The University of Michigan produces a tremendous number of major talents in the fields of visual arts, music, film, theater, literature, and more. The various colleges within U-M, as well as several in-house publications, also do a good job of documenting the various creative pursuits of the university's students, teachers, and alumni—if you know where to look.

So, here's a round-up of arts and culture articles and interviews published by various University of Michigan news services and departments over the past few months.

When I was a child, the mere mention of “summer school” was enough to scare most kids straight.

Little did I know then that many of my Asian American peers across the country were not only drilled and educated all day, every day in the summer, but for hours each afternoon during the school year, too.

U-M Stamps School of Art & Design professor Angela Chen’s new book, After School 課後, chronicles the author’s experience growing up (during the ‘90s and aughts) in this competitive subculture—both as a student and as the child of Taiwanese parents who owned a “supplemental school” called Futurelink, initially housed in a strip mall in Temple City, California.

“As a kid, none of us really wanted to be going to after school,” said Chen. “In Chinese, we call them buxiban … and in English, we refer to them as ‘cram schools,’ but among ourselves, as children, we called them ‘hell.’ Like, we hate going there. Nobody likes it. We all wish we could be at home, playing video games, or just with our families, having a nice cookie and milk snack or something. … But at the same time, as an adult, one thing I think about now is how a lot of my social life happened at Futurelink. Even though we were forced to study and do workbooks all the time, even in those 10 minutes of recess, or waiting for the van to pick us up and take us to Futurelink, a lot of social life happened in those in-between moments. … I have very fond memories of those moments in particular.”

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.

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:

Kyle E. Miller's The Idiot’s Garden thrusts you immediately into the reality that Bike, Peloria, Seed, and Nameless inhabit. In this futuristic, climate-fiction (cli-fi) novel, the oceans have boiled, whales consume power lines, and the people and creatures possess abilities beyond our present-day human world.

The Idiot’s Garden is not one thing: It's a postapocalyptic novel, poetry, and short stories. The exact category may not be the important thing, though. The language will draw you in with the riddle-like turns of phrases. “It was terrifying to be born a thing that could change its mind,” concludes the first unnamed chapter.

The characters come together by necessity. Events happen that this group does not fully understand, yet they keep finding ways forward. At the beginning of the book, Seed’s recovery from his all-consuming illness seems miraculous and is explained by the six-fingered Peloria having fed him a fish:

Have you ever felt a kinship with someone you have never even met?

Clare Kinberg, publisher and editor of the Washtenaw Jewish News, never crossed paths with her estranged Aunt Rose when she was alive, but Kinberg learned about all the connections and similarities the two had through her investigation into Rose’s life. Kinberg tells their intertwining stories in her new book, By the Waters of Paradise: An American Story of Racism and Rupture in a Jewish Family.

By the Waters of Paradise, though nonfiction, reads like a slowly unfolding mystery as Kinberg puts together clues about her aunt’s life. Kinberg also examines the broader context of the times in which she and Rose have lived. One throughline is traced from the racial tensions in St. Louis, where both of them are from, to across the country in the 20th century, from violence to racial covenants in deeds. Racism and antisemitism—even within their own family—have troubled both of their lives. Kinberg offers reflections on how distressing racist and antisemitic beliefs and actions were and are.

Both Rose and Kinberg entered interracial relationships—another throughline. Kinberg looks at how her own life parallels Rose’s, and at her own identity as she formed an interracial, queer family. Their chosen families influenced where each of them built their lives—coincidentally, both in Michigan at different points in time.

If you're an Ann Arbor District Library cardholder, you receive a weekly email newsletter listing news, upcoming events, and a slew of recommendations from the catalog. Those recs are also available at aadl.org/reviews, and we're always happy to make suggestions for books, audiobooks, streamable content in the catalog, DVDs, board games, tools, etc., if you visit us at the branches.

But our 2025 Staff Picks allow the AADL crew to go beyond the library catalog—and the calendar year.

We don't limit our year in review to things that came out in 2025 or items that can be checked out from AADL; the staff comments on whatever favorite media and events they experienced this year, no matter when or where they originated. Maybe a favorite album of 2025 came out in 1973, or the best book someone read this year is so old that it's out of copyright. It's all good, and it all counts.

Here are the categories of AADL's 2025 Staff Picks: