These events are primarily sponsored by the Department of English and the Office of the Provost of the University of Michigan.
All events are free and open to the public. The Helmut Stern Auditorium is located on the ground floor of the University of Michigan's Museum of Art (UMMA) 525 South State Street on the U-M's Central Campus. Addresses for other venues will be listed below those particular events.
Carrie Fountain: Janey Lack Poetry Reading
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Carrie Fountain’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Crazyhorse, AGNI, and Southwestern American Literature, among others. Her debut collection, Burn Lake, was a winner of a 2009 National Poetry Series Award and was published by Penguin in 2010. She lives in Austin, Texas and teaches at St. Edward’s University.
Time: 5:10PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA
Website: http://www.umma.umich.edu/
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu
Robin Hemley Reading
Thursday, September 20, 2012
Robin Hemley is the author of ten books of nonfiction and fiction and the winner of many awards including a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, The Nelson Algren Award for Fiction from The Chicago Tribune, The Story Magazine Humor Prize, an Independent Press Book Award, two Pushcart Prizes and many others. His fiction, nonfiction, and poetry has been published in the U.S., Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Australia, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and elsewhere and he frequently teaches creative writing workshops around the world. He has been widely anthologized and has published his work in such places as The New York Times, The Believer, The Huffington Post, Orion, The Wall Street Journal, The Chicago Tribune, New York Magazine, and many of the finest literary magazines in the U.S. The BBC is currently developing a feature film based on his book Invented Eden that tells the story of a purported anthropological hoax in the Philippines. His third collection of short stories, Reply All, is forthcoming in 2012 from Indiana University Press (Break Away Books) and The University of Georgia Press recently published his book A Field Guide for Immersion Writing: Memoir, Journalism, and Travel. He is a Senior Editor of The Iowa Review as well as the editor of a popular online journal, Defunct (Defunctmag.com) that features short essays on everything that’s had its day. He currently directs the Nonfiction Writing Program at The University of Iowa and is the founder and organizer of NonfictioNow, a biennial conference that will convene in November 2012 in Melbourne, Australia.
Time: 5:10PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA
Website: http://www.umma.umich.edu/
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu
Oni Buchanan and Jon Woodward perform "Uncanny Valley"
Thursday, September 27, 2012
Oni Buchanan’s concert programming is often interdisciplinary in nature, directly engaging the intimate connections between the arts, and frequently including adventurous contemporary works alongside established repertoire, bringing works from disparate centuries into fascinating and enlightening conversation. In addition to solo programming, she has co-curated (with poet Jon Woodward) several large-scale, interdisciplinary performance projects. Their first project, "Machines," featured the machines and films of kinetic sculptor Arthur Ganson exhibited alongside live performances of incredible contemporary musical works. They then produced "Four Quartets: Variations," moored by the performances of four vocalizing actors and four poets interacting with excerpted and remixed text of T. S. Eliot.
Most recently, they commissioned a concert-length work for piano/spoken text/electronics from renowned electroacoustic composer John Gibson, which will be premiered in September 2012 and performed on tour throughout the 2012/13 season. The piece, called "Uncanny Valley" (after Jon Woodward’s serial poem of the same name), explores the phenomenon of "semantic satiation," searching through repeated poetic lines and musical forms for what is most uncanny, and most human, in both language and music.
Oni Buchanan's third poetry book, Must a Violence, is forthcoming from the Kuhl House Poets Series in September 2012, selected by Mark Levine. Her previous books include Spring, a Poetry Honors winner of the 2009 Massachusetts Book Awards and selected by Mark Doty for the 2007 National Poetry Series, and What Animal, selected by Fanny Howe for the University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series. Oni is also a concert pianist, has released three solo piano CDs, and actively performs across the U.S. and abroad. She lives in Boston with her husband, the poet Jon Woodward. Photo by Jon Woodward.
Jon Woodward's books are Uncanny Valley (forthcoming from Cleveland State University Poetry Center), Rain (Wave Books), and Mister Goodbye Easter Island (Alice James Books). He lives in Boston with his wife, poet and pianist Oni Buchanan, and he works at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Time: 5:10PM
Location: Pendleton Room, Michigan League
Website: http://uunions.umich.edu/league/meeting/events/
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu
Hanna Pylväinen and Rachel Richardson Alumni Reading
Thursday, October 04, 2012
Hanna Pylväinen graduated from Mount Holyoke College and received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was also a postgraduate Zell Fellow. She is the recipient of residencies at the MacDowell Colony and the Headlands Center for the Arts, and a fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachussetts. Her first novel, We Sinners, is forthcoming from Henry Holt in August 2012. She is from suburban Detroit.
Rachel Richardson is the author of Copperhead (Carnegie Mellon, 2011). She grew up in Berkeley, California, and earned an MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan, where she won the Theodore Roethke Prize. She also received an MA in Folklore from the University of North Carolina and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford. Her poems have appeared in the Southern Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. She has taught in several prisons, public schools, and universities, and now lives in Greensboro, North Carolina with her family.
Time: 5:10PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA
Website: http://www.umma.umich.edu/
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu
David Shields Reading
Thursday, October 11, 2012
David Shields is the author of twelve books, including
Jeff, One Lonely Guy, which was co-written by Jeff Ragsdale and Michael Logan (Amazon Publishing NYC, March 2012);
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010), named one of the best books of the year by more than thirty publications;
The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead (Knopf, 2008), a New York Times bestseller;
Black Planet: Facing Race during an NBA Season, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award;
Remote: Reflections on Life in the Shadow of Celebrity, winner of the PEN/Revson Award; and
Dead Languages: A Novel, winner of the PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. His essays and stories have appeared in the
New York Times Magazine,
Harper’s,
Esquire,
Yale Review,
Village Voice,
Salon,
Slate,
McSweeney’s, and
Utne Reader; he’s written reviews for the
New York Times Book Review,
Los Angeles Times Book Review,
Boston Globe, and
Philadelphia Inquirer. His work has been translated into fifteen languages.
Shields has received a Guggenheim fellowship, two NEA fellowships, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation grant, and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. He lives with his wife and daughter in Seattle, where he is the Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington. Since 1996 he has also been a member of the faculty in Warren Wilson College’s low-residency MFA Program for Writers, in Asheville, North Carolina.
Photo by Tom Collicott
Time: 5:10PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA
Website: http://www.umma.umich.edu/
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu
Clayton Eshleman: Michigan Writers Reading
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Clayton Eshleman's poems, critical essays, and translations of poets as important and diverse as César Vallejo, Aimé Césaire, Pablo Neruda, Antonin Artaud, Vladimir Holan, Michel Deguy, Henri Michaux, and Bernard Bador have earned him (and his fellow co-translators in some cases) international acclaim, as testified by a National Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities, and two Landon Translation Prizes from the Academy of American Poets.
During his career he has published over forty books, including, between 2008 and 2012, three collections of poetry—The Grindstone of Rapport: A Clayton Eshleman Reader, Anticline, andAn Anatomy of the Night; and three translations—Curdled Skulls by Bernard Bador, Endure by Bei Dao, with Lucas Klein, and Solar Throat Slashed by Aimé Césaire, with A. James Arnold. In the past decade he has also published three collections of prose—Companion Spider, Archaic Design and Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld. In 2003 University of California Press published his translation of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo, on which he spent spent over forty years. In 2012 Black Widow Press will bring out a 400 page compendium of poetry, prose, prose poems, lectures, translations, and journals by Eshleman, spanning 1967 to 2012: The Price of Experience.
Time: 5:10PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA
Website: http://www.umma.umich.edu/
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu
Katie Estill and Daniel Woodrell Reading
Thursday, October 25, 2012
Daniel Woodrell has been called one of the best kept secrets in American literature and is the author of eight books including Tomato Red which won the 1999 PEN Center USA award for fiction, Woe to Live On which was adapted into a movie by Ang Lee, and Winter’s Bone, recently adapted into an Oscar-nominated film of the same name. He recently published his first collection of short fiction, The Outlaw Album, twelve new, timeless tales of those on the fringes of society. Five of Daniel Woodrell's eight published novels were selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Woodrell lives in the Ozarks near the Arkansas line with his wife, Katie Estill.
Photo by Bruce Carr.
Katie Estill is a graduate of Kenyon College and has an MFA degree from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lived in Greece for five years and has worked as a teacher, journalist, and head of a county task force on violence against women. She is the author of two novels: Evening Would Find Me, published by Joyce Carol Oates’ Ontario Review Press, and Dahlia’s Gone, St. Martin’s Press, which was a finalist for the Dashiell Hammett Prize. Her short stories have appeared in such journals as The Missouri Review, Mid-American Review, Ontario Review, Elder Mountain, and the anthology, Surreal South. She lives in the Ozarks with her husband, Daniel Woodrell.
Time: 5:10PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA
Website: http://www.umma.umich.edu/
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu
Toi Derricotte Reading
Thursday, November 08, 2012
Toi Derricotte's new book, The Undertaker's Daughter, was just released by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her previous books are Tender (1997), winner of the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize; Captivity (1989); Natural Birth (1983); and The Empress of the Death House (1978). The Black Notebooks, her literary memoir, was published by W.W. Norton in 1997 and won the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Non-Fiction and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. She has essays published in The Best American Essays 2006, edited by Lauren Slater, and The Best American Essays 2011, edited by Edwidge Danticat. Of her poems, Sharon Olds wrote, "Toi Derricotte's poems show us our underlife, tender and dreadful. And they are vibrant poems, poems in the voice of the living creature, the one who escaped--and paused, and turned back, and saw, and cried out. This is one of the most beautiful and necessary voices in American poetry today".
Recognized as a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania in 2009, her honors include the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America; two Pushcart Prizes; the Distinguished Pioneering of the Arts Award from the United Black Artists; the Alumni/Alumnae Award from New York University; the Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers, Inc.; the Elizabeth Kray Award for service to the field of poetry from Poets House; and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the Maryland State Arts Council. In 2009, she received the University of Pittsburgh Chancellor's Distinguished Public Service Award. With Cornelius Eady, she co-founded Cave Canem Foundation. She is a Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
Photo by Seichi Tsutsumi
Time: 5:10PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA
Website: http://www.umma.umich.edu/
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu
Terrance Hayes Reading
Thursday, November 15, 2012
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Terrance Hayes is the author of four books of poetry; Lighthead (2010),winner of the 2010 National Book Award in Poetry; Wind in a Box, winner of a Pushcart Prize; Hip Logic, winner of the National Poetry Series, a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and runner-up for the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets, and Muscular Music, winner of both the Whiting Writers Award and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has been a recipient of many other honors and awards, including two Pushcart selections, four Best American Poetry selections, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation. His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Fence, The Kenyon Review, Jubilat, Harvard Review, and Poetry. His poetry has been featured on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. A Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University, Hayes lives in Pittsburgh with his wife and children.
Time: 5:10PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA
Website: http://www.umma.umich.edu/
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu
Aleksandar Hemon Reading
Thursday, November 29, 2012
Aleksandar Hemon was born in 1964, in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina. He came to the US as part of a month long cultural exchange program of journalists and was supposed to return to Sarajevo on May 1st 1992, the same day that Sarajevo came under siege so was instead granted political asylum in the US. Hemon began writing fiction in English in 1995 and one of the first stories he wrote in English, “Islands”, appeared in Best American Short Stories 1999 (ed. Amy Tan). He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2003 and a “genius grant” from the MacArthur Foundation in 2004. He lives in Chicago with his wife and two daughters. From 2010 to 2013 he served as editor of Best European Fiction anthologies (Dalkey Archives).
Hemon is the author of The Question of Bruno, Nowhere Man, The Lazarus Project and his latest short story collection, Love and Obstacles was published in May 2009. His collection of auto-biographical essays, The Book of My Lives, is forthcoming from Farrar Straus and Giroux in the fall of 2012. He is at work on his next novel.
Co-sponsored by the Center for European Studies and the Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia
Photo by Velibor Božović
Time: 5:10PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA
Website: http://www.umma.umich.edu/
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu
Amitav Ghosh, Zell Distinguished International Writer in Residence
Thursday, December 06, 2012
Amitav Ghosh was born in Calcutta and grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. He studied in Delhi, Oxford and Alexandria and is the author of The Circle of Reason, The Shadow Lines, In An Antique Land, Dancing in Cambodia, The Calcutta Chromosome, The Glass Palace, The Hungry Tide, Sea of Poppies, and most recently, River of Smoke (2011), which is the second volume of a projected series of novels, The Ibis Trilogy. The Circle of Reason was awarded France’s Prix Médicis in 1990, and The Shadow Lines won two prestigious Indian prizes the same year, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Ananda Puraskar. The Calcutta Chromosome won the Arthur C. Clarke award for 1997 and The Glass Palace won the International e-Book Award at the Frankfurt book fair in 2001. In 2005 The Hungry Tide won the Crossword Book Prize, and in 2008 Sea of Poppies was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and was awarded the Crossword Book Prize and the IndiaPlaza Golden Quill Award.
Amitav Ghosh’s work has been translated into more than two dozen languages and he has served on the Jury of the Locarno Film Festival (Switzerland) and the Venice Film Festival (2001). Amitav Ghosh’s essays have been published in The New Yorker, The New Republic and The New York Times. His essays have been published by Penguin India (The Imam and the Indian) and Houghton Mifflin USA (Incendiary Circumstances). He has taught in many universities in India and the USA, including Delhi University, Columbia, Queens College and Harvard. In January 2007 he was given the Padma Shri, one of India’s highest honours, by the President of India. In 2010, Amitav Ghosh was awarded honorary doctorates by Queens College, New York, and the Sorbonne, Paris. Along with Margaret Atwood, he was also a joint winner of a Dan David Award for 2010.
Co-sponsored by the Michigan Quarterly Review
Time: 5:10PM
Location: Helmut Stern Auditorium, UMMA
Website: http://www.umma.umich.edu/
Contact: mslevad@umich.edu
