From Ernest Hemingway’s rural adventures to the gritty fiction of Joyce Carol Oates, the landscape of the “Third Coast” has inspired generations of the nation’s greatest storytellers.

Michigan Notable author Anna Clark explores Michigan’s extraordinary written culture as she discusses Michigan authors and her new book, Michigan Literary Luminaries: From Elmore Leonard to Robert Hayden.

This fascinating book is a shines a spotlight on this rich heritage of the Great Lakes State with a mixture of history, literary criticism, and original reporting. Discover how Saginaw greenhouses shaped the life of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Theodore Roethke. Compare the common traits of Detroit crime writers like Elmore Leonard and Donald Goines. Learn how Dudley Randall revolutionized American literature by doing for poets what Motown Records did for musicians.

Anna Clark is a freelance journalist in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The American Prospect, Grantland, Vanity Fair, the Columbia Journalism Review, Next City, and other publications. She is the director of applications for Write A House and founder of Literary Detroit. Anna also edited A Detroit Anthology, a 2015 Michigan Notable Book.

In this entry of the annual Sustainable Ann Arbor series, hosted by the City and the Ann Arbor District Library, the focus will be on climate and energy. This discussion will include updates on Ann Arbor’s Climate Action Plan, an overview of local climate impacts, and sustainable programs underway at the University of Michigan.

Speakers for the Climate and Energy discussion include:

o Mike Garfield, Executive Director, Ecology Center
o Anya Dale, Sustainability Rep, University of Michigan
o Sean Reed, Executive Director, Clean Energy Coalition
o Wayne Appleyard, Chair, Ann Arbor Energy Commission
o Nathan Geisler, Energy Programs Analyst, City of Ann Arbor

The Sustainable Ann Arbor series will include four events (held monthly through April) with each focusing on a different element of sustainability from Ann Arbor’s Sustainability Framework.

At each event, a think tank of local stakeholders including representatives from community organizations,and staff from both the City of Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County, will join the public to discuss local sustainability efforts and challenges in our community. Each program will include a series of short presentations followed by a question and answer session.

The forums offer an opportunity to learn more about sustainability in the community and tips for actions that residents can take to live more sustainably. Details of this series will be posted online on The City of Ann Arbor's Sustainability site. For information and videos from current and past Sustainable Ann Arbor Forums, please visit the City’s Sustainability website.

Local radio personality Martin Bandyke hosted this event with author Karen Dybis, taking a close look at the history of one of the area’s most popular snack foods!

For many, Detroit is the crunch capital of the world. More than forty local chip companies once fed the Motor City’s never-ending appetite for salty snacks, including New Era, Everkrisp, Krun-Chee, Mello Crisp, Wolverine and Vita-Boy. Only Better Made remains. From the start, the brand was known for light, crisp chips that were near to perfection.

Discover how Better Made came to be, how its chips are made and how competition has shaped the industry into what it is today. Bite into the flavorful history of Michigan’s most iconic chip as author Karen Dybis, in her book Better Made in Michigan : the salty story of Detroit's best chip, explores how Detroit “chipreneurs” rose from garage-based businesses to become snack food royalty. Detroiters claim to eat the most potato chips in the nation — seven pounds annually compared to four everywhere else — but is this true? In her book, Dybis dives into these stats.

Karen Dybis is a metro Detroit-based writer who has blogged for Time, worked the business desk at The Detroit News, and jumped on breaking stories for publications including Corp! Magazine, Detroit Unspun and Agence France-Presse newswire. She became fascinated with Detroit’s potato chip history after finding out there were more than two dozen chip companies in the city over the past century. Her research found there actually were more than 40 manufacturers of all sizes in Detroit. It was tasty research, indeed, as she tried all the flavors and companies she could find. Her favorite Better Made flavor is the Garlic Dill Pickle Krinkle Cut potato chips.

What do a mild mannered grocery store manager from Northern Michigan and the infamous skyjacker D.B. Cooper have in common? How can a married couple and the aircraft they were traveling in just disappear over a populated area? What really happened to the freighter that sailed out of Grand Haven, over the horizon and into oblivion?

Join author and shipwreck hunter Ross Richardson in exploring the baffling disappearances of a person, a plane, and a ship, and other mysterious unsolved disappearances in the Michigan Region.

Ross Richardson was the National Writer Series Author Next Door for October 2014, and the Grand Traverse Scene Magazine named his book Still Missing to their Notable Michigan Books list. He has spent the last decade and a half researching Great Lakes maritime history and searching for the Michigan Region’s missing aircraft and ships. He has been involved with over a dozen shipwreck discoveries, including recent discoveries in Northern Lake Michigan. Previously, Richardson penned the book The Search for the Westmoreland, Lake Michigan's Treasure Shipwreck. He operates a popular website, Michigan Mysteries, which is dedicated to missing persons, missing aircraft, and missing ships.

The League of Women Voters of the Ann Arbor Area (LWV-AAA) hosted this educational Town Hall on redistricting. This talk explores how legislative lines are drawn in Michigan, who draws them, and why it is a critically important question for those concerned about fair representation. The speaker is Susan Smith, Vice President of the League of Women Voters of Michigan.

In Michigan, the district lines are drawn by elected officials in the legislature, effectively allowing politicians to choose their voters and giving the political party in power at the time a tremendous advantage. Topics discussed include: what are the ramifications of partisan-drawn districts that favor one party over another, is there a better and fairer way to do this, and what are the alternatives?

The Ann Arbor District Library, the Library of Michigan and the Library of Michigan Foundation are pleased to present this special event, Night Of Notable Authors. Every year, the Library of Michigan selects up to twenty of the most notable books, either written by a Michigan resident or about Michigan or the Great Lakes. The selected books are honored in the year after their publication or copyright date. Each selected title speaks to our state's rich cultural, historical, and literary heritage and proves without a doubt that some of the greatest stories are found in the Great Lakes State.

The Night Of Notable Authors included a panel discussion moderated by Anna Clark (A Detroit Anthology, a 2015 Michigan Notable Book).

Panelists included:

Michigan Outdoor Writer and Poet Jerry Dennis (several Michigan Notable Book titles, including The Living Great Lakes: Searching For The Heart Of The Inland Seas, a 2004 Michigan Notable Book)

Mystery Author Loren Estleman (Nicotine Kiss: An Amos Walker Novel, a 2007 Michigan Notable Book)

Memoirist and True Crime Author Mardi Jo Link (two Michigan Notable Book titles, including Bootstrapper: From Broke To Badass On A Northern Michigan Farm, a 2014 Michigan Notable Book)

In Once in a Great City: A Detroit Story, David Maraniss, who was born in Detroit, captures this great American city at its pinnacle. Detroit in 1963 reflected the spirit of the entire country at the time, and its complicated past and future decline could be traced to this era.

It’s 1963, and Detroit is on top of the world. The city’s leaders are among the most visionary in America. It was the American auto makers’ best year; the revolution in music and politics was underway. Reuther’s UAW had helped lift the middle class. The air was full of promise. The auto industry was selling more cars than ever before and inventing the Mustang. Motown was capturing the world with its amazing artists. The progressive labor movement was rooted in Detroit with the UAW. Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech there two months before he made it famous in the Washington march.

Once in a Great City shows that the shadows of the city's collapse were evident even then. Detroit at its peak was threatened by its own design. It was being abandoned by the new world. Yet so much of what Detroit gave America lasts.

David Maraniss is an associate editor at The Washington Post. Maraniss is a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and bestselling author of Barack Obama: The Story and others, including When Pride Still Mattered: A Life of Vince Lombardi which was hailed by Sports Illustrated as “maybe the best sports biography ever published.”

Michigan Notable Books Award winning author Sally Howell speaks about the history of Islam in Detroit, a city that is home to several of the nation’s oldest and most diverse Muslim communities.

In the early 1900s, there were thousands of Muslims in Detroit. Most came from Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and British India. In 1921, they built the nation’s first mosque in Highland Park. By the 1930s, new Islam-oriented social movements were taking root among African Americans in Detroit. By the 1950s, Albanians, Arabs, African Americans, and South Asians all had mosques and religious associations in the city, and they were confident that Islam could be, and had already become, an American religion. When immigration laws were liberalized in 1965, new immigrants and new African American converts rapidly became the majority of U.S. Muslims. For them, Detroit’s old Muslims and their mosques seemed oddly Americanized, even unorthodox.

Old Islam in Detroit: Rediscovering the Muslim American Past explores the rise of Detroit’s earliest Muslim communities. It documents the culture wars and doctrinal debates that ensued as these populations confronted Muslim newcomers who did not understand their manner of worship or the American identities they had created. Looking closely at this historical encounter, it provides a new interpretation of the possibilities and limits of Muslim incorporation in American life and shows how Islam has become American in the past and how the anxieties many new Muslim Americans and non-Muslims feel about the place of Islam in American society today are not inevitable, but are part of a dynamic process of political and religious change that is still unfolding.

Sally Howell is Assistant Professor of History and Arab American Studies at the University of Michigan-Dearborn.

Urban planning as a field focuses on managing development to shape the effects of growth on cities. But what can planners do in cities like Detroit where developing, redeveloping, rebuilding, and revitalizing are not possibilities? University of Michigan professor of urban and regional planning Margi Dewar lays out directions with a few examples for a different kind of urban planning.

Allison Leotta is a former federal sex-crimes prosecutor who creates compelling and thrilling fiction based on her real-life experience. She served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in Washington DC, where she handled sex crimes, domestic violence, and crimes against children.

In her latest novel, A Good Killing, Leotta turns her eye toward small-town secrets hidden in a big football program. Drawing inspiration from the Steubenville rape case and the Jerry Sandusky trial, this novel features a strong female protagonist, a gripping premise, and heart-wrenching suspense that will keep you hooked until the last page.

A graduate of Michigan State University and Harvard Law School, Allison Leotta has provided legal commentary for outlets such as CNN, PBS, Reuters TV, and MSNBC. Other novels include Law of Attraction, Discretion, and Speak of the Devil. Allison also runs an award-winning blog called The Prime-Time Crime Review, where she reality-checks TV crime dramas.

This event was cosponsored by Aunt Agatha's Mystery Bookstore.