Litquake: A Spring Poets Supper

April is not the cruelest month when you can enjoy a spring-inspired feast of food and poetry at Gardenias restaurant in San Francisco! Litquake’s celebration of National Poetry Month features fabulous farm-to-table cuisine, courtesy of the former owners of Woodward’s Garden, as well as readings by two sensational new poets, Kimberly Grey and Solmaz Sharif.

Gardenias is the new restaurant owned by Margie Conard and her wife Dana Tommasino, who has been called “a poet on the page as well as on the plate.” Their former restaurant, Woodward’s Garden, earned a Michelin Guide notation and was a top SF pick by Martha Stewart, who said that Tommasino and Conard “spearheaded the farm-to-table movement.”

The evening will include a sumptuous three-course meal with complimentary wine, as well as performances by award-winning young poets, curated by Guggenheim Fellow D.A. Powell.

Poets’ price: $75 per person
(includes author readings, three-course prix fixe, wine)

Patrons’ price: $100 per person
(includes author readings, three-course prix fixe, wine plus signed copies of books by each reader)

Benefactors’ price: $125 per person
(includes author readings, three-course prix fixe, wine, signed books and invitation to private reception preceding the dinner)

Bios:

Kimberly Grey’s first book, The Opposite of Light, was awarded the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize and will be published by Persea Books in 2016. Her work has appeared in many places including Tin House, The Kenyon Review, A Public Space, PN Review, Boston Review, jupilat, Black Warrior Review, Southern Review, TriQuarterly and other journals. A former Stegner fellow, she teaches creative writing at Stanford University.

D. A. Powell is the author of Tea, Lunch, Cocktails, Chronic and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2013. Repast, Powell’s latest, collects his three early books in a handsome volume introduced by novelist David Leavitt. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Powell lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Solmaz Sharif’s poetry has appeared in The New Republic, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, jubilat, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, Witness, and other media. She is recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award as well as a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. She is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford University. Her first poetry collection, LOOK, will be published by Graywolf Press in 2016.