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.
Talk by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Elizabeth Fenn. Her book Encounters at the Heart of the World: A History of the Mandan People, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for History.
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.
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
Talk by environmental journalist Ibrahim Abdul-Matin, a New York City policy advisor who wrote Green Deen: What Islam Teaches about Protecting the Planet.
5:30 p.m., Rackham Amphitheatre (4th floor). Free. 936-3518
Talk by local novelist Lillian Li.
6-8 p.m., AADL Downtown multipurpose rm. Free. 327-4200
The Robertson Lecture is an endowed annual event of the LSA Residential College, and is a lasting gift of the first Dean of the RC, James Robertson. The lecturer is traditionally a notable alumna/us of the RC, someone impacting their chosen field(s) in ways congruent with the philosophy of the College. The 2018 Robertson Lecture will be delivered at the Keene Theater in East Quadrangle on October 19th by Nancy Blum, class of ’85, a Brooklyn-based artist who is known for her public art commissions and works on paper. In addition to graduating from the RC with majors in Psychology and Women’s Studies, she received an MSW from the U-M School of Social work and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. Her current work is installed primarily out of the gallery, not separated from the street but integrated into it, with a particular interest in sites of transit in cities and within hospital settings. Her recent commissions include medicinal wildflower windows at the San Francisco General Hospital acute care unit; large, graceful birds in flights of migration/immigration integrated into three light-rail stations in Minneapolis/St. Paul; and over-sized yellow flower sculptures sprouting from a rainwater filtration green space at a bus loop outside Philadelphia.
In her Robertson lecture, Nancy will share anecdotes about these and other works, and take us behind the scenes of her in-progress installation at the 28th Street 6 Train station in NYC. She’ll explore how her multiple interests take root in public art, and she’ll give us a sense for how she forged her own path as an artist – a journey, she says, that began at the Residential College, notably thanks to mentoring from her ceramics professor, Susan Crowell.
Following the Lecture, please join us for a reception for the artist at the RC Art Gallery, located on the first floor of East Quadrangle. Refreshments will be served. An exhibit of Nancy’s drawings will be on display at the same gallery through November 9th, (M-F 10am-5pm, free admission).
Participants write, direct, and perform their show in 24 hours from scratch), Performance. Free, but pay what you can.
