Upcoming Events
Dissidence: Exiled Writers on Resistance and Risk
Friday, September 16 at 7 pm at Trinosophes (1464 Gratiot Avenue, Detroit)
Friday, September 16 at 7 pm at Trinosophes (1464 Gratiot Avenue, Detroit)
City of Asylum Detroit kicks off the first ever Cities of Asylum Solidarity Tour, an annual panel of writers, artists, musicians, and journalists who have been attacked, imprisoned, and censored because of their work. This year’s theme is “Dissidence: Exiled Writers on Resistance and Risk.”
Cities of Asylum, a safe haven network to protect writers’ freedom of expression and physical safety, was inspired by Salman Rushdie, who suffered an attempted assassination last month. City of Asylum Detroit is the newest of four branches in the US to adapt this mission to their local context. Since opening their doors in 2020, they’ve brought feminist Burmese poet Pencilio, queer Nigerian novelist Pwaangulongii Dauod, Haitian photojournalist Dieu-Nalio Chery and Haitian videographer Mathide Chery Debel to safety.
Dissidence panelists will include essayist Pwaangulongii Dauod, who received death threats for writing about queer culture in Nigeria; poet Dmitry Bykov, who nearly died in a poisoning, then was banned from teaching or appearing on Russian TV; political cartoonist Pedro X. Molina, who watched Nicaraguan state forces jail his colleagues and occupy his newspaper's offices; and novelist Anouar Rahmani, who was threatened with imprisonment for writing about human rights in Algeria.
All four were forced to flee their homelands, and all four found safe haven in a City of Asylum in the United States.
Timed for Banned Books Week, the event is part of a three-city tour among City of Asylum programs starting in Detroit then traveling to Pittsburgh and Ithaca. It is also part of the new Writers at Risk series at Wayne State University, featuring writer and journalist Danny Fenster, who spent six months in prison in Myanmar.
The attack on Rushdie is a brutal reminder of the importance of the mission of City of Asylum Detroit and the values we will continue to defend. Come hear the stories of dissident writers who have found safety thanks to his work, and learn about their commitment to free creative expression at this evening of readings and lively conversation.
“Dissidence: Exiled Writers on Resistance and Risk” is supported by a grant from Cornell University’s Migrations Global Grand Challenge and the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative.
Cities of Asylum, a safe haven network to protect writers’ freedom of expression and physical safety, was inspired by Salman Rushdie, who suffered an attempted assassination last month. City of Asylum Detroit is the newest of four branches in the US to adapt this mission to their local context. Since opening their doors in 2020, they’ve brought feminist Burmese poet Pencilio, queer Nigerian novelist Pwaangulongii Dauod, Haitian photojournalist Dieu-Nalio Chery and Haitian videographer Mathide Chery Debel to safety.
Dissidence panelists will include essayist Pwaangulongii Dauod, who received death threats for writing about queer culture in Nigeria; poet Dmitry Bykov, who nearly died in a poisoning, then was banned from teaching or appearing on Russian TV; political cartoonist Pedro X. Molina, who watched Nicaraguan state forces jail his colleagues and occupy his newspaper's offices; and novelist Anouar Rahmani, who was threatened with imprisonment for writing about human rights in Algeria.
All four were forced to flee their homelands, and all four found safe haven in a City of Asylum in the United States.
Timed for Banned Books Week, the event is part of a three-city tour among City of Asylum programs starting in Detroit then traveling to Pittsburgh and Ithaca. It is also part of the new Writers at Risk series at Wayne State University, featuring writer and journalist Danny Fenster, who spent six months in prison in Myanmar.
The attack on Rushdie is a brutal reminder of the importance of the mission of City of Asylum Detroit and the values we will continue to defend. Come hear the stories of dissident writers who have found safety thanks to his work, and learn about their commitment to free creative expression at this evening of readings and lively conversation.
“Dissidence: Exiled Writers on Resistance and Risk” is supported by a grant from Cornell University’s Migrations Global Grand Challenge and the Mellon Foundation’s Just Futures Initiative.
Previous Events
Lives of the Saints
By Alan Franklin
Book launch with a reading by Alan Franklin
Friday, April 8 at 6:30 pm at Trinosophes (1464 Gratiot Avenue, Detroit)
A pointedly jaundiced look at the meaning of sainthood in the modern world, Franklin’s book is, among other things, the outcome of many years spent wondering how we humans went so wildly astray in our treatment of each other and of our shared planetary home. In that vein, Franklin’s multiple narrators embody, confront or critique a panoply of contemporary saints and their symptoms, from Christopher Columbus to Adolph Hitler, from family psychodynamics to globe-encircling hierarchies of power and domination. And all with a smile on their lips and a song in their hearts.
For most of his years as a fixture in Detroit’s Cass Corridor arts, music, and politics scene, guitarist Alan Franklin has been best known as a songwriter/singer with that city’s anarcho ska-punk band, the Layabouts. During that same time, his prose writings have appeared in riverrun magazine, the Fifth Estate, the Daily Barbarian, Subversions (Montreal), Dispatch Detroit, Three Fold and Autonomedia.
Ferne, A Detroit Story
By Barbara Henning
Book launch with readings by Barbara Henning and Lynn Crawford and introductions by Chris Tysh, Three Fold Poetry EditorSunday, March 6 at 3 pm EST on Zoom
Click here to register for this event. Please provide your name and email address.
Three Fold is delighted to present a virtual book launch for Ferne, A Detroit Story, a hybrid biography of the life of author Barbara Henning's mother, as well as a history of Detroit, the city in which she lived. About the book, Henning writes:
“Ferne was extraordinary in a very ordinary way, one of the many remembered only by family and friends; she was vibrant, funny and tender. Each of us has a particular story, a particular engagement with our dreams and desires as we encounter the limits of our mortality. As a young working-class woman, Ferne juggled with her possibilities, living through the first wave of feminism, Prohibition, the Great Depression and World War II; she died at 37 with four children, leaving an absence that demanded this retelling. The book is a collage of novelized story, with photographs and newspaper clipping from The Detroit Times, as well as from other histories and papers.”
A native Detroiter who lives in New York, Barbara Henning is the author of four novels and eight collections of poetry, most recently, Digigram (United Artists Books 2020) and a novel, Just Like That (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016). She has edited The Selected Prose of Bobbie Louise Hawkins (BlazeVox, 2012) and Looking Up Harryette Mullen (Belladonna, 2011).
This afternoon literary event opens with a reading by fiction writer Lynn Crawford of a novel in-progress as well as an excerpt from Crawford’s Three Fold literary series, Imaginary Dinner Party. Crawford's other books include Solow (House of Outside Press/Hard Press Editions, 1995), Blow (Hard Press Editions, 1998), Fortification Resort (Black Square Editions, 2005) a series of art-related sestinas, Simply Separate People (Black Square Editions/Hammer Books, 2002), Simply Separate People, Two (Black Square Editions and the Brooklyn Rail, 2011) and Shankus & Kitto: A Saga (DittoDitto, 2016).
Poet and playwright Chris Tysh, who edits Three Fold's poetry section, provides author introductions for this event.