Martinis & Writers with Literary Speakeasy

Come raise a glass at Literary Speakeasy and celebrate the closing of another year! We have five amazing artists for you this month, including poet Natasha Dennerstein; authors Danny Thanh Nguyen, Alvin Orloff, and Olga Zilberbourg; and musical guest Dawn Oberg. Your host and curator every month is James J. Siegel.

Literary Speakeasy is a FREE event with NO drink minimum. Arrive early and receive a FREE raffle ticket for your chance to win the evening’s secret Speakeasy prize.

Performer bios:
Natasha Dennerstein was born in Melbourne, Australia. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University. Natasha has had poetry published in many journals internationally. Her collections Anatomize (2015), Triptych Caliform (2016) and her novella-in-verse About a Girl (2017) were published by Norfolk Press in San Francisco. Her trans chapbook Seahorse (2017) was published by Nomadic Press in Oakland. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is an editor at Nomadic Press and works at St James Infirmary, a clinic for sex-workers in San Francisco. She was a 2018 Fellow of the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat.

Danny Thanh Nguyen’s short stories and personal essays have appeared in The Journal, Foglifter, South Dakota Review, Entropy, New Delta Review, Gulf Coast, and other magazines. He has been awarded fellowships from Lambda Literary Foundation, Kundiman, and Ragdale Foundation. Danny recently received an individual artist grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission for his collection of essays about parallel survivalism between Southeast Asian American refugee communities and queer leather communities in the post-AIDS epidemic era. He runs a social media persona project he calls “Sluterary Thirsterature” on Instagram: @engrishlessons.

Dawn Oberg is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. Her music is influenced by multiple genres, including jazz and cabaret. In 2008, she released her first solo album, Horticulture Wars, followed by Rye in 2013 and Bring in 2015. Mic’s Dan Weiss named Oberg’s song “Nothing Rhymes with Orange” one of the 16 best anti-Donald Trump songs of 2017.

Alvin Orloff spent the 1980s working as a telemarketer and exotic dancer while concurrently attending U.C. Berkeley and performing with The Popstitutes, a performance art/homocore band. In 1990 he and his bandmates founded Klubstitute, a queer cabaret featuring spoken word, theater, drag, and musical acts. In 1995 the club closed its doors and Orloff turned to writing. He published three novels before penning his recent memoir of life in the queer underground during the height of the AIDS crisis, Disasterama! He lives in San Francisco.

Olga Zilberbourg’s English-language debut, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES was published in September 2019 by WTAW Press. She grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia and makes her home in San Francisco. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Alaska Quarterly Review, World Literature Today, Tin House’s The Open Bar, and elsewhere. She serves as a co-facilitator of the San Francisco Writers Workshop.