First Friday: Poetry World Series

Daniel Handler returns to emcee this year’s series, where baseball and poetry collide to create a fabulous and wacky literary event. Two teams of illustrious poets duke it out using words to swing for the fences. This boisterous slugfest of wordplay, repartee, and quips, mixed with ballpark music, beer and popcorn, makes for a great outing.  You don’t even have to like poetry or baseball to enjoy this animated and quirky program.
Emcee:
Daniel Handler is the author of five novels, including We Are Pirates. As Lemony Snicket, he’s responsible for too many books for children, including the relatively new series All the Wrong Questions.

Judges:
Susan Terris is the editor of Spillway and the author of fourteen chapbooks, three artists’ books, and six books of poetry, including Ghost of Yesterday: New & Selected Poems (Marsh Hawk 2013) and Memos (Omnidawn 2015). Her publications include Best American Poetry, FIELD, Pushcart Prize XXXI, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review.

Mill Valley resident Brian Murphy is the author of six books, including San Francisco Giants: 50 Years. He was a sportswriter for 15 years at the LA Times, Santa Rosa Press Democrat, SF Examiner, and SF Chronicle before joining KNBR, where he’s hosted the popular “Murph and Mac” show since 2004.

Players:
George Higgins is the author of There, There (White Violet Press 2013). He has an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where he was a Holden Fellow, and is also a Cave Canem Fellow. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Fugue, Nimrod, Pleiades, Poetry Flash, and Salamander, among others.

Peter Kline teaches at USF and Stanford. His first book, Deviants, was published by SFASU Press in 2013. A former Stegner Fellow, he’s also received fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House and James Merrill House. His poetry has appeared in The Antioch Review, Five Points, Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and elsewhere.

Danusha Laméris’s book, The Moons of August, was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye for the 2013 Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Her work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, New Letters, The Sun, and elsewhere.

Dr. Raina J. León is a Cave Canem graduate fellow, CantoMundo fellow, and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective. Her books include Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and sombra: (dis)locate (February 2016). She’s a founding editor of The Acentos Review and an associate professor at Saint Mary’s College.

Meryl Natchez’s most recent book is a bilingual volume: Poems from the Stray Dog Café: Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Gumilev. She’s co-translator of Tadeusz Borowski: Selected Poems, and her collection Jade Suit was published in 2001. Her work has appeared in The Pinch, Atlanta Review, Lyric, Moth, and elsewhere.

Matthew Siegel’s Blood Work won the 2015 Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry and was a finalist for the Forward Foundation’s Felix Dennis Prize. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. A former Stegner Fellow, he teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.