One literary organizer said to another: “Can you get a couple of Babar people to come in and read at the Octopus?” The resulting reading…
Deb Olin Unferth‘s new collection of stories Wait Till You See Me Dance (Graywolf) is full of surprises, with twists and turns that often leave the…
For the fifth annual SFJazz Poetry Festival, Genny Lim has curated more than four nights of interdisciplinary performances. She’s used the opportunity to invest in…
Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them (2010), was working on a book inspired by a Chekhov…
Shortly after Dixie De La Tour moved to the Bay Area, she received an invitation that would change her life. “I used to have a…
In 2006, Kim Rosen arrived at the Tasaru Safe House in Narok, Kenya, and stood before a group of Maasai girls who had run away…
Disaster has long been an obsession for Oakland poet Madison Davis, whose debut book of that name is out this week from Bay Area press…
Ingrid Rojas Contreras and Jeremiah Barber were sitting on their couch, horrified by Donald Trump’s 100-day plan. “It occurred to us that he’s such a…
In the midst of a feud with the poet Denise Levertov about the possibilities of politically motivated art, George Oppen wrote his only essay, “The…
Cleve Jones’ new memoir, When We Rise: My Life in the Movement, begins with a single-sentence paragraph: “The movement saved my life.” “That’s not rhetoric,…