The Department of Interdisciplinary Studies, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Wayne State University, has selected Peter Markus as their 2007 Detroit Urban Writer-in-Residence. Markus will share his scholarship, professional and worldly experience with Detroit residents through a series of free writing workshops open to the public held on various days March 1 to May 29, 2007. The program is designed to promote critical and reflexive writing by Detroit’s urban residents about their life and the development of the social fabric of the city of Detroit.
Peter Markus is the author of several published books which include Good, Brother, AWOL Press, 2001 (reissued by Calamari Press in 2006); The Singing Fish, Calamari Press, 2005; The Moon is a Lighthouse, New Michigan Press, 2003; Still Lives with Whiskey Bottle, March Street Press, 1996. He has also authored many short fiction and non-fiction stories and anthologies. In 2002, a film based on his original story "Good, Brother," premiered worldwide at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah.
The workshop writing series, “Living in and Writing about Detroit and its Surrounding Communities,” is funded in part by the Michigan Humanities Council, an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the International Women’s Writing Guild-Detroit and the Grosse Pointe Artist Association. For more information, visit www.clas.wayne.edu/IS, click on IS Special Projects; or call (313) 577-4627; e-mail ag3260@wayne.edu.
The schedule of free workshops running over a ten-week period is:
• March 1: Language charged with meaning.
• March 8: In the Heart of the Heart of the City.
• April 3: First Encounters.
• April 10: Digging In.
• April 17: Landscape and Dream.
• May 1: Wrenching the City from Itself.
• May 8: The Shrinking City.
• May 15: Boomtown Revisited.
• May 22: Revisioning Detroit.
• May 29: We are the Stories We Tell.
The workshop will meet from 6 to 8 pm., Room 3304 on the 3rd floor of the David Adamany Undergraduate Library on each of these dates. The writing workshops are free and open to the public.
The Department of Interdisciplinary Studies directly and innovatively addresses the urban mission of Wayne State University by implementing curricula in ways that serve the needs of nontraditional students, many of whom are the first generation in their family or neighborhood to attend a university. It is the mission of IS to meet the needs of working and commuting students who are racially and ethnically diverse.