Peter Markus

George Dila

Featuring A. Van Jorden, Karen Swenson,Vivian Shipley, Peter Markus, George Dila et al

Happy New Year! We’re set to continue our first-rate literary programming for Metro Detroit and Southeast Michigan audiences with our annual Downtown/Uptown Literary Series. As usual, we’ll kick off the first two readings in January and February at The Scarab Club in Detroit’s Cultural Center/Wayne State Area. The series concludes in March and April at The Baldwin Library in Downtown Birmingham. All readings are FREE and Open to the Public. The Schedule is as follows:

Sunday January 29, 2006 at the Scarab Club in Detroit

217 E. Farnsworth & John R.—directly behind The Detroit Art Institute
2:00 p.m. 4:00 p.m.
Detroit Fiction Writer  Peter Markus
Traverse City Performance Poet John R. Alberts
Detroit Metro Poets & Newlyweds Andy Vinstra & Donna Stubek

Sunday February 26, 2006 at the Scarab Club in Detroit

217 E. Farnsworth & John R.—directly behind The Detroit Art Institute
2:00 p.m. 4:00 p.m.
University of Detroit-Mercy Poet John C Freeman
Ludington Fiction Writer George Dila
Schoolcraft College Poet Cheryl A. Vatcher-Martin
with special guest Herbert Metoyer 
(Folkway Recording Artists from New Orleans)

Sunday March 26, 2006 at Baldwin Public Library

300 West Merrill / Downtown Birmingham 48009 / (248) 647-1700
2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
The International Women’s Month Reading
National Book Award Winner Karen Swenson (NYC)
Detroit Poet Aurora Harris
Metro Detroit Poet Zilka Joseph

Sunday April 23, 2006 at Baldwin Public Library

300 West Merrill / Downtown Birmingham 48009 / (248) 647-1700
2:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.
National Poetry Month Celebration
A. Van Jordan (National Acclaimed Poet & author of award winning Macnolia)
Vivian Shipley (former Connecticut Poet Laureate & Acclaimed Author)
Gerry LaFemina (WV Poet & Director Frostburg University Creative Writing Program)

Again—Readings Are Free. January & February Readings are at The Scarab Club in Detroit’s Cultural Center / Wayne State Area, and the March & April Readings will be at The Baldwin Library located at 300 Merrill Street in Downtown Birmingham. Maps to both venues are located at www.springfed.org. These readings are sponsored by The Friends of the Baldwin Public Library, The Metro Detroit Writers Literary Arts Organization, Springfed Arts, Inc. and The Scarab Club of Detroit.

Downtown / Uptown 2006 Featured Readers’ Biographies:

January 29 @ Scarab Club

Peter Markus New MDW Fiction workshop Instructor and author of The Singing Fish (Calamari Press), The Moon is a Lighthouse (New Michigan Press), Good, Brother (AWOL Press), and Still Lives with Whiskey Bottle (March Street Press). His stories and poems have appeared in a wide range of literary journals, both on and offline, including Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, New Orleans Review, Northwest Review, Third Coast, Willow Springs, Another Chicago Magazine, Seattle Review, 3rd Bed, and Post Road. His work has also appeared in several anthologies published by HarperCollins, St. Martin’s Press, Bloomsbury, New Rivers Press, Mammoth Press, Bottom Dog, White Pine Press, Wayne State University Press, and in the recently published collection American Poetry: The Next Generation (Poets Under Forty), published by Carnegie Mellon University Press. He has received creative artist grants from ArtServe Michigan, was for six years the writer-in-residence at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, and is currently the Senior Writer with the InsideOut Literary Arts Project, where he has been a writer-in-the-schools since its inception. He also teaches fiction writing classes in the summer in New York City where he is on the faculty of the Gotham Writers’ Workshop.

John R. Alberts is a lively jazz performance poet from Northern Michigan. After quitting high school teaching in California 15 years ago, John returned to creative writing. Believing that poetry’s sound, its rhythm and melody rather than any worded message, to be of fundamental importance he reads aloud in venues across the country. His poetry grows from the solid heart of Jazz. 

Andy Vinstra is the author of a new book of poems. His bride Donna Stubek has published several of her poems nationally and locally.

February 26th at 2:00-pm at The Scarab Club

George Dila is a native Detroiter.  A professional writer, his career has included stints in advertising, corporate communications, journalism, broadcasting, and theatre.  He is also a fiction writer, with stories published in various journals including North American Review, Driftwood Review and others. His essays have appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, Traverse Magazine and other periodicals. He and Judith have lived in Detroit and suburbs, New York City, and Denver. They have called Ludington “home” since the millennium. George is a very entertaining and lively reader. He last appeared in Detroit a few years back at Poets @ the Opera House Series, and he received a fabulous response form the audience.

John Freeman’s poetry has appeared in the Minnesota Review, Driftwood, The Cimmaron Review, The Journal and several other publications.  He regularly reviews collections of poems for Mid-American Review.  He holds a Bachelor’s in Literature from the University of Detroit Mercy and an MFA in Creative Writing from Bowling Green State University.  He now teaches English and Creative Writing at UDM.

Herbert Metoyer is a great local and nationally acclaimed (via New Orleans) singer/songwriter . Herb started playing in the early 60’s on the Greenwich Village Scene with his friends Fred Neil, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and others. His first album was released on the classic Verve/Folkway Records.
March 26 at 2:00 pm at Baldwin Library

Karen Swenson is the author of several books, including An Attic of Ideals, East-West, A Sense of Direction and The Landlady in Bangkok, which won the National Poetry Series. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times, and her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Nation, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, and numerous other periodicals. Her frequent travels in Southeast Asia have been the subject of articles for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Leader.

Aurora Harris is a Detroit poet, educator, mentor and community activist. She is the founder of World Voice Cultural Arts, Inc., which provides poetry and creative writing workshops, and promotes emerging poets, writers, musicians and DJs. Harris is also the SlamMaster for Detroit, running four venues for the National Poetry Slam competition. Her poems have been published in Tilting the Continent: Southeast Asian American Writing, DrumVoices, Brooding the Heartland: Poets of the Midwest, Abandon Automobile and Michigan Feminist Studies.

Zilka Joseph is a longtime member of MDW’s Master level Poetry Workshop with Mary Jo Firth Gillett. She has placed in our annual MDW Members Only Literary Contest.
Originally from Calcutta, India. She moved to the Chicago in 1997, then to Michigan in 2000. An English teacher since 1990, Zilka taught at the Roeper School, and was Writer-In-Residence with InsideOut. She is currently a tutor at Oakland Community College. Published in India, and also in the U.S. in journals such as The Driftwood Review, Rattle, Paterson Literary Review, the Connecticut River Review, The Iconoclast, The MacGuffin. Zilka has two finished chapbook manuscripts.

April 23 at 2:00pm at The Baldwin Library

A. Van Jordan, born in Akron, Ohio, received his MFA from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. His first book, Rise, won the PEN/Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was a selection of the Academy of American Poets book club. His newest book MacNolia has received critical acclaim and many award nominations. He is an assistant professor at The University of Texas in Austin.

Vivian Shipley is editor of Connecticut Review and the Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor. In 2001, she won the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Prize, and the Daniel Varoujan Prize from the New England Poetry Club. In 2000, she won the Marble Faun Award for Poetry from the William Faulkner Society and numerous other prizes. Even though she did not begin writing poetry until late in life, she has won numerous awards. She has twice been nominated for a Pulitzer: in 1996 for Devil’s Lane, and in 2000 for Fair Haven. When There Is No Shore is the 2002 recipient of the Word Press Poetry Prize, while Crazy Quilt was the 2000 Paterson Poetry Finalist.

Gerry LaFemina is the author of several chapbooks, four full length collections of poetry, a collection of prose poems, numerous published stories, essays and poems, and is co-translator with Sinan Toprak of VOICE LOCK PUPPET, poems by contemporary Turkish poet Ali Yuce. Gerry’s latest book, The Parakeets of Brooklyn, received the 2003 Bodighera Prize in poetry, and was published in a bilingual edition of Italian and English.  His other books include The Window Facing Winter and Graffiti Heart.  A long time resident of Michigan he now directs and teaches in the Frostburg Center for Creative Writing at Frostburg State University in Maryland.