Erica Jong and Francesca Bell

Kanbar Auditorium, Osher Marin Jewish Community Center
200 N San Pedro Rd, San Rafael

This special event is cosponsored by the Marin JCC and Red Hen Press.

Fear of Flying, Erica Jong’s first and most famous novel, published in 1973, blew conventional thinking about women, marriage and sexuality out of the water, selling over 37 million copies and translated into over 45 languages including Chinese and Arabic. Her novel articulated what women thought but which, through decades of silent complicity with the status quo, was never voiced.

In the four decades since Fear of Flying, she has published over 25 books in 45 languages, including 9 works of fiction as well as celebrated non-fiction volumes. She has switched between fiction, non-fiction and poetry, becoming one of the most evocative poets of her generation with seven published volumes, and winning Poetry magazine’s Bess Hokin Prize.  Her awards include: The Fernanda Pivano award The Sigmund Freud Award, the Deauville Award and The United Nations Award for excellence in literature.

This reading celebrates her new book of poetry, The World Began with Yes, from Red Hen Press. In a dark time, these poems celebrate life.

Francesca Bell’s poems appear in many magazines including B O D Y, burntdistrict, ELLE, Flycatcher, New Ohio Review, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, Spillway, Tar River Poetry, and Zone 3. She has been nominated ten times for the Pushcart Prize and won the 2014 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle. Her translations, from Arabic and German, appear in Berkeley Poetry Review, Blue Lyra Review, Circumference | Poetry in Translation, Four by Two, Laghoo, and The Massachusetts Review. She co-translated Shatha Abu Hnaish’s book of poems, A Love That Hovers Like a Bedeviling Mosquito (Dar Fadaat, 2017), and Red Hen Press will publish her first collection, Bright Stain, in 2019. She is the events coordinator for the Marin Poetry Center and the former poetry editor of River Styx.