surreal, at others painfully real, the poems in Premonitions are the expression of a human life that merges and melds with the world around it, acting and reacting, loving and despairing, disintegrating and rebuilding. The speaker travels fluidly between strata of the natural world and her own body. Adding to the complexity of her poems, Schmuhl creates additional layers of meaning as the poems and their titles relate to the author’s synesthesia, a sensory phenomenon through which letters and numbers are experienced as colors and emotions.
Premonitions will turn the reader inward, encouraging the examination of the small details of life and a growing acceptance of the perpetual turmoil and uncertainty of existence despite our own desire to find a firm footing. This volume will be prized by lovers of contemporary poetry and literature alike.
Elizabeth Schmuhl is a multidisciplinary artist whose work appears in Michigan Quarterly Review, The Rumpus, Paper Darts, PANK, Hobart, Pinwheel, and elsewhere. She has worked at various nonprofits, including the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts, and currently works at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Keith Taylor 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.
7 p.m., Literati, 124 E. Washington. Free. 585-5567
Poet and memoirist Carmen Bugan was born in Romania and emigrated to the United States in 1989. She earned a BA from the University of Michigan Residential College, an MA in creative writing from Lancaster University, and a MA and PhD, both in English Literature, from Oxford University. Bugan’s work reckons with the legacy of totalitarianism, including the crippling effects of the culture of surveillance that existed under Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Her visit is co-sponsored by the LSA Honors Program and the Residential College.
Ken Mikolowski taught poetry at the RC for many years.
This local poet reads from Love Dream with Television, her debut collection, written in Tucson, Arizona, that “wonders through the ways in which television, film, advertising, sporting events, and celebrity culture weave their ways into our lived experiences,” says Ensor. “Tucson and its queers have pushed me to be more in my body, more in conversation with place and spirit and alchemy.” Signing.
7 p.m., Literati, 124 E. Washington. Free. 585-5567
Participants write, direct, and perform their show in 24 hours from scratch), Performance. Free, but pay what you can.
Literati is thrilled to welcome poets Phillip Crymble and Sarah Messer who will be sharing with us some of their latest work.
About Not Even Laughter:
A clearance bin of corner-cut records, remaindered paperbacks, and canisters of faded film, Phillip Crymble’s first full-length collection strives to rescue, celebrate, and preserve the works and sensibilities of those whose ideas and visions and have been long overlooked by posterity. Crymble’s technical acumen, ear for music, and emotional sincerity are the adhesive agents that bring the vernacular ethnographies, high-brow ekphrastics, tender elegies, forlorn love lyrics, and acutely observed accounts of plain and seemingly unremarkable domestic experience together in this formidable debut.
Phillip Crymble is a disabled writer and scholar living in Atlantic Canada. A SSHRC doctoral fellow at UNB Fredericton, he holds a MFA from the University of Michigan and has published poems in The New York Quarterly, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Hollins Critic, The Literary Review of Canada, Poetry Ireland Review, The Forward Book of Poetry 2017, and elsewhere. In 2016, Not Even Laughter, his first full-length collection, was a finalist for both the New Brunswick Book Award and the Writer’s Federation of Nova Scotia’s J.M. Abraham Prize.
Poet and Nonfiction writer, Sarah Messer, has received fellowships and grants from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, the NEA, the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2008-2009 she was a fellow in poetry at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (Bunting) at Harvard. She is the author of four books: a hybrid history/memoir, Red House (Viking), a book of translations, Having Once Paused: Poems of Zen Master Ikkyu (University of Michigan Press) and two poetry books, Bandit Letters (New Issues), and Dress Made of Mice (Black Lawrence Press). Her work has appeared in the Paris Review, the Kenyon Review, Gulf Coast, and Ploughshares, among others. For many years she taught as an Associate Professor in the MFA/BFA program at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. In 2010, Messer co-founded One Pause Poetry, an on-line audio archive and reading series in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Currently she teaches Creative Writing in the Residential College at the University of Michigan, and is a cheese maker at White Lotus Farms.
