The Ann Arbor Book Festival is Coming! May 15-18

This year's festival features;

Elizabeth Goodenough (Editor) -
Under Fire: Childhood in the Shadow of War
7:00 PM on Tuesday, May 13th at Shaman Drum Bookshop -
Author Reading/Signing

Under Fire is an eclectic, multidisciplinary collection that explores the representation of war and its aftereffects in children s books and documentary film. This richly illustrated volume brings together internationally known contributors to examine the ongoing influence of violence and war on children's literature by studying the childhood experiences of authors writing for children, the children represented in war stories, and the experiences of children who make up the stories readership. Under Fire opens timely avenues in literary studies and encourages those who work with young readers to envision children s studies in new ways.

Elizabeth Goodenough is a lecturer in English at the Residential College of the University of Michigan.

Maureen Freely - Enlightenment
12:30 PM on the Kalamazoo Stage - Author Reading/Signing

In October 2005, only a few months after her Turkish husband is detained and her five-year-old son distributed to a foster family by US border patrol, Jeannie Wakefield disappears. She leaves behind in Istanbul a 57-page letter to M, an anonymous investigative journalist who Jeannie begs to write about her plight. It is a grim and heartbreaking history of first loves shattered and best friends betrayed, and M finds herself, against her will, tangled in Jeannie’s narrative. But in the “deep state” of post-911 Turkey, nobody is who they say they are, and everyone is a suspect—exactly how much will M inadvertently sacrifice to save the woman who stole her only true love?

Maureen Freely is a writer, translator, and professor at the University of Warwick in Bath, England. She is well-known for her translations of Snow, Istanbul: Memories of a City, The Black Book, and Other Colors, by the Turkish novelist and Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk.

Firoozeh Dumas - Laughing without an Accent:
Adventures of an American Iranian at Home and Abroad
2:00 PM on the Hussey Stage - Author Reading/Signing

She is the author of the national bestseller Funny in Farsi, and now she returns with a warm and humorous autobiographical story about being a citizen of the world in her American, Iranian, Parisian family in Laughing without an Accent: Adventures of an Iranian American, at Home and Abroad. Whether describing her Iranian family’s wonder at her French husband’s Christmas traditions, comparing questionable delicacies in international cuisines, conveying the experience of taking fifty-one Iranian family members on a birthday cruise to Alaska, or going on a road trip to Iowa with a former American hostage in Iran, Firoozeh’s wit and insight illuminate the universality of the human condition, and show how our differences can become our bonds.

Raymond McDaniel - Saltwater Empire
2:00 PM on the Gale Stage - Poetry Reading

Conceived in the years before Hurricane Katrina and deeply influenced by its aftermath, Saltwater Empire is the second collection from native Floridian, Raymond McDaniel. An important addition in the canon of post-Katrina literature, each poem in this collection is expressed in original lyrics, text from The Tempest, and the words of New Orleans’ most desperate citizens.

Raymond McDaniel is the author of the National Poetry Series award-winning collection Murder (a violet). A native of Florida, McDaniel now lives in Ann Arbor, writes for The Constant Critic, teaches at the University of Michigan.

Danny Simmons - 85
2:00 PM on the WEMU Stage - Poetry Reading/Signing

Inspired by the widely praised novel Three Days as the Crow Flies, Danny Simmons and Floyd Hughes present a richly illustrated graphic novel set in the gritty underworld of New York City circa 1985 — a time and place when street culture and the fine arts scene came together in strange, often predatory ways.

Danny Simmons, a renowned painter of abstract-expressionist oil works, owns the Rush Arts Gallery in Manhattan and Corridor Gallery in Brooklyn. A poet and cofounder of the Def Poetry Jam performance series, he heads the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation with his brother, Russell Simmons.

Nicholas Delbanco - The Count of Concord 3:30 PM on the Michigan Stage - Author Reading/Signing

Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was—as Nicholas Delbanco writes—“world famous in his lifetime,” yet now he has been “almost wholly forgotten.” Sally Ormsby Thompson Robinson—the narrator of this novel and the Count’s fictional, last-surviving relative—is “haunted” by one of history’s most fascinating and remarkable figures. On par with Thomas Jefferson, Count Rumford was, among many other things, a politician, a spy, a philanthropist, and above all, a scientist. Based on countless historical documents, including letters and essays by Thompson himself, The Count of Concord brings to life the remarkable career of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford.

Nicholas Delbanco is a British-born American who received his B.A. from Harvard and his M.A. from Columbia University. He currently directs the Hopwood Awards Program and is the Robert Frost Distinguished University Professor of English at the University of Michigan.


Get all the details at www.aabookfestival.org