We have 168 local authors in our directory!
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| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
|---|---|---|
Jasmin An | Jasmine An comes from the Midwest. Her poetry and non-fiction can be found in Black Warrior Review’s Boyfriend Village, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nat. Brut, Waxwing and Best New Poets 2020. She is author of two chapbooks of poetry, Naming the No-Name Woman (Two Sylvias Press, 2016) and Monkey Was Here (Porkbelly Press, 2020), and Poetry Editor at Agape Editions. Her PhD dissertation in English and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan focuses on 21st century poets who co-opt bureaucratic paperwork as a response to the impact of U.S. empire in Southeast Asia. Her academic work of writing about poems and poets she admires is one way of honoring and caring for the community through which she’s learned to encounter and understand the world. Jasmine is a member of the Digital Inequality Lab, an interdisciplinary group of scholars exploring questions of power and our digital reality through humanities and culture centered methods. They published a co-authored "Lag Manifesto" meditating on the intersections between the twinned pandemics of COVID-19 and anti-Black racism with the journal Afterimage. Jasmine presented at the 2020 Council of Thai Studies Annual Gathering, where her paper, “a handful of syllables tossed back across the water:” negotiating diasporic Thai American gender identity through poetic practice, won the Graduate Student Paper Prize. | |
Jonathan Rowe | Born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Jonathan Rowe has won two Avery Hopwood writing awards at the University of Michigan, the Marion Kirkwood Best Brief award at Stanford Law School, and the Thomas Cooley Prize for Best Brief in the Michigan Supreme Court. After law school, Jonathan worked five years as a Trial Attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, prosecuting police brutality and racial violence cases; ten years as a Senior Partner at Dykema Gossett PLLC in Michigan, specializing in media defense litigation; and ten years as a Partner in Soble Rowe Krichbaum LLP in Ann Arbor, broadening his practice to include plaintiff-side securities class action and tobacco litigation, and serving as a private mediator and arbitrator. In 2006 Jonathan Rowe retired from law practice to write novels full-time. He is the author of The Writing on the Wall (2003), A Question of Identity (2005), and The River of Strange People (2010). Jonathan and his wife, Susan Kessler, lived in Hawaii for 11 years, but recently returned to Ann Arbor, to be closer to their two children and grandchildren. | |
Stephanie D. Preston | Stephanie D. Preston is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan. She has a master’s degree and a PhD in behavioral neuroscience from the University of California at Berkeley, where she studied the neurobiology and behavior of decisions in food-storing animals. Subsequently, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Department of Neurology at the University of Iowa College of Medicine to study how the brain supports emotion-based decisions in humans. Stephanie’s research is interdisciplinary in focus and methods to address how the brain evolved to support complex behavior at the intersection of emotion and decision making. One focus is on empathy and altruism, particularly how others' states impact our own and motivate helping. Another focus is on decisions about resources, such as food, money, material goods, and charitable gifts, to address issues surrounding consumerism, hoarding, and pro-environmental behavior. She is currently fusing her lines of research to determine how best to promote altruism and charitable giving across racial and political divides and for other species and the natural environment, including collaborations with corporations and non-profit organizations. |  |
Kay Gray | Kay Gray is originally from Los Angeles, but has chosen four seasons and adorable downtowns over fire in the hills and too much traffic. She lives in a historic home with her husband, dog, and cat, and keeps saying she will succeed at a garden next Spring, but we all know how that goes. She has short stories in Queen of Clocks and Other Steampunk Tales and Fairy Tales Punk'd. Kay is currently working furiously on scripts for her podcast Haunted Mitten, as well as clacking away at the keyboard on three other novels. | |
Stephanie Tharp | Stephanie Tharp is an industrial designer and educator— currently an Associate Professor and an Undergraduate Program Co-Director at the University of Michigan’s Stamps School of Art & Design. Her recent research surrounds the theory and practice of discursive design. One current project is a collaboration with chronic pain specialists exploring public engagement with medical research and challenging popular stigmas of pain sufferers. |  |
Christine Hume | Born into a military family and constitutionally restless, Christine Hume lived in over 25 places in the U.S. and Europe before landing in Ypsilanti. Her latest collection of essays on sex offenders and women’s bodies, Everything I Never Wanted to Know, will be available from Ohio State University Press (21st Century Essays Series). She is also the author of a lyric portrait of girlhood, Saturation Project (Solid Objects, 2021), which The New York Times says, “arrives…with the force of a hurricane,” as well as several books of poetry. She has guest edited two issues of the American Book Review, on #MeToo and Girlhood, and is currently guest editing a folio for The Hopkins Review on walking. Since 2001, she has been a faculty member in the Creative Writing program at Eastern Michigan University. | |
Charles Taylor | Cleveland native Charles Taylor and his wife, university administrator and award- winning children's book author Debbie Taylor, have lived and worked in Ann Arbor, Michigan for more than thirty years. An avid golfer, music collector and film buff, Charles is a longtime lecturer in English at the University of Michigan. He is author of the San Francisco-based thriller Dark Rhythm and the detective novel Watching, which is set in Southeast Michigan. | |
Deb Pilutti | Deb Pilutti writes and illustrates books for children with humor and candor. She feels lucky to have a job where reading, playing with toys, and watching cartoons is considered “research.” Before becoming an author & illustrator, Deb was a graphic designer and created toys and packaging for Oliebollen.com as well as graphics for SeaWorld and Warner Brothers theme parks. Deb lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan with her husband, Tom, and Australian Shepard, Tater. She enjoys hiking, camping, reading and hanging out with friends and family. | |
Stephanie Heit | Stephanie Heit (she/her) is a queer disabled poet, dancer, teacher, and codirector of Turtle Disco, a somatic writing space on Anishinaabe land in Ypsilanti, Michigan. She is a Zoeglossia Fellow, bipolar, a shock/psych system survivor, a mad activist, and a member of the Olimpias, an international disability performance collective. Her hybrid memoir poem PSYCH MURDERS (Wayne State University Press, 2022) takes you inside psychiatric wards and shock treatments toward new futures of care. The Color She Gave Gravity (The Operating System, 2017) explores the seams of language, movement, and mental health difference. Her work has appeared in journals such as Orion, Sonora Review, BathHouse, Venti, Rogue Agent, Ecotone, Anomaly, and About Place. | |
Kelly Murdoch-Kitt | Kelly Murdoch-Kitt is an Associate Professor at the Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan. She is a user experience designer and educator focused on people, systems, and interpersonal interactions. In her work and teaching, human connection drives the creation of effective and socially responsible concepts. She integrates visual communication, user experience, and service design with behavior change and social engagement, drawing on her industry experience as a user experience strategist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to joining U-M, Murdoch-Kitt served as an Assistant Professor in the School of Design at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She also taught in the Graphic Design Programs at the University of San Francisco and California College of the Arts. Her excellence in teaching and contributions to service within the discipline have been recognized by the Design Incubation Communication Design Educator Awards: Intercultural Design Collaborations in Sustainability; and the Decipher 2018 Design Educators Research Conference. Murdoch-Kitt and her research partner, Dr. Denielle J. Emans of Roger Williams University are co-authors of Intercultural Collaboration by Design: Drawing from Differences, Distances, and Disciplines through Visual Thinking (Routledge 2020). Based on their research, the book offers more than 30 visual thinking activities to support effective collaboration among diverse teams. Their research group, ORBIT Labs (Online Resource for Building Intercultural Teams), was recently recognized as a recipient of the 2022 Carol Hollenshead Inspire Award for Excellence in Promoting Equity and Social Change. Murdoch-Kitt and Emans are currently working together on a new book about the intersection of creative practice and psychological resilience, which argues that everyone can learn to become creatively resilient—and put methods of adaptability, flexibility, and optimism into practice. Its 15 case studies include various projects, practices, and activities that show readers how to utilize creative methods to work positively with uncertainty. |  |
| Author | Biography | Book Cover(s) |
