A2: Shaman Drum

Julie Ellison – a UM professor and founding director of Imagining America: Artists and Scholars in Public Life, a national consortium of 90 colleges and universities – has written a letter entitled “Saving Shaman Drum: A Call for a Campus-Community Alliance.” The letter is signed by more than 40 people, including former U.S. poet laureates Robert Hass and Robert Pinsky. Ellison writes: “One block from the University of Michigan’s Institute for the Humanities, Ann Arbor’s premier community humanities center is dying. Can we protect our local cultural landscape so that our civic ecology flourishes? Can we re-imagine Shaman Drum as a thriving independent bookstore, a sustainable center of learning, pleasure, and commerce?” [Source] See also two open letters written by Karl Pohrt, owner of Shaman Drum Bookshop. [From a Distressed Bookseller] [A Nicaraguan Interlude]