FRESH AND BEST: Poirier, Ventura + Labrador y Manzano

Diesel; A Bookstore welcomes Julien Poirier to the store for the release of Out of Print (City Lights, 2016) as part of the FRESH AND BEST reading series featuring scene-fixtures alongside new and often unpublished poets. Reading with Julien will be Sean Labrador y Manzano and Sierra Ventura. We hope you can join us for an evening of poetry, community, and beverages!

Julien Poirier is the author of several poetry collections, including El Golpe Chileño (Ugly Duckling, 2010), Stained Glass Windows of California (Ugly Duckling, 2012), Way Too West (Bootstrap, 2015) and Out of Print (City Lights). In 2005, he published an experimental newspaper novel, Living! Go and Dream (Ugly Duckling). He is also the editor of an anthology of writing by Jack Micheline, One of a Kind  (Ugly Duckling, 2008), and a book of travel journals by Bill Berkson, Invisible Oligarchs (Ugly Duckling, 2015). A founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse Collective, Poirier edited the newspaper New York Nights from 2001 to 2006. He has taught poetry in New York City public schools and at San Quentin State Prison. He lives in Berkeley with his wife and two daughters.

Sierra Ventura was born and raised in the East Bay. She is a poet, an amateur funny person, and an eldritch abomination. She is currently studying creative writing at Mills College in Oakland, CA. Her work has been published in City College of San Francisco’s literary journal, The Forum, The Walrus, and Odd Compulsion. Her poems have been compiled in the following chapbooks: Subhuman Sprawl, STYLE IS A FRAUD, Who’s Fucking Shoe is That?, Winter Vomiting Disease, Take Me to Suplex City, and Daria Reruns.

Sean Labrador y Manzano edited the print journal Conversations at the Wartime Café: a Decade of War 2001-2011; is founder of the series “Mixer 2.0, a San Francisco Bay Area M.F.A/PhD reading series;” curated the symposium “From Trauma to Catharsis: Performing the Asian Avant-Garde;” and with Dillon Westbrook and Robert Woodcock, he performs as José Rizal in the ninety-minute jazz choreo-poem, “Das Kapital, Volume 4: Elimination of the Industrial Phase and the Accumulation of Debt,” which was excerpted at the SF Jazz Poetry Festival, 2014. This year he did a whirlwind tour of conferences (ALA Boston, North American Review bicentennial, and Berkeley Poetry Conference) discussing a range of topics from Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialist Writings to the Asian Avant Garde. He was selected for the Best American Poetry in 2004. In response to the Best American Poetry 2015 controversy, on behalf of the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies, he will be moderating a roundtable on “Yellowface” at the American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco in 2016