Residential College's 50th Anniversary

Literati is excited to host a reading commemorating the University of Michigan Residential College's 50th Anniversary featuring past and present faculty!

Lolita Hernandez is the author of Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant, winner of a 2005 PEN Beyond Margins Award. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Quiet Battles and snakecrossing. She is a 2012 Kresge Literary Arts fellow, and her poetry and fiction have appeared in a wide variety of literary publications. After over thirty-three years as a UAW worker at General Motors, she now teaches in the creative writing department in the University of Michigan Residential College.

Laura Kasischke is a poet and novelist whose fiction has been made into several feature-length films. Her book of poems, Space, in Chains, won the National Book Critics Circle Award. She currently teaches at the University of Michigan and lives in Chelsea, Michigan.

Christopher Matthews raised in California and schooled in Michigan, Christopher Todd Matthews has taught at Kalamazoo College, Washington & Lee University in Virginia, and now the Residential College.  His work has appeared widely in such journals as The Massachusetts Review, Indiana Review, and Shenandoah, and has been recognized with three Pushcart nominations and two features in Ted Kooser’s syndicated American Life in Poetry project.  He holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD from the University of Michigan.

Sarah Messer taught as an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina-Wilmington for many years. Her books include Red House (Penguin, 2005), Bandit Letters (New Issues Poetry & Prose, 2001), Dress Made of Mice (Black Lawrence Press, 2015) and she is the translator for Having Once Paused: Poems of Zen Master Ikkayu (University of Michigan Press, 2015). She currently teaches poetry at the Residential College and is the co-founder of One Pause Poetry, an on-line audio archive and  local poetry reading series 

Ken Mikolowski is the author of four previous books, "Thank You Call Again," "little mysteries," "Big Enigmas," and "Remember Me." His poems have been published in "Brooklyn Rail, " "Hanging Loose," E"xquisite Corpse," and "Abandon Automobile," "A Detroit Anthology," and have been recorded by the Frank Carlberg Group. Mikolowski teaches poetry writing at the University of Michigan and, along with his wife Ann, was publisher, editor, and printer of The Alternative Press. He lives in Ann Arbor.

Laura Hulthen Thomas's short fiction and essays have appeared in a number of journals and anthologies, including The Cimarron Review, Nimrod International Journal, Epiphany, and Witness. She received her MFA in fiction writing from Warren Wilson College. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan's Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.