What Happened When I Stopped Watching TV Book Release Party

***Friday, March 1st, Wolfman Books, Downtown Oakland, 7:00pm*** The “What Happened When I Stopped Watching TV” Book Release Party Featuring Readings By

Alec West
Philip Staley
Lena Nicodemus
Joseph Kim

Alec West is a 26 year old East Bay native. He has worked with incarcerated youth as a mentor and writing instructor. He graduated from the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington with a degree in activism, organic agriculture and creative writing. When he’s not writing you can find him at music events and poetry slams, hiking in the woods, or splitting lanes down Martin Luther King or San Pablo on his bike. He is working on a Master’s in Education as an education specialist and hopes to become a special education teacher. “What Happened When I Stopped Watching TV” is his first book.

“What Happened When I Stopped Watching TV” is a collection of prose poetry based on the author’s experiences growing up in the Bay Area. The work focuses on themes of addiction, rebellion and hope as characters struggle against a world that would grind them up. Through disaster, the book brings the reader into the highs and lows of living life with eyes open, leaping and landing heart-first. Survival comes at a cost, but the lessons learned can bring healing across generations.

Philip Staley is a psychiatric nurse in the Bay Area and a contributor to the Green Windows Writing Anthology.

With over a decade of occult research and perfecting the art of the mental health report, Philip’s writing focuses on the underworld components of emotional landscapes. He manages to weave tension, humor, and a melancholy sovereignty into relatable fiction narratives.

Philip has been a near lifelong writer, cultivating plots and storylines for numerous roleplaying groups. His professional duties have taken him through the most desperate locales of several cities, and these experiences have shaped his writing and polished the neo-noir lens, through which he evaluates the world.

As a Bay Area writer, Philip Staley enjoys field trips to unconventional locations with a laptop, some headphones, and a daring sense of curiosity.

Lena Nicodemus is a writer/therapist/human originally from Baltimore, Maryland and now settled in Oakland. By day she works with children with autism and their families and by night she writes sometimes biting, sometimes gentle works ranging in topics from explorations of the fear about not having enough time to survival humor about rape culture.

Lena’s work has appeared in local publications and performances such as Quiet Lightning, Bay Area Generations, and the Green Windows anthology.

“Lena Nicodemus’ writing expands our own world. She moves through her life with her heart open, curious, and demanding then gifts her listeners by recreating in rich detail on paper the people and places she knows: from unanswered telephones to the variety of expressions possible on a child’s face; handmade bowls to grumpy voices. Her writing can bounce off the walls with anger or deepen a silence with intense love and compassion or demand answers to questions we didn’t realize we had. Her writing is always authentic and always relevant, even to those with a different experience.”
-Peggy Simmons, founder of Green Windows