Poetry Cocktail Hour: Amber Tamblyn, Alejandro Murguia, Steph Burt, etc.!

It’s a tough time for local bookstores, what with the social distancing and the sheltering in place. So we’re raising funds to help local Bay Area bookstores stay in business, with a series of fundraisers. This event will feature Amber Tamblyn, Alejandro Murguia, Jack Foley, Stephanie Burt, Baruch Porras-Hernandez and Jessy Randall reading for University Press Books!

The authors

Amber Tamblyn is an Emmy, Golden Globe and Independent Spirit Award nominated actress, writer and director, and the author of 6 books, including the critically acclaimed best sellers, Era of Ignition: Coming of Age in a Time of Rage and Revolution, Dark Sparkler and Any Man. Tamblyn is poet in residence at Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls and reviews books of poetry by womxn for Bust Magazine. She’s a contributing writer for the New York Times and New York Magazine’s The Cut, and a founding member of the Times Up Organization.

Alejandro Murguía is the author of Southern Front and This War Called Love (both winners of the American Book Award). His non-fiction book The Medicine of Memory highlights the Mission District in the 1970s during the Nicaraguan Solidarity movement. He is a founding member and the first director of The Mission Cultural Center. He was a founder of The Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade, and co-editor of Volcán: Poetry From Central America. Currently he is a professor in Latina Latino Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of the short story “The Other Barrio” which first appeared in the anthology San Francisco Noir and recently filmed in the street of the Mission District. In poetry he has published Spare Poems, and this year a new collection Native Tongue. He is the Sixth San Francisco Poet Laureate and the first Latino poet to hold the position.

Stephanie Burt is a poet, literary critic, and professor with eight published books, including two critical books on poetry and three poetry collections. Her essay collection Close Calls with Nonsense (Graywolf Press, 2009) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her next poetry collection is Advice from the Lights: Poems (Graywolf, 2017). Her other works include Don’t Read Poetry (Basic Books, 2019); The Poem is You: 60 Contemporary American Poems and How to Read Them (Harvard UP, 2016); Belmont (2013); The Art of the Sonnet (Harvard University Press, 2010); Something Understood: Essays and Poetry for Helen Vendler (University of Virginia Press, 2009); The Forms of Youth: Adolescence and 20th Century Poetry (Columbia University Press, 2007); Parallel Play: Poems (Graywolf, 2006); Randall Jarrell on W. H. Auden (University Press, 2005); Randall Jarrell and His Age (Columbia University Press, 2002); and Popular Music (Center for Literary Publishing, 1999).

Jack Foley has published 15 books of poetry, 5 books of criticism, a book of stories, and a two-volume “chronoencyclopedia,” Visions & Affiliations: California Poetry 1940-2005. He became well known through his “multivoiced” performances with his late wife, Adelle, who was also a poet; many of these can be seen on YouTube. His radio show, Cover to Cover, airs every Wednesday on KPFA–FM in California. In 2010, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Berkeley Poetry Festival. His most recent books are The Tiger & Other Tales, a book of stories, sketches, and two plays; Riverrun, a book of poetry; and Grief Songs, a book documenting his grief at the death of his wife, Adelle. In 2018, he became the recipient of the Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award.

Baruch Porras Hernandez is a San Francisco writer, stand up comedian, illustrator, and the author of the small poetry collections “I Miss You, Delicate” and “Lovers of the Deep Fried Circle” both from Sibling Rivalry Press. His solo show “Love in the Time of Piñatas” got a clapping man from the SF Chronicle and fed the “Baruchador” donut that Dynamo Donuts named after him to sold-out houses at Epic Party Theatre back in December of 2019. He is the creator of Tiny Baruch online comic – and touring show, follow Tiny Baruch’s adventures on Instagram, he’s a two-time winner of Literary Death Match, he has performed poetry and comedy all over North America, from dive bars to fancy theatres, sexual health clinics, a cave once, and even SF SketchFest.

Jessy Randall’s poems, comics, and other things have appeared in Asimov’s, McSweeney’s, Poetry, and The Best American Experimental Writing. Her collection of poems A Day in Boyland (Ghost Road) was a finalist for the Colorado Book Award. Her other books include The Wandora Unit (Ghost Road, a young adult novel about love and friendship in the high school poetry crowd), Interruptions, (Pecan Grove, collaborative poems with Daniel M. Shapiro), Injecting Dreams into Cows (Red Hen, poems), There Was an Old Woman (Unicorn, prose poems built from nursery rhymes), Suicide Hotline Hold Music (Red Hen, poems and comics), and How to Tell If You Are Human (Pleiades, diagram poems). She is a librarian at Colorado College.

The beneficiary

From 1974, University Press Books has stoked the blaze of well over ten thousand minds on fire, carrying new scholarship published by the great university presses in the English-speaking world. Since our founding, we’ve added quality fiction and creative non-fiction to our selection, without drifting from our mission to showcase top new texts introduced by university presses.

Every penny you spend on this event will directly to University Press Books.

How does it work?

We use the conferencing system Zoom. After you sign up you’ll get an email with the Zoom access code. (Check that Eventbrite is using your current email address.) You don’t have to join with video, but it’s nice to see faces.