Seven short farces about language and relationships, directed by students from RC Hums 482, and acted by students in RC Hums 281, all by master comic playwright, David Ives.
Featuring 3 RC alumni. This alumni panel will showcase and celebrate the university’s rich history of contributions made by International Studies alumni, while providing valuable insight for current students as they start to develop their own career paths. The panel will include a student Q&A portion; a networking reception with light appetizers will follow.
5-6:30 p.m., 555 Weiser Hall, 500 Church. Free.
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.
During our 2018-19 Year of Humanities and Environments, we’ve organized faculty panels to explore contributions of humanistic inquiry around specific environmental subjects. Today: “Criminal Justice and the Built Environment” with: Claire Zimmerman (Architecture, History of Art), Heather Thompson (History, Residential College), and David Thatcher (Architecture, Public Policy).
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.
