Release Party for New great weather for MEDIA Anthology

Perch Coffee House and great weather for MEDIA present an inspiring evening of cutting edge poets and prose writers from across the Bay Area and the U.S.  They come together to celebrate the release of great weather’s new anthology, Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea, which features work by intense wordsmiths – including those you’ll hear tonight – along with an interview with musician and artist Walter Steding. Come prepared for revelations, epiphanies, and a few broad smiles.

This evening features writers from across the US and beyond, including Mary Mackey (Berkeley), Julian Mithra (Oakland), Guy Biederman (Sausalito), Carol Dorf (Berkeley), Kit Kennedy (Rossmoor, CA), Cathyann Cusimano (Mountain View, CA), Richard Loranger (Oakland), and great weather editor Jane Ormerod (from NY and UK).

Based in New York City, great weather for MEDIA publishes established and emerging writers from across the United States and beyond.

Please stop by, get yourself dangerously verbiaged up, and pick up a copy of Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea to call your very own.

 Release party for new great weather for MEDIA Anthology

Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea

a reading by

Mary Mackey
Julian Mithra
Guy Biederman
Carol Dorf
Kit Kennedy
Cathyann Cusimano
Richard Loranger
and Jane Ormerod

plus a brief open mic

hosted by Richard Loranger

PERFORMER BIOS

Mary Mackey became a poet by running high fevers, tramping through tropical jungles, dodging machine gun fire, being caught in volcanic eruptions, swarmed by army ants, stalked by vampire bats, threatened by poisonous snakes, making catastrophic decisions with regard to men, and reading. She is the author of 14 novels, one of which made The New York Times bestseller list; and 8 collections of poetry including Sugar Zone, which won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence, and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems 1974 to 2019, which won a 2018 CIIS Women’s Spirituality Book Award and the 2019 Erich Hoffer Award for the Best Book Published by a Small Press. You can contact her at https://marymackey.com.

Julian née Sara Mithra’s first book If the Color Is Fugitive (Nomadic Press, 2018) traces queer desire on the frontier of the American West and was a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. They eke out a living in Oakland encouraging young people to write.

Guy Biederman is the author of Soundings and Fathoms (Finishing Line Press). He has won awards in Exposition Review’s Flash 405 contests, and his stories and poems appear in journals such as Carve, Flashback Fiction, and Sea Letter. Guy hosts This Day Afloat on Radio Sausalito, lives on a houseboat with his wife and two mutinous cats, and walks the planks daily.

Carol Dorf has two chapbooks available: Some Years Ask (Moria Press) and Theory Headed Dragon (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry appears in Bodega, E-ratio, About Place, Glint, Slipstream, The Mom Egg, Sin Fronteras, Surreal Poetics, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Scientific American, Maintenant, and The Other Side of Violet (great weather for MEDIA). She is poetry editor of Talking Writing and teaches math in Berkeley.

Kit Kennedy serves as Poet in Residence of SF Bay Times and Poet in Residence of her church. She has published six collections of poetry. She regrets little except she never (to date) has skateboarded but she is an avid pickleball player.

Cathyann Cusimano’s work has a way of making the ordinary speak as if it were a stop along a traveler’s journey. She is at once academic and undisciplined, is rebellious and constrained by the polite dance of her own way of seeing. Cathyann has published four books of poetry: Being Myself on Fire, The Soul Made Visible, The Main Content, and Ordinarily Divine.

Richard Loranger is a multi-genre writer, performer, musician, visual artist, and all-around squeaky wheel, currently residing in Oakland, CA. He is the founder of Poetea, a monthly literary conversation group. His publications include the books Sudden Windows, Poems for Teeth, The Orange Book, nine chapbooks, and work in over 100 magazines and journals. He curates the reading series Babar in Exile, and the queer talk and reading series #we. You can find more about his work and scandals at www.richardloranger.com.

Jane Ormerod is the author of the full-length poetry collections Welcome to the Museum of Cattle and Recreational Vehicles on Fire (both from Three Rooms Press), and the chapbook 11 Films (Modern Metrics/EXOT Books). Her work also appears in publications including Maintenant, Flapperhouse, Marsh Hawk Press Review, Post (BLANK), Sensitive Skin, and Paris Lit Up. Born on the south coast of England, Jane now lives in New York City and performs extensively across the United States and beyond. She is a founding editor of great weather for MEDIA.