Featured

• Gary Snyder
  The legendary poet Gary Snyder makes a rare trip to the Bay Area for the concluding event of this season's Holloway Series at UC Berkeley. With a vast array of influences that spans haiku, the Beats, poets of the SF Renaissance and Eastern philosophy, Snyder has won many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize, and is […]
• Jonathan Lethem
  Author of many books, among them nine inventive novels that include the National Critics Circle Award-winning "Motherless Brooklyn," "The Fortress of Solitude" and "Chronic City," Jonathan Lethem reads from and discusses his new novel, "A Gambler's Anatomy," about an international backgammon hustler who's convinced he's psychic. (It could be a brain tumor, though.)
• Sarah Griffin
  Sarah Griffin makes her way back from Dublin, Ireland to celebrate the launch of her debut novel, "Spare & Found Parts." Griffin lived in San Francisco for about three years, an experience she documented in the indelible memoir "Not Lost," as well as in The Irish Times, to which she continues to contribute. The launch […]
• Poetry in Parks 2016
  For its 100th show, Quiet Lightning teams up with CA State Parks and the Golden Gate National Parks Conservancy to present a day-long festival, with readings by Kay Ryan, Dana Gioia, Jane Hirshfield, Kim Stanley Robinson, Alejandro Murguia and many others; music by Classical Revolution; dance by Anna Halprin; youth readings and entertainment; food and […]
• Litquake
  Nine days filled with readings, panels and presentations of every imaginable kind, Litquake's annual festival is a backbone of the Bay Area literary world. Now in its 17th year, the festival features an average of nearly a dozen events each day, with over 800 authors from all over the Bay Area, the country and the […]
• Lunch Poems: Michael Palmer
  The longstanding UC Berkeley series Lunch Poems presents, for its first featured guest of this season, the poet and translator Michael Palmer, whose work has been translated into over 30 languages. Palmer is a recipient of the Arts and Letters Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His new book is […]
• Vanessa Hua
  Vanessa Hua launches her debut story collection, "Deceit and Other Possibilities," with a reading and conversation with Zyzzyva managing editor Oscar Villalon. Hua is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle; a former Steinbeck Fellow, she has received the 2015 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award and the San Francisco Foundation's Phelan Award for Fiction.
• Anne Raeff & Anthony Marra
  Anne Raeff celebrates the launch of her Flannery O'Connor Award-winning debut collection "The Jungle Around Us" with a reading and conversation with Anthony Marra, whose debut novel "A Constellation of Vital Phenomena" won the inaugural John Leonard Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, the Barnes & Noble Discovery Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.
• The Book of the Un
  Chicken John Rinaldi launches "The Book of the Un," a sequel to his one-of-a-kind "The Book of the Is," which launched five years ago with an epic party that filled Minna Gallery and its alley with literal acrobatics, pyrotechnics, costumes and interactive art. In his words, the book "deconstructs the systems that foster the Chaos […]
• Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival
  For the 21st year, Poetry Flash presents the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival, co-sponsored by the Ecology Center/Berkeley Farmers' Market and Moe's Books and featuring over 30 poets and writers, including Jane Hirshfield, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Juliana Spahr, Pireeni Sundaralingam, Wes "Scoop" Nisker; youth readings; Creek Poets reading; live music; zine tabling and book signings.