University of Michigan Press Blog

Buzz Alexander, of "Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?," Discusses Prison Art Project at UM Press Author Series Event

Author Buzz Alexander, professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan and 2005 Carnegie National Professor of the Year, will be speaking and signing books as a part of the UM Press Author Series on Wednesday, November 3rd.

With four experienced inmates and experts on the Michigan prison system, Alexander will discuss his latest book, Is William Martinez Not Our Brother? - a detailed account of origins and development of the Prison Creative Arts Project (PCAP). Serving prison and juvenile detention center inmates since its inception, PCAP provides incarcerated men and women with an opportunity to produce art and express themselves through a creative outlet.

Accompanying Alexander will be director at the American Friends Service Committee, Natalie Holbrook;  PCAP artist and illustrator of Is William Martinez Not Our Brother?, Ronald Rohn; and formerly incarcerated poet and member of the PCAP Linkage Exhibition, Michelle Southers. Also attending is Stacy Barker, a returned citizen after more than 20 years in prison and volunteer at the Girls Group in Ann Arbor and the Westland Youth Assistance Program.

Q&A with Diane Torr, co-author of Sex, Drag, and Male Roles: Investigating Gender as Performance

Why would women want to perform as men? Why is gender crossing so compelling, whether it happens onstage or in everyday life? What can drag performance teach, and what aesthetic, political, and personal questions does it raise?

Performance artist Diane Torr has been experimenting with the performance of gender for thirty years—exploring everything from feminist go-go dancing to masculine power play. One of the key pioneers of "drag king" performance, Torr has been celebrated internationally for her gender transformation workshops, in which she has taught hundreds of ordinary women how to pass as men on city streets around the world. This cultural subterfuge appeals to participants for many different reasons: personal confidence-building, sexual frisson, gender subversion, trans-curiosity, or simply the appeal of disguise and role play.

Sex, Drag, and Male Roles documents the evolution of Torr's work by blending first-person memoir and commentary from Torr with critical reflections and contextualization from leading performance critic Stephen J. Bottoms. The book includes a consideration of the long cultural history of female-to-male cross-dressing and concludes with Torr's "Do-It-Yourself" guide to becoming a "Man for a Day."

Diane Torr developed her cross-disciplinary art in the downtown New York art scene from 1976 to 2002. Now living in Scotland, Torr has earned an international reputation for her performances and gender transformation workshops (featured on HBO, BBC, and This American Life on NPR, among others). Her work is the focus of a feature film, Man for a Day.

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Q&A with Kazim Ali, author of Orange Alert: essays on poetry, art, and the architecture of silence

Whether he is discussing the way cell phones have altered physical intimacy and introduced new verb forms, or the way Emily Dickinson's mysteries are more clearly revealed in French translation, Kazim Ali is at once clear and complex, rigorous and charming, accessible and demanding.

In Orange Alert, Ali discusses contemporary poetry in relation to other art forms and to contemporary television, film, and electronic media, including the Internet, YouTube, and Facebook. 

He shines a light on the intersections between cultures in these essays on the craft of poetry, offering a hand to poets either geographically or metaphorically outside the mainstream of Western culture.

Kazim Ali is the author of two books of poetry, The Far Mosque and The Fortieth Day; two novels, Quinn's Passage and The Disappearance of Seth; and a memoir, Bright Felon: Autobiography and Cities. He is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Oberlin College. He has been a regular columnist for American Poetry Review.

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Q&A with Albin Zak, author of I Don't Sound Like Nobody: Remaking Music in 1950s America

The 1950s marked a radical transformation in American popular music as the nation drifted away from its love affair with big band swing to embrace the unschooled and unruly new sounds of rock 'n' roll.

The sudden flood of records from the margins of the music industry left impressions on the pop soundscape that would eventually reshape long-established listening habits and expectations, as well as conventions of songwriting, performance, and recording. When Elvis Presley claimed, "I don't sound like nobody," a year before he made his first commercial record, he unwittingly articulated the era's musical Zeitgeist.

The central story line of I Don't Sound Like Nobody is change itself. The book's characters include not just performers but engineers, producers, songwriters, label owners, radio personalities, and fans—all of them key players in the decade's musical transformation.

Written in engaging, accessible prose, Albin Zak's I Don't Sound Like Nobody approaches musical and historical issues of the 1950s through the lens of recordings and fashions a compelling story of the birth of a new musical language. The book belongs on the shelf of every modern music aficionado and every scholar of rock 'n' roll.

Albin J. Zak is Professor of Music at the University at Albany, State University of New York. He is the editor of The Velvet Underground Companion and the author of The Poetics of Rock: Cutting Tracks, Making Records, a groundbreaking study of rock music production. Zak is also a record producer, songwriter, singer, and guitarist.

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