ML Liebler is an internationally known & widely published Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist and arts organizer, and he is the author of 13 books including the award-winning Wide Awake in Someone Else’s Dream. Liebler has taught English, American Studies, Labor Studies, Canadian Studies and World Literature at Wayne State University in Detroit since 1980.

Peter Lewis got his start as a member of a surf band by the name of The Cornells and he went on to become a founding member of Moby Grape, one of the greatest American bands of all time. Moby Grape released their first album in 1967 and it’s still one of the most revered rock albums of all time.

Jim Daniels won the Blue Lynx Poetry Prize for his book Revolt of the Crash-Test Dummies. Two other books were published in 2007, his third collection of short fiction, Mr. Pleasant, and his eleventh book of poems, In Line for the Exterminator. In 2005, Daniels wrote and produced the independent film Dumpster, and Street, a book of poems accompanying the photographs of Charlee Brodsky.

Diane Shipley DeCillis is a poet and the owner of the Lido Gallery in Birmingham, Michigan.

11am | Chelsea Clocktower Commons (320 N. Main)
Edward Hirsch, a MacArthur Fellow, was born in Chicago in 1950. He taught at Wayne State University and lived in Detroit from 1978-1985. He has published nine books of poems, most recently Gabriel: A Poem (2014), a book-length elegy, and The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of work. He has also published five prose books, among them A Poet’s Glossary (2014), a complete compendium of poetic terms, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller. He lives in New York and serves as president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

12pm | Chelsea Depot (125 Jackson St.)
Rebecca Scherm is the author of Unbecoming, a novel. She received her MFA from the University of Michigan, where she was also a postgraduate Zell Fellow.  She lives in Michigan, where she is working on her second novel, Beta. Unbecoming is an intricately plotted and psychologically nuanced heist novel that turns on suspense and slippery identity. With echoes of Alfred Hitchcock and Patricia Highsmith, Rebecca Scherm’s mesmerizing debut has received comparisons to Gillian Flynn, Marisha Pessl, and Donna Tartt.

1:30pm | Chelsea Depot (125 Jackson St.)
Josh Malerman is the lead singer and songwriter for the rock band The High Strung. His novel Bird Box came out in May 2014 to starred reviews in Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly. Written with the narrative tension of The Road and the exquisite terror of classic Stephen King, Bird Box is a propulsive, edge-of-your-seat horror thriller, set in an apocalyptic near-future world. Bird Box was recently nominated for a 2015 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel.

2:30pm | Chelsea Clocktower Commons (320 N. Main)
Angela Flournoy is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she received a Dean’s Fellowship, and the University of Southern California. She has taught writing at the University of Iowa and Trinity Washington University and has worked for the Washington, D.C. Public Library. She was raised in Southern California by a mother from Los Angeles and a father from Detroit. Flournoy’s highly-anticipated debut tells the story of the Turners of Detroit’s Yarrow Street, a home with more than fifty years of family history, including thirteen children grown and gone—and some returned, the arrival of grandchildren, the fall of Detroit’s East Side, and the loss of a father.

3:30pm | Chelsea Clocktower Commons (320 N. Main St.)
Clayton Eshleman is one of America’s foremost translators and poets, noted in particular for his translations of César Vallejo and his studies of cave paintings. Eshleman also founded and edited two of the most innovative poetry journals of the later part of the 20th century: Caterpillar (20 issues, 1967-1973) and Sulfur (46 issues, 1981-2000). Among his recognitions and awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry, The National Book Award in Translation, two grants from the NEA, two grants from the NEH, two Landon Translation Prizes from the Academy of American Poets, and a Rockefeller Study Center residency in Bellagio, Italy.

4:30pm | Chelsea Clocktower Commons (320 N. Main St.)
Annie Martin has had numerous plays professionally produced and read across the state, including 10:53, Home: Voices From Families of the Midwest, Maidens, Mothers, and Crones: Voices from Women of the Midwest, Flap and a co-adaptation of Oedipus at Williamston Theatre; Gift of the Magi at the Performance Network; and Completing Dahlia at the Purple Rose Theatre. Awards include a Lansing State Journal Thespie Award and Lansing City Pulse Pulsar Award for best original script (for Mothers, Maidens, and Crones) and a Wilde Award for the adaptation of OEDIPUS. She is also the Senior Acquisitions Editor at Wayne State University Press where she started the Made in Michigan Writers Series, a literary series devoted to Michigan writers.