Once Upon a Time at the Opera House explores the importance of opera houses to the cultural and community life of nonmetropolitan areas in Michigan. As both the civic and arts center for the community, the local opera house was a venue for community meetings, political rallies, concerts, lectures, and theatrical entertainments. The well-illustrated and often humorous stories readers encounter in the book are based on historical facts, anecdotes, urban legends, and tall tales associated with three of the more than one hundred opera houses that existed in Michigan in the period spanning the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. A kind of storybook about the Golden Age of Opera Houses in many of America’s rural regions, Once Upon a Time at the Opera House is a truly fascinating compendium of American entertainment culture, architecture, and civic life as specifically expressed in the history of three Michigan  buildings.

You can learn more about the theaters we discuss in this episode following the links below:

The Tibbits Theatre: https://tibbits.org/
The Ramsdell Theatre: https://ramsdelltheatre.org/
The Calumet Theatre: http://www.calumettheatre.com/

James Berton Harris. Active in both academic and professional theatre for forty-five years, Harris is Professor Emeritus of Theatre at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and he has been a member of the theatre faculty at the University of Michigan and Boston University. He has worked extensively as a costume designer at regional theatres and Shakespeare festivals across the country, and his New York credits include on and off Broadway, as well as at Circle Repertory Company, Manhattan Theatre Club, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Once Upon a Time at the Opera House: Drama at Three Historic Michigan Theatres, 1882-1928, is available at msupress.org, your local bookstore, or wherever else you get your books. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to Daniel Trego, Madiha Ghous, Donté Smith, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press, especially Elise Jajuga and Julie Reaume, for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

RESPECT is a massive collection of poems and lyrics, a monument that shows the global impact of Detroit’s music scene. Its contents span genres from jazz and Motown and R&B to hip-hop, rap, rock, and even techno and electronica. The book’s contributors are Grammy winners, Pulitzer Prize winners, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees, and poets laureate. In its nearly 450 pages appear pieces by Eminem, June Jordan, Rita Dove, Jack White, Nikki Giovanni, Patricia Smith, Billy Bragg, and many more. Check out the RESPECT Spotify playlist for a great soundtrack to the book.

RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. You can find Jim Daniels’s author page on Facebook and M. L. Liebler at mlliebler.com. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

A Detroit native and prize winning poet, Jim Daniels is the Thomas Stockham Baker University Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He is the author of many collections of fiction and poetry, as well as four produced screenplays. Daniels has also edited five anthologies, including Challenges to the Dream: The Best of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day Writing Awards. 

M. L. Liebler is an internationally known and widely published Detroit poet, university professor, literary arts activist, and arts organizer. Author of fifteen books, Liebler has been a member of the English department faculty at Wayne State University since 1980, and he is currently the President of the Detroit Writers’ Guild. In 2018, Liebler received the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles literary award and the Murray E. Jackson Scholar in the Arts Award at Wayne State.
RESPECT: The Poetry of Detroit Music is available at msupress.org and other fine booksellers. 

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to Daniel Trego, Madiha Ghous, Donté Smith, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press, especially Elise Jajuga and Julie Reaume, for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo. 

In this episode, James D. Diamond discusses his book After the Bloodbath: Is Healing Possible in the Wake of Rampage Shootings. Topics include Indigenous justice traditions, restorative justice, the effects of rampage shootings on victims and families, and potential changes to the US legal system to encourage healing in the wake of tragedy.

After the Blood Bath, “examines the typical American reaction to the tragedy of rampage killings,” the “interplay between offenders and their families and victims and their families,” and “an emerging and unreported trend”: the desire for reconciliation and healing between families of rampage offenders and the families of their victims. In this work, Diamond draws on “a distinct difference in how some American Indian communities treat rampage killers and their families” to ask what the Western justice system might learn about restorative justice from other traditions. 

James Diamond, has spent more than twenty-five years as a criminal lawyer, with experience as both a state prosecutor and a criminal defense attorney. He is the former director of the Tribal Justice Clinic at James E. Rogers College of Law and Professor of Practice at the University of Arizona. You can find him online at https://jamesddiamond.com/.

You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to Daniel Trego, Madiha Ghous, Donté Smith, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press, especially Elise Jajuga and Julie Reaume, for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo.

In this episode, the press's director, Gabe Dotto, and the press's editor-in-chief, Catherine Cocks, join us to talk about the history and future of MSU Press and some of the challenges facing university press publishers today. You can connect with the press on Facebook and @msupress on twitter, where you can also find me @kurtmilb.

The MSU Press podcast is a joint production of MSU Press and the College of Arts & Letters at Michigan State University. Thanks to Daniel Trego, Madiha Ghous, Donté Smith, Kylene Cave, and the team at MSU Press, especially Elise Jajuga and Julie Reaume, for helping to produce this podcast. Our theme music is “Coffee” by Cambo.