Fiction at Literati: Vernon Smith: The Green Ghetto

When:
February 28, 2019 @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
2019-02-28T19:00:00-05:00
2019-02-28T20:30:00-05:00
Where:
Literati
124 E. Washington Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48104
USA

Literati is excited to welcome author Vernon Smith who will be sharing his new novel The Green Ghetto.

About The Green Ghetto:
Mitchell Hosowich is pleased as a puppy with two tails that the great American rust-out has rendered parts of Detroit rural again, wild. For him, the “Green Ghetto,” as the bureaucrats have come to call it, is a safe place to grow some fairly decent Detroit dope. But when two DEA agents start sniffing around his spread, only to wind up dead, Mitchell finds himself with a lot of explaining to do. Left with two stiffs, a dead dog, a shot cow, and fifty-nine missing marijuana plants, Mitchell decides not to wait around for the law to come down on him. Instead, he goes after his stolen pot, a chase that becomes a tense, and at times hilarious, cross-border road trip to nearby rural Canada. Set in a hyper post-9/11 culture, The Green Ghetto explores the universal theme of being compromised. But mostly, it is the story of how America got here from there in the war on drugs, terror, and words.

Windsor native Vern Smith grew up twenty minutes from the green ghetto – an actual Detroit phenomenon. His fiction has appeared in Concrete Forest: The New Fiction of Urban Canada (McClelland & Stewart), as well as the Insomniac Press anthologies, Iced, Hard Boiled Love, and Revenge. His novelette, “The Gimmick,” was a finalist for Canada’s highest crime-writing honor, the Arthur Ellis Award. A veteran of four newspapers and three magazines, Smith’s non-fiction has appeared in The Detroit Free Press, The Ottawa Citizen, The Vancouver Sun, Eye, Broken Pencil, and Quill & Quire, among other publications. He most recently managed CJAM 99.1 FM, where he founded the twenty-four-hour radio marathon Joe Strummer Day to Confront Poverty in Windsor-Detroit. He now lives on the edge of Chicago where urban Illinois meets the prairie.

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