Our first virtual event was a success. Thank you, Fred Reif, for a fascinating talk! Now let's get ready to welcome Ken Meisel and Jeff Vande Zande, scheduled for next Tuesday, August 18.

Ken Meisel will read from his most recent book, Our Common Souls: New & Selected Poems of Detroit. He is a poet and psychotherapist, a 2012 Kresge Arts Literary Fellow, a Pushcart Prize nominee and author of eight books of poetry.  He has been published in over 100 different magazines, and he was a featured artist in the 2019 film, Detroit: Tough Luck Stories.

Jeff Vande Zande will read from his new collection of short stories called The Neighborhood Division. Author Laura Hulthen Thomas had this to say: "Two shots realism, one shot speculative, a dash of horror-- the genre-bending stories in Jeff Vande Zande’s The Neighborhood Division and Other Stories shows us what happens when suburbia takes on a rebellious, sometimes eerie and always dangerous, life of its own. Vande Zande’s earnest, well-meaning characters are fated to discover that the seemingly benevolent perks of privilege they’ve come to rely upon are in fact the greatest threat to their security. From a family trapped in their own basement by an aggressive home renovation to a tenant’s crusade to save his building from collapsing under the load of his neighbors’ excessive possessions, these stories reveal the unexpected joys and perils of taking a closer look at our most familiar neighborhoods." A short promotional video is available here, https://vimeo.com/438979240

Please register beforehand. A $5 donation to FOTR is requested, as we continue to raise money to save the Stone House. However, we recognize that finances are tight these days for many reasons, so the donation is not required.

If you do not have a PayPal account, or if the $5 is a hardship right now, please email us directly, info@friendsofroethke.org, and we will manually register you. A Zoom link will be provided to all registrants before the start of the event.