In celebration of the Michigan Quarterly Review’s “Poetry at Michigan” Special Issue, acclaimed U-M writers will read from their work. This issue honors the legacy of poetry past and present at the University of Michigan. MQR’s new Editor-in-Chief Khaled Mattawa will introduce the event, and the lineup includes former MQR Editors Laurence Goldstein and Keith Taylor (who curated the content of this issue).
Michigan Quarterly Review is an interdisciplinary journal of arts and culture that combines the best of contemporary poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction with outstanding critical essays on literary, cultural, and political matters. The flagship journal of the University of Michigan, MQR draws from creative minds here and elsewhere, presenting lively, sophisticated work for readers from within the academy and beyond.
Refreshments will be served.
SCOTT BEAL is the author of Wait ’Til You Have Real Problems (Dzanc Books, 2014) and The Octopus (Gertrude Press, 2016). He teaches in the Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan and co-hosts the monthly Skazat! reading series in Ann Arbor.
PAUL R. DIMOND served as Director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights under Law, Special Assistant to the President of the United States for Economic Policy, and Director of the National Economic Council. His policy books include Beyond Busing (winner of the Ralph J. Bunche Book of the Year) and The Supreme Court and Judicial Choice. Recent published fiction includes a fantasy for tweeners, North Coast Almanac, and a historical novel, The Belle of Two Arbors.
LAURENCE GOLDSTEIN served as a professor of English at the University of Michigan from 1970 to 2017. A specialist in the literature of Romanticism and Modernism, he authored, edited, or co-edited fifteen books. In this century he published a volume of poetry, A Room in California; two collections of texts, Writing Ann Arbor: A Literary Anthology and Robert Hayden: Essays on the Poetry; and a book of literary criticism, Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City. He was Editor of Michigan Quarterly Review from 1977 to 2009.
ZILKA JOSEPH has been published in Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, and Rattle. Lands I Live In and What Dread, her chapbooks, were nominated for PEN and Pushcart awards. Her book Sharp Blue Search of Flame (WSUP) was a finalist for the Foreward Indie Book Award.
KHALED MATTAWA currently teaches in the graduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan. He is the author of four books of poetry, and a critical study of the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Mattawa has coedited two anthologies of Arab American literature and translated many volumes of contemporary Arabic poetry. His awards include the Academy of American Poets Fellowship prize, the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He is the current Editor of Michigan Quarterly Review.
THYLIAS MOSS taught at the University of Michigan from 1992–2014. The recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, she has published fourteen books. Her latest collection of poetry is Wannabe Hoochie Mama Gallery of Realities’ Red Dress Code (Persea).
ELIZABETH SCHMUHL is a multidisciplinary artist and the author of the forthcoming Premonitions (Wayne State University Press). She illustrates essays for The Rumpus, has taught writing at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, and currently works at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts.
KEITH TAYLOR taught at U-M from 2000 to 2018, and has served as Director of the Bear River Writer’s Conference and Poetry Editor of Michigan Quarterly Review. His most recent book of poems is The Bird-while (Wayne State University Press, 2017).
CODY WALKER has taught English at the University of Michigan since 2009. He’s the author of three poetry collections—The Trumpiad (2017), The Self-Styled No-Child (2016), and Shuffle and Breakdown (2008), all from Waywiser.