Litseen

Small Press Celebration: Editorial Argonáutica
2017-04-20 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
IESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Mark Haber, Scott Esposito and Editorial Argonáutica to the store to celebrate their latest bilingual books on Thursday, April 20th at 7pm.
Argonáutica is a Mexican press based in Monterrey, Mexico, an industrial city torn between the “Texas Way of Life” and one of the richest cultures in the world. Their mission is to bring world literature together, to reflect on the translation process and to promote authors that would otherwise not cross their borders. In addition to its artistic value, literature tells the story of culture and its individuals, as well as the way they interact with each other. Argonáutica’s goal is to help create a dialogue between the voices in each culture.
[El proyecto editorial de Argonáutica arrancó con el objetivo de acercar las literaturas del mundo, profundizar en el acto de la traducción y destacar la figura del traductor. Un aspecto distintivo de la editorial es la intención de publicar ediciones bilingües en las que sea posible cotejar las particularidades, giros y modos de cada lengua. Este enfoque permite abordar el fenómeno de la traducción como arte y como intercambio cultural.
En Argonáutica vemos la literatura como un elemento de contacto entre culturas y, por lo tanto, buscamos colaborar con instituciones culturales de diferentes países para establecer alianzas y proyectos editoriales en conjunto. Además de su valor estético, la literatura da cuenta de la diversidad de individuos y comunidades que interactúan en el contexto global de la contemporaneidad.
Argonáutica, además de proyecto editorial, pretende ser una plataforma para el diálogo intercultural de voces literarias provenientes de distintas latitudes.]
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Mark Haber‘s Melville´s Beard [Las barbas de Melville] is a collection of nine absurd stories varying in structure and tone. Each examines the human condition and the dilemmas we face in the tempest of our own self-induced problems. These are obscure, weird and, in many cases, disturbing stories. Mark’s stories are ageless because they speak to us, demanding we question our own natures, regardless of time and space.
[Es un libro de nueve relatos absurdos, con diferentes estructuras y tonos. Mark escribe sobre la condición humana, sobre los problemas a los que nos enfrentamos y que nosotros mismos creamos. Las suyas son historias oscuras, extrañas y perturbadoras. Son atemporales porque cuestionan la naturaleza del hombre sin importar tiempo o espacio.]
Mark was born in Washington D.C. and grew up in Clearwater, Florida. He is the store manager of Brazos Bookstore in Houston, Texas. He has been a juror on the Best Translated Book Award for 2016 and 2017. His criticism has appeared in The Rumpus, Music & Literature, LitHub. and The Quarterly Conversation. His debut collection of short stories, Deathbed Conversions, was published in 2009.
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Scott Esposito‘s Latin American Mixtape [Mixtape Latinoamericano] is not just a collection of literary essays on Latin American writers, it’s also about the insight that comes from a magnificent reader from abroad reading the great writers of a foreign continent. It includes three never-before-published pieces, exclusive interviews and a sharp point of view on literature.
[La serie de ensayos «lados b», como los llama el autor, no hablan solo del trabajo de autores latinoamericanos, sino también de la perspectiva de un extradordinario lector extranjero a partir de la lectura de grandes escritores. Incluye tres textos inéditos, entrevistas y una agudísima visión de la literatura en general.]
Scott is the author of The Surrender (2016, Anomalous Press), The Doubles (forthcoming, Civil Coping Mechanisms) and co-author of The End of Oulipo? (written with Lauren Elkin, Zero Books, 2013). Some of his texts have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, La Tempestad (Mexican magazine), Granta en español, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, among others. He is a senior editor of Two Lines Press, contributing editor of BOMB magazine, and founder of The Quarterly Conversation.

Both books will be available for purchase at the event.

JP Voyer
2017-04-20 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Pro Arts Gallery, 150 Frank H Ogawa Plaza, Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
Join Pro Arts and Little Black Cart on April 20th, 7:00 – 9:00 at Pro Arts Gallery for a book launch and reception for the English language version of “Inquiry Into the Causes and Nature of the Misery of People” by JP Voyer.
This statement from the co-translator of Voyer’s book, Isaac Cronin, explains briefly why he believes The Inquiry is the most important work of social criticism written since World War II.
“In the early 70s as the Situationist International imploded Voyer’s timely call for a detailed critique of Marx and the materialist economists fell on deaf ears in Paris. There was no public response by Debord or anyone else in his camp who had been directly challenged to take up this task. In the following years Voyer proceeded to make a series of bold discoveries. An Inquiry Into The Causes And Nature of The Misery of People takes on, among other classic economists, Adam Smith, whose masterpiece is alluded to in Voyer’s title. For the first time, and in a systematic fashion, Voyer shows: 1) that the economy doesn’t exist except as a false idea and practice on the part of our enemies; 2) that in our world communication, the most human of human acts, is what commodities, not people, do and 3) that there is no such thing as exchange value vs. use value, that there is only value which is the language of abstraction commodities speak to each other without slaves who transport these commodities participating in the discussion.”

Janice A. Lowe, Yohann Potico + Kevin Carnes
2017-04-20 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
Join us for a special evening of poetry and song in The Poetry Center, featuring New York-based poet, musician, and Dark Room Collective co-founder Janice A. Lowe (text, voice, and piano) performing works from her debut book, Leaving Cle (Miami University Press, 2016), with Yohann Potico (bass) and Kevin Carnes (drums).
Check out their work in advance here: Edge-acation and Boy Flower Tamir. This event is free and open to the public.
Fred Moten writes: “Leaving Cle is a beautiful document of eccentric return. A collection of unforecast surprise, it keeps giving home away, disbursing and dispersing hard, pleasurable weather like a new kind of lake effect. Cleveland is Brooklyn is Chicago and elsewhere, everywhere in a set of absolute specificities, upSouth, back east, out and out. There’s a black cosmology of ‘difference without separation’ of which Denise Ferreira da Silva, sociologist, speaks. Janice A. Lowe, poet, sings it so hard, makes her air such an irreducible element of the general air, that you couldn’t get away from it if you tried, which is fine, because that’s the last thing you’ll want. Her sound, her time, is everything you do.”
Janice A. Lowe is a composer and poet. She is the author of Leaving Cle: poems of nomadic dispersal (Miami University Press) and the chapbook SWAM (Belladonna Series.) Her poems have been published in Callaloo, Best American Experimental Writing 2016, The Poetry Project Online, Pre) Conceivable Bridges, American Poetry Review, Radiant Re-Sisters, The Hat and on a digital album with Drew Gardner’s Poetics Orchestra. She composed the musicals Lil Budda, (Text by Stephanie L. Jones,) Sit-In at the Five & Dime, (Words by Marjorie Duffield) and Somewhere in Texas, (Book and Lyrics by Charles E. Drew, Jr.). Her works for musical theater have been performed extensively in New York City and regionally and have received developmental residencies from the Eugene O’Neill Musical Theater Conference and the National Alliance for Musical Theater. She has composed for the plays 12th and Clairmont by Jenni Lamb, The Super Starlet Shero Show by The Jones Twins, and Door of No Return by Nehassaiu deGannes. She is the composer of Make Some Learned Noise, text by Randall Horton, an interactive poem with music, performed with the incoming freshman class, University of New Haven, 2015. Recently, she was commissioned to compose a song cycle based on the “Millie-Christine” poems, from the collection OLIO, by Tyehimba Jess. She is a co-founder of The Dark Room Collective and a founding member of absolute theater co. She has performed with the experimental bands w/o a net, HAGL, and Digital Diaspora. She teaches songwriting workshops at White Bird Productions and has taught Poetry and Performance at Purchase College and at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics She holds an MFA in Musical Theater Writing from New York University-Tisch School of the Arts. More at janicelowe.com Photo: Eric Perl.
Yohann Potico grew up in a West Indian family in France. He brings a distinctive perspective to his bass playing, producing and composing by blending an eclectic mix of influences—ranging from soul and jazz to funk and trip hop—with a unique melodic approach. He performed and recorded with Brooklyn-based independent rock trio California King from 2007 to 2014. With California King, he recorded and co-wrote tracks on three albums—Adoration of the Boogie Bear, 2008, La Belle Epoque 2010, and Sankofa, 2015. He has performed and recorded as a session musician with numerous bands including Sierra Leone-based hip-hop group Dry Eye, soul vocalist Annakei house/techno producer Michele Papa. For three years, Yohann has been in residence as bass player for the Eastern European and North African influenced group Balkan Stomp. As a producer and sound engineer, Yohann has worked with a wide range of artist including folk songwriter and performer Megan Palmer, jazz pianist and composer Jesse Elder, jazz vocalist Zack Foley and singer/artist Sabrina Iyadede.

Kevin Carnes is a drummer, composer and producer based in the Bay Area since 1984. He founded the Afro-Punk-Industrial band Beatnigs and is celebrating 25 years as a founding member of Broun Fellinis. Carnes has served as musical director/composer for City Circus and the Marin Theater’s production of August Wilson’s “Gem of the Ocean.”

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event phone:

415-338-2227

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center

Lidia Yuknavitch
2017-04-20 19:30 - 20:30 UTC | Tenderloin Museum, 398 Eddy St, San Francisco , CA, United States
Join us as we welcome Lidia Yuknavitch for her much-anticipated novel The Book of Joan!
A raucous celebration, a searing condemnation, and a fiercely imaginative retelling of Joan of Arc’s transcendent life. — Roxane Gay, New York Times-bestselling author of Bad Feminist
In the near future, world wars have transformed the earth into a battleground, a place to hide in caves and horde ammunition. Fleeing the unending violence and the planet’s now-radioactive surface, humans have regrouped to a mysterious platform known as CIEL, hovering over their erstwhile home. The changed world has turned evolution on its head, the surviving humans becoming sexless, hairless pale-white creatures floating in isolation, inscribing stories upon their skin.
Out of the ranks of the endless wars rises Jean de Men, a charismatic cult leader who appoints himself to rule over CIEL as a kind of corporate police state. To combat de Men’s vicious acts and thirst for blood, a group of rebels unite to dismantle his iron rule – galvanized by the heroic song of Joan, a child-warrior who possesses an unnatural talent, a force that lives within her and communes with the earth. When de Men and his armies fashion Joan into a martyr, instead of the living, breathing force of nature she is, the consequences are astonishing. And no one – not the rebels, Jean de Men, nor even Joan herself – can foresee the ways her life story will, in a brilliant instant, forge the destiny of an entire world for generations.
The Book of Joan is a riveting tale of destruction and the beauty found in unlikely places—even at the extreme end of post-human experience. A book suffused with dirt, sweat, and blood, it raises questions about what it means to be human, the meaning of sex and gender, and the role of art as means for survival.
“It’s unfair to compare Yuknavitch to only female authors. With her verve and bold imagination, she’s earned the throne left empty since the death of David Foster Wallace.” — Chuck Palahniuk
“Reading The Book of Joan is a meditation on art and sex and war. My brain is full-bloomed. Get ready, it’s glorious.” — Amber Tamblyn, author of Dark Sparkler
Lidia Yuknavitch is the author of the National Bestselling novel The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award’s Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader’s Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and three books of short stories. Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader’s Choice. She founded the workshop series Corporeal Writing in Portland, OR, where she also teaches Women’s Studies, Film Studies, Writing, and Literature. She received her doctorate in Literature from the University of Oregon. Her novel The Book of Joan is forthcoming from Harper, as well as a book based on her recent TED Talk, “The Misfit’s Manifesto.” She lives in Oregon with her husband Andy Mingo and their Renaissance man son, Miles. She is a very good swimmer.
RSVP appreciated but not required. If you cannot attend the event, but would like to request a signed copy of The Book of Joan, please order below and put your request in the comments field.

Rise: An Anthology of Power and Unity
2017-04-21 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
VAGABOND is very happy to announce the launch of our new publication,
Rise (an anthology of Power and Unity)
Featured readers include:

Jack Hirschman
Dorothy “Dottie” Payne
Nina Serrano
Mahnaz Badihian
Karen Melander-Magoon
Fred Dodsworth
Dee Allen
Tim Kahl
Isaac J Torres

Hosts: Mark Lipman and Antonieta Villamil.

Deb Olin Unferth
2017-04-21 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Praise for Wait Till You See Me Dance
“Deb Olin Unferth’s stories are so smart, fast, full of heart, and distinctive in voice—each an intense little thought-system going out earnestly in search of strange new truths. What anmportant and exciting talent.”—George Saunders
“Deb Olin Unferth’s stories are wild, funny, and wonderful.”—Geoff Dyer
“This book is an astonishment—strange, brainy, and loaded with feeling. Deb Olin Unferth shows, with brilliant force, the startling vitality of the short story. She is a master.”—Ben Marcus

About Wait Till You See Me Dance
Wait Till You See Me Dance consists of several extraordinary longer stories as well as a selection of intoxicating very short stories. In the chilling The First Full Thought of Her Life, a shooter gets in position while a young girl climbs a sand dune. In Voltaire Night, students compete to tell a story about the worst thing that ever happened to them. In Stay Where You Are, two oblivious travelers in Central America are kidnapped by a gunman they assume to be an insurgent but the gunman has his own problems.
An Unferth story lures you in with a voice that seems amiable and lighthearted, but it swerves in sudden and surprising ways that reveal, in terrifying clarity, the rage, despair, and profound mournfulness that have taken up residence at the heart of the American dream. These stories often take place in an exaggerated or heightened reality, a quality that is reminiscent of the work of Donald Barthelme, Lorrie Moore, and George Saunders, but in Unferth’s unforgettable collection she carves out territory that is entirely her own.

The WordParty Poetry + Jazz Night
2017-04-22 07:00 - 21:30 UTC | PianoFight, 144 Taylor St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Hosted by Jennifer Barone, Ingrid Keir. Live jazz with Daniel Heffez, Geordie Van Der Bosch and friends. FREE admission, all ages, full menu and bar in the front room. Open Mic for poetry only – 3min time limit, pick your best poem to read with live jazz accompaniment.

Sixteen Rivers Press Reading
2017-04-22 16:00 - 18:00 UTC | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
Join Sixteen Rivers Press poets Erin Rodoni and Gillian Wegener for an evening of reading and discussion.
The first section of Body, in Good Light opens with the words, “Between any two points, there is a love story”: points on a compass, points in time, between lovers and strangers, mother and child. Throughout this debut collection, Erin Rodoni distills experience for its essence, rendered in language that is fierce, tender, penetrating in its precision, and astonishing in its turns of phrase. Whether describing “turncoat cells” of cancer, the half-smile scar of a caesarian, or the alien landscape of childhood seared by wildfire, Rodoni’s poems remind us how tenuous our lives are, how each moment arrives as inescapably painful and miraculous as birth.
Erin Rodoni was born and raised in the small coastal community of Point Reyes, California. Her work has appeared in Colorado Review, Cimarron Review, Drunken Boat, Ninth Letter, and Vinyl Poetry, among others. Her poems have also been included in the Best New Poets anthology, featured on Verse Daily, and honored with an Intro Journals Award from the Association of Writers and Writing programs. Rodoni holds a BA from UC Berkeley and an MFA from San Diego State. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband and two young daughters.
The poems in This Sweet Haphazard are anything but haphazard in their designs or effects, and while sweetness resides here, it’s a sweetness hard-won by looking at life unflinchingly. Gillian Wegener’s gift is to show us that the ever-changing, the temporal, is as close as we’re apt to come to paradise. The second poem in the book, “Chorus,” establishes the multiple tensions that exist between person and place, tensions that come under the scrutiny of a shrewd, wry, endlessly inventive eye. These are poems that no one will forget, radiating as they do with Central Valley heat, with the beauty of the ordinary, and with the love of a woman for the “sweet haphazard of home,” from which everything here so accurately and ingeniously arises.
Gillian Wegener is the author of two previous books of poetry: a chapbook, Lifting One Foot, Lifting the Other (In the Grove Press, 2001), and a full-length collection, The Opposite of Clairvoyance (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2008). Widely published, she has won several awards for her work, including the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize in 2006 and 2007, and the Zócalo Public Square Prize for Poetry of Place in 2015. Wegener, a junior high teacher, lives with her husband and daughter in Modesto, where she coordinates and hosts the monthly Second Tuesday Reading Series. She is a cofounder of the Modesto- Stanislaus Poetry Center and has served as the poet laureate for the city of Modesto.

Amy S. Peele
2017-04-22 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
In Cut, a well-respected transplant nurse and her best friend meet the corrupt world of organ transplants in a wild roller coaster ride through lifestyles of the rich and famous.
While the federal government is launching a national investigation on the “equity” of organ distribution, a female tech CEO flies across the country to get a liver transplant. Soon, well-respected transplant nurse Sarah Golden and her best friend, Jackie, find themselves tangled up in an intense plot to uncover the answer to the question on everyone’s mind: Can you buy your way up to the top of the waiting list? Their pursuit of justice brings them to Miami, San Francisco, and Chicago—a sometimes fun, sometimes dangerous roller coaster ride from which they barely escape with their lives.
Amy S. Peele was born and raised in the Chicago area, where she graduated from South Chicago School of Nursing. She discovered her passion for organ donation and transplantation when she started as a transplant coordinator at University of Chicago, and has since enjoyed a thirty-five-year career in transplantation in both Illinois and California. Peele has lived and worked in the San Francisco area since 1985 and has been writing creatively for over fifteen years. In addition to killing people in her murder mysteries, she enjoys meditating, yoga, swimming, and pursuing her spirituality by studying the teachings of Deepak Chopra.

Kanishk Tharoor w/ Aaron Bady)
2017-04-22 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Kanishk Tharoor discusses his new story collection, Swimmer Among the Stars, with Aaron Bady.
Praise for Swimmer Among the Stars
“Like the storytellers of old, as well as the art’s 20th century masters, Kanishk Tharoor brings together times past and our present day in his dazzling fables where the exotic and the mundane, the lost and the hoped for, are woven into images that remind the reader that it is through sharing stories, and maybe stories alone, that civilizations and their subjects come together in surviving whatever tasks history sets for them.” —Sjón
“These stories gleam with the light of an authentic and wholly original imagination, beautifully crafted and in possession of an untamed, almost feral sense of creativity. With Borgesian intelligence and great tenderness of heart, Tharoor reminds us how vital it is to tell stories, and how urgently we need to consume them.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine
“It’s been years since I’ve encountered a collection as beguiling as Swimmer Among the Stars. Kanishk Tharoor seems to have sprung onto the scene fully formed, possessed of his own mischievous and erudite voice, already at the full height of his powers. Literary debuts are often described as ‘promising’; here are stories that read like promises fulfilled.” —John Wray, author of The Lost Time Accidents
About Swimmer Among the Stars
In one of the singularly imaginative stories from Kanishk Tharoor’s Swimmer Among the Stars, despondent diplomats entertain themselves by playing table tennis in zero gravity—for after rising seas destroy Manhattan, the United Nations moves to an orbiting space hotel. In other tales, a team of anthropologists treks to a remote village to record a language’s last surviving speaker intoning her native tongue; an elephant and his driver cross the ocean to meet the whims of a Moroccan princess; and Genghis Khan’s marauding army steadily approaches an unnamed city’s walls.
With exuberant originality and startling vision, Tharoor cuts against the grain of literary convention, drawing equally from ancient history and current events. His world-spanning stories speak to contemporary challenges of environmental collapse and cultural appropriation, but also to the workings of legend and their timeless human truths. Whether refashioning the romances of Alexander the Great or confronting the plight of today’s refugees, Tharoor writes with distinctive insight and remarkable assurance. Swimmer Among the Stars announces the arrival of a vital, enchanting talent.
More info on our site: http://www.greenapplebooks.com/event/9th-ave-kanishk-tharoor-and-aaron-bady

West Marin Review VII Reading
2017-04-23 15:00 - 16:00 UTC | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes contributors of the West Marin Review VII, to the store on Sunday, April 23rd at 3:00 pm. The reading participants include, Claire Blotter, Elaine Elinson, Kathleen Goodwin, Anuja Mendiratta, Larry Ruth, Vicki DeArmon, and Gabriel Schillinger-Hyman.
The West Marin Review is an award-winning literary and art journal published by Point Reyes Books and friends in the rural enclave of West Marin, CA. It offers an intriguing variety of art, poetry and prose from new, as well as, established contributors. The journal provides a blend of fiction and essays, humor, nature, memoir, poetry, art, and often, music. Contributors hail from places near and far- from rural California to Paris and everywhere in between. This volume features prose by, among others, Rick Bass, Stephanie E. Dickinson, Elaine Elinson, Blair Fuller and David Miller; poetry by Jody Farrell, Roy Mash, and others; and art by Mark Ropers, Wendy Schwartz, and others. This event will focus on local writers and artists with a list of participants to be named shortly.
Claire Blotter teaches poetry writing to elementary and high school students as a Poet in the Schools. She has published three chapbooks and lives near Deer Island Preserve in Novato, California.
San Francisco writer Elaine Elinson is coauthor of Wherever There’s a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California, which won a Gold Medal in the California Book Awards in 2010.
Kathleen Goodwin is a painter, photographer, and publisher of fine art books. Born in South Africa, she has lived in Inverness for twenty-five years drawn to the area’s open expanses and wildlife.
Anuja Mendiratta is a poet, a daughter of Indian immigrants, an independent consultant, and a walker of this beautiful earth. She resides in Berkeley, California and loves being outdoors.
At fourteen, Larry Ruth and a friend set out for Yosemite and hiked the John Muir Trail. They spent the last night on Mount Whitney in a snowstorm in July.
Vicki DeArmon is the Marketing & Events Director at Copperfield’s Books. She’s also the former publisher of Foghorn Press and a fiction writer.
Gabriel Schillinger-Hyman, age seventeen, attends Lick-Wilmerding High School in San Francisco. A classical and jazz pianist, he also enjoys the visual arts, including cartooning and landscape painting. He spends his free time in Point Reyes.

Be About It Presents: Julie Mannell + Friends
2017-04-23 15:00 - 18:00 (America/Denver) | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Join us for a fun afternoon in Oakland! After the reading, we will meet at the Fairlyland sign at Lake Merritt for open mic readings and a low-rent afterparty. BYOB.
Julie Mannell is a writer of poetry, fiction and essays, and an editor at Matrix Magazine. She is the recipient of the HarperCollins/Constance Rooke Scholarship, the Mona Adilman Poetry Prize, the Lionel Shapiro Award for Excellency in Creative Writing, and The Vagenius Award (presented by Roseanne Barr). Her work has been featured in the National Post, Toronto Star and Huffington Post, among others. At the moment, Mannell is an MFA candidate at the University of Guelph and holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from McGill University in English Literature and Philosophy. Originally from Fonthill, Ontario, she currently splits her time between Montreal and Toronto. She was recently named one of the Top 30 Poets Under 30. Twitter/insta/snap: @juliemannell.
http://www.juliemannell.com/
Kenta Maniwa is from Oakland, California. His writing can be found in Hobart, Metatron, Spy Kids Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, Bottlecap Press, and Be About It Press. His new chapbook, Japanese Tim Duncan, will be published this year.
Jesse Prado lives in Hayward and blogs at thegreatcratsby.tumblr.com and tweets from @prado_jesse
Mark Cronin recently requested all of his work be deleted from various websites such as Atticus Review and Volume 1 Brooklyn. All of his previous books are out of print. His first novel was going to be published in May of 2017 by a major publisher but it is not anymore. He holds no degrees and has never won an award. His favorite word is “erasure”.
The Open Minds are a rock n’ roll sister duo based out of the Bay Area. They have created a distinguished and distinctive sound that is both reminiscent and all their own. Their performances are high-drive, electric and spontaneous, creating a unique experience every time that will leave you wanting more.
Joined by: Jesse Prado, Ken Ta, Mark Cronin, and The Open Minds

The Racket #6: Drugz
2017-04-24 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
The Racket #6: DRUGZ is coming to Adobe Books, on Monday, April 24th at 7:00PM.
We’re gathering some fantastic writers to share their thoughts on, well, drugs. Be it psychedelic horseback riding or deep dives into the world of illicit pharmies, we’re going to hear it.
Our readers:
Philip Harris
Kar A. Johnson
Joe Wadlington
Matt Carney
Ingrid Rojas Contreras
And more to come.
Just write, “Drugz” on your oversized wall-calendar for the 24th of April.
We’ll see you there.

Donna Seaman
2017-04-24 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
An award-winning writer rescues seven first-rate twentieth-century women artists from oblivion—their lives fascinating, their artwork a revelation.
Who hasn’t wondered where—aside from Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo—all the women artists are? In many art books, they’ve been marginalized with cold efficiency, summarily dismissed in the captions of group photographs with the phrase “identity unknown” while each male is named.
Donna Seaman brings to dazzling life seven of these forgotten artists, among the best of their day: Gertrude Abercrombie, with her dark, surreal paintings and friendships with Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins; Bay Area self-portraitist Joan Brown; Ree Morton, with her witty, oddly beautiful constructions; Lois Mailou Jones of the Harlem Renaissance; Lenore Tawney, who combined weaving and sculpture when art and craft were considered mutually exclusive; Christina Ramberg, whose unsettling works drew on pop culture and advertising; and Louise Nevelson, an art-world superstar in her heyday but omitted from most recent surveys of her era.
These women fought to be treated the same as male artists, to be judged by their work, not their gender or appearance. In brilliant, compassionate prose, Seaman reveals what drove them, how they worked, and how they were perceived by others in a world where women were subjects—not makers—of art. Featuring stunning examples of the artists’ work, Identity Unknown speaks to all women about their neglected place in history and the challenges they face to be taken as seriously as men no matter what their chosen field.
Donna Seaman has degrees in the fine arts and English. An editor at Booklist, she reviews books for the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, among others. She has written bio-critical essays for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature and American Writers, and has published in TriQuarterly and Creative Nonfiction. Seaman created, hosted, and produced Open Books, a radio program about outstanding books and writers and the art of reading. She lives in Chicago.

Kristen Radtke
2017-04-24 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Susan Steinberg talks with Kristen Radtke about her debut graphic novel, Imagine Wanting Only This.

Praise for Kristen Radtke:

“Kristen Radtke’s Imagine Wanting Only This doesn’t tell a single story but a chorus of histories, personal and familial and historical, and invents its own marvelous language for their telling—a language forged from interior thought and visual imagination, bringing together words and illustration in continually surprising and moving ways. The voice in these pages is eloquent in so many ways at once, like a shape that exists in three dimensions rather than two, and it’s utterly singular: visually alive, attentive to details, self-questioning and tender as it surveys variously haunted terrains of heart and landscape. Radtke’s world is so immersive, and so sensitively conjured, that once I entered the sketched chamber of her pages, I didn’t want to leave again—or even pause for breath—until I reached the end.”
—Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

“Riveting and glorious. A book of sorrow filtered through intellect. In Kristen Radtke’s hands, nonfiction becomes poetry. A tremendous achievement.”
—Tom Hart, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Rosalie Lightning

“Cities, ambitions, romances, and bodies come to ruin before our eyes, as Kristen Radtke invites us, in her beautifully understated way, to be disturbed, fascinated, and yes, even attracted to that ruin. A remarkable bildungsroman!”
—Eula Biss, author of On Immunity

“Kristen Radtke leads us through a bleak and beautifully crafted story of heart and heartbreak—creation, connection, decay, and loss. Imagine Wanting Only This is challenging and inspiring.”
—Ellen Forney, New York Times bestselling author of Marbles

About Imagine Wanting Only This:

A gorgeous graphic memoir about loss, love, and confronting grief.
When Kristen Radtke was in college, the sudden death of a beloved uncle and the sight of an abandoned mining town after his funeral marked the beginning moments of a lifelong fascination with ruins and with people and places left behind. Over time, this fascination deepened until it triggered a journey around the world in search of ruined places. Now, in this genre-smashing graphic memoir, she leads us through deserted cities in the American Midwest, an Icelandic town buried in volcanic ash, islands in the Philippines, New York City, and the delicate passageways of the human heart. Along the way, we learn about her family and a rare genetic heart disease that has been passed down through generations, and revisit tragic events in America’s past. A narrative that is at once narrative and factual, historical and personal, Radtke’s stunning illustrations and piercing text never shy away from the big questions: Why are we here, and what will we leave behind?

Oakland Noir
2017-04-25 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Moderated by Eddie Muller & Jerry Thompson
with Kim Addonizio, Nick Petrulakis, Jamie DeWolf, Joe Loya
A celebration of a new crime fiction anthology from Akashic Books
Oakland Noir

California’s noir quotient continues to rise with Oakland Noir, which reveals all the dark complexities of this prominent city. Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched in 2004 with Brooklyn Noir. Each story is set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the city of the book.
Brand-new stories by: Nick Petrulakis, Kim Addonizio, Keenan Norris, Keri Miki-Lani Schroeder, Katie Gilmartin, Dorothy Lazard, Harry Louis Williams II, Carolyn Alexander, Phil Canalin, Judy Juanita, Jamie DeWolf, Nayomi Munaweera, Mahmud Rahman, Tom McElravey, Joe Loya, and Eddie Muller.
In the wake of San Francisco Noir, Los Angeles Noir, and Orange County Noir—all popular volumes in the Akashic Noir Series—comes the latest California installment, Oakland Noir. Masterfully curated by Jerry Thompson and Eddie Muller (the “Czar of Noir”), this volume will shock, titillate, provoke, and entertain. The diverse cast of talented contributors will not disappoint.
JERRY THOMPSON is an accomplished violinist, playwright, and poet. He is the coauthor of Black Artists in Oakland, and owned Black Spring Books, an independent bookstore.
EDDIE MULLER, a.k.a. the “Czar of Noir,” has been nominated for several Edgar and Anthony awards, and his novel The Distance won a Shamus Award. He produces the San Francisco Noir City Film Festival, the largest annual film noir retrospective in the world, and is a frequent host on Turner Classic Movies.

Andres Barba + Yiyun Li
2017-04-25 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Andres Barba discusses his new novel, Such Small Hands, with Yiyun Li, followed by a party sponsored by Transit Books.

Praise for Andres Barba

Every once in a while a novel does not record reality but creates a whole new reality, one that casts a light on our darkest feelings. Kafka did that. Bruno Schulz did that. Now the Spanish writer Andrés Barba has done it with the terrifying Such Small Hands.—Edmund White

Barba explores what the dynamics of an orphanage reveal about any insular community and the trials of its inevitable outcast.—Idra Novey, author of Ways to Disappear

Andrés Barba needs no advice. He has already created a world that is perfectly realized and has a craft that is inappropriate for a writer of his age.—Mario Vargas Llosa

About Such Small Hands

Shirley Jackson meets The Virgin Suicides, set at an all-girls orphanage. It was once a happy city; we were once happy girls. . . . Life changes at the orphanage the day Marina shows up. As she tries to find her place, she creates a game whose rules are dictated by a haunting violence. In hypnotic, lyrical prose, Andrés Barba evokes the pain of loss and the hunger for acceptance—a masterwork from the Spanish writer at the peak of his powers.

Anselm Berrigan + Hoa Nguyen
2017-04-25 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith is delighted to host local literary nonprofit Small Press Traffic as they present two superb visiting poets, Anselm Berrigan and Hoa Nguyen. Please join us!
Small Press Traffic hosts poets Anselm Berrigan and Hoa Nguyen as part of its longtime reading series. Since 1974 Small Press Traffic (SPT) has been at the heart of the San Francisco Bay Area innovative writing scene, bringing together authors, readers, educators, small presses, and community members through talks, readings, workshops, and performances. Its mission is to provide a local and national platform for experimental writing, foregrounding underserved writers and those who identify as women, people of color, and/or from the LGBTQI community.
Hoa Nguyen is the author of eight poetry books and chapbooks. She lives in Toronto, Ontario where she teaches poetics at Ryerson University and curates a reading series.
Anselm Berrigan‘s recent books of poetry include Come In Alone (Wave, 2016) and Primitive State (Edge, 2015). A chapbook, Degrets, is forthcoming from Couch Press. He is the poetry editor for The Brooklyn Rail, and also editor of the just-about-released What Is Poetry? (Just kidding, I know you know): Selected Interviews from the Poetry Project Newsletter, 1983-2009.
RSVP appreciated but not required. If you cannot attend the event, but would like to request a signed copy of any of our featured authors’ works, please order below and put your request in the comments field.

Jacqueline Winspear
2017-04-25 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
Jacqueline Winspear reads from her latest Maisie Dobbs adventure, In This Grave Hour.

“A female investigator every bit as brainy and battle-hardened as Lisbeth Salander.”–Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

Tuesday, April 25, 2017 – 7:30pm

Sunday September 3rd 1939. At the moment Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain broadcasts to the nation Britain’s declaration of war with Germany, a senior Secret Service agent breaks into Maisie Dobbs’ flat to await her return. Dr. Francesca Thomas has an urgent assignment for Maisie: to find the killer of a man who escaped occupied Belgium as a boy, some twenty-three years earlier during the Great War.
In a London shadowed by barrage balloons, bomb shelters and the threat of invasion, within days another former Belgian refugee is found murdered. And as Maisie delves deeper into the killings of the dispossessed from the “last war,” a new kind of refugee — an evacuee from London — appears in Maisie’s life. The little girl billeted at Maisie’s home in Kent does not, or cannot, speak, and the authorities do not know who the child belongs to or who might have put her on the “Operation Pied Piper” evacuee train. They know only that her name is Anna.
As Maisie’s search for the killer escalates, the country braces for what is to come. Britain is approaching its gravest hour — and Maisie could be nearing a crossroads of her own.
Jacqueline Winspear is the author of the bestselling Maisie Dobbs series, which includes Journey to Munich, A Dangerous Place, Leaving Everything Most Loved, Elegy for Eddie, and eight other novels. Her standalone novel, The Care and Management of Lies, was also a bestseller and a Dayton Literary Peace Prize finalist. Originally from the United Kingdom, she now lives in California.

Matthew Isaac Sobin
2017-04-26 18:00 - 20:00 UTC | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
In The Last Machine in the Solar System, life on Earth ended billions of years ago, but the last machine carries on.
Nearly three billion years into the future, the solar system is a very different place. Earth is long gone, and the sun is a gray, shrunken dwarf. All that remains of humanity and conscious thought is Jonathan—the last machine.
Created to survive Earth’s destruction by our ever-expanding sun, Jonathan witnessed the end of life on Earth. This is his story and that of his creator, Nikolai. It is also the story of the human race, which failed to disentangle its destiny from the star that gave rise to all life-forms on Earth.
Matthew Isaac Sobin grew up in Huntington, New York, and graduated from Tufts University with a bachelor’s degree in history, with studies in astronomy and geology. He currently lives in Hayward, California, with his partner, sculptor Patricia Gonzalez, and works with the Peter Beren Literary Agency. This is his first published work.

Red Light Lit: Happy Hour
2017-04-26 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Denver) | PianoFight, 144 Taylor St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
In honor of national poetry month, Red Light Lit is having a FREE Happy Hour show at PianoFight.
Featured readers include: Peter Thomas Bullen, Allyson Darling, Fred Dodsworth, Nick Jaina, Ari Moskowitz, Xan Roberti and more.
Red Light Lit is a collective of writers, musicians and artists who explore love relationships and sexuality through poetry, prose, art and song.

Andrés Barba
2017-04-26 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Andrés Barba to the store to discuss and sign, Such Small Hands, on Wednesday, April 26th at 7:00 pm. This is Transit Books inaugural book and we are so pleased to be a part of it!
Life changes at the orphanage the day seven-year-old Marina shows up. She is different from the other girls: at once an outcast and object of fascination. As Marina struggles to find her place, she invents a game whose rules are dictated by a haunting violence. Written in hypnotic, lyrical prose, alternating between Marina’s perspective and the choral we of the other girls, Such Small Hands evokes the pain of loss and the hunger for acceptance.
Andrés Barba is the one the most lauded contemporary Spanish writers. He is the author of twelve books, including August, October and Rain Over Madrid. In addition to literary fiction, he has written essays, poems, books of photography, and translations of De Quincey and Melville. His books have been translated into ten languages.
Transit Books is a nonprofit publisher of international and American literature, based in Oakland, California. Founded in 2015, Transit Books is committed to the discovery and promotion of enduring works that carry readers across borders and communities.

Event date:

Wednesday, April 26, 2017 – 7:00pm to 8:00pm

Event address:

DIESEL, A Bookstore
5433 College Avenue

Oakland, CA 94618

John Waters
2017-04-26 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
John Waters reads from his new book, Make Trouble, and delivers advice for artists, graduates and anyone trying to make a living as a creative person.

Note: This event will be ticketed. Tickets include a copy of Make Trouble and a beverage. Tickets available here

About Make Trouble

When John Waters delivered his gleefully subversive advice to the graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design, the speech went viral, in part because it was so brilliantly on point about making a living as a creative person. Now we all can enjoy his sly wisdom in a manifesto that reminds us, no matter what eld we choose, to embrace chaos, be nosy, and outrage outdated critics.
Waters notes with irony that he is eminently qualified to be a commencement speaker because he was suspended from high school, then kicked out of college—yet he is a success doing what he loves best. Anyone embarking on a creative path, he tells us, would do well to realize that pragmatism and discipline are as important as talent, and that rejection is nothing to fear. Waters advises young people to eavesdrop, listen to their enemies, and horrify us with new ideas. In other words, make trouble.

Shanthi Sekaran
2017-04-26 20:00 - 22:00 UTC | A2 Cafe, 5212 Broadway St, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
Shanthi Sekaran’s has written two novels: the first is The Prayer Room (MacAdam/Cage, 2009); and the second is Lucky Boy (Penguin Random House, 2017). Her short prose has appeared in the New York Times, Canteen magazine, Mutha magazine, and New California Writing.

She’s a member of the SF Writers’ Grotto and the Portuguese Artists Colony.

She earned her BA from UC Berkeley, her MFA in Creative Writing from Johns Hopkins University, and a Creative Writing PhD from the University of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne (UK).
Sekaran joined CCA’s Writing faculty in fall 2010.

Cory Doctorow + John Scalzi
2017-04-27 18:00 - 20:00 UTC | Borderlands Books, 866 Valencia Street, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
CORY DOCTOROW:
Fascinating, moving, and darkly humorous, Walkaway is a multi-generation SF thriller about the wrenching changes of the next hundred years…and the very human people who will live their consequences. From New York Times bestselling author Cory Doctorow, an epic tale of revolution, love, post-scarcity, and the end of death.
“Walkaway is now the best contemporary example I know of, its utopia glimpsed after fascinatingly-extrapolated revolutionary struggle.” ―William Gibson
JOHN SCALZI:
Our universe is ruled by physics. Faster than light travel is impossible―until the discovery of The Flow, an extradimensional field available at certain points in space-time, which can take us to other planets around other stars. Riding The Flow, humanity spreads to innumerable other worlds. Earth is forgotten. A new empire arises, the Interdependency, based on the doctrine that no one human outpost can survive without the others. It’s a hedge against interstellar war―and, for the empire’s rulers, a system of control.
“John Scalzi is the most entertaining, accessible writer working in SF today.” ―Joe Hill, author of The Fireman

The Impossible Fairy Tale: Korean Author Han Yujoo in Conversati
2017-04-27 18:30 - 20:30 UTC | The Lab, 2948 16th Street, San Francisco , CA, 94103, United States
Long known as a vital, innovative author in her native Korea (as well as the publisher of Oulipopress), Han Yujoo here presents her first full-length book to be translated into English, The Impossible Fairy Tale (tr. Janet Hong). Called a “stunning debut” by Kirkus in a starred review, and praised as “a new kind of literary horror, as intellectual as it is transfixing” by Sarah Gerard, The Impossible Fairy Tale is a remarkable book. Come meet this exciting Korean author as she is introduced to the United States in conversation with Two Lines Press Senior Editor Scott Esposito.
It all takes place at The Lab, long known as a home for excellent cultural events in San Francisco. Snacks and alcoholic beverages will be served.
Copies of The Impossible Fairy Tale will be sold, and Han will sign books after the event.
More information: https://www.catranslation.org/event/the-impossible-fairy-tale-korean-author-han-yujoo-in-conversation-with-scott-esposito/

David Shapiro
2017-04-27 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
celebrating the release of his new poetry collection
In Memory of an Angel
from City Lights Books
Named after Alban Berg’s famed violin concerto, In Memory of an Angel is the first full-length collection in fifteen years from New York School maestro David Shapiro. Packed with erudition, pursuing themes of art history, architecture, literature, and Jewish identity, the poems of In Memory of an Angel achieve a rare combination of lyrical abstraction and postmodern self-referentiality, rendered with Shapiro’s understated virtuosity. Yet there’s a strong current of love poetry flowing through these avant-garde ruminations, as well as reminiscences of childhood and reflections on fatherhood. A surrealistic violation of the boundary between the real and the dream pervades In Memory of an Angel. Shapiro’s poems take a bewildering variety of forms, many of his own invention, even as he is equally at home in the quotidian and anecdotal. Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Jasper Johns, Frank O’Hara—these are only some of the characters peopling Shapiro’s New York, a landscape both sophisticated and haunted by memory.
The author of 10 previous books of poems, as well as monographs on John Ashbery, Jim Dine, Jasper Johns, and Mondrian, David Shapiro is a member of the second generation of New York School poets. A child prodigy on the violin, he went on to become a literary and art critic and teaches at Patterson College and Cooper Union. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and has received awards from the Merrill Foundation, the NEA, the NEH, and the Graham Foundation. He lives in Riverdale, the Bronx, NYC.
Praise for David Shapiro:
“An erudite and relentlessly modernizing mind . . . [Shapiro’s] aleatory, portent-free sophistication seems confident enough to accommodate primitive, endearing, and frankly tender tropes and situations . . . The effect is of unforeseen intimacy at the heart of abstraction.”—The New Yorker
“David Shapiro has an incredible mastery of the language and an ear sensitive to every nuance of idiom and rhythm.”—Poetry
Praise for In Memory of an Angel:
“A Taoist, a Kabbalist, and a Dadaist walk into a bar. They discover that the bar is really David Shapiro’s new book of poems, where they can drink ‘tears from sleeping birds’ and relax ‘in/ the soft hands/ of the gods.’ In Memory of an Angel literally drenches the reader in moments of wonder. Shapiro’s gift is unique. He possesses a childlike, not innocence, but sophistication. His playful erudition draws in everyone from Andy Warhol, to Kenneth Koch, to John Dewey – and it welcomes you as well, in its democratic embrace.”––Elaine Equi
“David Shapiro published his first book, January: A Book of Poems, while still a teenager. Since then, now for over fifty years, he has remained one of our very finest American poets. His mind is illuminated and his poems luminous. In Memory of an Angel is a strikingly beautiful and invaluable selection of his work!”––Jim Jarmusch
“It’s always a deep pleasure when David Shapiro has a new book, he never ceases to astonish, he has built a singular, hyper-lyrical, always brilliant poetry. In Memory of an Angel is filled with spells and charms and spinning language, elegy, and wild proclamations; as he writes: “I invented the new movement / without photographs like / the affair of the whole being / as it was said ferocious and / intimate and I invent it / to last.” And so it will.”––Peter Gizzi
“In Memory of an Angel mesmerizes with virtuosic greatness; a deft masterwork by a poet’s poet whose sui generis genius has for five decades defied and invigorated the New York School label. Shapiro upends language not for less meaning, but more—and for a multilayered storytelling sufficiently unfettered to get at life’s labyrinthine mix of ‘cardboard and gold’ promise and peril. Pervaded by wide erudition and a skilled violinist’s musical acuity, these wise, many-angled poems reward rumination, with their dream-drenched mystery, verbal excitement and open-ended, sometimes near-mystical profundity; always with Shapiro’s pluralistic heart on his metaphysical sleeve.”––Kate Farrell

Ericka Huggins
2017-04-27 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Grand Lake Theatre, 3200 Grand Avenue, Oakland, CA, 94610, United States
Please join us on Thursday, April 27 for one evening with activist, former political prisoner, and poet Ericka Huggins as she reaches into her own history, reading the words of sheroes and heroes that span the last 50 years of her life. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, she made a commitment to the Human Rights Movement and is a witness to movements across formations today.
Ericka is introduced by writers Chinaka Hodge and Zoé Samudzi, both sharing their thoughts and works in criticism of the moment. The entire evening features open dialogue with audience members.
Grand Lake Theatre
Thursday, April 27 • 7PM
http://matatu.eventbrite.com/
co-presented by the Oakland Book Festival
__________
ERICKA HUGGINS is a human rights activist, poet, educator, Black Panther leader and former political prisoner. Her extraordinary life experiences have enabled her to speak to audiences around the world on issues relating to the physical and emotional well-being of women, children and youth, whole being education, over-incarceration, and the role of the spiritual practice in sustaining activism and promoting change.
As a result of her 14-year tenure as a leader of the Black Panther Party (the longest of any woman in leadership), Ericka brings a unique, complete and honest perspective to the challenges and successes of the Black Panther Party and its significance today.
__________
CHINAKA HODGE is a poet, educator playwright and screenwriter. Originally from Oakland, California, she​ ​graduated from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study in May of 2006, and was honored to be the​ ​student speaker at the 174th Commencement exercise. Chinaka was a 2012 Artist in Residence at The​ ​Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin, CA. In early 2013, Hodge was a Sundance Feature Film lab​ ​Fellow for her script, 700th& Int’l. Since its early days, Chinaka has served in various capacities at Youth​ ​Speaks/The Living Word Project, the nation’s leading literary arts nonprofit. During her tenure there,​ ​Hodge served as Program Director, Associate Artistic Director, and worked directly with Youth Speaks’​ ​core population as a teaching artist and poet mentor. Her poems, editorials, interviews and prose have​ ​been featured in Newsweek, San Francisco Magazine, Believer Magazine, PBS, NPR, CNN, CSpan,​ ​and in two seasons of HBO’s Def Poetry.
__________
ZOÉ SAMUDZI is a queer black woman whose work is dedicated to reclaiming and reframing narratives both within the academy and outside of it. Wielding black feminist & womanist epistemologies, she interrogates structural whiteness and theorizes on decolonizing ways of knowing and truth-telling.
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The Kenyan matatu, the Thai tuk-tuk, and the Brooklyn dollar van are means of public transport used by people around the world. MATATU replicates these vehicles as a mode of collective and publicly accessible transportation, rooted in local community and global diasporas, that shuttles audiences from one arthouse experience to the next.
MATATU is a fiscally sponsored project of Intersection for the Arts, and supported by KQED, East Bay Express, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Learn more about us at www.matatufestival.org/weare
The OAKLAND BOOK FESTIVAL is an annual celebration of ideas, debate, and the arts that will take place this year at Oakland City Hall on Sunday, May 21st. The 2017 festival revolves around the theme of “Equality” and will feature over one hundred artists, activists, academics, and other public intellectuals that are aiming to achieve it in their own way. All events at the OBF are free and open to the public.

Orlando White + Patrick James Dunagan
2017-04-27 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
Orlando White receives the Poetry Center Book Award for LETTERRS (Nightboat Books) and reads with award judge Patrick James Dunagan. This event is free and open to the public.
‘San Francisco poet Robert Duncan remarked: “There is no end to the task of bringing the sounds into our conscious art.” (“Notes on the Structure of Rime”) As a critical reader I am always looking out for those poets whose work answers Duncan’s oracular call for unabashed attention to how the language of the poem is presented so as to be thereby sounded; a poet who sets the poems upon the page as though the realization of a musical score, readied for the eye to hear as the ear sees. Over in New Mexico, native born Diné (Navajo) poet Orlando White churns out just such work, attuned to “a lilt of sound: curve murmurs” (“EMIT”). White’s LETTERRS presents forward-learning contemplative action towards what constitutes an avant-garde poetics of today: a bracing engagement of/with advancing a spatial “open space,” page-as-field, poem-writing. White describes how “The white space is just as important as the text in a poem, whether it’s the counter that shapes an O or S, a line break after a word or a caesura within a line.” (“Functional White: Crafting Space & Silence”) His use of caesura and spacing within the individual line of the poem designates breath, measure, and the fragility of even individual letters. While with a quick glance through LETTERRS “the blank” white space of the page may be deemed deceptively sparse in appearance, upon sustained reading White’s employment of the practice proves to be truly nothing less than masterfully accomplished.
‘White sees “white space as a place of liberation, dissolving boundaries between what is authoritative and what is not.” (LETTERRS interview, Taos Journal) In this same conversation, he also speaks of “the page” as a “type of energy,” stating that “as an Indigenous person too, I see it as a type of resistance against English colonialism.” Without necessarily overt expression of a political stance, White nevertheless remains committed against colonialist tendencies latent in his experience using English as a poet. “One can argue language is always connected to race and vice versa; this may be why my poems ultimately reflect an intersection of Diné thought and English fluency. But I find my sensibilities are attuned to how a poet builds her or his poems rather than focusing on content, which may overwhelm a poem.” (“To Find the Subject by Leaving the Subject: Expectations of Race & Content”) For my own needs, LETTERRS reignites the exciting potentiality for working with the open space of the page, ever aware of the specific attentive care that’s required. White serves up his own colossal ambitions and tops them with admirable verve. I’m thrilled by the promise of his work and am very much interested in seeing what’s next; the as yet unwritten exploration towards which White is undoubtedly headed. “Write, means to / place life / into book.” (“n”) It’s nothing other than a pleasure to recognize White’s substantial contribution to the larger ongoing endeavor of Poetics which is achieved here. May many future readers realize in this work the necessary life-sustaining freshness which the Imagination requires to carry the work of “the poems” forward: “Letter hypnotizes to stay / alive after meaning fades.” (“O”)-
—judge’s statement, Patrick James Dunagan
Poet Orlando White is from Tółikan, Arizona. He is Diné of the Naaneesht’ézhi Tábaahí and born for the Naakai Diné’e. White earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MFA from Brown University. He is the author of LETTERRS (Nightboat Books, 2015) and Bone Light (Red Hen Press, 2009), a collection of poems Kazim Ali described as a “careful excavation on language and letters and the physical body.” White’s work has appeared in such journals as Ploughshares, the Kenyon Review, Salt Hill, and elsewhere. The recipient of a residency from the Lannan Foundation, White teaches at Diné College in Tsaile, Arizona.
Patrick James Dunagan lives in San Francisco and works at Gleeson Library for the University of San Francisco. He is a graduate of the Poetics program from the now-defunct New College of California, where he studied under Tom Clark, Adam Cornford, Gloria Frym, Joanne Kyger, George Mattingly, and David Meltzer. Alongside poets Marina Lazzara and Nicholas Whittington, he’s currently at work editing together an anthology of critical writings by Poetics program alumni and faculty. His critical reviews and other writings have appeared in a number of online and print publications. His books include: GUSTONBOOK (Post Apollo, 2011), Das Gedichtete (Ugly Duckling, 2013), Book of Kings (Bird and Beckett Books, 2015), Drops of Rain / Drops of Wine (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016), and THE DUNCAN ERA: One Reader’s Cosmology (Spuyten Duyvil, 2016).

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event phone:

415-338-2227

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center

Jackie Townsend
2017-04-27 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Books Inc. in The Marina, 2251 Chestnut St, San Francisco , CA, 94123, United States
Jackie Townsend shares her compelling new novel, The Absence of Evelyn. Newly divorced Rhonda, haunted by her sister Evelyn’s ghost, travels to an old palazzo in Rome to confront Marco, the man who stole her sister’s heart–only to find out he’s vanished in the wake of Evelyn’s death. Meanwhile, Rhonda’s nineteen-year-old daughter Olivia, adopted by Rhonda at birth, travels to the mysterious and lush waters of northern Vietnam, where she’s been summoned by the missing Marco–a man she only knows from her parents’ whispers, a man she has never met or seen. Soon, truths are exposed and lives unraveled, and the real journey begins. Four lives in all, spanning three continents, are now bound together in an unfathomable way–and they tell a powerful story about love in all its incarnations, filial and amorous, healing and destructive.
