Community Calendar

The Richland Community Library is excite to welcome Michigan Notable Author Brittany Rogers!

Brittany is a poet, visual artist, essayist, high school teacher, and lifelong Detroiter. Her work has been featured in Underbelly, Mississippi Review, and The Metro Times, just to name a few.

Her debut collection of poems, Good Dress, was selected as a 2025 Michigan Notable Title.

About Good Dress:
Following the tradition of Nikky Finney, Krista Franklin, and Morgan Parker, Brittany Rogers's Good Dress documents the beauty and audacity of Black Detroit, Black womanhood, community, class, luxury, materialism, and matrilineage. A nontraditional coming of age, this collection witnesses a speaker coming into her own autonomy and selfhood as a young adult, reflecting on formative experiences. With care and incandescent energy, the poems engage with memory, time, interiority, and community.

This program is presented in partnership with the Library of Michigan Foundation & the MI Humanities Grant.

Join us for a virtual author conversation with Susanna Ashton, author of A Plausible Man: The True Story of the Slave Who Inspired Uncle Tom's Cabin.

In December 1850, Harriet Beecher Stowe sheltered fugitive slave John Andrew Jackson for one night in Brunswick, Maine—an encounter that helped inspire Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

In A Plausible Man, Ashton pieces together Jackson’s journey from slavery to freedom and his rise as an international abolitionist, uncovering his story through a historical detective lens.

Thank you to the Alumni Association of the University of Michigan for sponsoring this episode.

This event is virtual. Register for the Zoom link to attend.

Independent historian Jason A. Cherry delves into the life of William Trent, a prominent yet often overlooked figure in colonial American history, in his biography, William Trent: Factor of Ambition.

As a fur trader, military officer, and land speculator, Trent played a significant role in the economic and political dynamics of the 18th-century American frontier. Heavily researched at the Clements, this book explores his interactions with Native American communities, his involvement in key historical events like the French and Indian War and Pontiac's Rebellion, and his complex relationships with figures such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

A true story of a woman who murdered her married lover in Gilded Age San Francisco—and the trial that captured the city’s dramatic transformation from a wild frontier town into a modern metropolis. From the New York Times bestselling author of Empire of Sin.

Drawing on the Crittenden papers at the Clements Library, Trespassers at the Golden Gate brings vivid depth to its tale of love, murder, and madness in Gilded Age San Francisco.