Literati is pleased to be a part of the 23rd Annual CLIFF Conference to host the Student Creative Reading Event.
U-M grad students were invited to submit creative pieces to read for up to five minutes each on the theme of “Silence.”
The Comparative Literature Intra-Student Faculty Forum (CLIFF) is an annual conference sponsored by the graduate students of the Department of Comparative Literature. CLIFF is designed to promote increased awareness of research being conducted in various languages and interdisciplinary studies at the University of Michigan.
Our spring Family Read culminates with a visit by the author of Lucky Broken Girl, Ruth Behar. Join us for a fun-filled evening at Riverside Arts Center, with hands on Cuban drumming, cha-cha lessons, a youth art exhibit, hopscotch, Cuban snacks, and an author reading and book signing.
76 N. Huron St.
Ypsilanti, MI 48197
Phone:734-482-4110Email:info@ypsilibrary.orgWebsite:www.ypsilibrary.org
Naomi Long Madgett and Gabrielle Civil will join us in the Hopwood Room for a public conversation about living a literary life: What does it mean to be a black woman / poet today? How has the role or impact of poetry changed? What’s most vital in a poet’s education? How can we rethink and reclaim publishing? How we can bridge the divides between different schools of poetry? How can we reconcile the ivory tower and the community center? What can poetry do in our communities? What good books are we reading (songs are we singing, art are we seeing)? What do we love? How can we brave joy?
About the presenters:
Mentored by poet Langston Hughes, Naomi Long Madgett moved to Detroit in 1946. In the 1960s, she joined a group of African American writers who met regularly at Boone House, including Margaret Danner, Dudley Randall and Oliver LaGrone. Madgett was named Detroit poet laureate in 2001. In her poetry, influenced by the work of Emily Dickinson, John Keats, and Langston Hughes, Madgett often engages themes of civil rights and African American spirituality. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including One and the Many (1956), Exits and Entrances (1978), and Octavia and Other Poems (1988, reissued and expanded in 2002). In 1972, Madgett founded Lotus Press. She edited the anthology Adam of Ifé: Black Women in Praise of Black Men (1992), and her own work was included in the anthologies The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949 (1949, edited by Langston Hughes) and Ten: Anthology of Detroit Poets (1968, edited by Oliver LaGrone). A selection of her papers, documenting her poetry career and the history of Lotus Press, is held by the University of Michigan’s Special Collections Library.
Gabrielle Civil is a black feminist performance artist, originally from Detroit, MI. She has premiered fifty original solo and collaborative performance works around the world. Signature themes included race, body, art, politics, grief, and desire. Since 2014, she has been performing “Say My Name” (an action for 270 abducted Nigerian girls)” as an act of embodied remembering. She is the author of Swallow the Fish and Tourist Art (with Vladimir Cybil Charlier). She currently teaches Creative Writing and Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts. The aim of her work is to open up space.Experiments in Joy is forthcoming from CCM Press.
U-M Near Eastern Studies and history professor Ellen Muehlberger is joined by a U-M Sweetland Center for Writing faculty member to discuss writing.
7 p.m., Literati, 124 E. Washington. Free. 585-5567.
Following the devastation resulting from the 1915 Armenian Genocide in the Ottoman Empire, the survivors of the massacres were dispersed across the Middle East, Europe and North and South America. Not content with watching World War I silently from the sidelines, a large number of Armenian volunteers joined the Légion d’Orient. They were trained in Cyprus and fought courageously in Palestine alongside Allied commander General Allenby, eventually playing a crucial role in defeating the German and Ottoman forces in Palestine at the Battle of Arara in September 1918. The Armenian legionnaires signed up on the understanding that they would be fighting in Syria and Turkey, and, should the Allies be successful, they would be part of an occupying army in their old homelands, laying the foundation for a self-governing Armenian state.
Susan Pattie describes the motivations and dreams of the Armenian Legionnaires and their ultimate betrayal as the French and the British shifted their priorities, leaving their ancestral homelands to the emerging Republic of Turkey. Complete with eyewitness accounts, letters and photographs, this book provides an insight into relations between the Great Powers through the lens of a small, vulnerable people caught in a war that was not their own, but which had already destroyed their known world.
Copies of “The Armenian Legionnaires” will be available for purchase (cash only) at the event.
Susan Pattie, former Director of the Armenian Institute in London is currently leader of the Pilot Project of the Armenian Diaspora Survey, funded by the Gulbenkian Foundation. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
ONE PAUSE POETRY SALON is (literally) a greenhouse for poetry and poets, nurturing an appreciation for written art in all languages and encouraging experiments in creative writing.
We meet every Weds in the greenhouse at Argus Farm Stop on Liberty St. The poems we read each time are unified by form (haiku, sonnet, spoken word), poet, time / place (Tang Dynasty, English Romanticism, New York in the 70s) or theme / mood (springtime, poems with cats, protest poems). We discuss the poems and play writing games together, with time for snacks and socializing in between.
Members are encouraged to share their own poems or poems they like – they may or may not relate to the theme of the evening. This is not primarily a workshop – we may hold special workshop nights, but mostly we listen to and talk about poems for the sake of inspiring new writing.
Whether you are a published poet or encountering poetry for the first time, we invite you to join us!
$5 suggested donation for food, drinks and printing costs.
8-10 p.m., Argus Farm Stop greenhouse, 325 W. Liberty. $5 suggested donation. onepausepoetry.org, 707-1284.
The Zell Visiting Writers Series constitutes the backbone of the HZWP events calendar, bringing the world of contemporary literature to Ann Arbor with visits from working writers that include readings, extensive student-moderated Q&A sessions, individual consultations, craft lectures, and public panel discussions with members of our faculty.
Anthony Marra is the author of The Tsar of Love and Techno and New York Times-bestseller A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, longlisted for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in fiction, and the Barnes and Noble Discover Award, the Grand Prix des Lectrices de Elle in France and was the first English-language novel to win the Athens Prize for Literature in Greece. Marra received his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop before fellowship and teaching at Stanford University.
His work has been honored with the National Magazine Award, the Whiting Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 2017, Marra was included in Granta’s decennial list of best young American novelists, and won the $50,000 Simpson Prize in 2018, which he will put toward finishing a new novel about exiles in 1940s Hollywood, slated for release in 2019.
About Elemental: A Collection of Creative Nonfiction:
Elemental: A Collection of Michigan Creative Nonfiction comes to us from twenty-three of Michigan’s most well-known essayists. A celebration of the elements, this collection is both the storm and the shelter. In her introduction, editor Anne-Marie Oomen recalls the “ritual dousing” of her storytelling group’s bonfire: “wind, earth, fire, water-all of it simultaneous in that one gesture. . . . In that moment we are bound together with these elements and with this place, the circle around the fire on the shores of a Great Lake closes, complete.”
The essays approach Michigan at the atomic level. This is a place where weather patterns and ecology matter. Farmers, miners, shippers, and loggers have built (or lost) their livelihood on Michigan’s nature-what could and could not be made out of our elements. From freshwater lakes that have shaped the ground beneath our feet to the industrial ebb and flow of iron ore and wind power-ours is a state of survival and transformation. In the first section of the book, “Earth,” Jerry Dennis remembers working construction in northern Michigan. “Water” includes a piece from Jessica Mesman, who writes of the appearance of snow in different iterations throughout her life. The section “Wind” houses essays about the ungraspable nature of death from Toi Dericotte and Keith Taylor. “Fire” includes a piece by Mardi Jo Link, who recollects the unfortunate series of circumstances surrounding one of her family members.
Elemental‘s strength lies in its ability to learn from the past in the hope of defining a wiser future. A lot of literature can make this claim, but not all of it comes together so organically. Fans of nonfiction that reads as beautifully as fiction will love this collection.
Anne-Marie Oomen is author of Love, Sex, and 4-H, House of Fields, Pulling Down the Barn, and Uncoded Woman, among others. She teaches at Solstice MFA at Pine Manor College, Interlochen’s College of Creative Arts, and at conferences throughout the country.
Literati is excited to welcome author Julie Dobrow who will be sharing her new biography, After Emily.
About After Emily:
Despite Emily Dickinson’s world renown, the story of the two women most responsible for her initial posthumous publication–Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham–has remained in the shadows of the archives. A rich and compelling portrait of women who refused to be confined by the social mores of their era, After Emily explores Mabel and Millicent’s complex bond, as well as the powerful literary legacy they shared.
Mabel’s tangled relationships with the Dickinsons–including a thirteen-year extramarital relationship with Emily’s brother, Austin–roiled the small town of Amherst, Massachusetts. After Emily’s death, Mabel’s connection to the family and reputation as an intelligent, artistic, and industrious woman in her own right led her to the enormous trove of poems Emily left behind. So began the herculean task of transcribing, editing, and promoting Emily’s work, a task that would consume and complicate the lives of both Mabel and her daughter. As the popularity of the poems grew, legal issues arose between the Dickinson and Todd families, dredging up their scandals: the affair, the ownership of Emily’s poetry, and the right to define the so-called “Belle of Amherst.”
Utilizing hundreds of overlooked letters and diaries to weave together the stories of three unstoppable women, Julie Dobrow explores the intrigue of Emily Dickinson’s literary beginnings. After Emily sheds light on the importance of the earliest editions of Emily’s work–including the controversial editorial decisions made to introduce her singular genius to the world–and reveals the surprising impact Mabel and Millicent had on the poet we know today.
Julie Dobrow is a professor with appointments in the department of Child Study and Human Development and the Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University and serves as director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies. Her writing has appeared in the Boston Globe Magazine and the Huffington Post, among other publications. She lives outside of Boston.
