Bill Harris‘ latest book Booker T. & Them: A Blues, is a “bio-poem” considering the lives of several African Americans who sought to be men that mattered in a racist America, including Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois, William Monroe Trotter, George Washington Carver, and Jack Johnson, as he traces their effects on history and each other.

“The genius of Bill Harris has never been more evident than in Booker T & Them. This book is such a tightly woven fabric of history, biography, poetry, drama, song, sound, quotations, and definitions that the threads defy separation. We are taken on an unforgettable journey into the thoughts and experiences of Washington and some of his contemporaries their public and their secret selves as they battle racism and its apostles in various ways. Everyone who cares about justice should read this marvelously written book.” -Naomi Long Madgett, poet laureate of Detroit

Bill Harris retired as professor of English at Wayne State University in 2011 and is author of numerous plays, including Robert Johnson Trick the Devil, Stories About the Old Days, Riffs, and Coda. He is the author of three books of poetry, Birth of a Notion; Or, the Half Ain t Never Been Told (Wayne State University Press, 2009), The Ringmaster s Array, and Yardbird Suite: Side One, which won the 1997 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Award. Harris was named the 2011 Kresge Eminent Artist by the Kresge Foundation in recognition of his professional accomplishments and community engagement.

Terry Blackhawk’s latest book of poetry is The Light Between, a collection probing beyond and through the painful dissolution of a long marriage to examine the complexities of love with bravery and delicacy. Mythical themes, elements of the natural world, and masculine/feminine polarities resonate throughout Blackhawk’s poems as she explores loss, the nature of relationships, and the integrity of the individual soul. Ultimately, The Light Between celebrates our connectedness to one another, to the planet, and to the natural world.

Terry Blackhawk is the author of five previous poetry collections, including Escape Artist, winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Prize. She has received the Foley Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize, the Michigan Governor s Award for Arts Education, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Michigan Council for Arts and Cultural Affairs. She is founding director of Detroit s acclaimed InsideOut Literary Arts Project and lives and writes not far from the river in Detroit, Michigan.

The 1968 season- hailed as “The Year of the Pitcher”- culminated in a legendary World Series pitting the defending champion St. Louis Cardinals against the Detroit Tigers for what would become known as the last “pure” World Series before divisional playoffs were instituted. Led by ace pitchers Denny McLain and Mickey Lolich- as well as a lineup that included Al Kaline, Jim Northrup, and Willie Horton- Detroit battled back from a 3-1 Series deficit to win their first title since 1945, giving the city a much-needed boost following the previous summer’s devastating urban uprising.

“Summer of ‘68″ isn’t a book about Detroit; it is bigger than that. But that year, the story of Tigers baseball resonated beyond the city’s borders. Wendel ably captures both how, and why, it mattered so much”. – The Detroit Free Press, April 15th complete review here!

Read an excerpt from Summer of ‘68 here.

Read a recent NY Times op-ed by author Tim Wendel about the 1968 season here.

“No book better captures how in 1968 sports changed America—and vice versa. In splendid fashion, Tim Wendel takes us on a rollicking journey through an unparalleled year of tumult, tragedy, and, too, joy. Summer of ’68 reads like a novel brimming with surprising action, colorful characters, and fresh insights. I enjoyed every page.”  Tom Stanton, author of The Final Season and Ty and The Babe

Wendel’s seamlessly narrative juggles players’ quotes from 1968 and reminiscing in the present time. – The Joy of Sox

Wendel is terrific at providing us with a balance of the game itself, the players involved and their ties to the situations surrounding the racial divide, the unpopular war and tumultuous political circumstances. He is able to describe the anger, the fears and the disgust felt by citizens and players alike. Most importantly and thankfully, he is able to meld the social elements with the play on the field. He provides smiles to the readers, by stringing together the historic events on the field that any true baseball fan can admire. As Wendel says, baseball and America changed forever in the summer of 1968.  - Redbird Rants

About the Author: Tim Wendell is the author of nine books including High Heat: The Secret History of the Fastball and the Improbable Search for the Fastest Pitcher of All Time. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Weekend, Washingtonian, National Geographic Traveler, Huffington Post, The Potomac Review, Gargoyle, GQ and Esquire. Tim teaches fiction and nonfiction writing at Johns Hopkins University, where he received the 2009 Award for Teaching Excellence and the Professional Achievement Award in 2004 and 2010. He is a Walter E. Dakin Fellow and Tennessee Williams Scholar to the Sewanee Writing Conference, and a Pen/?Faulkner visiting writer to the Washington, D.C. Public Schools. He received his master’s in writing from Johns Hopkins and a bachelor’s degree in magazine journalism from Syracuse University.

Born in Philadelphia, he was raised in Lockport, N.Y. One of his first jobs was writing music reviews for The Buffalo Courier-Express. Since then he’s worked on both coasts and in between, covering everything from the Olympics to politics to the America’s Cup. He lives in the Washington, D.C. area with his wife and their two children.

Technorati Tags: Baseball, Detroit Tigers, Summer of '68, Tim Wendel

“The word mitzvah comes from the root of the word…connection. It’s that idea about connecting with other human being even if it’s over a very minor thing like letting someone into traffic.”  -Linda Cohen.

1,000 Mitzvahs: How Small Acts of Kindness Can Heal, Inspire and Change Your Life shares Cohen’s two-and-a-half-year journey from sorrow to inspiration through simple daily acts of kindness. She presents each mitzvah as a short vignette and the myriad forms they take from helping the elderly to donating to good causes to baking and collecting food for others. As she pursues her quest, Cohen finds her life is improved by these small acts and that every time she goes our of her way to do something good for someone else, she enhances her own well-being.

“Performing one thousand mitzvahs turned out to be exactly what I needed to move from grief to inspiration and help honor my father’s memory in a positive manner. Along the way, I received so much more than I gave.”

To reserve copies of the book please call Book Beat at 248-968-1190, or visit their website: thebookbeat.com

A limited number of autographed copies of the book are now available at the Book Beat.
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In addition to writing, Cohen speaks around the country on the subjects of volunteerism, parenting and mitzvahs. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Willowbrook, a non-profit summer arts program for children. Visit her at www.1000mitzvahs.com.

Read an interview with Linda Cohen here.

Images from the Linda Cohen signing at the Oak Park Library, photos by Elaine Cohen:

Technorati Tags: 1000 MItzvahs, Linda Cohen

“Celestina” draws from some medieval practices, yet it is clearly positioned within a new world where greed is paramount. On a more positive note, Rojas’s surprisingly contemporary women characters signify a change in attitude as well.” – World Books Review: A Chic “Celestina”

A Spanish Romeo and Juliet, Celestina was published in 1499 and became Spain’s first-ever bestseller. Readers thrilled to the salty character of Celestina and her world of prostitutes and black magic even as they mourned the fate of Calisto and Melibea, the young lovers she unites using her wiles as a seller of perfumes and potions. Fernando De Rojas’s exhilarating mix of street wit, obscenity, and cultured rhetoric mark Celestina as a masterpiece: an original, explosive, genre-defying work that paved the way for the picaresque novel and for Cervantes.

Fernando de Rojas (1475–1541) was born in Toledo, Spain. He worked as a lawyer and served as mayor of Talavera for some time. Celestina is his only published work.

World Book Night is an annual celebration designed to spread a love of reading and books. To be held in the U.S. as well as the U.K. and Ireland on April 23, 2012. It will see tens of thousands of people go out into their communities to spread the joy and love of reading by giving out free World Book Night paperbacks.

World Book Night, through social media and traditional publicity, will also promote the value of reading, of printed books, and of bookstores and libraries to everyone year-round.

A list of chosen World Book Night paperback titles can also be found HERE.

Help spread the word through the World Book Night Facebook page!  Also, on the day of the event we encourage everyone to pass along any books from your own personal collections in order to spread the gift of reading even more. Give a book to friend or stranger! Make it a fun day to remember! If you are a teacher or  educator, please consider a classroom program geared toward making April 23rd an awareness day for books, reading and literacy.

April 23 is also a symbolic day in world literature. Declared as International Day of the Book by UNESCO in 1995, this celebration of books  and literature draws it’s inspiration from a Catalan tradition, the Festival of the Rose.

Legend has it that Saint George, Patron Saint of Catalonia and international knight-errant, slew a dragon about to devour a beautiful Catalan princess. From the dragon’s blood sprouted a rosebush, from which the hero plucked the prettiest rose for the princess. Hence the traditional Rose Festival celebrated in Barcelona since the Middle Ages to honor chivalry and love. In 1923, this lover’s “festa” became even more poetic when it merged with “el dia del llibre”, or The Day of the Book, to mark the nearly simultaneous deaths of Miguel de Cervantes and William Shakespeare, the two giants of literary history, on April 23, 1616.

On this day in Barcelona, bookstalls and street festivities run the length of the picturesque La Rambla, the old city’s main boulevard and, according to the Spanish author Garcia Lorca, “the only street in the world which I wish would never end”. Read more about this tradition at: DRAGON’S BLOOD & BOOKS- A SPRING FESTIVAL

Technorati Tags: World Book Day, World Book Night

Sumner does well to contextualize contemporary events both in the world and the writer’s personal life during each novel’s conception, ultimately connecting many dots in the Vonnegut oeuvre. - Publisher’s Weekly

“In his chapter on Night Mother, Sumner zeroes in on the novel’s insistence on the impossibility of true moral purity through its portrayal of a protagonist who embodies the role of both war criminal and war hero: “He opens us to the disturbing malleability of the human soul, insists that there is no place of purity and ‘clean hands’ to which we can safely and finally retreat.” – Kirkus reviews

In Unstuck in Time, Gregory Sumner guides us, with insight and passion, through a biography of fifteen of Kurt Vonnegut’s best known works, his fourteen novels starting with Player Piano (1952) all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005), to illustrate the quintessential American writer’s profound engagement with the “American Dream” in its various forms.

Sumner gives us a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American Dream: grandiose ambition, unbridled material success, rugged individualism, and “winners” over “losers.” Instead of a celebration of these values, we read and share Vonnegut’s outrage, his brokenhearted empathy for those who struggle under the ethos of survival-of-the-fittest in the frontier mentality—something he once memorably described as “an impossibly tough-minded experiment in loneliness.”

Heroic and tragic, Vonnegut’s novels reflect the pain of his own life’s experiences, relieved by small acts of kindness, friendship, and love that exemplify another way of living, another sort of human utopia, an alternative American Dream, and the reason we always return to his books.

GREGORY D. SUMNER, JD, PhD, is chair of history at the University of Detroit Mercy, where he has taught since 1993. He holds a doctorate in American history from Indiana University and is the author of Dwight Macdonald and the Politics Circle. Sumner has been awarded summer fellowships by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and has twice been William J. Fulbright Senior Lecturer at the Université di Roma Tre. Watch a live radio interview with Gregory Sumner.

Technorati Tags: Gregory Sumner, Kurt Vonnegut, Unstuck in Time

On Saturday, May 19th from 11am to 12pm in the Elmwood Branch of the Detroit Public Library (550 Chene, Detroit, MI (313) 481-1732) , author and Detroit News columnist Susan Whitall along with Kevin and Keith John (children of Little Willie John) will host an event 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.

“Little Willie John is the soul singer’s soul singer.” – Marvin Gaye

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

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“Full of encounters with a veritable who’s who of downtown New York and the counterculture beyond it (Lenny Bruce, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa, Andy Warhol, Pete Seeger, Ken Kesey, Charles Olson, George Plimpton, Abbie Hoffman, and the Grateful Dead, just to name a few), Fug You is an illustrated history of social change in the 60’s, as told by he man at the center of it all. In short and in long, this is a “coming-of-age” drama of epic proportions, tracing the voyage of a man through the wild electromagnetic forests of the 1960’s as he holds together a longtime marriage with his college sweetheart while savoring an era of experimental art, music, sexual rebellion, and demand for genuine change in America.” -from the introduction to Fug You

Sometimes described as the bridge the between the Beat and Hippie generations, Ed Sanders has been at the forefront of the American avant-garde since the early 1960’s. He created Fuck You/A Magazine of the Arts in 1962, the year before opening the legendary Peace Eye Bookstore in NY’s Lower East Side, which quickly became an important gathering place for bohemians, artists, and radicals. In 1964, he co-founded The Fugs, a satirical and self-satirizing rock band with a political slant, who performed at various war protests against America’s involvement in Vietnam.  The band’s often frank and humorous lyrics about sex, drugs, and politics have caused a hostile reaction in some quarters, most notably the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the late 1960’s. In 1966, he was at the center of a notorious obscenity trial after authorities raided the Peace Eye Bookstore, landing him on the cover of Life magazine as “a leader of New York’s Other Culture.”

In 1971, Sanders wrote The Family, a profile of the events leading up to the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders. He attended the Manson group’s murder trial, and spent time at their residence at the Spahn Movie Ranch. Sanders is also the founder of the Investigative Poetry movement. His 1976 manifesto Investigative Poetry, published by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books, had an impact on investigative writing and poetry during the ensuing decades. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in poetry in 1983, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in poetry in 1987. His Thirsting for Peace in a Raging Century, Selected Poems 1961-1985 won an American Book Award in 1988.

Watch an hour-long interview with Ed Sanders from 1975 here.

Book Beat is located at 26070 Greenfield Rd. in Oak Park, MI.

“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.

“Little Willie John is the soul singer’s soul singer.” – Marvin Gaye

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