Writers & Books

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   The Renunciations is a book of resilience, survival, and the journey to radically shift one’s sense of self in the face of trauma. Moving between a childhood marked by love and abuse and the breaking marriage of that adult child, Donika Kelly charts memory and the body as landscapes to be traversed and tended.   “A lionhearted odyssey through the self, a casting aside…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Presented in partnership with the Livonia Public Library.   In a memoir filled with human drama, wisdom and timeless life lessons, On the Road Less Traveled: An Unlikely Journey from the Orphanage to the Boardroom tells the improbable story of how Hajim bounced from foster homes to orphanages in a daily struggle to survive, to living the American dream as an accomplished Wall Street…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   A “dazzling” (Bryan Washington, author of Memorial) and brilliantly satirical debut novel about two best friends—a disgraced influencer and a struggling actor—who form The Atmosphere, a cult designed to reform problematic men.   Sasha Marcus was once the epitome of contemporary success: an internet sensation, social media darling, and a creator of a high profile wellness brand for women. But a confrontation with an…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Buy All the Morning Crows at our independent bookstore, Ampersand Books.   “Untranslatable and mysterious as any mythology, a various history of a changeable self accumulates in these inventive, charged, and often ecstatic poems.”--Cleopatra Mathis   Meg Kearney will be in conversation with Steve Huff, author of A Fire in the Hill.   Meg Kearney’s most recent poetry collection, All Morning the Crows, is…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   The follow-up to Leslie C. Youngblood’s  critically acclaimed Love Like Sky, Forever This Summer is a middle-grade novel about family, identity, and learning to stand up for what’s right.   “A glorious, big-hearted, and joyful novel! Forever This Summer celebrates three talented girls who discover, with love and empathy, they can triumph, heal, and inspire one another as well as their families and community."—Jewell…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Presented in partnership with the Livonia Public Library.   The 1960s transformed America.  After World War II, Korea, and the dreams of a healing nation, the ‘60s shook America to its foundation—the assassination of an idealistic young president, a tragic and unpopular war, the battle for civil rights, a cosmic clash of riots and burning cities, and an explosion of sex, drugs and rock…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   In her fiercely beautiful memoir, Jeannine Ouellette recollects fragments of her life and arranges them elliptically to witness each piece as torn and whole, as something more than itself. Caught between the dramatic landscapes of Lake Superior and Casper Mountain, between her stepfather’s groping and her mother’s erratic behavior, she lives for the day she can become a mother, herself, and create her own…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event. In this intimate collection, award-winning poet Cheryl Boyce-Taylor pays tribute to her departed son Malik ‘Phife Dawg’ Taylor of the legendary hip-hop trio A Tribe Called Quest.   Mama Phife Represents is a hybrid-story that follows the journey of a mother’s grieving heart through her first two years of public and private mourning. Told through a tapestry of narrative poems, dreams, anecdotes, journal entries, and…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   A heady, inventive, fantastical novel about the nature of memory and the difficulty of confronting trauma. Harrowing, meticulous, and deranged, Subdivision is a brilliant maze of a novel from the writer Kelly Link has called "a master of the dark arts." With the narrative intensity and mordant humor familiar to readers of Broken River, J. Robert Lennon continues his exploration of the mysteries of…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Presented in partnership with the Livonia Public Library.   After years of grappling with an eating disorder and trauma from her early childhood, Sadhvi Saraswati  felt as if she was successfully navigating her way through early adulthood. When she agreed to travel to India to appease her husband, Sadhvi never imagined that she would be embarking on a journey of healing and awakening. Hollywood…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   When Danielle Geller’s mother dies of alcohol withdrawal during an attempt to get sober, Geller returns to Florida and finds her mother’s life packed into eight suitcases. Most are filled with clothes, except for the last one, which contains diaries, photos, and letters, a few undeveloped disposable cameras, dried sage, jewelry, and the bandana her mother wore on days she skipped a hair wash. …

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Bodies Unbound is a well-researched narrative about the relationship between bodies and gender. Drawing on the experiences of individuals whose bodies and gender identities don’t match medical and social expectations, the author explores how ideologies of gendered bodies shape medical care.   “Sledge’s fieldwork has led to a rich and vibrant analysis of how gender is enacted, resisted, performed, and policed in medical settings.…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   From the widely acclaimed, best-selling author of American War, a new novel—beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving—that looks at the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child.   “It is one thing to put a human face on a migrant crisis and another to do so in so compelling a way that a reader simply cannot put your book down." —Gish…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Presented in partnership with the Livonia Public Library.     Samuel Antek, a first violinist with the NBC Symphony Orchestra, captured the 17 years he performed under the baton of the legendary Arturo Toscanini in the memoir This Was Toscanini, published in 1963.  Antek shared his keen observations of Toscanini’s singular approach to musical creativity, his unpredictable moods, his passions, his relentless demands on…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Said Shaiye will be in conversation with Hanif Abdurraqib, bestselling author of A Little Devil in America: Notes in Praise of Black Performance and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize-winning collection, A Fortune for Your Disaster.   Are You Borg Now? is an experimental book blending nonfiction, poetry, and self-interrogation. Shaiye uses The Borg from Star Trek: Voyager as a foil to answer the central…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Idra Novey will be in conversation with Joseph O. Legaspi    Those Who Knew is a taut, timely novel about what a powerful politician thinks he can get away with and the group of misfits who finally bring him down. A riveting exploration of the cost of staying silent and the mixed rewards of speaking up in a profoundly divided country.   “Novey—a poet…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Crooked Hallelujah tells the stories of Justine—a mixed-blood Cherokee woman—and her daughter, Reney, as they move from Eastern Oklahoma’s Indian Country in the hopes of starting a new, more stable life in Texas amid the oil bust of the 1980s. Life in Texas isn’t easy, however, and Reney feels unmoored from her family in Indian Country. Against the vivid backdrop of the Red River,…

Scroll down and select “Get Tickets” to receive a Zoom link to this virtual event.   Toni Jensen grew up around guns: As a girl, she learned to shoot birds in rural Iowa with her father, a card-carrying member of the NRA. As an adult, she’s had guns waved in her face near Standing Rock, and felt their silent threat on the concealed-carry campus where she teaches. And she has always known that in this she is not alone. As…