Virtual Event: Adam Jentleson Book Club Talk
2021-04-15 17:00 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA
JOIN US ON THURSDAY, APRIL 15 AT 5PM PT WHEN FOR A BOOK CLUB TALK WITH ADAM JENTLESON ON HIS BOOK KILL SWITCH: THE RISE OF THE MODERN SENARE AND THE CRIPPLING OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY, MODERATED BY SPENCER PAHLKE AND AMANDA SADRA!
In partnership with The American Constitution Society chapters from Berkeley Law, Stanford Law School, and ASU Law, the Political & Election Empowerment Project, and Manny’s
You can register for the event here!
About the Event
Why can’t we pass gun control legislation even after a horrific mass shooting? Why couldn’t Congress pass any civil rights legislation for 82 years after Reconstruction? What could prevent us from reversing the anti-democratic, anti-voting legislation coming from states like Georgia?
The filibuster.
But isn’t the filibuster a central part of the founder’s vision for our country? Doesn’t the filibuster protect minority rights? And doesn’t the filibuster encourage bipartisan legislating?
No. No. And not even close.
The modern filibuster is the result of more than two centuries of work by those who stood—and stand—in the way of equality, progress, and fairness. It is now a kill switch that allows a minority of the Senate, representing a minority of voters, to repeatedly block needed—and popular—legislation.
This drove Adam Jentleson, Sen. Harry Reid’s former Deputy Chief of Staff, to write Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy. The book is a history of the intertwining narratives and bad faith actors that delivered the Senate to its current anti-democratic condition.
Adam has been quoted just about everywhere of late, from the NYT to Politico to the Washington Post. He’s also a GQ columnist and frequent MSNBC contributor.
And—he will be joining us for a moderated Zoom discussion about Kill Switch and the filibuster on April 15 from 5-6pm Pacific.
If you’ve seen him in the news and want to ask him your question, or learn more about the filibuster, or you’ve already read the book and are a fan—this is the chance to meet Adam!
Please RSVP at this link—and forward this on to others who would be interested as well as post on social media!

Virtual Event: Patrick Radden Keefe and Jane Mayer
2021-04-15 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
JOIN US ON THURSDAY, APRIL 15 AT 6PM PT WHEN PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE IS JOINED BY JANE MAYER TO DISCUSS HIS LATEST BOOK, EMPIRE OF PAIN: THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE SACKLER DYNASTY, ON ZOOM!
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About Empire of Pain
A grand, devastating portrait of three generations of the Sackler family, famed for their philanthropy, whose fortune was built by Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin, by the prize-winning, bestselling author of Say Nothing
The Sackler name adorns the walls of many storied institutions—Harvard, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Oxford, the Louvre. They are one of the richest families in the world, known for their lavish donations to the arts and the sciences. The source of the family fortune was vague, however, until it emerged that the Sacklers were responsible for making and marketing a blockbuster painkiller that was the catalyst for the opioid crisis.
Empire of Pain begins with the story of three doctor brothers, Raymond, Mortimer and the incalculably energetic Arthur, who weathered the poverty of the Great Depression and appalling anti-Semitism. Working at a barbaric mental institution, Arthur saw a better way and conducted groundbreaking research into drug treatments. He also had a genius for marketing, especially for pharmaceuticals, and bought a small ad firm. Arthur devised the marketing for Valium, and built the first great Sackler fortune. He purchased a drug manufacturer, Purdue Frederick, which would be run by Raymond and Mortimer. The brothers began collecting art, and wives, and grand residences in exotic locales. Their children and grandchildren grew up in luxury.
Forty years later, Raymond’s son Richard ran the family-owned Purdue. The template Arthur Sackler created to sell Valium—co-opting doctors, influencing the FDA, downplaying the drug’s addictiveness—was employed to launch a far more potent product: OxyContin. The drug went on to generate some thirty-five billion dollars in revenue, and to launch a public health crisis in which hundreds of thousands would die.
This is the saga of three generations of a single family and the mark they would leave on the world, a tale that moves from the bustling streets of early twentieth-century Brooklyn to the seaside palaces of Greenwich, Connecticut, and Cap d’Antibes to the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. Empire of Pain chronicles the multiple investigations of the Sacklers and their company, and the scorched-earth legal tactics that the family has used to evade accountability. The history of the Sackler dynasty is rife with drama—baroque personal lives; bitter disputes over estates; fistfights in boardrooms; glittering art collections; Machiavellian courtroom maneuvers; and the calculated use of money to burnish reputations and crush the less powerful.
Empire of Pain is a masterpiece of narrative reporting and writing, exhaustively documented and ferociously compelling. It is a portrait of the excesses of America’s second Gilded Age, a study of impunity among the super elite and a relentless investigation of the naked greed and indifference to human suffering that built one of the world’s great fortunes.
About Patrick Radden Keefe
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of the New York Times bestseller Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the “10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade” by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change.
About Jane Mayer
Jane Mayer is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of three bestselling and critically acclaimed narrative nonfiction books. She co-authored Landslide: The Unmaking of the President, 1984–1988, with Doyle McManus, and Strange Justice: The Selling of Clarence Thomas, with Jill Abramson, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, was named one of The New York Times’s Top 10 Books of the Year and won the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize, the Goldsmith Book Prize, the Edward Weintal Prize, the Ridenhour Prize, the New York Public Library’s Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award. It was also a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. For her reporting at The New Yorker, Mayer has been awarded the John Chancellor Award, the George Polk Award, the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, and the I. F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence presented by the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Mayer lives in Washington, D.C.

Reading: Rick Barot & Barbara Jane Reyes
2021-04-15 19:00 - 20:00 | online
Rick Barot was born in the Philippines in 1969 and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied at Wesleyan University and The Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. Barot is the author of four books of poetry: The Galleons (Milkweed Editions, 2020), finalist for the National Book Award; Chord (Sarabande Books, 2015), winner of the 2016 UNT Rilke Prize, the PEN Open Book Award, and the Publishing Triangle’s Thom Gunn Award; Want (Sarabande Books, 2008), winner of the 2009 Grub Street Book Prize; and The Darker Fall (Sarabande Books, 2002), winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize.

Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Letters to a Young Brown Girl (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2020). She was born in 1971 in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her undergraduate education at the University of California Berkeley and her MFA in creative writing (poetry) at San Francisco State University. Reyes’s poetry collections include Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Books, 2017), a finalist for the California Book Award, and Diwata (BOA Editions, 2010). Her first book, Gravities of Center, was published by Arkipelago Books in 2003, and her second book, Poeta en San francisco (Tinfish Press, 2005) received the 2005 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets.
Registration available soon here.

Jonathan Meiburg
2021-04-15 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Jonathan Meiburg (of the band Shearwater) discusses his new book, A Most Remarkable Creature: The Hidden Life and Epic Journey of the World’s Smartest Birds of Prey (Knopf).
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channle.
REGISTER HERE
About A Most Remarkable Creature
In 1833, Charles Darwin was astonished by an animal he met in the Falkland Islands: handsome, social, and oddly crow-like falcons that were “tame and inquisitive . . . quarrelsome and passionate,” and so insatiably curious that they stole hats, compasses, and other valuables from the crew of the Beagle. Darwin wondered why these birds were confined to remote islands at the tip of South America, sensing a larger story, but he set this mystery aside and never returned to it. Almost two hundred years later, Jonathan Meiburg takes up this chase. He takes us through South America, from the fog-bound coasts of Tierra del Fuego to the tropical forests of Guyana, in search of these birds: striated caracaras, which still exist, though they’re very rare. He reveals the wild, fascinating story of their history, origins, and possible futures. And along the way, he draws us into the life and work of William Henry Hudson, the Victorian writer and naturalist who championed caracaras as an unsung wonder of the natural world, and to falconry parks in the English countryside, where captive caracaras perform incredible feats of memory and problem-solving. A Most Remarkable Creature is a hybrid of science writing, travelogue, and biography, as generous and accessible as it is sophisticated, and absolutely riveting.
“I’m in love with this book. If you like great writing, strange historical twists, adventure, nature, music and/or birds this will quickly become one of your all-time favorite books.”—Laurie Anderson, artist
About Jonathan Meiburg
In 1997, Jonathan Meiburg received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship to travel to remote communities around the world, a year-long journey that sparked his enduring fascination with islands, birds, and the deep history of the living world. Since then, he’s written reviews, features, and interviews for print and online publications including The Believer, The Talkhouse, and The Appendix on subjects ranging from a hidden exhibit hall at the American Museum of Natural History to the last long-form interview with author Peter Matthiessen. But he’s best known as the leader of the band Shearwater, whose albums and performances have often been praised by NPR, The New York Times, The Guardian, and Pitchfork. He lives in central Texas.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Mike Mechanic, Jackpot
2021-04-15 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
VIRTUAL EVENT: Bookshop welcomes Michael Mechanic, journalist and senior editor at Mother Jones magazine, to discuss his new book, Jackpot: How the Super-Rich Really Live—and How Their Wealth Harms Us All. Mechanic dives into the lives of the extremely rich, revealing the fascinating, otherworldly realm they inhabit—and the insidious effects their disproportionate affluence has on them, as well as our society at large. Tim O’Reilly and Kim Polese will join as panelists; the conversation will be moderated by Clive Thompson. This event is co-hosted by reader-supported investigative news organization, Mother Jones.
Register for this free online event by clicking here!

This is a free event. The featured book may be preordered below.
You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!
Have you ever fantasized about being ridiculously wealthy? Probably. Striking it rich is among the most resilient of American fantasies; we spent $81 billion on lottery tickets in 2019. Americans dream of the jackpot, the big exit, the life-altering payday, in whatever form that takes. We would escape day jobs and cramped living spaces, bury our debts, and bail out struggling friends and relations. But the reality for the ultra-wealthy is quite different.
“Mechanic’s nuanced perspective on wealth accumulation offers fresh insights …. an intriguing look at the boons and burdens of wealth.” —Publishers Weekly
Michael Mechanic is a senior editor at Mother Jones magazine. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife, two teenagers, and various animals. Jackpot is his first book.
Tim O’Reilly is the founder, CEO, and Chairman of O’Reilly Media, the company that has been providing the picks and shovels of learning to the Silicon Valley goldrush for the past thirty-five years. The company’s online learning and knowledge-on-demand platform at oreilly.com is used by thousands of enterprises and millions of individuals worldwide. O’Reilly has a history of convening conversations that reshape the computer industry. If you’ve heard the term “open source software,” “web 2.0,” “the Maker movement,” “government as a platform,” or “the WTF economy,” he’s had a hand in framing each of those big ideas. Tim is also a partner at early-stage venture firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures (OATV), and on the boards of Code for America, PeerJ, Civis Analytics, and PopVox. He is the author of many technical books published by O’Reilly Media, and most recently WTF? What’s the Future and Why It’s Up to Us (Harper Business, 2017). He is working on a new book about why we need to rethink antitrust in the era of internet-scale platforms.
Kim Polese is co-founder and board chair of CrowdSmart, a startup that combines human expertise with artificial intelligence to help funders identify promising young companies, reducing ingrained biases that have prevented many would-be founders from raising venture capital. Early in her career, Kim led the launch of Java as a founding product manager at Sun Microsystems. She has co-founded several companies, including software pioneer Marimba, where she was Chairman and CEO, took the company public, and later oversaw its successful acquisition by BMC. Marimba remains one of the world’s top internet-of-things platforms, delivering three billion software updates annually to our devices, appliances, and vehicles. Kim earned her degree in biophysics from UC-Berkeley and has done post-baccalaureate study in computer science at the University of Washington. An Aspen Institute Crown Fellow, she is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including Information Week’s “Top Technology Executives” and Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Americans.”
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, a columnist for Wired, and his most recent book is CODERS: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World.

Virtual Speaking Axolotl Reading and Open Mic #34
2021-04-15 20:00 - 22:00 | online
A Latinx poetry reading series y open mic entering into our 3rd consecutive year that happens every third Thursday of the month en el Zoom mundo. Curated y hosted by Josiahluis Alderete.

Sign up for the 10-slot virtual open mic by filling out this form:
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This month’s features: TBA

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High Dawn 8: Choi / Morgan / Foster / Suzuki
2021-04-16 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Presented in partnership with UC Berkeley Poetry Colloquium
RSVP for Zoom link: spt-april.eventbrite.com

Based in Berkeley, CA, 최 Lindsay is a poet and translator working between English, Korean, and Swedish. They are the author of Transverse (Futurepoem, 2020), and a chapbook, Matrices (speCt! books, 2017). They are a Kundiman fellow and a Ph.D. student in English literature at UC Berkeley. More of their work can be found in Omniverse, Amerarcana, and Aster(ix) Journal, and elsewhere.
Recent projects include a creative manuscript in and out of translation on the colonial history of leprosy in Korea. Their editorial work includes a print journal of translations and experiments in collaboration between Swedish and American poets, released in Sweden, Denmark, and the U.S, edited collaboratively by Berkeley Poetry Review and Ordkonst. They are a founding co-editor, with Noah Ross, of the chapbook press MO(O)ON/IO. Their work has been translated to French, and will appear in the forthcoming issue of NIOQUES, 22/23: Nouvelle Poésie Des États-Unis (New U.S. Poetry), edited by DoubleChange Collective, and translated by Abigail Lang. Visit them at lindsaychoi.com.

As a writer and artist, Saretta Morgan’s current work uses text, etching, sculpture, and video to engage relationships between ecology, Black diaspora and migration in the United States Southwest. She is based between Phoenix and Mohave Valley, Arizona where she teaches creative writing at Arizona State University and is an active member of the grassroots humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths Phoenix, which supports the safe passage of migrants in the U.S. Mexico borderlands.
Saretta is author of the chapbooks, Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and room for a counter interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017). She has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Virginia Piper Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. Recent work can be found at Triple Canopy, The Colorado Review, and Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day.

Photo credit: Ted Roeder

Poet, essayist, and educator Tonya M. Foster is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, and the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; the chapbook A History of the Bitch (forthcoming, Sputnik and Fizzle, 2020); and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her next poetry collection, Thingification is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2021. Monkey Talk, a multi-genre series about race, paranoia, aesthetics and surveillance is in development with support from a 2020 Creative Capital Foundation grant. She has been an artist-in-Residence at the San Francisco Museum of the African Diaspora, at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and at Macdowell. A 2020-2021 Lisa Goldberg Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, Dr. Foster holds the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University. She was raised in New Orleans, and her family goes generations back in Louisiana.

kaori suzuki is a tokyo-born music maker/composer currently living in oakland, ca. seeking modes of heightened listening-and-being in her spiraling sound visions, she uses high-droning modified acoustic instruments, electroacoustic sound technologies, intensely high register electronics, tape, and other elements necessary to spin her often loud, auditory transmissions.
her projects include solo compositions and durational music for vhf-combination tones; collaborative immersive light-sound happenings; drumming in the oakland-based minimalist psych-punk group, night collectors; and playing amplified cello and guitar in the ecstatic music band.
suzuki has performed widely in numerous venues across the u.s, japan, europe, mexico, and canada, and has published her recordings on independent labels in germany and the u.s. she currently teaches in the music department at the center for contemporary music at mills college.

Virtual Event: Frank Mortimer and Bob Tanem
2021-04-16 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Join us on Friday, April 16 at 6pm PT when Frank Mortimer discusses his new book, Bee People and the Bugs They Love, with KSFO’s Bob Tanem, on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
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Praise for Bee People and the Bugs They Love
“It is an achievement to convey so much knowledge so accessibly without once seeming overbearing. The main reason it all works is the honest descriptions of friendships that spring up around a shared, all-absorbing interest in bees. The book is written in a stylistically assured voice and with a structure that makes it easy to follow. And Mortimer intersperses useful facts about his passion in a successful and funny book that is sure to swell the ranks of the world’s beekeepers.”
—The New York Times

“Frank Mortimer’s BEE PEOPLE AND THE BUGS THEY LOVE is the bee’s knees and getting a ton of buzz. Bee smart, people, and read this un-BEE-lievably interesting look at the quirky world of beekeeping.”
—Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“If the world of beekeepers has a top ambassador, it’s Frank (The Beeman) Mortimer. Bee People and the Bugs They Love is a delightful portrayal for non-beekeepers of what life is like for those of us who are always thinking about bees.
—Tom Seeley, author of The Lives of Bees

”Bee People takes a long look at your first beekeeper’s meeting, that first bee sting, capturing your first swarm and tasting your first honey…My advice, read Mortimer’s book first, before you become a beekeeper. If you do, you will become a beekeeper. He gets it right. And Bee Nerd Alert: You will meet some of the best people in the world – beekeepers.“
—Kim Flottum, author, The Backyard Beekeeper, and editor-in-chief of Bee Culture Magazine

About Bee People and the Bugs They Love
A fascinating foray into the obsessions, friendships, scientific curiosity, misfortunes and rewards of suburban beekeeping—through the eyes of a Master Beekeeper…

Who wants to keep bees? And why? For the answers, Master Beekeeper Frank Mortimer invites readers on an eye-opening journey into the secret world of bees, and the singular world of his fellow bee-keepers. There’s the Badger, who introduces Frank to the world of bees; Rusty, a one-eyed septuagenarian bee sting therapist certain that honey will be the currency of the future after the governments fail; Scooby the “dude” who gets a meditative high off the awesome vibes of his psychedelia-painted hives; and the Berserker, a honeybee hitman who teaches Frank a rafter-raising lesson in staving off the harmful influences of an evil queen: “Squash her, mash her, kill, kill, kill!”

Frank also crosses paths with those he calls the Surgeons (precise and protected), the Cowboys (improvisational and unguarded) and the Poseurs, ex-corporate cogs, YouTube-informed and ill-prepared for the stinging reality of their new lives. In connecting with this club of disparate but kindred spirits, Frank discovers the centuries-old history of the trade; the practicality of maintaining it; what bees see, think, and feel (emotionless but sometimes a little defensive); how they talk to each other and socialize; and what can be done to combat their biggest threats, both human (anti-apiarist extremists) and mite (the Varroa Destructor).

With a swarm of offbeat characters and fascinating facts (did that bee just waggle or festoon?), Frank the Bee Man delivers an informative, funny, and galvanizing book about the symbiotic relationship between flower and bee, and bee and the beekeepers who are determined to protect the existence of one of the most beguiling and invaluable creatures on earth.

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #55
2021-04-16 18:00 - 19:30 | online
90 minutes
30 readers
3 minutes each
On Zoom!
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!

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Pandemic times continue in 2021 and we continue to gather our community virtually across state and country lines. Join us to read, join us to listen. All are welcome.

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Poetry and Environmental Justice, Writers tba
2021-04-17 12:00 - 13:00 | online
Remote access event, free and open to the public
Registration link pending, will be announced here
With emcee, Elise Ficarra
Presented in conjunction with the Poetry Coalition
Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Academy of American Poets in support of Poetry Coalition programs
Details tba

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center, in conjunction with the Poetry Coalition

Courttia Newland in conversation with Naomi Jackson and Victor LaValle
2021-04-17 12:00 - 14:00 | CA
Courttia Newland in conversation with Naomi Jackson and Victor LaValle
discussing Courttia Newland’s newly published novel
A River Called Time
from Akashic Books
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
———-
Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register. (link to be posted soon)
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(Click Here) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon)
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The Ark was built to save the lives of the many, but rapidly became a refuge for the elite, the entrance closed without warning.
Years after the Ark was cut off from the world—a world much like our own, but in which slavery has never existed—a chance of survival within the Ark’s confines is granted to a select few who can prove their worth. Among their number is Markriss Denny, whose path to future excellence is marred only by a closely guarded secret: without warning, his spirit leaves his body, allowing him to see and experience a world far beyond his physical limitations.
Once inside the Ark, Denny learns of another with the same power, whose existence could spell catastrophe for humanity. He is forced into a desperate race to understand his abilities, and in doing so uncovers the truth about the Ark, himself, and the people he thought he once knew.
Courttia Newland is the author of seven books including his much-lauded debut, The Scholar. His last novel, The Gospel According to Cane, was published by Akashic in 2013. In 2016 he was awarded the Roland Rees Bursary for playwriting. As a screenwriter, he has written two episodes of the Steve McQueen BBC series Small Axe. A River Called Time is his latest book.
Naomi Jackson is author of The Star Side of Bird Hill, published by Penguin Press in June 2015. The Star Side of Bird Hill was nominated for an NAACP Image Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize, the Center for Fiction’s First Novel Prize, and the International Dublin Literary Award. Star Side was named an Honor Book for Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. It was also selected for the American Booksellers Association’s Indies Introduce and Indies Next List programs. The book has been reviewed by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, NPR.org and Entertainment Weekly, which called Star Side “a gem of a book.“ Publishers Weekly named Jackson a Writer to Watch. Jackson is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark. She was the 2018-19 Writer-in-Residence at Queens College and previously taught at the University of Iowa, University of Pennsylvania, City College of New York, and Oberlin College.
Victor LaValle is the author of four novels which include, The Ecstatic, Big Machine, The Devil in Silver, and The Changeling and two novellas, Lucretia and the Kroons and The Ballad of Black Tom, as well as a short story collection titled Slapboxing with Jesus. He is also the creator and writer of a comic book Victor LaValle’s DESTROYER. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the World Fantasy Award, British World Fantasy Award, Bram Stoker Award, Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, Shirley Jackson Award, American Book Award, and the key to Southeast Queens.

Conversations with Authors - Jasmin Darznik (Online Event)
2021-04-17 16:00 - 18:00 | CA
A dazzling novel of one of America’s most celebrated photographers, Dorothea Lange, exploring the wild years in San Francisco that awakened her career-defining grit, compassion, and daring.
In 1918, a young and bright-eyed Dorothea Lange steps off the train in San Francisco, where a disaster kick-starts a new life. Her friendship with Caroline Lee, a vivacious, straight-talking Chinese American with a complicated past, gives Dorothea entrée into Monkey Block, an artists’ colony and the bohemian heart of the city. Dazzled by Caroline and her friends, Dorothea is catapulted into a heady new world of freedom, art, and politics. She also finds herself unexpectedly falling in love with the brilliant but troubled painter Maynard Dixon. Dorothea and Caroline eventually create a flourishing portrait studio, but a devastating betrayal pushes their friendship to the breaking point and alters the course of their lives.
The Bohemians captures a glittering and gritty 1920s San Francisco, with a cast of unforgettable characters, including cameos from such legendary figures as Mabel Dodge Luhan, Frida Kahlo, Ansel Adams, and D. H. Lawrence. A vivid and absorbing portrait of the past, it is also eerily resonant with contemporary themes, as anti-immigration sentiment, corrupt politicians, and a devastating pandemic bring tumult to the city—and the gift of friendship and the possibility of self-invention persist against the ferocious pull of history.
As Dorothea sheds her innocence, her purpose is awakened and she grows into the figure we know from history—the artist whose iconic Depression-era photographs like “Migrant Mother” broke the hearts and opened the eyes of a nation.
Jasmin Darznik’s debut novel, Song of a Captive Bird, was a New York Times Book Review “Editors’ Choice,” a Los Angeles Times bestseller, longlisted for the Center for Fiction Prize, and awarded the Writers’ Center’s First Novel Prize. Darznik is also the author of the New York Times bestseller The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life. Her books have been published in seventeen countries. She was born in Tehran, Iran, and came to America when she was five years old. She holds an MFA in fiction from Bennington College, a JD from the University of California, and a PhD in English from Princeton University. Now a professor of English and creative writing at California College of the Arts, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.

Virtual Event: Jonathon Keats and Alla Efimova
2021-04-18 18:00 - 19:00 | CA
Join us on Sunday, April 18 at 6pm PT when Jonathon Keats is joined by Alla Efimova to discuss the new monograph, Thought Experiments: The Art of Jonathon Keats, on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82380142783

About Thought Experiments
Jonathon Keats’ work as an artist and thinker is compelling for our time. Keats poses critical questions, asks us to fundamentally reconsider our assumptions, and proposes radical methods of response. In a time when the environment and human lifeways are experiencing unprecedented change, thought leaders like Keats are needed to encourage us to consider possibilities—from the absurd to the profound. Since the turn of the millennium, Keats has comprehensively extended his academic training in philosophy by prolifically presenting conceptual art projects that he refers to as “thought experiments.” These include installations and performances in museums and galleries around the globe. His motivations are to make space for exploring ideas, offering provocations, and confronting systems we generally take for granted. By prototyping alternative realities—systematically asking “what if?”—these projects probe the world in which we live, exploring the potential for societal change.

About Alla Efimova
Alla Efimova, Ph.D., is a contemporary art curator and museum specialist with a background in critical theory. She is the founder and principal of KunstWorks, a consulting firm that addresses the growing need for legacy planning among artists of the post-war generation. As the former Director and Chief Curator of The Magnes at the University of California Berkeley, one of the largest museum collections of Jewish art and history, Efimova engaged cutting-edge scholars as guests curators and collaborators and commissioned important regional and international artists to create site-specific projects, including two works by Jonathon Keats. She also co-published two of his artist books together with Modernism Inc.: Yod the Inhuman and Zayin the Profane. Efimova is an author of several books and catalogs and has taught at the University of California Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Irvine as well as the San Francisco Art Institute.

About Jonathon Keats
Acclaimed as a “poet of ideas” by The New Yorker and a “multimedia philosopher-prophet” by The Atlantic, Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer and experimental philosopher based in the United States and Europe. His conceptually-driven transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University to the Triennale di Milano, and from SXSW to CERN to UNESCO. He is the award-winning author of four books of nonfiction on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future (Oxford University Press) – and three book-length works of fiction. A contributing editor to both Discover Magazine and Art & Antiques, he also authors a weekly online art and design column for Forbes. He has been an artist-in residence at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics, UC Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station, and the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, a Black Mountain College Legacy Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an Imaginary Fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and a research fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment. He is currently a Polar Lab artist at the Anchorage Museum, a visiting scholar at San Jose State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, and an artist-in-residence at both the SETI Institute and UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. He serves as co-director and principal philosopher for Earth Law Center’s Interspecies Technology Transfer Consortium and as founding director and curator of the Museum of Future History. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.

VIRTUAL: Launch for Miah Jeffra / The Violence Almanac
2021-04-19 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Booksmith and The Bindery are thrilled to host the virtual launch for Miah Jeffra‘s new story collection The Violence Almanac! More to be announced soon, but won’t you save the date and join us?
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order The Violence Almanac here – we’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
About the book
In The Violence Almanac, Miah Jeffra complicates the boundaries between culture and nature, fiction and true-crime, desire and pain. In this powerful fiction debut, Jeffra takes us through the California landscape to map the various ways that violence emerges, terrorizes and shapes our most familiar social structures.
An ostracized child yearns to be the hero for a rural community threatened by an escaped penitentiary inmate. An ambitious young writer receives mysterious film clips that thrust her and her boyfriend into a spiral of grief. A sex worker attempts to move on after her best friend is murdered by a john. A seismologist struggles to control his rage over a breakup that summons his internal racism. A biographer seeks to capture the truth of Andrea Yates, the Texas mother who drowned her five children.
Familiar and real, ripped from headlines yet a fiction all its own, The Violence Almanac vacillates between visceral horror and heartbreaking humanity. With a broad array of voices, these stories paint a portrait of the vastly diverse, complicated, hyper-mediated state of California and the state of ourselves, and blurs the line between safety and danger, love and obsession, victim and agent of violence.
About the author
Miah Jeffra is author of The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! (Sibling Rivalry 2020), the chapbook The First Church of What’s Happening (Nomadic 2017), and co-editor, with Arisa White and Monique Mero, of the anthology Home is Where You Queer Your Heart (Foglifter 2021). Awards include the New Millennium Prize, the Sidney Lanier Fiction Prize, The Atticus Review Creative Nonfiction Prize, the Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship, Lambda Literary Fellowship, and 2019 finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Outstanding Anthology. Most recent work can be seen in The North American Review, The Pinch, The Greensboro Review, DIAGRAM, The Boiler, Litro, Barrelhouse, The Forge and Interim. Miah is a founding editor of Whiting Award-winning queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press. Photo by Sean Mikula.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

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Beronda L. Montgomery
2021-04-20 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Beronda L. Montgomery discusses her new book, Lesson from Plants (Harvard University Press), with Crystal M. Fleming.
“An invitation to awareness, awe, and curiosity. Beronda Montgomery takes us deep into the sophisticated and life-giving behaviors and community lives of plants, giving us evergreen lessons about resilience and diversity along the way.”—David George Haskell, author The Songs of Trees
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Lessons from Plants
We know that plants are important. They maintain the atmosphere by absorbing carbon dioxide and producing oxygen. They nourish other living organisms and supply psychological benefits to humans as well, improving our moods and beautifying the landscape around us. But plants don’t just passively provide. They also take action.
Beronda L. Montgomery explores the vigorous, creative lives of organisms often treated as static and predictable. In fact, plants are masters of adaptation. They “know” what and who they are, and they use this knowledge to make a way in the world. Plants experience a kind of sensation that does not require eyes or ears. They distinguish kin, friend, and foe, and they are able to respond to ecological competition despite lacking the capacity of fight-or-flight. Plants are even capable of transformative behaviors that allow them to maximize their chances of survival in a dynamic and sometimes unfriendly environment.
Lessons from Plants enters into the depth of botanic experience and shows how we might improve human society by better appreciating not just what plants give us but also how they achieve their own purposes. What would it mean to learn from these organisms, to become more aware of our environments and to adapt to our own worlds by calling on perception and awareness? Montgomery’s meditative study puts before us a question with the power to reframe the way we live: What would a plant do?
About the participants
Beronda L. Montgomery is MSU Foundation Professor of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and Microbiology & Molecular Genetics at Michigan State University. A Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Microbiology, she was named one of Cell’s 100 Inspiring Black Scientists in America.
Crystal M. Fleming, PhD, is a writer and sociologist who researches racism in the United States and abroad. She earned degrees from Wellesley College and Harvard University and is associate professor of sociology and Africana studies at Stony Brook University. Fleming writes about race, sexuality, and politics for publications including The Root, Black Agenda Report, Vox, and Everyday Feminism, and she has tens of thousands of followers on social media. She is the author of Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France and How to Be Less Stupid About Race: On Racism, White Supremacy and the Racial Divide (Beacon Press, 2018).

Virtual Get Lit #71
2021-04-20 19:00 - 21:00 | online
We’re in our 6th consecutive year as we continue to celebrate 12–15 writers taking risks and reading never-before-read work (rough drafts/debuts) within a 3-minute time limit + live music. All ages are welcome. Emceed by Abe Becker.

Nomadic Press’ Safe Space Statement and Process: https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess

Poster by Jevohn Tyler Newsome

FREE AND ALL WELCOME!

If you enjoy spaces like this and can swing it in these tight times, please consider supporting us via:

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Topic: Nomadic Press’ Monthly Get Lit
Time: Feb 16, 2021 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Every month on the Third Tue, until Dec 21, 2021, 11 occurrence(s)
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Ada Limón & Aria Aber
2021-04-21 14:00 - 15:00 | online
Wednesday, April 21 2021, 2:00pm via Zoom
Ada Limón is the author of five books of poetry, including The Carrying, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and was named one of the top 5 poetry books of the year by the Washington Post. Her fourth book Bright Dead Things was named a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She serves on the faculty of Queens University of Charlotte Low Residency M.F.A program, and the online and summer programs for the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center. In Spring 2021, Limón is serving as Distinguished Visiting Writer in Poetry, teaching English 342: Poetry Workshop and English 352: Poetry Tutorial for the MFA in Creative Writing program.
Aria Aber was raised in Germany. Her debut book Hard Damage won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and was published in September 2019. Her poems are forthcoming or have appeared in The New Yorker, New Republic, Kenyon Review, The Yale Review, Poem-A-Day, Narrative, Muzzle Magazine, Wasafiri and elsewhere. A graduate from the NYU MFA in Creative Writing, where she was the Writers in Public Schools Fellow, she holds awards and fellowships from Kundiman, Dickinson House, and the Wisconsin Institute of Creative Writing. For Spring 2020, Aber will be the Li Shen Visiting Writer at Mills College. She is at work on a second book of poems and a novel. Aber is serving as the Visiting Editor in Poetry this semester for MFA in Creative Writing Program.

VIRTUAL: Alex Riley with Steve Silberman / A Cure for Darkness: The Story of Depression and How We Treat It
2021-04-21 14:00 - 16:00 | CA
Booksmith is thrilled to host award-winning science writer Alex Riley for his first book A Cure for Darkness: The Story of Depression and How We Treat It, a fascinating look at the treatment of depression, blending journalism, science, history, and memoir. He’ll be in conversation with Neurotribes author Steve Silberman. Please note our early start time of 12pm PT.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order A Cure for Darkness here – we’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay (use code EVENTSHIP when checking out). We are happy to fulfill orders anywhere in the world – international postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to contact us at events@booksmith.com.
About the book
What is depression? Is it a persistent low mood or a complex range of symptoms? Is it a single diagnosis or a diversity of mental disorders requiring different treatments? In A Cure for Darkness, science writer Alex Riley explores these questions, digging into the long history of depression and chronicling the lives of psychiatrists and scientists who sought cures for their patients.
Since 2015, Riley has received both cognitive behavioral therapy and antidepressants for his own depression. Throughout his treatment, he wondered—are antidepressants effective? Do short-term talking therapies actually work? And what treatments are on the horizon for those who don’t respond to these first-line treatments? Expanding from his own experience, he tracks treatments through history, from the “talking cure” to electroconvulsive therapy to magic mushrooms. With depression fast becoming the leading burden of disease around the world, the future of mental healthcare depends not just on the development of new therapies, but on increasing access for people who are currently without. Reporting on the field of global mental health from its colonial past to the present day, Riley highlights a range of scalable therapies, including how a group of grandmothers stands on the frontline of a mental health revolution.
Weaving in personal and family history, A Cure for Darkness is a gripping narrative journey and a surprisingly hopeful work that delves deep into the science of mental health.
About the authors
Alex Riley is an award-winning science writer and the author of A Cure for Darkness: The Story of Depression and How We Treat It, his first book. He received a best feature award from the Association of British Science Writers for his reporting on the Friendship Bench, a project that began in Zimbabwe in 2006 and has since provided mental health care to thousands of people in New York. A former research scientist, he has co-authored peer-reviewed scientific papers while working at the Natural History Museum in London. Since leaving academia in 2015, he began writing popular science articles for magazines such as New Scientist, PBS’s NOVA Next, BBC Future, Mosaic Science, Aeon, and Nautilus Magazine. He lives in Bristol.
Steve Silberman is an award-winning science writer and the author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity, which Oliver Sacks called “a sweeping and penetrating history presented with a rare sympathy and sensitivity.” The book became a widely-praised bestseller in the United States and the United Kingdom. His TED talk, The Forgotten History of Autism, has been viewed more than a million times and translated into 35 languages. He lives with his husband Keith in San Francisco. Author photo by Tanya Rosen-Jones.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Virtual Event: Jakob Guanzon and Lysley Tenorio
2021-04-21 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Wednesday, April 21 at 6pm PT when Jakob Guanzon discusses his debut novel, Abundance, with Lysley Tenorio on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84964860993

Praise for Abundance
“Jakob Guanzon’s excellent debut novel, Abundance, is the story of a father and son scraping by in a country that relegates its most vulnerable to day-to-day survival. Despite that struggle, Guanzon infuses his characters with spirit and fight, and renders them in prose that is sharp, blunt, and lyrical, all at once. To read Abundance is to understand America in ways both shockingly new and startlingly familiar. Contemporary American fiction is lucky to add this book to its shelves.”—Lysley Tenorio, author of The Son of Good Fortune

“From the table of contents, Guanzon had me hooked. This haunting and fiercely passionate story takes America’s capitalist heart to task. Here is an unforgettable accounting of family, fever, and the fortunes of our strip mall society.”—Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark

“A quest, a page-turner, and above all a love story, Abundance lays bare one father’s brutal, tender hustle to care for his son in a winner-take-all world. Henry’s meticulously plotted journey, unfolding in heart-stopping prose, marks Jakob Guanzon as a debut author with compassion and talent to burn.”—Mia Alvar, author of In the Country

About Abundance
A wrenching debut about the causes and effects of poverty, as seen by a father and son living in a pickup

Evicted from their trailer on New Year’s Eve, Henry and his son, Junior, have been reduced to living out of a pickup truck. Six months later, things are even more desperate. Henry, barely a year out of prison for pushing opioids, is down to his last pocketful of dollars, and little remains between him and the street. But hope is on the horizon: Today is Junior’s birthday, and Henry has a job interview tomorrow.

To celebrate, Henry treats Junior to dinner at McDonald’s, followed by a night in a real bed at a discount motel. For a moment, as Junior watches TV and Henry practices for his interview in the bathtub, all seems well. But after Henry has a disastrous altercation in the parking lot and Junior succumbs to a fever, father and son are sent into the night, struggling to hold things together and make it through tomorrow.

In an ingenious structural approach, Jakob Guanzon organizes Abundance by the amount of cash in Henry’s pocket. A new chapter starts with each debit and credit, and the novel expands and contracts, revealing the extent to which the quality of our attention is altered by the abundance—or lack thereof—that surrounds us. Set in an America of big-box stores and fast food, this incandescent debut novel trawls the fluorescent aisles of Walmart and the booths of Red Lobster to reveal the inequities and anxieties around work, debt, addiction, incarceration, and health care in America today.

Unity and Struggle: A Collective Address with Tongo Eisen-Martin, San Francisco's Poet Laureate
2021-04-21 18:00 - 19:30 | online
Register Here

Co-presented with San Francisco Public Library
Please join Tongo Eisen-Martin, San Francisco’s 8th Poet Laureate, and family for an evening of poetry and exposition on the revolutionary potentials of art; as beautifully no incarnation of craft exists outside of the movements, renaissances; the people who pass us through. FREE
Registration required. Event to be held on Zoom.
Featuring:

Marc Bamuthi Joseph
Biko Eisen-Martin
Mahogany Browne
Jive Poetic
Joyce Lee

Eisen-Martin is a poet and the founder of Black Freighter Press. His book Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, Pocket Poet series), received a 2018 American Book Award, the 2018 California Book Award for Poetry and was short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His previous book, someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), was nominated for a California Book Award. His forthcoming book, A Good Earth: City Lights Pocket Poets Series No 62, will be published in September 2021.
Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He is a graduate of Columbia University.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Eisen-Martin spent time as a child hanging out at the Western Addition Cultural Center, now the African American Art and Culture Complex, where he later taught writing workshops. In his vision for Poet Laureate, he aims to organize poetry circles in underserved neighborhoods throughout the City and recruit and nurture artists from San Francisco’s marginalized communities.

Marie Mutsuki Mockett in conversation with Garnette Cadogan
2021-04-21 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
discussing her new book
American Harvest: God, Country, and Farming in the Heartland
published by Graywolf Press
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(CLICK HERE) to register. Link to be posted soon.
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(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. Link to be posted soon.
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For over one hundred years, the Mockett family has owned a seven-thousand-acre wheat farm in the panhandle of Nebraska, where Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s father was raised. Mockett, who grew up in bohemian Carmel, California, with her father and her Japanese mother, knew little about farming when she inherited this land. Her father had all but forsworn it.
In American Harvest, Mockett accompanies a group of evangelical Christian wheat harvesters through the heartland at the invitation of Eric Wolgemuth, the conservative farmer who has cut her family’s fields for decades. As Mockett follows Wolgemuth’s crew on the trail of ripening wheat from Texas to Idaho, they contemplate what Wolgemuth refers to as “the divide,” inadvertently peeling back layers of the American story to expose its contradictions and unhealed wounds. She joins the crew in the fields, attends church, and struggles to adapt to the rhythms of rural life, all the while continually reminded of her own status as a person who signals “not white,” but who people she encounters can’t quite categorize.
American Harvest is an extraordinary evocation of the land and a thoughtful exploration of ingrained beliefs, from evangelical skepticism of evolution to cosmopolitan assumptions about food production and farming. With exquisite lyricism and humanity, this astonishing book attempts to reconcile competing versions of our national story.
Marie Mutsuki Mockett is the author of a novel, Picking Bones from Ash, and a memoir, Where the Dead Pause, and the Japanese Say Goodbye, which was a finalist for the PEN Open Book Award. She has written for the New York Times, Salon, National Geographic, Glamour, Ploughshares, and other publications and has been a guest on The World, Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered on NPR. She is a core faculty member of the Rainier Writing Workshop and a Visiting Writer in the MFA program Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California. She lives in San Francisco.

Garnette Cadogan is the Porter Distinguished Visiting Professor for the 2020-2021 academic year. Born and raised in Jamaica, Garnette Cadogan is an essayist, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University.
This event has been sponsored by the City Lights Foundation.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Bonnie Tsui, Why We Swim
2021-04-21 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
FREE VIRTUAL EVENT: Award-winning Bay Area author Bonnie Tsui will join us to discuss Why We Swim (in paperback April 13th)—her immersive, unforgettable, and eye-opening perspective on swimming and human behavior. Tsui will be in conversation with Boston Marathon champion and two-time Olympian Des Linden.
Rebecca Skloot, bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, says, “I was enchanted by this book: it’s a beautifully written love poem to water that takes us inside the incredible human need to be at one with it, the amazing ways we succeed, and the tremendous price that comes when we feel. It’s a deeply reported and fascinating story that takes us from the first record of swimming (which lies in the middle of a desert) to tales of vanishing aquatic societies, sea nomads, and so much more. This is a book Bonnie Tsui was born to write.”
Register for this free Crowdcast event by clicking here!

This is a free event. The featured book may be preordered below. You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!
We swim in freezing Arctic waters and piranha-infested rivers to test our limits. We swim for pleasure, for exercise, for healing. But humans, unlike other animals that are drawn to water, are not natural-born swimmers. We must be taught. Our evolutionary ancestors learned for survival; now, in the twenty-first century, swimming is one of the most popular activities in the world.
Why We Swim is propelled by stories of Olympic champions, a Baghdad swim club that meets in Saddam Hussein’s palace pool, modern-day Japanese samurai swimmers, and even an Icelandic fisherman who improbably survives a wintry six-hour swim after a shipwreck. New York Times contributor Bonnie Tsui, a swimmer herself, dives into the deep, from the San Francisco Bay to the South China Sea, investigating what it is about water that seduces us, despite its dangers, and why we come back to it again and again.
“The only thing better than reading Bonnie Tsui’s writing about swimming is swimming itself—and both are sublime. Why We Swim is an aquatic tour de force, a captivating story filled with adventure, meditation, and celebration. This book is a joy to dive into.” — Susan Casey, bestselling author of The Wave and Voices in the Ocean
Bonnie Tsui lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area. A longtime contributor to the New York Times and California Sunday Magazine, she has been the recipient of the Jane Rainie Opel Young Alumna Award from Harvard University, the Lowell Thomas Gold Award, and a National Press Foundation Fellowship. Her last book, American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods, won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature and was a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and Best of 2009 Notable Bay Area Books selection. Her website is bonnietsui.com.
Des Linden is the 2018 Boston Marathon champion and a two-time U.S. Olympian. In April 2018, Linden braved headwinds and torrential rain to become the first American women’s champion at the Boston Marathon since 1985. Her win was one for the record books as she bested the field in the worst conditions in race history. She finished 7th in the women’s marathon at the Rio Olympic Games. Linden attended Arizona State University where she was an All-American in both cross country and track. After graduation, she moved to Rochester, Michigan to join the Hansons Brooks Distance Project. She currently trains in Northern Michigan and continues representing Brooks. A self-proclaimed bacon aficionado, her hobbies include reading, writing, and collecting assorted whiskeys.

Launch Event for American Geography in Honor of Barry Lopez
2021-04-22 16:00 - 17:30 | online
Radius Books and The Green Arcade invite you to join Sandra S. Phillips, Debra Gwartney, Toby Jurovics, and Beverly Dahlen to celebrate the launch of AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY: PHOTOGRAPHS OF LAND USE FROM 1840 TO THE PRESENT, including live readings of recent work from Robert Adams and Barry Lopez.

Books signed by Sandra Phillips can be ordered from The Green Arcade’s Online Shop: www.TheGreenArcade.com

Here is the link to register: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Q5YOD4eKT12vqHqyW534EA

Drawing primarily from the vast permanent collection of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, American Geography charts a visual history of land use in the United States.

From the earliest photographic records of human habitation to the latest aerial and digital imagery, from nearly uninhabited desert and isolated mountainous territories to suburban sprawl and densely populated cities, this compilation offers an increasingly nuanced perspective on the American landscape.
Divided by region, these photographs address ways in which different histories and traditions of land use have given rise to different cultural transitions: from the Midwestern prairies and agricultural traditions of the South, to the riverine systems in the Northeast, and the environmental challenges and riches of the far West.
American Geography provides a complex, thought-provoking survey featuring work from Robert Adams, Dawoud Bey, Barbara Bosworth, Debbie Fleming Caffery, William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein, Terry Evans, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Emmet Gowin, Lee Friedlander, Dorothea Lange, An-My Lê, Trevor Paglen, Wendy Red Star, Mark Ruwedel, Victoria Sambunaris, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, and Carleton E. Watkins, among others.

Becky Albertalli with Leah Johnson
2021-04-22 18:00 - 19:00 | CA
We could not be more excited: #1 New York Times bestselling author, rom com queen, and longtime favorite Becky Albertalli will be joining us for a virtual event to chat about Kate In Waiting, a buoyant and endearing new novel about daring to step out of the shadows and into the spotlight in love, life, and yes, theater.

Contrary to popular belief, best friends Kate Garfield and Anderson Walker are not codependent. Carpooling to and from theater rehearsals? Environmentally sound and efficient. Consulting each other on every single life decision? Basic good judgment. Pining for the same guys from afar? Shared crushes are more fun anyway. But when Kate and Andy’s latest long-distance crush shows up at their school, everything goes off-script. Turns out, communal crushes aren’t so fun when real feelings are involved. This one might even bring the curtains down on Kate and Anderson’s friendship.
Becky Albertalli is the author of William C. Morris Award winner and National Book Award longlist title, Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda (now a hit film, Love, Simon); the acclaimed The Upside of Unrequited; and the New York Times bestsellers Leah on the Offbeat, What If It’s Us (cowritten with Adam Silvera), Yes No Maybe So (cowritten with Aisha Saeed), and Love, Creekwood: A Simonverse Novella.
Becky will be chatting with Leah Johnson, author of the bestselling You Should See Me in a Crown that was the inaugural Reese’s Book Club YA pick, was named one of Cosmo’s 15 Best Young Adult Books of 2020, an Indies Introduce pick, and a Junior Library Guild selection.

Please note that we have a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during our virtual events. In the event that someone joins the event who is not there to celebrate the author, the store will immediately remove any disrespectful comments and remove this individual from the event. Once removed, they cannot rejoin.

Mira Sethi
2021-04-22 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
reading from her new fiction collection
Are You Enjoying?
published by Alfred Knopf
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(CLICK HERE) to register. Link to be posted soon.
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(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. Link to be posted soon.
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An exhilarating debut by a young writer from Pakistan: provocative, funny, disarmingly original stories that upend traditional notions of identity and family, and peer into the vulnerable workings of the human heart.
From the high-stakes worlds of television and politics to the intimate corridors of home–including the bedroom–these wryly observed, deeply revealing stories look at life in Pakistan with humor, compassion, psychological acuity, and emotional immediacy. Childhood best friends agree to marry in order to keep their sexuality a secret. A young woman with an anxiety disorder discovers the numbing pleasures of an illicit love affair. A radicalized student’s preparations for his sister’s wedding involve beating up the groom. An actress is forced to grow up fast on the set of her first major tv show, where the real intrigue takes place off-screen. Every story bears witness to the all-too-universal desire to be loved, and what happens when this longing gets pushed to its limits. Are You Enjoying? is a free-spirited, confident, indelible introduction to a galvanizing new talent.

Mira Sethi is an actor and a writer. She grew up in Lahore and attended Wellesley College, after which Sethi worked as a books editor at The Wall Street Journal. She has written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. Sethi regularly appears in mainstream Pakistani drama series on television. She lives in Lahore, Karachi, and San Francisco.
reading from her new fiction collection
Are You Enjoying?
published by Alfred Knopf
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
———-
Event is free, but registration is required.
(CLICK HERE) to register. Link to be posted soon.
———–
(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. Link to be posted soon.
———–
An exhilarating debut by a young writer from Pakistan: provocative, funny, disarmingly original stories that upend traditional notions of identity and family, and peer into the vulnerable workings of the human heart.
From the high-stakes worlds of television and politics to the intimate corridors of home–including the bedroom–these wryly observed, deeply revealing stories look at life in Pakistan with humor, compassion, psychological acuity, and emotional immediacy. Childhood best friends agree to marry in order to keep their sexuality a secret. A young woman with an anxiety disorder discovers the numbing pleasures of an illicit love affair. A radicalized student’s preparations for his sister’s wedding involve beating up the groom. An actress is forced to grow up fast on the set of her first major tv show, where the real intrigue takes place off-screen. Every story bears witness to the all-too-universal desire to be loved, and what happens when this longing gets pushed to its limits. Are You Enjoying? is a free-spirited, confident, indelible introduction to a galvanizing new talent.

Mira Sethi is an actor and a writer. She grew up in Lahore and attended Wellesley College, after which Sethi worked as a books editor at The Wall Street Journal. She has written op-ed pieces for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Guardian. Sethi regularly appears in mainstream Pakistani drama series on television. She lives in Lahore, Karachi, and San Francisco.

Open Mic Night | Featuring Jewelle Gomez
2021-04-22 18:00 - 20:00 | online
OPEN MIC THURSDAYS continue. Join us on ZOOM twice a month for our virtual Open Mic. Look for MoAD Open Mic every other Thursday this month. Hosted by poet Nia McAllister, join us for an evening of spoken word, featuring amazing poets and musicians from throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Participate or just watch. Everyone is welcome.
All interested performers, please sign up below. For those interested in listening as part of the audience, no need to fill out the form, just follow the zoom link below:
Sign up to perform below. Everyone is welcome.

Open Mic, April 22 2021

First Name

Last Name

Email Address

Donations of any amount are always welcome, so if you are able to, please consider donating to MoAD online HERE, or donating through Give by Cell by texting the word: MOADSF to the number: 56512 on your cell phone, then follow the link provided to make a donation. All donations will go towards supporting MoAD and continuing to bring you engaging programming.
Here are the instructions for joining via ZOOM:
REGISTER IN ADVANCE VIA ZOOM TO RECEIVE A LINK TO JOIN THE PROGRAM
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUtce2vrzwiEt0a_Tbt0aZXjd2UWKjmTNNB
Once you register, you will receive an email with the link to join the program.
Our Featured Artist: Jewelle Gomez
Jewelle Gomez, (Cape Verdean/Wampanoag/Ioway) is a novelist, essayist, poet, educator, and public speaker. She’s the author of eight books including the first Black Lesbian vampire novel, THE GILDA STORIES, which has been in print more than 25 years and was recently optioned by Cheryl Dunye for a TV mini-series. Her work has appeared numerous anthologies including “Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora,” and “Red Indian Road West.” Her plays about James Baldwin and Alberta Hunter have been produced in San Francisco and New York City. Follow @VampyreVamp

VIRTUAL: Berkeley Arts & Letters & Greater Good Science Center present Amanda Ripley with Jason Marsh / High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out
2021-04-22 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Berkeley Arts & Letters and the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley are thrilled to present Amanda Ripley for her new book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. She’ll be in conversation with GGSC executive director Jason Marsh.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order High Conflict here – we’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
About the book
When we are baffled by the insanity of the “other side”—in our politics, at work, or at home—it’s because we aren’t seeing how the conflict itself has taken over.
That’s what “high conflict” does. It’s the invisible hand of our time. And it’s different from the useful friction of healthy conflict. That’s good conflict, and it’s a necessary force that pushes us to be better people.
High conflict, by contrast, is what happens when discord distills into a good-versus-evil kind of feud, the kind with an us and a them. In this state, the normal rules of engagement no longer apply. The brain behaves differently. We feel increasingly certain of our own superiority and, at the same time, more and more mystified by the other side.
New York Times bestselling author and award-winning journalist Amanda Ripley investigates how good people get captured by high conflict—and how they break free.
Our journey begins in California, where a world-renowned conflict expert struggles to extract himself from a political feud. Then we meet a Chicago gang leader who dedicates his life to a vendetta—only to find himself working beside the man who killed his childhood idol. Next, we travel to Colombia, to find out whether thousands of people can be nudged out of high conflict at scale. Finally, we return to America to see what happens when a group of liberal Manhattan Jews and conservative Michigan corrections officers choose to stay in each other’s homes in order to understand one another better.
All these people, in dramatically different situations, were drawn into high conflict by similar forces, including conflict entrepreneurs, humiliation, and false binaries. But ultimately, all of them found ways to transform high conflict into something good, something that made them better people. They rehumanized and recategorized their opponents, and they revived curiosity and wonder, even as they continued to fight for what they knew was right.
People do escape high conflict. Individuals—even entire communities—can short-circuit the feedback loops of outrage and blame, if they want to. This is a mind-opening new way to think about conflict that will transform how we move through the world.
About the authors
Amanda Ripley is the New York Times bestselling author of The Smartest Kids in the World and The Unthinkable. She writes for The Atlantic, Politico, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, among other publications.
Jason Marsh is the executive director of UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center and the founding editor in chief of the center’s award-winning online magazine, Greater Good, which engages 1 million readers each month. He is also the founding producer of the GGSC’s online course and podcast–both called The Science of Happiness--which have reached millions of students and listeners worldwide. Marsh has co-edited three anthologies of Greater Good articles: The Compassionate Instinct, Are We Born Racist?, and The Gratitude Project; his own articles for Greater Good have explored everything from the psychology of the bystander to the reasons why he should finally start meditating. His writing has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the opinion section of CNN.com. Previously, he worked as a reporter and producer at KQED Public Radio in San Francisco, as a documentary producer, and as a kindergarten teacher. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Reclaiming Connection and Community
2021-04-22 19:00 - 20:30 | Virtual
The American Dream as it has been defined for more than a century is about the well-paying job, the nuclear family, and upward mobility. But what both clouds and defines that dream is the distance between us, our neighbors, and that we, our communities, are defined by the dichotomy of winners and losers. What has been lost in many people’s day to day and in the larger American Dream is the key element that helped many of us to succeed in the first place-community.
Join author and activist Mia Birdsong and CIIS Director of Diversity and Inclusion Rachel Bryant for a conversation on reclaiming family, friendship, and communities. Sharing insights from her book, How We Show Up, Mia shows that what separates us isn’t only the ever-present injustices built around race, class, gender, values, and beliefs, but also our denial of our interdependence and need for belonging. Mia highlights how we can return to our inherent connectedness to find strength, safety, and support in vulnerability and generosity, in asking for help, and in being accountable.
Discover how showing up-literally and figuratively-points us toward the promise of our collective vitality and leads us to the liberated well-being we want.
Free, suggested donation of $10.
https://www.ciis.edu/public-programs/event-calendar/birdsong-mia-april-22-2021 publicprograms@ciis.edu 415-575-6175

Discussion of THE JACKPOT | Author Michael Mechanic in conversation with Dashka Slater
2021-04-22 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Please join us on Thursday, April 22, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a discussion of JACKPOT: HOW THE SUPER-RICH REALLY LIVE—AND HOW THEIR WEALTH HARMS US ALL with local author Michael Mechanic in discussion with Dashka Slater (author of THE 57 BUS and ESCARGOT).
Our discussion will be webcast on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85795898890.
Order your copy of JACKPOT at http://bit.ly/ggpJackpot, or in audiobook from Libro.fm at http://bit.ly/JackpotAB.
Description

A senior editor at Mother Jones dives into the lives of the extremely rich, showing the fascinating, otherworldly realm they inhabit—and the insidious ways this realm harms us all.
Have you ever fantasized about being ridiculously wealthy? Probably. Striking it rich is among the most resilient of American fantasies, surviving war and peace, expansions and recessions, economic meltdowns and global pandemics. We dream of the jackpot, the big exit, the life-altering payday, in whatever form that takes. (Americans spent $81 billion on lottery tickets in 2019, more than the GDPs of most nations.) We would escape “essential” day jobs and cramped living spaces, bury our debts, buy that sweet spread, and bail out struggling friends and relations. But rarely do we follow the fantasy to its conclusion—to ponder the social, psychological, and societal downsides of great affluence and the fact that so few possess it.
What is it actually like to be blessed with riches in an era of plagues, political rancor, and near-Dickensian economic differences? How mind-boggling are the opportunities and access, how problematic the downsides? Does the experience differ depending on whether the money is earned or unearned, where it comes from, and whether you are male or female, white or black? Finally, how does our collective lust for affluence, and our stubborn belief in social mobility, explain how we got to the point where forty percent of Americans have literally no wealth at all?
These are all questions that Jackpot sets out to explore. The result of deep reporting and dozens of interviews with fortunate citizens—company founders and executives, superstar coders, investors, inheritors, lottery winners, lobbyists, lawmakers, academics, sports agents, wealth and philanthropy professionals, concierges, luxury realtors, Bentley dealers, and even a woman who trains billionaires’ nannies in physical combat, Jackpot is a compassionate, character-rich, perversely humorous, and ultimately troubling journey into the American wealth fantasy and where it has taken us.
About the Author

Michael Mechanic, the author of JACKPOT, is a longtime East Bay resident, Oakland Tech parent, and senior editor at Mother Jones magazine. He is also the former managing editor of the East Bay Express and a graduate of UC Berkeley, where he majored in biochemistry and earned a master’s degree from the Graduate School of Journalism. Mechanic has won numerous awards for his writing, including a “best feature” award from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for a piece about illegal cockfighting culture.
Praise For…

“Economic inequality has never been more gaping in the United States, which makes it the perfect time to read Jackpot, Michael Mechanic’s entertaining and eviscerating peek behind the velvet curtains and into the real lives of America’s Super-Rich. Mechanic provides an eyeopening exposé of the myriad ways in which our nation’s political system unfairly enriches those at the top at the expense of those at the bottom. His myth-busting conclusion is that everyone loses, even the lucky few who have hit the jackpot.” —JANE MAYER, author of Dark Money
“Eye-opening…. often a gleeful sendup of the absurd eccentricities of the superrich…. A scathing but fair indictment of how the mindless worship of wealth makes us all poorer.” —Kirkus Reviews

About Dashka Slater

Dashka Slater has been telling stories since she could talk. An award-winning journalist who writes about criminal justice and other topics for such publications as The New York Times Magazine and Mother Jones, she is also the author of eleven books of fiction and non-fiction for children and adults. Her work has been translated into a dozen languages. Learn more at www.dashkaslater.com.

Andri Snaer Magnason and Rebecca Solnit In conversation about On Time and Water
2021-04-22 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Orion Magazine and Point Reyes Books present a special Earth Day conversation featuring Rebecca Solnit and Icelandic writer Andri Snaer Magnason. The two will discuss Magnason’s new book, On Time and Water (Open Letter Books).
“It is difficult to express to someone who has not read [On Time and Water] how wonderful and how horrifying—in a nutshell, how truly vital—this book is. Magnason has created a masterpiece, staunchly scientific and highly informative, yet utterly raw in its humanity.”—Asymptote Journal
This pre-recorded conversation will premiere on our Crowdcast channel in celebration of Earth Day 2021.
This is a free event, but we encourage you to pay what you will or purchase the book to support the bookstore and Orion Magazine. All ticket sales will be split between the organizations.
REGISTER HERE
About On Time and Water
A few years ago, Andri Snaer Magnason, one of Iceland’s most beloved writers and public intellectuals, was asked by a leading climate scientist why he wasn’t writing about the greatest crisis mankind has faced. Magnason demurred: he wasn’t a specialist, he said; it wasn’t his field. But the scientist persisted: “If you cannot understand our scientific findings and present them in an emotional, psychological, poetic or mythological context,” he told him, “then no one will really understand the issue, and the world will end.”
Based on interviews and advice from leading glacial, ocean, climate, and geographical scientists, and interwoven with personal, historical, and mythological stories, Magnason’s response is a rich and compelling work of narrative nonfiction that illustrates the reality of climate change–and offers hope in the face of an uncertain future. Moving from reflections on how one writes an obituary for an iceberg to exhortation for a heightened understanding of human time and our obligations to one another, throughout history and across the globe, On Time and Water is both deeply personal and globally-minded: a travel story, a world history, and a desperate plea to live in harmony with future generations. Already a massive bestseller in Iceland, and selling in two dozen territories around the world, this is a book unlike anything that has yet been published on the current climate emergency.
About Andri Snaer Magnason and Rebecca Solnit
Andri Snær Magnason is one of Iceland’s most celebrated writers. He has won the Icelandic Literary Prize for fiction, children’s fiction, and non-fiction. In 2009, Magnason co-directed the documentary Dreamland, which was based on his book Dreamland: A Self-Help Manual for a Frightened Nation (forthcoming from Open Letter). In 2010, Magnason was awarded the Kairos Prize, presented to outstanding individuals in the field of intercultural understanding. Magnason ran for president of Iceland in 2016 and came third out of nine candidates.
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell, River of Shadows, and Wanderlust. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to The Guardian and other publications.
