Featured

• Barbara Jane Reyes
  The author of four previous collections of poetry, including "Poeta en San Francisco," "Diwata" and "To Love as Aswang," Barbara Jane Reyes celebrates the publication of her fifth (also the 16th in City Lights' acclaimed Spotlight Series) "Invocation to Daughters," with a reading from the book. She is joined by poet and pastor David Brazil, […]
• Cristina Rivera Garza
  Mexican author Cristina Rivera Garza reads from and discusses her new novel "The Iliac Crest" with Mauro Javier Cardenas ("The Revolutionaries Try Again"). The novel begins on a dark and stormy night, when two mysterious women invade an unnamed narrator's house, where they proceed to question his identity. Unable to defend his supposed masculinity, he […]
• Black Took Collective
  Co-founded in 1999 by Duriel E. Harris, Dawn Lundy Martin and Ronaldo V. Wilson at Cave Canem, a retreat for African American Poets, Black Took Collective is a group of younger black post-theorists who perform and write in hybrid experimental forms, embracing radical poetics and cutting-edge critical theory about race, gender and sexuality. They perform […]
• Daniel Alarcon
  Recently long-listed for the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction, "The King is Always Above the People" is Daniel Alarcon's first collection since his award-winning debut "War by Candlelight" (2005). Author of the critically acclaimed novels "Lost City Radio" and "At Night We Walk in Circles," Alarcon returns to the Bay Area to read from […]
• Jerome Rothenberg
  Fifty years ago, Jerome Rothenberg changed the course of poetics with the opening statement to his landmark "Technicians of the Sacred: A Range of Poetries From Africa, America, Asia, Europe & Oceania": Primitive means complex. Rothenberg celebrates a revised and expanded third edition, a stout roster of friends including Michael Palmer, Al Young and Jack […]
• Writers With Drinks
  Charlie Jane Anders flirts with the boundaries of reality in her introductions to this literary variety show's authors. November features readings by Ben Loory ("Tales of Falling and Flying"), Stephen Elliott ("The Adderall Diaries"), Annalee Newitz ("Autonomous"), Maggie Shen King ("An Excess Male"), Dr. Jen Gunter ("Wielding the Lasso of Truth") and Marvin K. White […]
• Lucha Libro
  Radar Productions presents the Bay Area's first literary wrestling competition, in which five QTPOC writers compete live for the publication of their next chapbook. On the day of, in a ring in front of screaming fans, each author is given three words that they must incorporate into a narrative written in 10 minutes and broadcast, […]
• Cristina Garcia & Elizabeth Rosner
  Berkeley Arts & Letters presents Cristina Garcia discussing "Here in Berlin"--a meditation on war and mystery fueled by stories and ghosts of contemporary Berlin--with Elizabeth Rosner, whose "Survivor's Cafe" is a nonfiction work that examines the ways survivors, witnesses and post-war generations talk about and shape traumatic experience. Signing follows. Book packages available in advance.
• Rebecca Foust & Javier Zamora
  Marin Poet Laureate Rebecca Foust and Javier Zamora read poems on the theme of "sanctuary," as well as selections from their books. Foust is the author of five collections, most recently "Paradise Drive" (winner of the Press 53 Poetry Prize), and Zamora's anticipated debut "Unaccompanied" is just out from Copper Canyon. Foust's Poet Laureate project […]
• Solmaz Sharif
  Solmaz Sharif returns to UC Berkeley--where she has studied and taught with June Jordan's Poetry for the People--to read from her work as part of the Lunch Poems series. A featured set in the Morrison Library at midday, Lunch Poems can feel like a communal meditation. Sharif's debut book, "Look" (Graywolf), was a finalist for […]