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Events

Sunday, November 10, 2024 at 4 p.m.
The Night Lives of Bats
A lecture by Vanessa Rojas, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
Free and open to the public
Trinosophes, 1464 Gratiot Avenue, Detroit

Join us to learn more about how bats benefit our ecosystems. See and hear their recorded echolocation sounds and learn to look for unique characteristics to identify bats by sight and sound. Vanessa Rojas has been studying bats for over 15 years, beginning with her graduate research at University of Michigan–Flint. She then continued her work as a bat educator and researcher, splitting her time between Detroit and the Smoky Mountains National Park. Her work studying bat habitats continued with a PhD in Wildlife Ecology. She is now an Associate Professor at a State University of New York campus based in the Adirondack Park.


A Literary Celebration of Tyrone Williams’ Life and Work
Sunday, June 23, 2024 at 5-8 p.m.
Free and open to the public
Trinosophes, 1464 Gratiot Avenue, Detroit

Our dear friend & Three Fold editorial advisor, Detroit-born poet Tyrone Williams, passed away on March 11, one month after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. You are invited to attend a literary celebration of his life and work, organized by fellow Detroit poets.

Those presenting: Tyrone’s Sisters (Jacqueline Brooks, Wanda Gee, Andrea Martin), Alise Alousi, Rudy Baron, Melba Boyd, Pat Clifford, Lynn Crawford & John Haddad, Tod Duncan, Carla Harryman, Kim Hunter, Barbara Henning, Geoffrey Jacques, M.L. Liebler, Jonah Mixon-Webster, Kofi Natambu (via audio), Julie Patton, Lee Sandweiss, Suzanne Scarfone,  Dennis Teichman, Chris Tysh and Rayfield Waller.


The Hinterlands in Conversation with Jonathan Flatley
Sunday, April 7, 2024 at 7 p.m. 
In conjunction with Will You Miss Me? A Dossier on The Hinterlands by Jonathan Flatley
Trinosophes, 1464 Gratiot Avenue, Detroit


Ceremonial Abyss [live score]
Accompanied by Robert Laidler, Emily Roll, Tamar M. Boyadjian, Zan De Parry and John M. Ganiard
Thursday, February 15, 2024 at 7 p.m.
Trinosophes, 1464 Gratiot Avenue, Detroit


Trinosophes First Fundraiser for Two Rooms Records and Three Fold Press
Poetry readings by Isaac Pickell, kim d. hunter, Robert Laidler
Friday, September 29 at 6 p.m.
Trinosophes, 1464 Gratiot Avenue, Detroit

Isaac Pickell is a poet and PhD student in Detroit, where he teaches and studies the borderlands of Black literature. He is the author of the chapbook everything saved will be last (Black Lawrence Press, 2021) and It’s not over once you figure it out, a full-length collection forthcoming from Black Ocean in 2023. His most recent work can be found in Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, and Passages North.

Robert Laidler, Assistant Professor of Teaching in the Wayne State Department of English, is the author of a poetic libretto, The Fallen Petals of Nameless Flowers, which premiered at Chamber Music Detroit in 2022. He earned his MFA in poetry from the University of Michigan.

Based in Detroit, where he works for social justice groups in Michigan, kim d. hunter is a poet and prose writer. He is the author of a collection of short stories, The Official Report on Human Activity (Wayne State University, 2018), and two books of poetry: edge of the time zone (White Print Inc., 2009) and borne on slow knives (Past Tents, 2001). He co-directed the Woodward Line Poetry Series for thirteen years and holds a 2012 Kresge Literary Arts Fellowship.

Because this event is a fundraiser generating support for our free, online arts and literary journal, we appreciate contributions of $15 at the door, which buys you a ticket to stay beyond the reading and enjoy an evening also featuring music, refreshments and a raffle.




Dissidence: Exiled Writers on Resistance and Risk
Reading and discussion with Pwaangulongii Dauod, Dmitry Bykov, Pedro X. Molina, Anouar Rahmani
Friday, September 16, 2023 at 7 p.m.
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.


Lives of the Saints by Alan Franklin
Book launch with a reading by Alan Franklin
Friday, April 8, 2023 at 6:30 p.m.
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 Editor
Sunday, March 6, 2023 at 3 p.m. EST on Zoom

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).




Founded in 2020, Three Fold is an independent quarterly based in Detroit that presents exploratory points of view on arts, culture, and society in addition to original works in various media, including visual art, literature, film and the performing arts. We solicit and commission contributions from artists, writers, and activists around the world. Three Fold is a publication of Trinosophes Projects, a 501(c)3 non-profit organization located in the historic Eastern Market neighborhood in downtown Detroit. Click here to check out Three Fold’s events page and view a schedule of the publication’s on-site activities.

Three Fold recognizes, supports, and advocates for the sovereignty of Michigan’s twelve federally-recognized Indian nations, for historic Indigenous communities in Michigan, for Indigenous individuals and communities who live here now, and for those who were forcibly removed from their Homelands. We operate on occupied territories called Waawiiyaataanong, named by the Anishinaabeg and including the Three Fires Confederacy of Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa), and Bodewatomi (Potawatomi) peoples. We hold to commit to Indigenous communities in Waawiiyaataanong, their elders, both past and present, and future generations.