Litseen

Black Artists Showcase ft. Meccamorphosis
2020-06-10 20:00 - 22:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
THE LONGEST RUNNING POETRY SLAM ON THE WEST COAST!
Bringing you some of the best poetry from across the world every week since 1999, and third in the nation at the 2015 National Poetry Slam!
http://berkeleyslam.org/
https://twitter.com/berkeleyslam
Instagram: @berkeleyslam
https://www.patreon.com/berkeleyslam
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Welcome to another show! Show some love to our feature, Meccamorphosis! We are also raising funds for the Okra Project alongside Greetings from Queer Mountain (https://www.theokraproject.com/) and need your help to reach our goal of $540!
Meccamorphosis is an author, actress, teaching artist and poet. Mecca first garnished national attention after winning Brave New Voices, an international youth poetry slam. Since then Mecca has been traveling the country performing, teaching and building upon the intersection of activism and art. Mecca is an incredible voice for Black women everywhere.
We will be hosting a writing workshop on Zoom at 7pm. The code for this workshop is 829 9882 7381. Get a prompt from the feature and meet other writers!
For more about Mecca, check out Mecca’s website at https://meccamorphosis.squarespace.com/.

Red Light Lit Livestream 1 - Thea Matthews w/ David Williams
2020-06-11 14:00 - 14:30
Red Light Lit and Light Rail Station are teaming up for a series of livestream readings through June. For our first event we’re hosting poet Thea Matthews, whose debut collection of poems, Unearth [The Flowers], comes out June 20. Accompanying her musically is David Williams, who has appeared on more than 20 albums (six of them his own). The event will be hosted by comedian Luna Malbroux, who will be taking questions from the audience.
Photo by Christina Campbell

Litquake on Lockdown: Alka Joshi and The Henna Artist
2020-06-11 18:00
Please join us for this vivid and compelling evening with Alka Joshi, author of The Henna Artist, the May selection for Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine Book Club. Tune in at 6pm Pacific time and learn why Publishers Weekly calls this novel “eloquent and moving,” while Christian Science Monitor highlights its “vibrant characters, evocative imagery, and sumptuous prose.”
A portrait of one woman’s struggle for fulfillment in a society pivoting between the traditional and the modern, The Henna Artist takes readers on a journey through 1950s Indian culture, a world that is at once lush and fascinating, stark and cruel. Escaping from an abusive marriage, seventeen-year-old Lakshmi makes her way alone to the vibrant pink city of Jaipur. There she becomes the most highly requested henna artist—and confidante—to the wealthy women of the upper class. But trusted with the secrets of the wealthy, she can never reveal her own. Alka Joshi reads from and discusses her book, with bestselling author Tom Barbash. FREE, $5 suggested donation
Streamed live at Crowdcast and Facebook Live!
Books are available from your favorite indie bookstores, or order from bookshop.org!

Moderators

Tom Barbash
Tom Barbash is the author of five books, including Dakota Winters. His short story collection Stay Up With Me was nominated for the Folio Prize and picked as a Best Book of the Year by the Independent of London, NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, and San Jose Mercury News. His novel The… Read More →

Speakers

Alka Joshi
Alka Joshi was born in India and raised in the U.S. since the age of nine. She has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from California College of Arts and runs an advertising and marketing agency. She has lived in France and Italy and currently lives in Pacific Grove, California… Read More →

Write From The Gut at SFPL Poem Jam
2020-06-11 18:00 - 20:00
SF Poet Laureate Kim Shuck presents Poem Jam as it makes its debut as an online forum. Kim hands the keys to the car over to the San Francisco Creative Writing Institute’s Session Showcase: an evening of work developed by the school’s students over the Spring, including readings from faculty and the students in classes taught by Hollie Hardy, Alexandra Kostoulas, Kim Shuck, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Preeti Vangani, Caitlin Krause, Paul Corman-Roberts.
More info at SF Public Library

The Racket Weekly : Black Girl Magic w/ Yodassa Williams
2020-06-11 19:00 - 20:30
THE RACKET WEEKLY: BLACK GIRL MAGIC w/ YODASSA WILLIAMS.
THURSDAY, JUNE 11TH, 7PM / ZOOM LINK TO COME
This week we are celebrating Yodassa Williams, the release of her new book THE GODDESS TWINS (SparkPress) and her Black Girl Magic Virtual Book Tour with The Racket Weekly: BLACK GIRL MAGIC. Yodassa will be reading from her book and we’ve invited an amazing group of Black femme identifying writers to join in the fun.
Doors at 7. Show at 7:15.
The Readers:
Yodassa Williams
Nazelah Jamison
Rochelle Spencer
Kelechi Ubozoh
Lis Owuor

VIRTUAL: Juli Delgado Lopera in conversation with Daniel Handler / Fiebre Tropical
2020-06-11 19:00 - 21:00
Are you still bummed we had to postpone the launch party for Juli Delgado Lopera and their debut novel, Fiebre Tropical? Us too! But be bummed no longer and join us for a virtual event, in conversation with Daniel Handler (Bottle Grove).
We’ll be streaming live on our Facebook page.
Friends, neighbors: We are pleased to be able to bring you some of our events virtually while our doors are otherwise closed in the interest of public health. If you’d like to support the store, you can still do that in the usual ways:
> Buy the book and we’ll deliver it directly to your door.
> Buy one of our gift certificates, which we keep on file and never expire.
> Make a donation.
Thank you very much for your support – we’re proud to be a legacy business and a mainstay of the Haight-Ashbury since 1976!

Uprooted from her comfortable life in Bogotá, Colombia, into an ant-infested Miami townhouse, fifteen-year-old Francisca is miserable and friendless in her strange new city. Her alienation grows when her mother is swept up into an evangelical church, replete with Christian salsa, abstinent young dancers, and baptisms for the dead.
But there, Francisca also meets the magnetic Carmen: opinionated and charismatic, head of the youth group, and the pastor’s daughter. As her mother’s mental health deteriorates and her grandmother descends into alcoholism, Francisca falls more and more intensely in love with Carmen. To get closer to her, Francisca turns to Jesus to be saved, even as their relationship hurtles toward a shattering conclusion.

“Fiebre Tropical is a literary explosion. In a rollicking, multilingual prose both wise and irreverent, brimming with snark and queer humor, Juliana Delgado Lopera crafts a migration tale we’ve never read and badly need.” – Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms
“A magnificent novel, by turns electric, hilarious, sexy, thrilling, wrenching, and profound. Pa decirlo clarito: Juliana Delgado Lopera is a writer of explosive talent, and this book is a fierce and radiant contribution, yes, to queer literature, Latinx literature, and immigrant literature, but also to literature, punto.” –Carolina De Robertis, author of Cantoras
“When you drive around town, when you stare out the window, when you wake up in the middle of the night, whether you know it or not, you are waiting for a book like this. Fiebre Tropical is a triumph, and we’re all triumphant in its presence.” – Daniel Handler, author of All the Dirty Parts

Juli Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer and historian based in San Francisco. They are the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017) and the illustrated, bilingual oral history collection ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute Books 2017), which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award. They are the recipient of the 2014 Jackson Literary Award, and have received fellowships from the Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, The SF Grotto, and an individual artist grant from the SF Arts Commission. Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Foglifter, Four Way Review, Broadly, and TimeOut Mag, among others. Formerly, they served as the creative director of RADAR Productions, a queer literary nonprofit in San Francisco.

Daniel Handler is the author of the novels We Are Pirates, The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, Adverbs, and Why We Broke Up, a 2012 Michael L. Printz Honor Book. He is responsible for many books for children, including the thirteen-volume sequence A Series of Unfortunate Events and the four-book series All the Wrong Questions. He is married to the illustrator Lisa Brown, and lives with her and their son in San Francisco.

This is a free, all-ages event.
To have Fiebre Tropical sent to your door, order here or below.
RSVP appreciated by not required.

Conversations Across the Diaspora | Writer & Model Jess Cole
2020-06-12 12:00 - 13:00
Introducing a new monthly series with guests from all over the globe — some you may recognize and some you may not, but all will bring a new perspective to the African Diaspora.
Conversations across the Diaspora
A new interactive series brings you eclectic conversations from across the African diaspora. Join author and host Sarah Ladipo Manyika for talks with some of the most exciting voices from Berlin to Harare, from Tamale to London and New York and everywhere in between. We’ll introduce you to all sorts of folks—some you will know, others you may never have heard of, but never the usual suspects talking about the usual topics. We’ll be speaking with everyone from actors to poets, scholars, athletes, entrepreneurs, architects, artists and many more. Come join us!
We launch this month with author and host Sarah Ladipo Manyika in conversation with writer & model Jess Cole. After you register you will receive information to join via zoom on June 12th at 12 noon (Pacific Daylight Time), 8pm (UK).
Jess Cole is a journalist and a high fashion model. Jess was one of the original contributors for the UK’s Gal-dem magazine and has also written for The Guardian, I-D, Dazed, Document Journal and Vogue international, Jess is specifically interested, via interview based creative essays, in broadening the narratives of diversity by exploring the rich variety of blackness within the public sphere. Drawing on her experience as a high fashion model, Jess is also drawn to creating disruptive narratives through an interchange lens of radical feminism and environmental concerns.
In 2017, a chance encounter with an IMG agent led Jess (with a freshly chopped short mullet) into an unexpected path as a high fashion model at the relatively old age of 23. Three months into being signed worldwide with IMG models, Jess signed an exclusive contract with Burberry. In addition to fronting campaigns for Celine, Mugler, Burberry and more, Jess has modeled for American, British, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Korean titles of Vogue. Jess has also walked the runways for luxury brands such as Tom Ford, Hermes, Kenzo; her most cherished experience is being a frequent face for the iconic and black focused high-end brand, Wales Bonner.
Earlier this year, Jess co-directed her first play–an adaptation of TS Eliot’s The Family Reunion whose opening night was just days before Corona hit. Now enjoying a hiatus from both journalism and modeling, Jess has turned her attention to some new creative works including work on a poetry collection entitled Post love in the time of consumption.
Sarah Ladipo Manyika was raised in Nigeria and has lived in Kenya, France, Zimbabwe, and England. Sarah is a novelist, short story writer, and essayist and founding books editor for Ozy.com. Her debut novel, In Dependence, is an international bestseller while her second novel, Like a Mule Bringing Ice Cream to the Sun, has been translated into a number of languages. Her nonfiction includes personal essays and intimate profiles of people she meets from Mrs. Harris and Pastor Evan Mawarire to Toni Morrison and Michelle Obama. Sarah previously served on MoAD’s board and currently serves as Board Director for the women’s writing residency, Hedgebrook.
DONATIONS OF ANY AMOUNT ARE ALWAYS WELCOME, SO IF YOU ARE ABLE TO, PLEASE CONSIDER DONATING TO MOAD ONLINE https://www.moadsf.org/support-us/make-a-donation/, 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.

Poetry Cocktail Hour: Amber Tamblyn, Alejandro Murguia, Steph Burt, etc.!
2020-06-12 17:00 - 18:30
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.

We Are The Voices: Bay Area Bookseller Voices with SPD Presents
2020-06-12 17:00 - 20:00
We Are The Voices presents: Bay Area Bookseller Voices
and SPD Presents invite you to a night of readings with:
Julia Bloch
Angie Sijun Lou
Melissa Merin
To access the reading please RSVP with a ticket on our eventbrite page here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/we-are-the-voices-presents-bay-area-bookseller-voices-with-spd-presents-tickets-106994988892
Julia Bloch grew up in Northern California and Sydney, Australia. She is the author of three books of poetry: Letters to Kelly Clarkson, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; Valley Fever; and The Sacramento of Desire, released in 2020 from Sidebrow Books. She is a Pew Fellow in the Arts and lives in Philadelphia.
Angie Sijun Lou is from Seattle and Shanghai. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in the American Poetry Review, FENCE, Black Warrior Review, the Adroit Journal, the Asian American Literary Review, Hyphen, the Margins, and others. She is a Kundiman Fellow in Fiction, a PhD student in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a calculus instructor at San Quentin State Prison.
Melissa has been writing since she could hold a crayon. She is established as a parent, a lover & partner, a queer, an anti-authoritarian and a consistently retiring punker. She is too Black to ever be considered a snowflake. Melissa believes in utilizing a diversity of tactics to build the world we need; one of her favorite tactics is writing. Melissa is a long-time educator and agitator and has never been able to get it together to “publish” her poetry, though, though many zines and many blogs tell the story of trying. Melissa has the distinction of being one of a few Black cis-women of her generation to not love Beyonce or Oprah.
We Are The Voices and SPD Presents have teamed up as apart of We Are The Voices ongoing Bay Area Bookseller Voices series.
We Are The Voices is able to support this event through a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, this project connects Mills College students with local and national poets, performers, writers, and scholars to collaborate around transformative art and critical scholarship.
Led by Mills Professor Sheila Lloyd, We Are the Voices We Have Been Waiting For: Poetry, Performance, and Public Humanities is a five-year, multi-pronged project that brings visiting artists and scholars to campus, broadening the conversation for Mills students and building connections with our local community.
In an increasingly corporatized book industry, Small Press Distribution (SPD) brings readers independently published literature, emphasizing small press values–equity, experimentation, and access. We connect underrepresented literary communities to the marketplace and to each other via book distribution, events, and public advocacy. Prioritizing artistic and activist visions, SPD’s nearly 400 presses publish a full diversity of writers who rely on us to reach readers nationwide.

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #13
2020-06-12 18:00
90 minutes
30 readers
3 minutes each
On Zoom!
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!
Sign up to read here:
https://forms.gle/1ZNKSnnzRZpXxvUE7
Showing up is one amazing form of support that we really appreciate. Another is financial. Money = energy to us, and donating sends one signal (of many) that you would like our work to continue. If enjoy spaces like this and can swing it in these tight times, please consider supporting us via:
1) the Cash App to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress;
2) donating via the “ticket” option here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nomadic-press-virtual-open-mic-13-tickets-108505205992;
OR 3) donating through the website at www.nomadicpress.org/donate
We have a short goal for the evening of $150.
It feels really important to gather in these times, and we need to prioritize the health of most vulnerable community members (our elders, those who work with elders, and those with suppressed immune systems). So we are hosting another virtual open mic! Feel free to join just to listen, too! We can hold up to 100 people.
Hosted by Nazelah Jamison (with J. K. on tech). It’s a continuing experiment, and we hope you can join us!
Our safe space process still applies to our collective virtual space, so please read this by visiting https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess.
Zoom Joining Info
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Virtual Open Mic #13
Time: Jun 12, 2020 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87057163143
Meeting ID: 870 5716 3143
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*Virtual* Reading feat. Jeff Alessandrelli and Alix Coupet, Jr.
2020-06-12 18:30
Please join us on Friday, June 12th from 6:30-7:10 pm PDT
for a virtual reading featuring
Jeff Alessandrelli and Alix Coupet, Jr.!

*****
author bios & photos below.

Zoom link to be emailed to participants & posted on social media
on the day of the event.

Please RSVP for the reading here to have the link emailed to you.

If you’re in a position to give, we will be asking for contributions to Community Ready Corps.#BlackLivesMatter. Dismantle white supremacy!
or contribute today: http://www.crc4sd.org/contribute & https://www.getreadystayready.org/

we look forward to sharing this experience with you!
Jeff Alessandrelli is most recently the author of the poetry collection Fur Not Light (Burnside Review Press, 2019). Forthcoming is a chapbook on the literary work of the deceased writer and environmental activist Mark Baumer and a full-length book centered around masculinity and shyness. In addition to his own writing, Alessandrelli also runs the literary record label/press Fonograf Editions. He’s at https://jeffalessandrelli.net/.
Alix Coupet, Jr. is both poet and educator who teaches writing and tricksterdom to public school youth. His aim is to land the plane somewhere between playful pain and peace. Born in Chicago, Alix jokes that many people say subjective things about his city, but that, objectively, Chicago is the greatest city in the world. Since the time of this writing, he has been rejected from six more publications.

USAAF 2020 | KSW Presents Aria Aber & Monica Sok
2020-06-13 15:00 - 17:00
co-presented by API Cultural Center- San Francisco
with special musical guest, Kohinoorgasm
Screening on www.ovee.itvs.org
On Saturday, June 13, as part of API Cultural Center of San Francisco’s United States of Asian America Festival, KSW Presents Aria Aber, author of Hard Damages (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and Monica Sok, author of A Nail the Evening Hangs On (Copper Canyon Press. 2020). Award-winning poets and children of refugees, their books explore the impact of inherited wars—Aber, through interrogating historical and personal implications of Afghan American relations, and Sok, through myth- and memory-making of Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge regime.
As an Asian American community, many of us come together bearing the scars of violence, but our kinship ties are not based in this violence. Instead, they are based in love and recognition, in knowing the way our histories are informed by US imperialism and Cold War-era regimes. Our kinship is built on offering one another the lifelines we need to persist and thrive—because of this violence, despite this violence.
Opening the reading will be a special musical performance by APAture 2017 featured artist, Kohinoorgasm!
Event will screen on OVEE, link will be sent before 6/13.
NO ONE WILL BE TURNED AWAY FOR LACK OF FUNDS. Email info@kearnystreet.org and we’ll take care of you.
Message from our curators, Michelle Lin and Kazumi Chin:
We recognize that like us, you are working hard to protest and fight for Black Lives Matter and the abolition of policing and white supremacy. We do not wish to take the spotlight away from this vital and important work. Additionally, we recognize that as federal and municipal governance calls upon US military to enact violence on those fighting for Black lives, there are important parallels to be made across many communities of color. We condemn US militarism and state violence in all forms. We stand with immigrants, with refugees, and with Black lives. Abolish the police. Black lives matter.
Additionally, please donate and help out our local communities! We want to highlight two Bay Area organizations playing a key role in our local protests. Anti Police-Terror Project (https://www.antipoliceterrorproject.org) has been organizing Oakland protests and are also offering bail funds for Black and Brown folks detained in the Bay Area. The Bay Area Anti Repression Community Bail Fund (https://antirepressionbayarea.com), since the Occupy movement, has provided bail funds for those arrested at actions. Please support our Bay Area Black Lives Matter protests.

KPFK Poets Cafe Podcast Series In Conversation with Connie Post
2020-06-14 11:00 - 11:30
SUNDAY, June 14 @ 11 a.m. PDT
https://soundcloud.com/poetscafe
Join Poets Cafe this Sunday @11:30 a.m. PDT for the KPFK Poets Cafe Podcast Series on Soundcloud with guest Connie Post. This is a deep conversation on the geography of breached boundaries whether through environmental or physical abuse. Prime Meridian, is a tough, beautiful and lasting read that speaks a truth to Post’s power to write her way through the hard lessons learned by the body and shed through the will.
Juan Herrera: 21st Poet Laureate of the United States, says Post’s poems are of a seer – unwrapping time, being, the Change we are igniting. The considerations are hard won- who we are, what is coming upon us in this age, the passage we are entering and the exit -the seer knows it. There are no exhortations, no longings for forecasts, only the seeing and the forthcoming Being that envelopes us more and more “until all that is left of us” . We need this wisdom book, clear elixirs from the Source. True mind-beauty, caved with humanity – beam, everyone must touch this volume in order to traverse the present age, Bravissimo.”
“I have been on fire / since the moment I walked / through this door.” Thus begins one of the many burning poems in Connie Post’s Prime Meridian. In fact, the work in this book is so good it is as though Post herself has been on fire since she walked through the door of poetry. In poems both personal and political, Post manages to connect physical and geological ailments by way of her spare but unsparing lyrics. This is an important collection everyone should be reading.” Dean Rader:
Connie Post served as Poet Laureate of Livermore, California (2005 to 2009). Her work has appeared in Calyx, One, River Styx, Slipstream, Spoon River Poetry Review, Valparaiso Poetry Review, The Slippery Elm, The Pedestal Magazine, and Verse Daily. Her Awards include the 2018 Liakoura Award the 2016 Crab Creek Review Poetry Award and the Caesura award. Her Chapbook “And When the Sun Drops” received the Aurorean’s Editor’s Chapbook Award Her first full length Book “Floodwater” (Glass Lyre Press 2014) won the Lyrebird Award. Her second full length book (also from Glass Lyre Press) “Prime Meridian “was released in January 2020. About this book, Juan Herrera says, ” We need this wisdom book, clear elixirs from the Source.”
Host Lois P. Jones
Produced by Marlena Bond
#KPFK
#poetscafe

Fanny Howe, Alice Lyons, Linda Norton online reading
2020-06-15 12:00 - 13:00
Fanny Howe, Alice Lyons and Linda Norton read from their work.

Fanny Howe is an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She was awarded the 2009 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, presented annually by the Poetry Foundation to a living U.S. poet whose lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition. Today, Howe is one of the most widely read of American experimental poets, although her writing career began during the 1960s with a series of paperback original novels she published under the pseudonym Della Field. Howe has continued to publish novels throughout her career, including the recently republished Bronte Wilde (2020). She has also continued to publish in the essay form. Some of her essays have been collected, including The Wedding Dress: Meditations on Word and Life (2003). Howe lives in New England. Her most recent collection of poems is Love and I (Graywolf 2019).
Alice Lyons is a writer whose work embraces the visual arts. She is author of a novel, Oona (Lilliput Press, 2020), and three collections of poetry, including The Breadbasket of Europe (Veer Books, 2016).She was a 2015/16 Radcliffe Fellow in Poetry and New Media at Harvard. Born in Paterson, New Jersey, she has lived in the West of Ireland for more than twenty years.
Linda Norton is a visual artist and writer. She is author of Wite Out: Love and Work (Hanging Loose, 2020) and The Public Gardens: Poems and History (Pressed Wafer, 2011) which was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is a writing consultant with the LEAD Project and the labor union Unite Here, and an instructor at San Francisco State University. Born in Boston, Norton lives in Oakland.

VIRTUAL: Stephen Haff / Kid Quixotes
2020-06-15 17:30 - 19:30
Booksmith and The Bindery host Stephen Haff for his new book, Kid Quixotes: A Group of Students, Their Teacher, and the One-Room School Where Everything Is Possible. Please join us!
This will be a virtual event, which we will be streaming live on our Facebook page.
Friends, neighbors: We are pleased to be able to bring you some of our events virtually while our doors are otherwise closed in the interest of public health. If you’d like to support the store, you can still do that in the usual ways:
> Buy the book and we’ll deliver it directly to your door.
> Buy one of our gift certificates, which we keep on file and never expire.
> Make a donation.
Thank you very much for your support – we’re proud to be a legacy business and a mainstay of the Haight-Ashbury since 1976!

The unlikely yet inspiring true story of a teacher struggling with mental illness, a silent daughter of an undocumented mother, and the amazing one-room schoolhouse that helped them find their voices, heal their pain, and become empowering models of resilience.
After seven years at a high school with metal detectors and armed police, Yale-educated teacher Stephen Haff suffered a breakdown. Doctors later diagnosed him with bi-polar depression. Inspired by his former students, Haff formed a reading group that eventually became Still Waters in A Storm, an after-school program in Bushwick, Brooklyn. techniques from outside standard educational practices—Drawing from his experiences, Haff developed a new teaching method using AA meetings, Quaker prayers, psychotherapy, and even Buddhist meditation circles to create a more empathetic and collaborative environment. In this fluid, welcoming space, Stephen and his students found solace and something else: their voices. All agreed that at Still Waters there would only be one rule: everyone listens to everyone. And this one rule has unlocked their incredible potential.
Over the years, Still Waters’ students have studied Latin, played violin and now they have taken on a new challenge: translating episodes from the classic Don Quixote into English from Spanish. With the help of dictionaries and the approval of acclaimed Don Quixote translator, Edith Grossman, the Still Waters students created a modern travelling musical, The Traveling Adventures of Kid Quixote, which has been performed across New York City.
The star of Kid Quixote is six-year-old Sarah Sierra. Before Still Waters, Sarah was silent. But now she has many stories to tell, from her mother’s journey across the desert to America on a tiger to a girl-knight that defeats giants made of ice who lock up children. At Still Waters, these students, led by Sarah, have found their voices and are using them to deliver a message of diversity, tolerance, love, optimism, and resilience essential to us all.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Pico Iyer, Autumn Light
2020-06-15 18:00 - 20:00
online event with bestselling author Pico Iyer who will be in-conversation with Alan Christy about his new book, Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells—a far-reaching exploration of Japanese history and culture and a moving meditation on impermanence, mortality, and grief—and A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, now in paperback. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
Registration for this free Crowdcast event will begin soon.

This is a free event. The books may be purchased below.
You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!

AUTUMN LIGHT: SEASON OF FIRE AND FAREWELLS:
Returning to his longtime home in Japan after his father-in-law’s sudden death, Pico Iyer picks up the steadying patterns of his everyday rites: going to the post office and engaging in furious games of ping-pong every evening. But in a country whose calendar is marked with occasions honoring the dead, he comes to reflect on changelessness in ways that anyone can relate to: parents age, children scatter, and Iyer and his wife turn to whatever can sustain them as everything falls away. As the maple leaves begin to turn and the heat begins to soften, Iyer shows us a Japan we have seldom seen before, where the transparent and the mysterious are held in a delicate balance, and where autumn reminds us to take nothing for granted.
A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO JAPAN:
“Arguably the greatest living travel writer” ( Outside magazine), Pico Iyer has called Japan home for more than three decades. But, as he is the first to admit, the country remains an enigma even to its long-term residents. In A Beginner’s Guide to Japan, Iyer draws on his years of experience—his travels, conversations, readings, and reflections—to craft a playful and profound book of surprising, brief, incisive glimpses into Japanese culture. He recounts his adventures and observations as he travels from a meditation hall to a love hotel, from West Point to Kyoto Station, and from dinner with Meryl Streep to an ill-fated call to the Apple service center in a series of provocations guaranteed to pique the interest and curiosity of those who don’t know Japan—and to remind those who do of its myriad fascinations.
PICO IYER is the author of eight works of nonfiction and two novels. A writer for Time since 1982, he is a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, the Los Angeles Times, the Financial Times, and many other magazines and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific. He splits his time between Nara, Japan, and the United States.
ALAN CHRISTY got his PhD in History at the University of Chicago in 1996. He has been with the History Department at UC Santa Cruz since 1995, with a two-year stint as a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Tokyo from 2004-2006. He studies the history of Japan, especially historical memory, historical consciousness and the legacies of war and empire. He is the Director of the Okinawa Memories Initiative, a transnational public history project that explores the postwar Okinawan-American relationship in Okinawa and throughout the Pacific region. He is also the Provost of Cowell College.

Red Light 2 - Jeneé Darden & Peter Bullen
2020-06-16 14:00 - 14:30
Red Light Lit and Light Rail Station are teaming up for a series of livestream readings through June. For our second event. we’re featuring humorist Peter Thomas Bullen, whose first book, “Wallflower,” was published by Nomadic Press. Journalist, author, and public speaker Jeneé Darden will also be reading from her first book, “When a Purple Rose Blooms,” published by Nomadic Press. Our musical guest is David Williams, who has appeared on more than 20 albums (six of them his own). The event will be hosted by comedian, writer and playwright, Luna Malbroux.

VIRTUAL: Jennifer Rosner with Kate Quinn / The Yellow Bird Sings
2020-06-16 17:30 - 19:30
Booksmith and The Bindery host Jennifer Rosner for her debut novel, The Yellow Bird Sings. She’ll be in conversation with Kate Quinn (The Huntress). Please join us!
This will be a virtual event, which we will be streaming live on our Facebook page.
Friends, neighbors: We are pleased to be able to bring you some of our events virtually while our doors are otherwise closed in the interest of public health. If you’d like to support the store, you can still do that in the usual ways:
> Buy the book and we’ll deliver it directly to your door.
> Buy one of our gift certificates, which we keep on file and never expire.
> Make a donation.
Thank you very much for your support – we’re proud to be a legacy business and a mainstay of the Haight-Ashbury since 1976!

As Nazi soldiers round up the Jews in their town, Róza and her 5-year-old daughter, Shira, flee, seeking shelter in a neighbor’s barn. Hidden in the hayloft day and night, Shira struggles to stay still and quiet, as music pulses through her and the farmyard outside beckons. To soothe her daughter and pass the time, Róza tells her a story about a girl in an enchanted garden:
The girl is forbidden from making a sound, so the yellow bird sings. He sings whatever the girl composes in her head: high-pitched trills of piccolo; low-throated growls of contrabassoon. Music helps the flowers bloom.
In this make-believe world, Róza can shield Shira from the horrors that surround them. But the day comes when their haven is no longer safe, and Róza must make an impossible choice: whether to keep Shira by her side or give her the chance to survive apart.
Inspired by the true stories of Jewish children hidden during World War II, Jennifer Rosner’s debut is a breathtaking novel about the unbreakable bond between a mother and a daughter. Beautiful and riveting, The Yellow Bird Sings is a testament to the triumph of hope — a whispered story, a bird’s song — in even the darkest of times.

Sam Lansky - Broken People
2020-06-16 18:00 | Book Passage Corte Madera, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
“He fixes everything that’s wrong with you in three days.”
This is what hooks Sam when he first overhears it at a fancy dinner party in the Hollywood hills: the story of a globe-trotting shaman who claims to perform “open-soul surgery” on emotionally damaged people. For neurotic, depressed Sam, new to Los Angeles after his life in New York imploded, the possibility of total transformation is utterly tantalizing. He’s desperate for something to believe in, and the shaman—who promises ancient rituals, plant medicine and encounters with the divine—seems convincing, enough for Sam to sign up for a weekend under his care.
But are the great spirits the shaman says he’s summoning real at all? Or are the ghosts in Sam’s memory more powerful than any magic?
At turns tender and acidic, funny and wise, Broken People is a journey into the nature of truth and fiction–a story of discovering hope amid cynicism, intimacy within chaos and peace in our own skin.
Sam Lansky is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir The Gilded Razor and the West Coast editor at Time magazine. He’s written for New York magazine, The Atlantic, Esquire, and Out. He lives in Los Angeles, California. Read more at samlansky.com

Litquake on Lockdown: You, Me, and Everyone In Quarantine
2020-06-16 18:00
Cutting-edge poetry and visuals from both coasts, on the theme of “You, Me, and Everyone In Quarantine.” From the depths of their shelter-in-place, these writers will perform their literary hearts out for you! With Wo Chan and Katie Fricas from New York, Micheal Foulk from Oakland, and Preeti Vangani from San Francisco. Curated and hosted by Baruch Porras-Hernandez. FREE, $5 suggested donation
Streamed live at Crowdcast and Facebook Live!
Books are available from your favorite indie bookstores, or order from bookshop.org!

Moderators

Baruch Porras-Hernandez
Baruch Porras Hernandez is a San Francisco writer, stand up comedian, illustrator, organizer, 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… Read More →

Speakers

Wo Chan
Wo Chan is a queer poet and drag performer living in Brooklyn. Wo has received fellowships from the New York Foundation of the Arts, Kundiman, and the Asian American Writers Workshop. As a member of Switch N’ Play, Wo has performed at venues including The Whitney, National Sawd… Read More →

Preeti Vangani
Preeti Vangani is a poet & essayist. Her work has been published in BOAT, Buzzfeed, Gulf Coast, and Threepenny Review among other journals. She is the winner of the RL Poetry Award 2017 and her debut book of poems titled Mother Tongue Apologize was published by RLFPA Editions in February 2019. S… Read More →

Katie Fricas
Katie Fricas is a cartoonist and bibliophile in New York City. She makes nonfiction essay comics on art, politics, oddities, and hidden histories for various publications and websites including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, the Guardian, and Hyperallergic. Her comic… Read More →

Micheal Foulk
Micheal Foulk is a non-binary queer comedian, writer, actor, and organizer thriving in Oakland, California. They have produced over 200 live shows featuring Sketch, Storytelling, and Stand Up across the country. Micheal has been featured on SF Sketchfest, Crom Comedy Festival, Moontower… Read More →

Ainissa Ramirez
2020-06-16 18:00 - 20:00
discussing the subject of her new book
The Alchemy of Us: How Humans and Matter Transformed One Another
from The MIT Press
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Crowdcast platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Crowdcast before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Crowdcast.
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(Click Here) to make reservations
Event is free, but reservations are required
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The Book for this event may be purchased at this link :
>Purchase THE ALCHEMY OF US here<

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In the bestselling tradition of Stuff Matters and The Disappearing Spoon: a clever and engaging look at materials, the innovations they made possible, and how these technologies changed us.
In The Alchemy of Us, scientist and science writer Ainissa Ramirez examines eight inventions—clocks, steel rails, copper communication cables, photographic film, light bulbs, hard disks, scientific labware, and silicon chips—and reveals how they shaped the human experience. Ramirez tells the stories of the woman who sold time, the inventor who inspired Edison, and the hotheaded undertaker whose invention pointed the way to the computer. She describes, among other things, how our pursuit of precision in timepieces changed how we sleep; how the railroad helped commercialize Christmas; how the necessary brevity of the telegram influenced Hemingway’s writing style; and how a young chemist exposed the use of Polaroid’s cameras to create passbooks to track black citizens in apartheid South Africa. These fascinating and inspiring stories offer new perspectives on our relationships with technologies.
Ramirez shows how materials were shaped by inventors, but also how those materials shaped culture, chronicling each invention and its consequences—intended and unintended. Filling in the gaps left by other books about technology, Ramirez showcases little-known inventors—particularly people of color and women—who had a significant impact but whose accomplishments have been hidden by mythmaking, bias, and convention. Doing so, she shows us the power of telling inclusive stories about technology. She also shows that innovation is universal—whether it’s splicing beats with two turntables and a microphone or splicing genes with two test tubes and CRISPR.
Ainissa Ramirez is a materials scientist and sought-after public speaker and science communicator. A Brown and Stanford graduate, she has worked as a research scientist at Bell Labs and held academic positions at Yale University and MIT. She has written for Time, Scientific American, the American Scientist, and Forbes, and makes regular appearances on PBS’s SciTech Now.

Strange Hotel: Irish Literary Sensation Eimear McBride in conversation with Brooke Warner
2020-06-16 19:00
The trajectory of Eimear McBride’s career is an underdog’s dream: she spent six months writing her debut novel, A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing, and nine years trying to sell it, only to take the literary scene by storm when it was finally published in 2013 to an avalanche of acclaim, awards (including the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction), and rapturous comparisons to James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. Now, McBride is joining Women Lit in a live virtual conversation with Brooke Warner, publisher of She Writes Press and SparkPress, in celebration of her eagerly awaited new novel, Strange Hotel, which further cements her singular place in the contemporary canon. As unforgettable as her debut, McBride’s latest book depicts a rootless woman’s exile as she hotel-hops across the globe, seeking to quash her ghosts and escape the dangers that haunt her.

Get Lit #61 (Music by: Kiva Uhuru)
2020-06-16 19:00, 2020-06-16 19:00 - 21:30
12–15 writers reading new work + live music + beer made on site + tacos just down the street: pure magical Get Litness.
This month’s performers:
Noelia Cerna
Maymunah Rasheed
Aurora Masum-Javed
José Héctor Cadena
Soma Mei Sheng Frazier
Poet E Spoken
Charlie Neer
Angelique Palmer
Joyce E. Young
Kai Sugioka-Stone
Nazelah Jamison
Kristina Ten
E.K. Keith
Gamal Abdel Chasten
Karla Brundage
Music by: Kiva Uhuru
We’re headed into our 5th consecutive year at Ale Industries as we celebrate 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.
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!
Showing up is one amazing form of support that we really appreciate. Another is financial. Money = energy to us, and donating sends one signal (of many) that you would like our work to continue. If enjoy spaces like this and can swing it in these tight times, please consider supporting us via:
1) the Cash App to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress;
2) donating via the “ticket” option here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/get-lit-61-tickets-109374259354;
OR 3) donating through the website at www.nomadicpress.org/donate
We have a short goal for the evening of $200.
Zoom Joining Information
Topic: Get Lit #61
Time: Jun 16, 2020 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
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Meeting ID: 847 7504 6781
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Nomadic Press Safe Space Statement
White supremacy and white supremacist-capitalist values permeate this country, including every state, county, city, and political persuasion. This includes the Bay Area. Illustrations of this range from the more obvious neo-nazi hate groups to all-white reading lineups, white terrorist shootings to labeling racial equity work in the literary community as censorship, mass incarceration to the voices most often published. Nomadic Press unequivocally stands against all iterations of white supremacy.
We are works in progress, continually doing the work of internally dismantling white supremacist values that have been inherited by virtue of being in the US. Simultaneous with this internal work, Nomadic Press utilizes a racial equity lense (as proposed by Race Forward) to dismantle white supremacy within publishing and the literary communities in which we work. We are not perfect, and we are always trying to be better.
Nomadic Press events are active, real-time safe spaces for those who have been intentionally silenced and marginalized, and we will work to ensure that the marginalized continue to take their rightful place in our communities.
Direct and timely non-violent communication and de-escalation techniques will be utilized to privately call in instances of racism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, or misogyny whether in the content of one’s reading or in one’s interactions with members of the community. If, after being called in privately for a mediation, a community member is unwilling to acknowledge and address the harm they have caused, we will protect the safety of this space by revoking a reader’s access to the microphone. We encourage community members to come to us if someone has violated these guidelines away from the microphone. If the situation warrants (i. e., instances of sexual predation, violence, or threats of violence), we will make the information public to inform our communities of the present danger.
We are communities in progress. We must be better, always, and we ask that we work together to ensure that the safety of our most vulnerable members is prioritized above all else.
Read more about our safe space process here: www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess
Poster by: Jevohn Tyler Newsome

THE CHILL by Scott Carson | GGP Online Book Club
2020-06-16 19:00 - 21:00
Please join us on Tuesday, June 16, 2020 at 7 PM PDT for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of Scott Carson’s new novel, THE CHILL.
“Wow! This is one terrific horror/suspense/disaster novel. Characters you root for and a story that grips from the first page.” —Stephen King
Please join us even if you have not read the book yet. We’ll play a sample from the audiobook from our audiobook partner, Libro.fm.
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83200265394.
You can order a hardcover of THE CHILL at bit.ly/GGPChillHC, or an audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at bit.ly/ChillAB.
Description

“Wow! This is one terrific horror/suspense/disaster novel. Characters you root for and a story that grips from the first page.” —Stephen King, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Institute
“Horror has a new name and it’s Scott Carson. The Chill is an eerie dive into the murky depths of the supernatural. A story that has you looking back over your shoulder on every page.” —Michael Connelly, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Night Fire
“A creepy tale of supernatural terror.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
In this terrifying thriller, a supernatural force—set in motion a century ago—threatens to devastate New York City.
Far upstate, in New York’s ancient forests, a drowned village lays beneath the dark, still waters of the Chilewaukee reservoir. Early in the 20th century, the town was destroyed for the greater good: bringing water to the millions living downstate. Or at least that’s what the politicians from Manhattan insisted at the time. The local families, settled there since America’s founding, were forced from their land, but they didn’t move far, and some didn’t move at all…
Now, a century later, the repercussions of human arrogance are finally making themselves known. An inspector assigned to oversee the dam, dangerously neglected for decades, witnesses something inexplicable. It turns out that more than the village was left behind in the waters of the Chill when it was abandoned. The townspeople didn’t evacuate without a fight. A dark prophecy remained, too, and the time has come for it to be fulfilled. Those who remember must ask themselves: who will be next? For sacrifices must be made. And as the dark waters begin to inexorably rise, the demand for a fresh sacrifice emerges from the deep…

Armistead Maupin And Alia Volz For Rakestraw Books
2020-06-17 12:00
Fundraising Goal: $2000
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 Alia Volz and Armistead Maupin.
Alia Volz is the author of Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020). She is a MacDowell Colonist and a Ucross Foundation Fellow. Other writings appear in The Best American Essays, The New York Times, Golden State 2017: Best New Writing from California, and Dig If You Will The Picture: Remembering Prince. She’s a homegrown San Franciscan from weedy hippie stock.
Armistead Maupin’s iconic Tales of the City series has since blazed its own trail through popular culture – from a sequence of globally best-selling novels, to a Peabody Award-winning television miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney, to an ambitious new musical that had its world premiere at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater in 2011. In 2019 Netflix will be airing a new series based on the novels titled Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.
This event is hosted by Charlie Jane Anders, organizer of Writers With Drinks.
All proceeds benefit Rakestraw Books. Shop online now!

June 17 at 12 PM
Register at Eventbrite

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.

Alchemy of the Reset with Natalie G. Diaz
2020-06-17 12:00 - 13:00
Alchemy of the Reset is a conversation series hosted and created by Senior Fellows Brett Cook and Liz Lerman and YBCA Chief of Program Meklit Hadero. The Senior Fellows program centers interdisciplinary artists and curators who are interested in developing systems and structures that catalyze artist-driven change as leaders in our organization and in the life of our community.
In the wake of current social crises, including both COVID and ongoing racist police violence, our society must do the work to leap forward, to transform. Already, we are seeing glimmers of this. Over several weeks, Cook, Lerman and Hadero will be dialoguing with thought leaders, including artists, scientists, educators and more whose work points us to some of these new systems. In line with the characteristic community building backgrounds of Cook and Lerman, this is about a heart and human centered approach, with opportunities for audience connectivity and engagement.

Natalie G. Diaz
Natalie Diaz was born and raised in the Fort Mojave Indian Village in Needles, California, on the banks of the Colorado River. She is Mojave and an enrolled member of the Gila River Indian Tribe. Her first poetry collection, When My Brother Was an Aztec, was published by Copper Canyon Press. She is a Lannan Literary Fellow and a Native Arts Council Foundation Artist Fellow. She was awarded a Bread Loaf Fellowship, the Holmes National Poetry Prize, a Hodder Fellowship, and a PEN/Civitella Ranieri Foundation Residency, as well as being awarded a US Artists Ford Fellowship. Diaz teaches at Arizona State University. She splits her time between the east coast and Mohave Valley, Arizona, where she works to revitalize the Mojave language.
Hosts:

Brett Cook is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who uses creative practices to transform outer and inner worlds of being. His public projects often involve community workshops featuring arts-integrated pedagogy along with contemplative practices, performance, and food to create a fluid boundary between art making, daily life, and healing.
Teaching and public speaking are extensions of Cook’s social practice that involve communities in dialogue to generate experiences of reflection and insight. He has taught at all academic levels in a variety of subjects, and published in academic journals at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and Columbia and Harvard Universities. In 2009, he published Who Am I In This Picture: Amherst College Portraits with Brett Cook and Wendy Ewald through Amherst College Press.
Cook has received numerous awards, including the Lehman Brady Visiting Professorship at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and the Richard C. Diebenkorn Fellowship at the San Francisco Art Institute. Recognized for a history of socially relevant, community engaged projects, he was selected as a cultural ambassador to Nigeria as part of the U.S. Department of State’s 2012 smARTpower Initiative and an inaugural A Blade of Grass Fellow for Socially Engaged Art in 2014. Cook’s work has been featured in private and public collections including the Smithsonian/National Portrait Gallery, the Walker Art Center, and Harvard University.

Meklit Hadero is an Ethiopian American vocalist, songwriter, composer and cultural activist making music that sways between cultures and continents.
Her innovative take on ethio-jazz has taken her around the world, from her home base of San Francisco to her home city of Addis Ababa (where she is a household name). Hadero has founded and led many creative and cultural initiatives, from musical collaborations to performance series. She is a National Geographic Explorer, a TED Senior Fellow, former codirector of the Red Poppy Art House, and has served as an artist in residence at New York University and Harvard University.

Liz Lerman is a choreographer, performer, writer, educator and speaker, and the recipient of numerous honors, including a 2002 MacArthur “Genius Grant,” a 2011 United States Artists Ford Fellowship in Dance, and the 2017 Jacob’s Pillow Dance Award. A key aspect of her artistry is opening her process to various publics from shipbuilders to physicists, construction workers to ballerinas, resulting in both research and outcomes that are participatory, relevant, urgent, and usable by others. She founded Liz Lerman Dance Exchange in 1976 and cultivated the company’s unique multi-generational ensemble into a leading force in contemporary dance until 2011. She was an artist-in-residence and visiting lecturer at Harvard University in 2011, and her most recent work, Healing Wars, toured across the US in 2014-15. Lerman conducts residencies on Critical Response Process, creative research, the intersection of art and science, and the building of narrative within dance performance at such institutions as Harvard University, Yale School of Drama, Wesleyan University, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the National Theatre Studio, among others. Her collection of essays, Hiking the Horizontal: Field Notes from a Choreographer, was published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press and released in paperback in 2014. In 2016 Lerman was named the first Institute Professor at the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University, where she is building a lab focused on creative research.

Armistead Maupin And Alia Volz For Rakestraw Books
2020-06-17 12:00 - 17:00
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 Alia Volz and Armistead Maupin.
Alia Volz is the author of Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020). She is a MacDowell Colonist and a Ucross Foundation Fellow. Other writings appear in The Best American Essays, The New York Times, Golden State 2017: Best New Writing from California, and Dig If You Will The Picture: Remembering Prince. She’s a homegrown San Franciscan from weedy hippie stock.
Armistead Maupin’s iconic Tales of the City series has since blazed its own trail through popular culture – from a sequence of globally best-selling novels, to a Peabody Award-winning television miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney, to an ambitious new musical that had its world premiere at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater in 2011. In 2019 Netflix will be airing a new series based on the novels titled Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.
This event is hosted by Charlie Jane Anders, organizer of Writers With Drinks.
All proceeds benefit Rakestraw Books. Shop online now!

June 17 at 12 PM
Register at Eventbrite

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.

Virtual Event: Matt Ortile, Nicole Chung and Cinelle Barnes
2020-06-17 17:00 - 19:00
Join us on Zoom on Wednesday June 17th at 5:00pm PDT for Matt Ortile discussing his new book, The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I’ve Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance with Nicole Chung and Cinelle Barnes.
Zoom Login
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82645267456
Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,82645267456# or +12532158782,,82645267456#
Or Telephone:
Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location):
US: +1 669 900 9128 or +1 253 215 8782 or +1 346 248 7799 or +1 646 558 8656 or +1 301 715 8592 or +1 312 626 6799
Webinar ID: 826 4526 7456
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kcncUD1CD1
Praise for The Groom Will Keep His Name
Matt Ortile’s ardent and precocious collection sets the page aflame with its explosive mixture of passion and politics, cultural analysis and self-examination. Cruising through virtual and nocturnal circuits, Ortile riffs like a guitar savant on what it means to be a young wanderer in the city today with astute carnality and endearing candor. The Groom Will Keep His Name is a daring brown and queer manifesto that proclaims to everyone making our way in the world: never bow to the false gods of whiteness and normalcy.—Meredith Talusan, author of Fairest
About The Groom Will Keep His Name
A riotous collection of “witty and captivating” (Bitch Magazine) essays by a gay Filipino immigrant in America learning that everything is about sex–and sex is about power
When Matt Ortile moved from Manila to Las Vegas, the locals couldn’t pronounce his name. Harassed as a kid for his brown skin, accent, and femininity, he believed he could belong in America by marrying a white man and shedding his Filipino identity. This was the first myth he told himself. The Groom Will Keep His Name explores the various tales Ortile spun about what it means to be a Vassar Girl, an American Boy, and a Filipino immigrant in New York looking to build a home.
As we meet and mate, we tell stories about ourselves, revealing not just who we are, but who we want to be. Ortile recounts the relationships and whateverships that pushed him to confront his notions of sex, power, and the model minority myth. Whether swiping on Grindr, analyzing DMs, or cruising steam rooms, Ortile brings us on his journey toward radical self-love with intelligence, wit, and his heart on his sleeve.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Laila Lalami, The Other Americans
2020-06-17 19:00 - 21:00
Bookshop Santa Cruz invites you to join us for a free online event with author Laila Lalami to discuss her latest book now out in paperback, The Other Americans. This timely, powerful novel about the suspicious death of a Moroccan immigrant, was shortlisted for the National Book Award. The Other Americans is at once a family saga, a murder mystery, and a love story informed by the treacherous fault lines of American culture. This event is cosponsored by The Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz.
Register for this free Crowdcast event here.
This is a free event. The book may be purchased below.
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Late one spring night, as Driss Guerraoui is walking across a darkened intersection in California, he is hit and killed by a speeding car. The aftermath of his death brings together a diverse cast of characters: Guerraoui’s daughter Nora, a jazz composer returning to the small town in the Mojave she thought she’d left for good; her mother, Maryam, who still pines for her life in the old country; Efrain, an undocumented witness whose fear of deportation prevents him from coming forward; Jeremy, an old friend of Nora’s and an Iraqi War veteran; Coleman, a detective who is slowly discovering her son’s secrets; Anderson, a neighbor trying to reconnect with his family; and the murdered man himself. As the characters—deeply divided by race, religion, and class—tell their stories, each in their own voice, connections among them emerge. Driss’s family confronts its secrets, a town faces its hypocrisies, and love—messy and unpredictable—is born.
Laila Lalami is the author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, Secret Son, and The Moor’s Account, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and which won the American Book Award, the Arab American Book Award, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, Harper’s Magazine, and The Guardian. In 2019, she was awarded the Simpson/Joyce Carol Oates Prize for her body of work. A professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside, she lives in Los Angeles.
