Steve Amick’s short fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Southern Review, The New England Review, Playboy, Story, the anthology The Sound of Writing, and on National Public Radio. His first novel, THE LAKE, THE RIVER & THE OTHER LAKE was released May 5, 2005 by Pantheon, a division of Random House. He has an MFA from George Mason University and has been a college instructor, playwright, copywriter, songwriter and musician. He lives in Michigan, dividing his time between his hometown, Ann Arbor, and a family cottage on a famously clear lake along the northern edge of the Lower Peninsula.
"Amick's thrilling first novel [THE LAKE, THE RIVER…] offers an entertaining look at people who 'have a lot of junk going on.' Set in the upper Michigan lake town of Weneshkeen, where tourists mix with locals in a series of clashes that move from the hilarious to the heartfelt ...Amazingly rich and colorful, the writing flows so smoothly that one's only regret might be that the novel has to end. Highly recommended." --LIBRARY JOURNAL

Her poetry and fiction draw from the rhythms and language of her Trinidad and St. Vincent heritage, and are tempered by 33 years as a UAW worker, 21 of them at the Cadillac Plant in Detroit. She is the author of AUTOPSY OF AN ENGINE AND OTHER STORIES FROM THE CADILLAC PLANT (Coffee House Press), which won a 2005 PEN Beyond Margins Award. She is the author of two collections of poems : QUIET BATTLES AND SNAKECROSSING. Her work appears in many literary publications, and she reads from her works nationally and in the Detroit area. She has taught creative writing at the Western Wayne Correctional Facility and compiled the resulting work into an anthology entitled, Gittin Down : Profiles from Michigan Prison Writers. She has taught creative writing at the Wayne State University Labor School, sociology and composition at the Detroit College of Business, as well as Diversity in Society online for Davenport University. She works for the UAW in the UAW-GM Quality Network. Lolita has an MFA in creative writing from the Vermont College of Norwich University, a B.A. in journalism from Wayne State University, a B.A. in psychology from the University of Michigan; a UAW journeyman card in Experimental Product Engineering Layout and Assembly; and a well-deserved B.S. from the school of life. She is an active member of UAW Local 160.

On AUTOPSY OF AN ENGINE (fiction): “In her account of the closing of the Clark Street facility of the Cadillac Motor Company, Lolita Hernandez positions herself at the intersection of journalism and literature. Here is not only a report from the assembly line, brilliantly told. This is also a talented writer's record of loss, a poet’s meditation from inside the working place.” --Richard Rodriguez

Mark Yakich's first book of poems, UNRELATED INDIVIDUALS FORMING A GROUP WAITING TO CROSS, was a winner of the 2003 National Poetry Series and was published by Penguin Books. He is an assistant professor of English at Central Michigan University in Mt. Pleasant. “Mark Yakich is an original... In the unabashedly unwieldy title and in each poem, there are no borders drawn between the commonplace and the metaphysical. There are journeys, crossings, and departures—all evocative of the loneliness, alienation, and desire for identity with another (person or place), which, formalized, makes this work recognizable as art of a very high order." —James Galvin, Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment

Since its publication midway through 2005, Clemens’s MADE IN DETROIT (Doubleday) has received much attention, and created some controversy. “MADE IN DETROIT is the story of a young man’s education in social and racial realities most writers would rather avoid. But it is also the story of a literary apprenticeship in the classic American mold. In addition to his youthful Catholicism, Clemens acquired another belief–in reading and writing–and he embraced the writer’s vocation with the enthusiasm that only those raised in a household devoid of books can. Yet, in coming to grips with Detroit, and race relations in America in general, he discovered that there are places–geographic, mental, emotional–where even literature cannot help.” (from the Random House website).
“In MADE IN DETROIT, Paul Clemens tells a personal account of the life and death of an American city. Love among the ruins is never easy, sweet, comfortable, or without a sense of injury, and so it proves here. With clarity, courage, and a deep familiarity with his literary predecessors—from James Joyce to James Baldwin—Clemens has written a book as riven, wounded, and yet surprisingly durable as its subject.” —Jeffrey Eugenides, author of The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex

Readings by the winners of MSU's annual literary prizes. Presented by Jeff Wray, assistant professor of English and co-director of Film Studies at MSU. Special appearance by Paul Beatty, noted author and award judge for this years event.