Thu Dec 16 10, Coffee Bar

(Charles Kruger)

The annual release party for Fourteen Hills, the San Francisco State University Review, has been a must-attend event in the SF literary community since the review’s inception in 1994. Over the years, writers for the review have garnered an impressive series of  awards including multiple appearances in the “Best American” anthologies, a Flannery O’Connor Award, an O. Henry Award, and a Pushcart Prize special mention. And they throw a great party!

At the recent release party for issue 17.1, the two story Coffee Bar was packed shoulder-to-shoulder with a collection of literary lights, hipsters, rap artists, slam poets, street poets, novelists, scenesters , professors, MFA students, friends and fans buying up multiple copies of the new edition and raffle tickets for an astonishing assortment of prizes including a $250 certificate to Body Bazarre Tattoo, tickets to Cal Shakespeare, and multiple gift certificates to local bookstores.

Here is video of the readers, with biographical information from Fourteen Hills.

Adam Johnson is a former Wallace Stegner Fellow and the Senior Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Winner of the Whiting Writers’ Award the Gina Berriault Award and an NEA Fellowship, he is the author of a short story collection, Emporium (2002), and the novel Parasites Like Us (2002) which won the California Book Award. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, Harper’s, The Paris Review, Tin House, and Best American Short Stories.,

Maxine Chernoff chairs the Creative Writing Department at SFSU and is editor of New American Writing. She is the author of six collections of fiction and ten books of poetry, most recently The Turning (Apogee Press, 2009). Her co-translation of The Selected Works of Friedrich Hoelderin won the 2009 PEN America Translation Award. She taught in Prague in the summer of 2010.

Molly Prentiss recently earned her MFA in Creative Writing at the California College of the Arts and is now a resident writer at Workspace with the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. She has been published in La Petit Zine, Miracle Monocle, Plaid Review, The City Reader, and elsewhere. She is a co-director of an arts and writing collective called factorycompany.

Stephen Elliott is the author of seven books including The Adderall Diaries. He usually sends an email to The Daily Rumpus list five times a week.

Myron Michael is a recording artist, writing teacher, Cave Canem Fellowship recipient, and proprietor of Rondeau Records. His words appear online and in The Harvard Review, Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds (City Lights, 2009), Tea Party, and Nanomajority. He is the author of Scatter Plot (chapbook, forthcoming), and co-author of Hang Man (Move Or Die, 2010).

Jason Bayani is a recent graduate of Saint Mary’s MFA program. He is a Kundiman fellow and a highly regarded veteran of the National Poetry Slam scene. He co-founded the Pilipino American poetry collective, Proletariat Bronze, and has toured across the country, reading his work. He currently teaches at St. Mary’s.

Noah Gershman’s apartment was let to the girl from Cincinnati. Then Gershman crossed the continent of Africa by car.