Big reads deliver big conversations

By Catherine Engstrom-Hadley
Staff Writer

During the month of March, the Bailey Library is celebrating diversity and inclusion with a series of events and exhibits, as part of its “Cultivating Conversations” project, which features a different theme each month.

Last Wednesday, the library kicked off the month with a discussion about sports and race, led by a trio of University of Michigan student athletes.

This event was an extension of the Neutral Zone’s Big Read in Ann Arbor.

Big Read is a month-long project that will include a host of book clubs and critical discussions that explore the book “Citizen: An American Lyric” by Claudia Rankine, with a focus on race, class, gender and other intersecting identities.

The project was funded by a grant from the National Endowment of the Arts and organized by the Neutral Zone, a non-profit teen center located in downtown Ann Arbor.

The U-M students who visited campus focused on chapter two of Rankine’s book, which is about racial issues in sports. The students spoke about the various facets of sports and discussed the media’s portrayal of Serena Williams.

Socrates Gavallas, one of the presenters, mentioned the double standard Williams faces.

“When someone like [John] McEnroe lashes out on the court, he is portrayed like a rebel, when Serena Williams gets upset on the court she’s reviewed as out of control,” Gavallas said.

The student presenters also spoke openly of their own athletic experiences and social hurdles.

“Body image is a huge issue in the sports world,” said Gavallas.

Nikki Calae, a diver at U-M said earlier in her career she had interests in pole vaulting but her coaches pushed her towards diving instead because of her body type.

Camryn McPherson, a sophomore diver at U-M, described how her strengths and accomplishments as an athlete are at times trivialized or used for mocking by her male peers.

“The boys at the gym will compare the weights we are using and say to their friends ‘you can’t lift as much as the girls?’ but we use it to push ourselves to keep lifting and lift more than them,” McPherson said.

Throughout the month of March, both the Neutral Zone and the Bailey Library will continue to highlight diversity, identity and intersectionality with a jam-packed event schedule. On deck at the library is “Can’t Keep Quiet”, a Women’s History Month poetry open mic and release party for the anthology of the same name, a Black Men Read storytime and the Human Library. Keep an eye out for the green posters distributed by the library, which pose questions such as “How do we gender technology?” and “What steps can we take to reduce unconscious bias?”

The Neutral Zone will host an identity collage workshop led by local artist Anika Love. Love will guide participants as they create their own identity collages and write artist’s statements to be displayed in the Ann Arbor District Library gallery.

Another event, Citizenship Dinner: Immigration, will include food and poetry from Miss Michigan Latina 2019 Fernanda González, Ann Arbor’s Youth Poet Laureate Aldo Leopoldo Pando Girard and Hasna Ghalib, a member of the 2018 Ann Arbor Youth Slam Team.

Similar events will also be held at various book club meetings in the region, culminating at the Big Read event, featuring visiting artist Kush Thompson.

All the events are free and open to the public.

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