Calendar

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.

Ypsilanti District Library

Riverside Arts Center

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.

Jill Dougherty (BA Russian ’70), former foreign affairs correspondent, CNN

Lots of countries lie.

Some call it “winning hearts and minds,” others call it “strategic communications,” still others call it “softening the battlefield.” However it’s described, propaganda is a key component of international relations, a tool employed both by diplomats and warriors. Russia has used propaganda since the 1917 Russian Revolution both to mold the minds of its own citizens and to spread the gospel of Marxism-Leninism around the world. Today’s Russia uses a well-honed media strategy to craft public opinion at home—and to promote the country’s public image abroad.

But the Kremlin also uses propaganda—now turbo-charged by digital advances like artificial intelligence, machine learning and big-data analytics—as a tool of war, a less-costly form of conflict than shedding blood, to undermine and weaken foes.

Jill Dougherty, former CNN Moscow Bureau Chief, examines how Russia uses information, and disinformation, to achieve its strategic objectives.

Jill Dougherty served as CNN correspondent for three decades, reporting from more than 50 countries. She is a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. and a CNN Contributor who provides expert commentary on Russia and the post-Soviet region. Ms. Dougherty joined CNN in 1983, and was appointed Moscow Bureau Chief in 1997. During nearly a decade in that post, she covered the presidencies of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, Russia’s post-Soviet economic transition, terrorist attacks, the conflict in Chechnya, Georgia’s Rose Revolution and Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. After a long career with CNN, Ms. Dougherty pursued academic interests, most recently as a Distinguished Visiting Practitioner at the University of Washington’s Evans School of Public Policy and Governance. An alumna of the University of Michigan, she has a B.A. in Slavic languages and literature, a certificate of language study from Leningrad State University, and a master’s degree from Georgetown University. In addition to writing for CNN.com, her articles on international issues have appeared in the “Washington Post,” “Huffington Post,” and “The Atlantic,” among other publications. Jill Dougherty is also a member of track-two diplomatic initiatives seeking to improve the U.S.-Russia relationship.

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.

Containment & Surveillance: Shifting Borders and Boundaries will explore how policing and surveillance are being utilized to define and defend new borders and boundaries in a changing city. Topics will include Project Greenlight, the jurisdictions and powers of various law enforcement agencies in Detroit, and the role of policing in the shifting landscape of public and private space in the city.

Each week will feature different Detroit-based speakers and guests who will explore the given topic and engage the students through a combination of formal remarks, presentations, and public discussion. Light dinner provided; free transportation from Ann Arbor to Detroit; public welcome and encouraged to attend.

*Please note that the recommended readings list is subject to be added to and/or edited*

Recommended Readings:

• Policing Home Spaces
• Detroit’s New Policing Strategy Is Stop-And-Frisk on a Massive Scale
• Does Detroit’s Project Green Light really make the city safer?
• Group fighting police brutality has questions for Wayne State University
• Dislocation Without Relocation
• “A War within Our Own Boundaries”: Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State
• Inside the Real Time Crime Center, DPD’s 24-hour monitoring station
• My Own Private Detroit
• Organizing to End the School-to-Prison Pipeline: An Analysis of Grassroots Organizing Campaigns and Policy Solutions
• The Dismantling of an Urban School System: Detroit, 1980-2014
• Project Green Light faces scrutiny as Detroit eyes mandate for thousands of businesses
• Watching Dan Gilbert’s watchmen
• Wayne State facing $127,000 fine for faulty crime reporting
• Spatial Stigma, Sexuality, and Neoliberal Decline in Detroit, Michigan

Film screening and discussion with writer, director & producer, Marcos Colón