Helen Zell Writers' Program

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Literati Book Store welcomes poets Anne Carson and Anne Waldman to their Poetry at Literati series! 

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living. Her awards and honors include the Lannan Award, the Pushcart Prize, the Griffin Trust Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Guggenheim fellowship, and the MacArthur “Genius” Award. She is the author of Red Doc>; Nox; Glass, Irony and God; The Autobiography of Red; The Beauty of the Husband; Decreation; Economy of the Unlost; Eros the Bittersweet; Grief Lessons; If Not, Winter; Men in the Off Hours; and Plainwater.

Anne Waldman is a celebrated poet, performer, professor, editor, and cultural activist. She is the author of more than forty books, including Marriage: A Sentence; Structure of the World Compared to a Bubble; Manatee/Humanity; and the feminist epic The Iovis Trilogy: Colors in the Mechanism of Concealment. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award, and a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she lives in New York City and Boulder, Colorado.

Literati Book Store

124 E. Washington St.

Chigozie Obioma, author of The Fishermen, which has been chosen as one of the American Library Association's Best Four Debuts of the Spring, will do a reading and book signing at:

Literati Book Store 

     124 E. Washington      Ann Arbor , Michigan  48104

This video is an impressionistic portrait of artist Frank Born painting portrait impressions of poets at the University of Michigan for an exhibition at the U-M Institute for the Humanities Gallery (http://www.lsa.umich.edu/humanities). Poets featured in the video are: Tarfia Faizullah, Laurence Goldstein, Lorna Goodison and Laura Kasischke. For more information about the Painter & Poets Project, click here!

Painter and Poets Project Unveiling & Reception

Book signing in the UMMA Forum from 5-6pm.

Fiction Reading in the UMMA Apse from 6-7pm.

Kazuo Ishiguro’s seven previous books have won him wide renown and numerous honors. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. Both The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go have more than 1,000,000 copies in print across platforms, and both were adapted into highly acclaimed films.

Presenter: Dr. Tiya Miles, Professor of American Culture, Afroamerican & African Studies, History, Native American Studies and Women Studies; University of Michigan

Please join us for a book launch event for Dr. Tiya Miles, an award-winning historian, scholar, and educator, who will discuss and read from her new book, The Cherokee Rose.

Dr. Miles is an award-winning historian and the recipient of a recent MacArthur “Genius Grant,” The Cherokee Rose explores territory reminiscent of the bestselling and beloved works of Alice Walker, Octavia Butler, and Louise Erdrich. Now, Tiya Miles's luminous but highly accessible novel examines a little-known aspect of America’s past—slaveholding by Southern Creeks and Cherokees—and its legacy in the lives of three young women who are drawn to the Georgia plantation where scenes of extreme cruelty and equally extraordinary compassion once played out.

Date:  March 24, 2015 @ 4:00 - 5:30pm  

Location:  2239 Lane Hall, 204 S. State St. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1290

Based on the author's in-depth and award-winning research into archival sources at the Chief Vann House Historic Site in Chatsworth, Georgia, and the Moravian mission sponsored there in the early 1800s, Miles has blended this fascinating history with a contemporary cast of engaging and memorable characters, including Jinx, the free-spirited historian exploring her tribe’s complicated racial history; Ruth, whose mother sought refuge from a troubled marriage in her beloved garden and the cosmetic empire she built from its bounty; Cheyenne, the Southern black debutante seeking to connect with a meaningful personal history; and, hovering above them all, the spirit of long-gone Mary Ann Battis, a young woman suspected of burning a mission to the ground and then disappearing from tribal records. Together, the women’s discoveries about the secrets of the Cherokee plantation trace their attempts to connect with the strong spirits of the past and reconcile the conflicts in their own lives.

A reception and book signing will follow this program.

This event is co-sponsored by the Department of Afroamerican & African Studies, the Institute for Research on Women & Gender, Department of American Culture, the Department of Native American Studies, and the Center for the Education of Women.

March 17, 2015

Poetry Reading: 6:00pm                                               Location: UMMA Apse

March 18, 2015

Q&A: 2:00pm                                Location: Hopwood Room, 1176 Angell Hall

March 19, 2015

READING: 5:10pm                                 Location: UMMA Helmut Stern Auditorium