Local poet Douglas Smith is co-editor of Mayapple Press’s In Drought Times: Scenes from Rural and Small Town Life. He was a finalist in the 2016 Mudfish Magazine and the 2017 New Guard Knightville Poetry contests. His poetry has been published in numerous journals and publications. Smith’s latest collection of poems is Social Work and Other Myths. Award-winning Michigan playwright Brian Cox calls this work a “poignant expression of compassion. These poems beseech us to identify with the humanity in the desperate, the afflicted, the abandoned, the evicted and the exiled.. Smith is a poet who creates an awareness that burrows into you and changes how you see.”
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.
Crazy Horse family elder Floyd Clown Sr. will join author William Matson at AADL to discuss their book, “Crazy Horse: The Lakota Warrior’s Life and Legacy”. The book is based on the Crazy Horse family’s oral history, now being told publicly over a century after Crazy Horse’s assassination. Floyd Clown Sr., a son to Edward Clown, who was a nephew to Crazy Horse and keeper of the sacred bundle and pipe, will represent his family at the discussion.
Clown currently lives in Dupree, SD on the Cheyenne River Reservation. Matson, a documentary film maker, currently resides in Spearfish, SD.
This event includes a book signing and books will be on sale.
Join us for Night Time Story Time at Nicola’s Book! Bring your family out for a meet + greet with illustrator Chris Van Dusen as he shares A Piglet Named Mercy. Cookies and milk will be served to all – and don’t forget to wear your pajamas!!
About the Book
Mr. Watson and Mrs. Watson live ordinary lives. Sometimes their lives feel a bit too ordinary. Sometimes they wish something different would happen. And one day it does, when someone unpredictable finds her way to their front door. In a delightful origin story for the star of the Mercy Watson series, a tiny piglet brings love (and chaos) to Deckawoo Drive — and the Watsons’ lives will never be the same.
About the Illustrator
Chris Van Dusen is the author-illustrator of many books for young readers, including The Circus Ship and Hattie & Hudson, and the illustrator of the Mercy Watson and Deckawoo Drive series. He lives in Maine.
Literati is pleased to welcome poets Adam Giannelli and Tommye Blount who will be reading from their latest collections Tremulous Hinge and What We Are Not For.
About Tremulous Hinge:
Rain intermits, bus windows steam up, loved ones suffer from dementia–in the constantly shifting, metaphoric world of Tremulous Hinge, figures struggle to remain standing and speaking against forces of gravity, time, and language. In these visually porous poems, boundaries waver and reconfigure along the rumbling shoreline of Rockaway or during the intermediary hours that an insomniac undergoes between darkness and dawn. Through a series of self-portraits, elegies, and Eros-tinged meditations, this hovering never subsides but offers, among the fragments, momentary constellations: “moths all swarming the / same light bulb.”
From the difficulties of stuttering to teetering attempts at love, from struggling to order a hamburger to tracing the deckled edge of a hydrangea, these poems tumble and hum, revealing a hinge between word and world. Ultimately, among lofting waves, collapsing hands, and darkening skies, words themselves–a stutterer’s maneuvers through speech, a deceased grandfather’s use of punctuation–become forms of consolation. From its initial turbulence to its final surprising solace, this debut collection mesmerizes.
About What We Are Not For:
Through biography, fairy tale, and history, Tommye Blount’s debut chapbook WHAT ARE WE NOT FOR redraws the fatherland of manhood as a territory beyond whose borders tenderness and cruelty fight for space. The men and boys in these poems are transformed into instruments of pleasure and of destruction, worshipped artifacts and disfigured toys, victims and assailants. WHAT ARE WE NOT FOR moves its reader toward caustic longing, the hope that danger and risk promise.
“Tommye Blount’s WHAT ARE WE NOT FOR is an instruction manual on how to fall to our knees and crawl from the mouth of failed transformations. Here, Pinocchio’s boyhood demands bloodspill for proof and the speaker’s humanity is never fulfilled: ‘After all, I am a broken animal.’ Desire turns toward the darkest trail and does not look back through challenging forms and twisted prosody. This collection is rope and whip, daughter-sons and muzzles, and ‘a prayer they mistake/ for a growl.’ I am not myself, any longer, after these poems.’ Phillip B. Williams”
Adam Giannelli’s poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, FIELD, Yale Review, and elsewhere. He is the translator of a selection of prose poems by Marosa di Giorgio, Diadem, and the editor of High Lonesome, a collection of essays on Charles Wright. He lives in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Born and raised in Detroit, Tommye Blount now lives in the nearby suburb of Novi, Michigan. He has been the recipient of fellowships and scholarships from Cave Canem and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. His work has appeared in POETRY, New England Review, Phantom, Four Way Review, The Offing, Vinyl, and other publications. He holds an MFA from The MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
Literati is pleased to be on-hand as the official bookseller as the Detroit Public Library welcomes David Maraniss to their Spring Author Series, in support of his latest, A Good American Family: The Red Scare and My Father.
Official details can be found here, including RSVPs.
“Drawing on Elliott’s essays, letters, and FBI files, Maraniss explores his family history…to show how politics molded individual lives…Maraniss also weaves in insightful studies of other figures in the post-war Red Scare…Clear-eyed and empathetic, Maraniss’s engrossing portrait of a patriotic, baseball-loving red reveals the complex human motivations underneath the era’s clashing dogmas.”
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“an absorbing history of American political and cultural life in the 1940s and ‘50s… A cleareyed, highly personal view of a dark chapter in American history.”—Kirkus Reviews
David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s—Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History). A Good American Family is his twelfth book. Visit him at www.DavidMaraniss.com.
Join us for an evening with Pulitzer Prize-winning author, David Maraniss. In his new book David captures the pervasive fear and paranoia that gripped America during the Red Scare of the 1950s through the chilling yet affirming story of his family’s ordeal, from blacklisting to vindication. With A Good American Family, he turns the lens on his own family to examine the politics of the 1950s McCarthy era.
Ticket Information:
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Event Details
Seating at the event will be first-come first-served. This event will be a standing-room crowd, so if you require a seat for medical reasons, please contact us in advance to make arrangements.
About the Book
In a riveting book with powerful resonance today, Pulitzer Prize-winning author David Maraniss captures the pervasive fear and paranoia that gripped America during the Red Scare of the 1950s through the chilling yet affirming story of his family’s ordeal, from blacklisting to vindication.
Elliott Maraniss, David’s father, a WWII veteran who had commanded an all-black company in the Pacific, was spied on by the FBI, named as a communist by an informant, called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1952, fired from his newspaper job, and blacklisted for five years. Yet he never lost faith in America and emerged on the other side with his family and optimism intact.
In a sweeping drama that moves from the Depression and Spanish Civil War to the HUAC hearings and end of the McCarthy era, Maraniss weaves his father’s story through the lives of his inquisitors and defenders as they struggle with the vital twentieth-century issues of race, fascism, communism, and first amendment freedoms. A Good American Family powerfully evokes the political dysfunctions of the 1950s while underscoring what it really means to be an American. It is an unsparing yet moving tribute from a brilliant writer to his father and the family he protected in dangerous times.
“Clear-eyed and empathetic, Maraniss’s engrossing portrait of a patriotic, baseball-loving red reveals the complex human motivations underneath the era’s clashing dogmas.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
“An absorbing history of American political and cultural life in the 1940s and ’50s… A clear-eyed, highly personal view of a dark chapter in American history.”—Kirkus
About the Author
David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post and a distinguished visiting professor at Vanderbilt University. He has won two Pulitzer Prizes for journalism and was a finalist three other times. Among his bestselling books are biographies of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, Roberto Clemente, and Vince Lombardi, and a trilogy about the 1960s – Rome 1960; Once in a Great City (winner of the RFK Book Prize); and They Marched into Sunlight (winner of the J. Anthony Lucas Prize and Pulitzer Finalist in History). A Good American Family is his twelfth book.
Literati is pleased to welcome Paul Vachon who will be sharing his new book Detroit: An Illustrated Timeline.
About Detroit: An Illustrated Timeline
Let’s talk a walk a long walk, back over three centuries. At the dawn of the eighteenth century Detroit was established as simply an outpost for the French to take advantage of the fur trade while keeping the British at bay. Over the subsequent 300 plus years this small settlement advanced to become a regional hub of commerce, a focal point of nineteenth century industrial strength, and ultimately the nexus of the auto business–the industry that redefined mobility and in doing so changed the course of world history.
Detroit’s long evolution occurred along an often rocky path, marked by a devastating fire, military conquests, conflicts with southern slave hunters, a burgeoning population, all while enduring persistent racial tensions and insurrection. As the Arsenal of Democracy the city proved essential to the allied victory in World War II; but the following decades proved ruinous. As the city bled people and resources, whole areas were decimated–yet nonetheless poised for a rousing comeback.
This book points out many of the seminal events and noteworthy turning points of Detroit’s long journey, some little known: the city’s fall to the British during the War of 1812, the existence of slavery in Detroit as late as the 1820s, and Mayor Hazen Pingree’s aggressive advocacy for the everyday citizen against corporate interests.
Chapters devoted to the twentieth century highlight Detroit’s underappreciated architectural heritage, the development of its notable cultural institutions, as well as the exploits of assorted scoundrels, such as the Black Legion, the Purple Gang, Harry Bennett and Father Charles Coughlin.
Triumphant sports teams, the contributions of religious leaders, and courage of civil rights leaders are all brought to life, completing this chronological sketch of America’s city of the straits.
A lifelong resident of the Detroit area, Paul Vachon is an author, freelance writer and public speaker. He possesses a strong interest in Detroit history, and has written four previous books devoted to the subject. He’s also written guidebooks on Michigan travel. Paul is a member of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. In his spare time, Paul enjoys traveling and nature photography. He also thinks having a map of the state on the back of his left hand is pretty cool.
For this event, Richards will be in conversation with Sherlonya Turner, Public Experience and Desk Service Manager at AADL.
Cecile Richards has been an activist since she was taken to the principal’s office in seventh grade for wearing an armband in protest of the Vietnam War. Richards had an extraordinary childhood in ultra-conservative Texas, where her civil rights attorney father and activist mother taught their kids to be troublemakers. She had a front-row seat to observe the rise of women in American politics and watched her mother, Ann, transform from a housewife to an electrifying force in the Democratic party.
As a young woman, Richards worked as a labor organizer alongside women earning minimum wage, and learned that those in power don’t give it up without a fight. She experienced first-hand the misogyny, sexism, fake news, and the ever-looming threat of violence that constantly confront women who challenge authority.
Now, after years of advocacy, resistance, and progressive leadership, she shares her “truly inspiring” (Redbook) story for the first time—from the joy and heartbreak of activism to the challenges of raising kids, having a life, and making change, all the while garnering a reputation as “the most badass feminist EVER” (Teen Vogue).
In the “powerful and infinitely readable” (Gloria Steinem) Make Trouble: Stand up, Speak Out, and Find the Courage to Lead, Richards reflects on the people and lessons that have gotten her through good times and bad, and encourages the rest of us to take risks, make mistakes, and make trouble along the way.
This event includes a signing and books will be for sale.
