The Baldwin Public Library

“At the Dark End of the Street is one of those rare studies that makes a well-known story seem startlingly new.  Anyone who thinks he knows the history of the modern civil rights movement needs to read this terrifying, illuminating book.” – Kevin Boyle, author of “Arc of Justice”

Books will be available for purchase at the event.  If you have any questions regarding this event, please call Book Beat (248) 968-1190.

“My mother told me, if you call yourself ‘Little’ Stevie Wonder you’d better be as good as Little Willie John.” – Stevie Wonder

“Little Willie John was a soul singer before anyone thought to call it that.” – James Brown

On Tues., July 12th at 7pm, Book Beat will host an event with author and Detroit News columnist Susan Whitall along with Kevin and Keith John (children of Little Willie John) in memory and celebration of one of Detroit’s greatest unsung musical heroes, Little Willie John, creator of such timeless classics as “Fever,” “Need Your Love So Bad,” and “Grits ain’t Groceries.”  One of the first singers to successfully meld gospel with rhythm and blues into what eventually became known as soul music, Willie was primed to become a breakout pop star when a tragic incident led to his imprisonment and suspicious death at the age of 30.

“Fever: Little Willie John’s Fast Life, Mysterious Death and the Birth of Soul” is the first authorized biography to consider the life of the influential singer and the circumstances surrounding his untimely death.  Author Susan Whitall will be joined by John’s two sons, Keith and Kevin John, for a rare presentation in memory of this brilliant, and electrifying singer.

Link to Detroit News article about Willie’s life and career here

Excerpt from “Fever” describing Willie on stage here

Our next door neighbor Street Corner Music will be stocking some of Little Willie John’s music. Please don’t miss this exciting presentation!

Danielle McGuire is a writer and Assistant Professor in the History Department at Wayne State University. Since receiving her PhD from Rutgers in 2007, she has won numerous teaching and research awards. Her dissertation on sexualized racial violence and the African American freedom struggle received the 2008 Lerner Scott Prize for best dissertation in women’s history.

The Book Beat will be selling her book at the event, she will be speaking and autographing.  This event is free and open to the public.  The Oak Park Public Library is located @ Oak Park Public Library 14200 Oak Park Boulevard, Oak Park, MI  48237 (248) 691-7480

Book Beat will be selling books for this event.  Please contact Book Beat (248) 968-1190 if you have any questions regarding this event or you would like to reserve a copy to be signed.

“In the nineteenth century, when much of the nation was solidifying racial discrimination and barriers between the races and to achievement for former slaves, the small town of Covert, Michigan, was embarking on a bold social order–equality among the races. Historian Cox details the founding families–black and white–who established Covert in 1860 as a mixed-race community that defied the social conventions of the time, electing blacks to powerful political positions and providing a haven for economic development for achievers of all races. Drawing on historical documents from newspaper accounts to personal diaries and town records, Cox portrays the determined individuals who helped one another in hard times, built schools for all to attend, encouraged church membership for all, and in myriad ways took a different path than that of a nation in the grip of Jim Crow and lynchings.” -ALA review

Chris Tysh Book Signing Sun. Feb 6th

Detroit Poet and Playwright Chris Tysh will be signing and reading from her latest work Night Scales on Sunday, February 6th at 2pm.

“The shining star of Night Scales, though, is author Chris Tysh. It was Tysh’s own mother who survived the Holocaust by passing for Catholic and being exiled to Paris, where her daughter was raised. The author’s poetic meditation not only confronts survival in a visceral sense, but also the emotional implications of having to survive, weighing its value and its consequences in a manner that hasn’t been reached since Elie Wiesel’s harrowing recollection.  Through a series of jarring poetic scenes, Tysh comments on the weight that gets passed on to the family who made such radical sacrifices, showing us that though scars fade, they span generations and never really disappear.”  -Metro Times Review of Night Scales

Chris Tysh has been on the faculty of the English department at Wayne State University, Detroit since 1989, where she teaches creative writing and women’s studies. She has authored several poetry collections and completed a full screenplay based on a novel of Georges Bataille.  Her books include Secrets of Elegance, Porn?, Coat of Arms,  In the Name, Continuity Girl and Cleavage. Recently, her play, Night Scales, A Fable for Klara K, was produced at the Wayne State University Studio Theatre under the direction of Aku Kadogo. She has given numerous readings, both here and abroad. She is a recipient of a 2003 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a 2010 Kresge Artist Fellowship.

Books will be available for purchase at the event.  Book Beat is located at 26010 Greenfield Rd. Oak Park, MI  48237.  Please contact us (248) 968-1190 if you have any questions or would like to reserve a book for this event.

Author Anna-Lisa Cox at Southfield Library Thurs., Feb 10th

Author Anna-Lisa Cox will be reading and signing from her book A Stronger Kinship on Thursday, February 10 at 7pm in the Meeting Room of the Southfield Public Library (26300 Evergreen Road, Southfield, Michigan 48076).

Book Beat will be selling books for this event.  Please contact Book Beat (248) 968-1190 if you have any questions regarding this event or you would like to reserve a copy to be signed.

“In the nineteenth century, when much of the nation was solidifying racial discrimination and barriers between the races and to achievement for former slaves, the small town of Covert, Michigan, was embarking on a bold social order–equality among the races. Historian Cox details the founding families–black and white–who established Covert in 1860 as a mixed-race community that defied the social conventions of the time, electing blacks to powerful political positions and providing a haven for economic development for achievers of all races. Drawing on historical documents from newspaper accounts to personal diaries and town records, Cox portrays the determined individuals who helped one another in hard times, built schools for all to attend, encouraged church membership for all, and in myriad ways took a different path than that of a nation in the grip of Jim Crow and lynchings.” -ALA review

Signed Copies of Amos Mcgee back in stock!

We’re happy to have signed copies of this year’s Caldecott-winning title  “Amos McGee Has A Sick Day” back in stock.  They are signed by both Illustrator Erin E. Stead and Author Philip C. Stead.

Book Beat is located at 26010 Greenfield Rd., Oak Park, MI 48237.  Please call us at (248) 968-1190 if you would like to reserve a copy or have any questions.

2011 ALA Award Winners now in stock!

Congratulations to all the winners of the 2011 ALA Children’s Book Awards!

Newberry and Caldecott Award-winners- as well as Honor titles- are now in stock, including author Clare Vanderpool’s Newberry award-winning debut novel, Moon Over Manifest.

Special congratulations to Michigan illustrator Erin E. Stead and her husband, author Philip C. Stead, on their 2011 Caldecott Award-winning book A Sick Day for Amos Mcgee.  Some of you may recall meeting Philip and Erin in 2009 when we hosted a signing at the Oak Park Public Library  for Philip’s first book Creamed Tuna Fish & Peas on Toast.  We are very happy for them and look forward to their future efforts.

Reading Group Selection for February

The Book Beat Reading Group will not be meeting in January. The Tanners by Robert Walser will be the book discussion for the month of February. We will be meeting on Wednesday, February 23rd @ 7:00 p.m. at the Goldfish Teahouse, 117 W. Fourth Street in Downtown Royal Oak. All are welcome.

Copies of The Tanners are now in stock at Book Beat and are discounted 15%.

“A clairvoyant of the small” W. G. Sebald calls Robert Walser, one of his favorite writers in the world, in his acutely beautiful, personal, and long introduction, studded with his signature use of photographs.

“The incredible shrinking writer is a major twentieth-century prose artist who…can be placed in that comic tradition [that] runs from Gogol through Kafka and down to José Saramago . . . . When Walser met Lenin in Zurich during the war, all he had to say was ‘So you, too, like fruitcake?’ . . . It is remarkable to see what variety and richness what easiness and charm, what winsome inanities and philosophical depths he could pack into half a page.”
—Benjamin Kunkel, The New Yorker

Author Heather Sellers at the Baldwin Library, Wed. Feb. 16th

Author Heather Sellers will be reading from and signing her latest book You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know at the Baldwin Public Library (300 West Merrill Street, Birmingham, MI 48009 (248) 647-1700) on Wed., Feb. 16th at 7:30pm.

“You Don’t Look Like Anyone I Know does not read like any memoir you know…Unless I’ve got prose blindness, Sellers is an ace…Her calm, glass-half- full-to-overflowing worldview could, in another writer’s hands, veer towards treacle, but she pulls it off beautifully. I predict exciting things for her: critical acclaim, hearty sales, and, perhaps best of all, long lines of strangers at every reading.”
-The New York Times Book Review

Book Beat will be selling books for this event.  If you have any questions or would like to reserve a copy to be signed, contact Book Beat at (248) 968-1190.

Join us on Sunday afternoon, June 27th at 2 PM at the Book Beat, 26010 Greenfield in Oak Park, for a special presentation with poet, playwright and educator Bill Harris. Please call 248-968-1190 for more information or check http://thebookbeat.com

Bill will present his book Birth of a Notion, which confronts contemporary stereotypes and prejudices by looking back to their roots in early American history. In a hybrid work of prose and poetry that takes its cues from nineteenth-century minstrelsy, Harris speaks back to preconceived notions about “blackness” through many different characters and voices. His narrative is at turns sarcastic, serious, wry, and lyrical, as he investigates the source of pervasive racist images and their incorporation into American culture.

“An incisive, witty, and elegant account of the complex dimensions and often deeply disturbing realities informing the contentious American discourse(s) on racial mythology, cultural identity, and political history.” – Kofi Notambu

Harris takes readers on a tour of nineteenth-century American history, from the 1830s and the rise of the abolitionist movement, to Reconstruction and the Industrial Revolution in the 1860s, and to the beginning of the twentieth century. He considers cultural productions that gave rise to America’s idea of the “new Negro,” including the development of minstrelsy as popular entertainment, the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the museum curios of P. T. Barnum, and the exhibitions of “exotic” people at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Along the way, Harris interjects a range of symbols, word-play, and famous personalities into his narrative, referring to everyone from Karl Marx, Uncle Sam, Charles Dickens, Buffalo Bill, and Walt Whitman. He ends with the development of jazz and the blues as cultural products that would become important vehicles for self-representation in the new century. Harris’s fast-paced narrative interspersed with graphic elements shows the importance of point-of-view in creating history, which always contains some elements of fiction as a result. Anyone interested in poetry, American history, and African American studies will appreciate Birth of a Notion.

“In the pernicious game of truth vs. myth, Bill Harris’s hard-hitting Birth of a Notion knocks the ball all the way out of the park.” — Al Young, poet laureate emeritus of California

Playwright, poet, critic and novelist, Bill Harris, is a Professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit. He was formerly Production Coordinator for Jazzmobile, and the New Federal Theatre, both in New York. His plays have had more than seventy productions nationwide.

“Ashley Bryan was born in a rough section of New York City in 1923, one of six children born to West Indian immigrants from Antigua. His early love of drawing, painting, and creating handmade books was encouraged by family, friends, and school teachers.” A more complete biography is available at the Children’s Library at the University of Southern Mississippi

Starting minutes after Franklin finished her distinctive rendition of “My Country Tis of Thee” Tuesday, the store’s phones started ringing.

By this afternoon, they had sold hundreds of hats. A store they work with in Dallas had sold 500 more, and the material was running out.

“People are calling from England, asking for the hat,” said Luke Song, who designed Franklin’s chapeau. I’m shocked. I had no idea. We did not expect this. Source: Bill McGraw,The Detroit Free Press

And that soulful whisper-shout rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” was an amazing piece of work – up there with Jimi Hendrix’s “Star Spangled Banner” – a moment suspended in time – she rocked the world!

“I am obviously profoundly honored and thrilled,” she said. “Not only to have a chance to have some small part of this extraordinary moment in American history. . . . This incoming president of ours has shown in every act that words matter, that words carry meaning, that words carry power, that words are the medium with which we communicate across difference and that words have tremendous possibilities, and those possibilities are not empty.”full article: The Washington Post

Listen to the Poetry Foundation interview with Elizabeth Alexander on how the Derek Walcott-toting, June Jordan-quoting president will affect poets and poetry – podcast at: Obamapoetics at the National Poetry Foundation.

“Words matter. Language matters. We live in and express ourselves with language, and that is how we communicate and move through the world in community.

President-elect Obama has shown us at all turns his respect for the power of language. The care with which he has always used language along with his evident understanding that language and words bear power and tell us who we are across differences, have been hallmarks of his political career. My joy at being selected to compose and deliver a poem on the occasion of Obama’s Presidential inaugural emanates from my deep respect for him as a person of meaningful, powerful words that move us forward. And as his campaign was a movement much larger than the man himself, I understand that as a country we stand poised to make tremendous choices about our collective future. The distillation of language in poetry, its precision, can help us see sharply in the midst of many conundrums.

This is a powerful moment in our history. The joy I feel is sober and profound because so much struggle and sacrifice have brought us to this day. And there is so much work to be done ahead of us. Poetry is not meant to cheer; rather, poetry challenges, and moves us towards transformation. Language distilled and artfully arranged shifts our experience of the words – and the worldviews – we live in.

This is only the fourth time in our history that a President has featured a poet at his inaugural. I hope that this portends well for the future of the arts in our everyday and civic life.”

Elizabeth Alexander
December 2008

Past Poet’s who have Read at a Presidential Inauguration:

• Robert Frost recited “The Gift Outright” (PBS transcript) at John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural. Frost recited the poem from memory after he was unable to read the text of the poem he’d written for the inauguration, “Dedication” (PBS transcript), because of the sun’s glare upon the snow-covered ground. A video of Frost reading “The Gift Outright” at Kennedy’s inauguration is available through the EarthStation1.com Web site (http://www.earthstation1.com/).
• Maya Angelou read “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s 1993 inaugural. A video of the reading is available through YouTube.
• Miller Williams read “Of History and Hope” at Bill Clinton’s 1997 inaugural. Click here to listen to a RealAudio recording of Williams reading the inaugural poem from the PBS Online NewsHour website.

In addition, James Dickey read ”The Strength of Fields” at Jimmy Carter’s January 19, 1977 inaugural gala at the Kennedy Center.

Source: Library of Congress, FAQ

Some background history: hundreds of these invented albums, complete with liner notes, bar-codes, spine titles, and shrinkwrap were found at a flea market sale somewhere around Washington D.C. The mix of album’s intoned enticing titles like ‘Mercy the World’, TV Dinners of Mines’, ‘Bloody Vampure’, ‘Ghetto Prince’ and ‘Channel of Dream’. They appeared on the made up labels; Ramit Records, Puppy Dogg, Fake Records, Decision Records, T.T.H. records, Lord’s House, Sex Stereo, Spooky, Mercy Records and many others. Some of these “albums” even had hand-drawn grooves printed on the cardboard records they contained. There were also stacks found of hand-drawn 7″ 45s. Some of the albums contained their own hand written lyrics:

Better get hip Come off This Trip
Killin your Own Kind
Poisoning Our Minds
Stealing Without Concern or Feelings
Beating and raping our women
“where have we come?”
“Where have we been?”
“Where are we going?”
When every, everyday some what
We’re living in sin
“PEOPLE! PEOPLE!… WELL… WE…”
Better get hip and come off that trip…
– From The Drug Store, by Mingering Mike

Its a story that has come full circle with the publication of Mingering Mike’s beautiful new coffee-table sized book. Work once discarded is rescued from oblivion and given a second chance. A star is reborn. Mike has now joined the ranks of visionary African-American artists such as Mose Tolliver, Bill Traylor, and James Hampton. This just in: you can now listen to vintage Mingering Mike recordings taken from old ascetate pressings he made in the early 1970s, hear several mind-blowing selections on MINGERING MIKE’S MYSPACE PAGE