During an intro to playwriting class at Michigan State University seven years ago, Cole Hunter Dzubak found inspiration for his first play, Afterall, in an unlikely source: Oasis’ 1995 megahit "Wonderwall."

Given a prompt from his professor to write a play based on an existing piece of media, Dzubak said he ran with the idea of deconstructing what have become different interpretations of the song, repurposing them in his own story.

Originally believed to be a story about songwriter Noel Gallagher’s then-girlfriend and future wife, Gallagher later corrected the record that "Wonderwall" was actually a song about an imaginary friend “who's gonna come and save you from yourself."

Dzubak’s obsession with the song and its two supposed meanings made him realize what he had to do.

“Afterall is really about that idea of those two interpretations of the song kind of being pitted against one another, and it forces the main character to pick: imaginary friends or love of his life,” Dzubak said.

After years of tinkering, Dzubak and Ypsilanti’s Neighborhood Theatre Group will debut Afterall as its latest production, with shows set for February 27 through March 1 and March 6-8 at the Back Office Studio in Ypsilanti.

Flames, with all their energy and implications, burn through Kelly Hoffer’s new poetry collection, Fire Series. In the way that fire reconfigures the landscape, the poet shares, “I am constant in my remaking, making / my memory in my own image.”

What is there to remake? Hoffer’s poems reply that anything can be vulnerable: grief, one’s mind, rooms, a body, words. The poem “Firebreak” looks for some stability that is not there and inquires, “how do you protect a body from language, / be it poison or polish or pith?” There does not seem to be a way to find immunity from the ever-present flame, tangible or metaphysical, because when “I open / my chest to the weather” the poet finds things like “sentimental white-hot pining.”

As in her previous book, Undershore, Hoffer continues to engage with form in Fire Series. In the poem “chemical lace / day series,” she offers the same poem twice, the first spanning several pages and the second repeated but with select words and letters grayed out to form a lace-like new poem from the remaining text. Several poems take a repeated Bible verse, Genesis 3:24, and give it the erasure treatment as well, though again, none of the words are fully gone, only grayed out. These poems bring a literal “remaking” while finding new meanings and outlooks.

Poems in Fire Series spark with the sensuality brought by the heat of the blaze, with titles like “Pluming” and “the faces of a diamond.” The poem “Field holiday” concludes:

Kameryn Alexa Carter is an MFA student in the Helen Zell Writers Program at the University of Michigan and the co-editor of Emergent Literary. Her new book of poetry is "Antediluvian," which follows 2025's "New Amerykah Part Two: Return of the Ankh," which is about Erykah Badu's 2008 album.

We're publishing Carter's poem "Whoso list to hunt" from "Antediluvian," and below it she answered a few questions about her work.

Tracy Zeman teaches writing at the University of Michigan and literature in U-M’s remote New England Literature Program. Originally from Illinois, Zeman currently lives outside Detroit with her husband, daughter, and dog, where she hikes and bird watches in all seasons. Her new book of poetry is called "Interglacial." 

We're publishing Zeman's poem "Belle Isle" from "Interglacial," and below it she answered a few questions about her work.

Lillian Li’s new novel, Bad Asians, tracks a group of close friends during their formative years and through their choices as they navigate early adulthood—and the large and small consequences of those choices. Grace, who is on the fringes of the group, may see the core four friends for who they are, but does she really know them? Do they really know each other?

Li, who is originally from the D.C. metro area and lives in Ann Arbor, will celebrate the release of Bad Asians in the Michigan Union’s Rogel Ballroom on Tuesday, February 17, at 7 pm, presented by Literati.

The friends—Errol, Vivian, Diana, and Justin, plus Grace—meet as kids in the '90s and all live in the same vicinity, as illustrated by a map of their homes with a character list at the start of the book. Grace always seems to be one-upping them, which creates distance and jealousy owing, in part, to the high expectations of their Chinese American parents. External forces, like the lack of employment prospects from the financial crisis in the late aughts and the internet’s growing reign, affect their lives more than they could have anticipated.

After moving back in with their parents following college, what is there to do but make a video?

When Grace, passionate about film, talks them into starring in her documentary, the four friends agree and participate in interviews, but they reveal more than they had intended. As the eponymous documentary, Bad Asians, starts to haunt them, each character must decide how to respond.

The friends are hyper-aware of how they are perceived in the documentary. As Errol says in the film, “Maybe I’m a bad Asian, but I think there’s more to life than giving your parents something to brag about.” What constitutes “more to life” is something all of them have to seek for themselves. Amidst drugs, heartbreak, career challenges, and more, the characters must find a way forward, and whether that will mean staying connected with each other is a question only they can answer.

Li and I caught up about her new book, Bad Asians. We had a Q&A interview about her writing process, the internet, the characters, the features of the novel, and what Li is reading and writing next.

Mark Braun is ready to celebrate his birthday.

Known musically as “Mr. B,” the blues and boogie-woogie pianist turns 69 this month and is celebrating his big day with a February 13 show at Kerrytown Concert House.

Billed as “Mr. B’s Annual Birthday Bounce,” the show will feature a collaboration with drummer Ali Jackson. It also marks another milestone in Braun’s recovery from three recent hand surgeries.

“I hurt myself about a year ago pretty badly and had emergency surgery on one of my hands,” said Braun, who lives in Ann Arbor.

“And that recovery has gone as well as can be expected. It will never be exactly the same again, but I’m in pretty good shape. And then just lifelong overuse of my hands required more recent surgeries for carpal tunnel and trigger finger releases … and that has led into the wintertime.”

“One Track Mind” features a Washtenaw County artist or band discussing one song from their latest release.

Standout Track: No. 2, “Stand Up!”, from 3Steez aka Trés Styles. The Athletic Mic League MC’s latest album, The Lover & The Fighter: Ninja, is the first of three planned releases featuring a martial arts theme. The boom-bap hip-hop album revisits 3Steez’s past, including his time living in New York. On “Stand Up!”, 3Steez includes lyrical references to Athletic Mic League, Ann Arbor, Detroit, and other Michigan shout-outs. “I’m in New York talking about being from Michigan. I’m in ninja mode, killing everything as a member of my crew, representing Michigan everywhere I [go]. When I got home, I felt like that song needed to exist and be heard. I’d been in New York so long people thought I was from there—which made sense—but as a member of AML, I had to make sure Michigan was still being put on the map.”

In the past two years, U-M professor Aaron Coleman released two poetry collections, which travel from the zoo to the wilderness.

His 2024 book, The Great Zoo, a translation of Nicolás Guillén’s El gran zoo (1967), shares Coleman’s English versions of the poems alongside the original Spanish. The 2025 book, Red Wilderness, spans generations of a family, from the Civil War to the present.

In The Great Zoo, Guillén and Coleman turn zoo residents into metaphors that perceive them well beyond rote notions of what they are. The poets possess an intimate knowledge of their subjects while keeping a level of removal in their unique descriptions of what lives within the exhibits. The zoo’s contents offer not only creatures but also items and phenomena, both naturally occurring and manmade, and as wide-ranging as a clock and a constellation.  

Coleman describes the book in his introduction:

Terry Swafford’s 2015 oil painting Canal House depicts a light green home located in “Little Venice,” an area where the Detroit River canals cut through the city’s eastern neighborhoods.

The home is across a canal from what’s now Coriander Kitchen & Farm.

“To make that painting, I was situated on what has become the dining patio of [the restaurant],” said Swafford, who also does home renovation work in Detroit’s historic neighborhoods.

“At the time, it was a derelict platform for raising boats, and there was a regular gas station pump from the ‘80s. It had been a party store that lost its business when the adjacent trailer park was razed. The green house and rusted boat lift are still there as part of the scenery one can enjoy while eating really good food.”

Canal House is one of 18 paintings featured in Swafford’s latest exhibit, On Site: Paintings From Detroit’s East Side (2015-2025), at U-M’s North Campus Research Complex.

Lynn Galbreath’s Ambivalence paintings are inspired by a past visit to a Brussels art museum.

The Detroit artist observed an elementary class viewing art while she was at the museum in Belgium. The class, along with its instructors and chaperones, listened silently to a gallery docent discuss a painting based on The Rape of the Sabine Women.

“I co-chaperoned 11 groups on immersive art experiences to Italy, Spain, France, Belgium, England, Germany, The Netherlands, Austria, and the Czech Republic,” said Galbreath, who’s a retired adjunct associate professor of studio art at Oakland University.

“I lived in Argentina and Mexico and have done a lot of traveling with friends and family. Much of each trip is documented with sketches, notes, and images. Many of which inspire my work. The underlying meaning of Ambivalence is the unfortunate repetitive, cyclical nature of history.”

The Ambivalence paintings are also some of the works featured in Galbreath’s latest exhibit, Twenty-Two Paintings From the Series “Telegraph,” “Working Hard for a Living,” and “Storyboard,” at U-M’s North Campus Research Complex.