Saturday, September 30 at 1pm 2413 Parkview Ave. Free
Authors Kelly Fordon, Laura Hulthen Thomas, and Lolita Hernandez — each with titles published in Wayne State University’s Made in Michigan writers series — discuss how their fiction transforms home into character. How do writers use assumptions about familiar places to find the unexpected and surprising? When is a hometown the whole trouble, and also the last, best hope for change? They’ll also talk about how the unique landscape of the upper Midwest inspires their fiction.
This panel is preceded by a Local Writers Brown Bag Lunch & Gabfest at noon; drop in early to chat & check out the current roster of writers groups meeting at Kazoo Books.
Kelly Fordon’s work has appeared in The Florida Review, The Kenyon Review (KRO), Rattle and various other journals. She is the author of three poetry chapbooks. The first one, On the Street Where We Live, won the 2012 Standing Rock Chapbook Award and the latest one, The Witness, won the 2016 Eric Hoffer Award for the Chapbook and was shortlisted for the Grand Prize. Her novel-in-stories, Garden for the Blind, was chosen as a Michigan Notable Book, a 2016 Foreword Reviews’ INDIEFAB Finalist, a Midwest Book Award Finalist, an Eric Hoffer Finalist, and an IPPY Awards Bronze Medalist in the short story category. She teaches at the College for Creative Studies, Springfed Arts, and InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit.
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. States in Motion, a collection of short stories, has just been published as part of Wayne State University’s Made in Michigan writers series. She currently heads the undergraduate creative writing program at the University of Michigan’s Residential College, where she teaches fiction and creative nonfiction.
Lolita Hernandez is the author of two collections of short stories: Making Callaloo in Detroit, a 2015 Notable Book, and Autopsy of an Engine and Other Stories from the Cadillac Plant, winner of a 2005 PEN Beyond Margins Award. She also is the author of two chapbook collections of poems: Quiet Battles and snakecrossing. She is a 2012 Kresge Literary Arts fellow. 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 of the University of Michigan Residential College.
