Calendar

Sep
9
Mon
Emerging Writers: Top Ten Writing Myths @ AADL Westgate, West Side Room
Sep 9 @ 7:00 pm – 8:45 pm

Do writers have to write every day? Is writer’s block real? Can you write a book in your spare time? In this workshop, Bethany Neal and Alex Kourvo look at the top ten myths of a writer’s lifestyle, and get real about what it takes to make writing your career.

This is part of the monthly Emerging Writers Workshops, which offer support, learning, and advice for local authors. Each month, two weeks after the workshop, there is a meet-up where the instructors will read samples of your work and offer advice and assistance in a casual, supportive atmosphere.

Do you have a completed manuscript? Consider submitting it to the library’s imprint Fifth Avenue Press.

 

Sep
10
Tue
Poetry at Literati: Jeff Kass: Teacher/Pizza Guy @ Literati
Sep 10 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome Jeff Kass back to Literati for a reading from his new poetry collection, Teacher/Pizza Guy, as part of our ongoing Poetry at Literati series. Free and open to the public, book signing to follow. 

About the book: Explores the emotional and physical labor necessary to work nights as a pizza delivery driver and days as a high school English teacher.

Jeff Kass teaches tenth-grade English and creative writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He is the founder of the Literary Arts Program at Ann Arbor’s teen center, The Neutral Zone, where he was program director for twenty years. He is also the author of the award-winning short story collection Knuckleheads, the poetry collection My Beautiful Hook-Nosed Beauty Queen Strut Wave, and the thriller Takedown. He lives in Ann Arbor with the author Karen Smyte and their children, Sam and Julius.

Sep
11
Wed
Lara Zielin: Author Your Life @ AADL Westgate
Sep 11 @ 7:00 pm – 8:45 pm

As a published young-adult and romance author, Lara Zielin was always asking what her characters wanted and what would make them happy. Her life changed forever when she began to ask those same questions about herself.

At the start of 2018, Lara began a book she unimaginatively titled Lara’s Life to test whether writing about the life she wanted to have could actually help it come to pass.

Every day she wrote about herself like a character in the third person, and wrote about the things she wanted to have happen to this person. After a year of doing this, her life was markedly different.

Come hear Lara talk about the process of third-person writing and the reasons why writing about yourself this way can change cognitive patterns and lead to breakthroughs. Lara will explain how you can begin to put pen to paper in this way yourself, and she’ll give you prompts and writing tips for your own story.

This event includes a book signing and books will be on sale.

 

Poetry Salon: One Pause Poetry @ Argus Farm Stop
Sep 11 @ 8:00 pm – 10:00 pm

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.

 

 

 

Sep
12
Thu
Story Night for Grown Ups: Beverly Black, Steve Daut, Jill Halpern, and Laura Lee Hayes @ Crazy Wisdom
Sep 12 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm

Tellers will be Beverly Black, Steve Daut, Jill Halpern,and Laura Lee Hayes – Storytelling has power. Much more than just talking about personal experiences, today’s professional, passionate and playful storytellers can grab your attention and hold you spellbound with each word and each gesture. Hosted by Steve Daut and Laura Lee Hayes. Mark your calendars and join us for Story Night in the Crazy Wisdom Tea Room

 

 

Sep
15
Sun
Shachar Pinsker: A Rich Brew: How Cafes Created Modern Jewish Culture @ AADL Malletts Creek
Sep 15 @ 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm

Shachar Pinsker, professor, Judaic Studies and Middle East Studies, University of Michigan discusses his book A Rich Brew: How Cafes Created Modern Jewish Culture.  The book explores the ways in which cafes provide a window into understanding modern Jewish culture and modernity. Through its focus on Jewish cafe culture in six cities: Odessa, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin, New York, and Tel Aviv, we see how Jews who migrated to cities gravitated towards cafes as important spaces and sites for producing Jewish culture. It is a story of the global aspects of Jewish modernity, what it means to be part of the public sphere, and the ways in which cafes present an important backdrop to the changes and challenges of modernity.

This event includes a book signing and books will be for sale. This event is in partnership with the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor (CHAA), an organization of scholars, cooks, food writers, nutritionists, collectors, students, and others interested in the study of culinary history and gastronomy. Their mission is to promote the study of culinary history through regular programs open to members and guests, through the quarterly newsletter Repast, and through exchanges of information with other such organizations.

Sep
16
Mon
Alexandra Minna Stern: Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate @ Literati
Sep 16 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome University of Michigan professor Alexandra Minna Stern to discuss her new book, Proud Boys and the White Ethnostate: How the Alt-Right is Warping the American Imagination, which Kirkus calls “An important study that extends the knowledge from other recent books that have demonstrated a stubbornly pervasive network of white nationalists.” 

About the book: What is the alt-right? What do they believe, and how did they take center stage in the American social and political consciousness?

From a loose movement that lurked in the shadows in the early 2000s, the alt-right has achieved a level of visibility that has allowed it to expand significantly throughout America’s cultural, political, and digital landscapes. Racist, sexist, and homophobic beliefs that were previously unspeakable have become commonplace, normalized, and accepted—endangering American democracy and society as a whole. Yet in order to dismantle the destructive movement that has invaded our public consciousness, we must first understand the core beliefs that drive the alt-right.

To help guide us through the contemporary moment, historian Alexandra Minna Stern excavates the alt-right memes and tropes that have erupted online and explores the alt-right’s central texts, narratives, constructs, and insider language. She digs to the root of the alt-right’s motivations: their deep-seated fear of an oncoming “white genocide” that can only be remedied through swift and aggressive action to reclaim white power. As the group makes concerted efforts to cast off the vestiges of neo-Nazism and normalize their appearance and their beliefs, the alt-right and their ideas can be hard to recognize. Through careful analysis, Stern brings awareness to the underlying concepts that guide the alt-right and animate its overlapping forms of racism, xenophobia, transphobia, and anti-egalitarianism. She explains the key ideas of “red-pilling,” strategic trolling, gender essentialism, and the alt-right’s ultimate fantasy: a future where minorities have been removed and “cleansed” from the body politic and a white ethnostate is established in the United States. By unearthing the hidden mechanisms that power white nationalism, Stern reveals just how pervasive this movement truly is.

Professor Stern is the author of the prize-winning book Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, (University of California Press, 2005) and Telling Genes: The Story of Genetic Counseling in America (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012) is a Choice 2013 Outstanding Academic Title in Health Sciences.

Sep
17
Tue
Susan J. Douglas: Celebrity: A History of Fame @ Literati
Sep 17 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

We welcome University of Michigan Professor Susan J. Douglas in support of her new book, Celebrity: A History of Fame. Free and open to the public, book signing to follow.

About the book: Today, celebrity culture is an inescapable part of our media landscape and our everyday lives. This was not always the case. Over the past century, media technologies have increasingly expanded the production and proliferation of fame. Celebrity explores this revolution and its often under-estimated impact on American culture. Using numerous precedent-setting examples spanning more than one hundred years of media history, Douglas and McDonnell trace the dynamic relationship between celebrity and the technologies of mass communication that have shaped the nature of fame in the United States.

Susan J. Douglas is the Catherine Neafie Kellogg Professor of Communication Studies at The University of Michigan. She is the author of five books, including The Rise of Enlightened Sexism (2010), Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (1999) and Where The Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (1994).

The Moth Storyslam: Cars @ Greyline
Sep 17 @ 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm

Open-mic storytelling competitions. Open to anyone with a five-minute story to share on the night’s theme. Come tell a story, or just enjoy the show!

6:30pm Doors Open | 7:30pm Stories Begin

*Tickets for this event are available one week before the show, at 3pm ET.

*Seating is not guaranteed and is available on a first-come, first-served basis. Please be sure to arrive at least 10 minutes before the show. Admission is not guaranteed for late arrivals. All sales final.

Media Sponsor: Michigan Radio.

CARS: Prepare a five-minute story about the most American way of getting from point A to point B. Tell us about drag-racing on empty neighborhood streets, dropping keys down a sewer, getting away just in the nick of time. Driving though, driving in, turning around, turning back, circling around and around. Tells us about riding in your precious hunk of metal.

 

Sep
18
Wed
Polly Rosenwaike: Look How Happy I’m Making You, and Cody Walker: The Trumpiad, in conversation @ Nicola's Books
Sep 18 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm

Ann Arbor Natives Polly Rosenwaike and Cody Walker are joining us in conversation around their most recent works. Polly will be sharing her beautifully written series of stories about… conception and Cody, he will share his brilliantly written comedic poetry.

Author: Polly Rosenwaike
Title: Look How Happy I’m Making You

A candid, ultimately buoyant debut story collection about the realities of the “baby years,” whether you’re having one or not.

The women in Polly Rosenwaike’s Look How Happy I’m Making You want to be mothers, or aren’t sure they want to be mothers, or—having recently given birth—are overwhelmed by what they’ve wrought. Sharp and unsettling, wry and moving in its portrayal of love, friendship, and family, this collection expands the conversation about some of women’s most intimate experiences.

Author: Cody Walker
Title: The Trumpiad

The new U.S. president doesn’t read books, but for everyone else, there’s Cody Walker’s The Trumpiad, a blistering and hilarious take on America’s political collapse. Key Difference: I wouldn’t lump / Trump / in with Hitler and Mussolini. / Trump’s hands are littler. (They’re teeny.) The Trumpiad will be published on April 29th 2017, which, if no one manages to stop him, will mark Trump’s 100th day in office.

About the Authors

Polly Rosenwaike’s story collection, Look How Happy I’m Making You, was a featured book pick in O MagazineMs.People, and New York Magazine. Her stories, reviews, and essays have been published in The O. Henry Prize StoriesGlimmer TrainNew England ReviewThe Cut, the New York Times Book Review, the San Francisco ChronicleLit Hub, and The Millions. She is the fiction editor of the Michigan Quarterly Review.

Cody Walker directs the Creative Writing Sub-concentration at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. He’s the author of two full-length poetry collections—The Self-Styled No-Child and Shuffle and Breakdown—and a chapbook, The Trumpiad. (The chapbook doubles as a fundraiser for the ACLU.) His work appears in The New York Times MagazineSlate, and The Best American Poetry. He’s the co-director of the Bear River Writers’ Conference and the co-editor of Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest.

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