Litseen

Gary Snyder and Jane Hirshfield
2020-01-17 19:00 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Mill Valley Public Library, 375 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley , CA, 94941, United States
Cosponsored by Poetry Society of America
Gary Snyder began his career in the 1950s as a noted member of the “Beat Generation,” though he has since explored a wide range of social and spiritual matters in both poetry and prose. Snyder’s work blends physical reality and precise observations of nature with inner insight received primarily through the practice of Zen Buddhism. He has been described as the “poet laureate of Deep Ecology”. Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His awards also include the Bollingen Prize, an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, a Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Bess Hokin Prize and the Levinson Prize, the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and the Ruth Lilly Award.

Jane Hirshfield’s ninth, forthcoming poetry collection, Ledger (Knopf, 2020), centers on the crises of climate and biosphere, and on our interconnection with one another and all beings. She is the founder of #PoetsForScience, a project originating with the first March For Science in D.C. in 2017, and the author of two now-classic books of essays, Nine Gates and Ten Windows. Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts, as well as the Poetry Center and California Book Awards. The Washington Post has named her “among the modern masters” and the New York Times called her last book, The Beauty, “a deep well of wisdom.”

Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal Vo. 35
2020-01-17 19:00 - 20:30 | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
featuring
K.R. MORRISON
More details and readers to be announced…

"SoMa Lurk" Book Release
2020-01-17 19:00 - 21:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
a reading in support of “SoMa Lurk” a collection of poems and photos by José Vadi, published by Project Kalahati. Readings by Sarah O’Neal, Tongo Eisen-Martin and José Vadi

New Sutras official release party! W/Camille Roy & drought spa
2020-01-17 19:00 - 22:00 | The Lede, 906 Washington St., Oakland, CA, 94607, United States
Join us in celebrating the official release of Suzanne Stein’s 21st century technicolor epic NEW SUTRAS at The Lede in Old Oakland, a new bar/restaurant with collaborative relationships in local media production.
We’re excited to present Suzanne and her incredible work alongside Bay Area luminaries Camille Roy and DROUGHT SPA (Alex Cruse and Kevin Lo).
The space is accessible, a few blocks from 12th St. Oakland BART station, with food and drink. There will be books for sale, and copies of our chapbooks for free.
More information/bios of featured readers/performers to come!

Poets @ Play
2020-01-19 13:00 - 16:00 | Edwin Markham House in History Park, 1650 Senter Road, San Jose, 95112, United States
topic: tba
Edwin Markham House in History Park
635 Phelan Avenue, San José, CA 95112
Admission FREE
Free parking in the Staff/Volunteer lot on Phelan Avenue.
Please enter History Park from the Phelan Avenue side
Questions? Call 408-368-0353
RSVP recommended but not required: poetsatplay@pcsj.org
The Markham House / map:

Daniel Levitin, Successful Aging
2020-01-20 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz , CA, 95060, United States
Neuroscientist and bestselling author Daniel Levitin (This Is Your Brain on Music) will join us to discuss his important new book, Successful Aging.
Author of the iconic bestsellers This Is Your Brain on Music and The Organized Mind, Daniel Levitin turns his keen insights to what happens in our brains as we age, why we should think about health span, not life span, and, based on a rigorous analysis of neuroscientific evidence, what you can do to make the most of your seventies, eighties, and nineties today no matter how old you are now.
Successful Aging uses research from developmental neuroscience and the psychology of individual differences to show that sixty-plus years is a unique developmental stage that, like infancy or adolescence, has its own demands and distinct advantages. Levitin looks at the science behind what we all can learn from those who age joyously, as well as how to adapt our culture to take full advantage of older people’s wisdom and experience. Throughout his exploration of what aging really means, Levitin reveals resilience strategies and practical, cognitive enhancing tricks everyone should do as they age.
Successful Aging inspires a powerful new approach to how readers think about our final decades, and it will revolutionize the way we plan for old age as individuals, family members, and citizens within a society where the average life expectancy continues to rise.
Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, is a neuroscientist, cognitive psychologist, and bestselling author. He is Founding Dean of Arts & Humanities at the Minerva Schools at KGI in San Francisco, and Professor Emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at McGill University. He is the author of This Is Your Brain on Music, The World in Six Songs, The Organized Mind, and A Field Guide to Lies. He divides his time between Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.
“This is the book I need now. This is probably the book YOU need now. Levitin beautifully weaves hard science with more subtle, subjective agents of change—compassion, friendship, the redemptive power of work—into a refreshing guide for those of us navigating the penultimate stage of life.” —Rosanne Cash, Four-time Grammy winning singer and songwriter, author of Composed
“Predictions are perilous, but here’s one I can make with certainty: Tomorrow you and I will be older than we are today. That’s why you, I, and everyone we know needs this remarkable book. With a scientist’s rigor and a storyteller’s flair, Daniel Levitin offers a fresh approach to growing older. He debunks the idea that aging inevitably brings infirmity and unhappiness and instead offers a trove of practical, evidence-based guidance for living longer and better. SUCCESSFUL AGING is an essential book for the rest of your life.” —Daniel H. Pink, author of WHEN and DRIVE

This free event will take place at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Chairs for open seating are usually set up about an hour before the event begins.
If you have any ADA accommodation requests, please email info@bookshopsantacruz.com by January 18th.

Caroline Goodwin, open mic
2020-01-20 19:00 - 21:00 | Himalayan Flavors, 1585 University Avenue, Berkeley, 94703
Poetry Express presents Caroline Goodwin in a featured poetry reading, open mic before and after featured reading, hosted by Bruce Bagnell, Himalayan Flavors Restaurant, back room, 1585 University Avenue, Berkeley, free but donations appreciated, 7:00-9:00 (poetryexpressberkeley.blogspot.com)

Gibby Haynes / Me and Mr. Cigar
2020-01-21 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from his new novel
Me and Mr. Cigar
published by Soho Press
From the wild and wonderful mind of Gibby Haynes—world famous Butthole Surfers front man/lyricist and self-proclaimed eternal Texan adolescent—comes the surreal tale of seventeen-year-old Oscar Lester and his trusted dog, Mr. Cigar.
Oscar and his dog have made a pretty good life for themselves, despite the fact that Oscar’s family has all but vanished—his father is dead; his mother has a new boyfriend. His older sister, Rachel, fled five years ago…right after Mr. Cigar bit off her hand.
Despite the freak accident, Oscar knows his dog is no menace. Mr. Cigar is a loyal protector: a supernatural creature that can exact revenge, communicate telepathically, and manipulate car doors and windows with ease. So, when Rachel—now twenty-two and an artist living in New York—calls out of the blue and claims she’s being held hostage, Oscar sees an opportunity to make things right between them.
He races north, intent on both saving Rachel and fleeing the mysterious evil forces targeting his dog. And it’s only by embarking on this dual quest that Oscar starts to untangle his own life and understand the bizarre reality of Mr. Cigar.
*Features original artwork by Gibby Haynes as full color endpapers and illustrations throughout the book.
Gibby Haynes is a musician, visual artist, writer, and filmmaker best known as a founding member of the Butthole Surfers, whose outrageous concerts spawned a global cult following and whose albums have sold millions worldwide. He lives in Brooklyn with his family. Me & Mr. Cigar is his first novel.

Black Love Night of Poetry and Poetry Workshop!
2020-01-22 08:00 - 17:00 | Strut, 470 Castro Street, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
Join us for the first Black Love of 2020! Join us for a chill night of poetry from Queer Black Artists part of QTPOC at Strut!
And a free poetry workshop lead by Tanea Lunsford Lynx!
This show is free. Free drinks and non alcoholic beverages will be provided!
POETRY WORKSHOP from 6:30 PM to 7:30 PM
BLACK LOVE POETRY SHOW from 7:30 PM to 8:30 PM!
Poetry show Hosted by SevanKelee Boult!
With Literary Performances from
Lauren Wheeler!
Lisa Evans!
and Tanea Lunsford Lynx!
PLUS A SPECIAL APPEARANCE BY Freddie!!
more info coming soon!
QTPOC at Strut is every Thursday at Strut on the third floor we focus our programming, testing, and services to the queer and trans people of color communities.
Sexual Health Services and PrEP Enrollments from 5pm-6:30pm.
Poetry Workshop at 6:30 PM
Black Love poetry performances at 7:30 PM
POETRY WORKSHOP
Have you ever wanted to write poetry? Want to take a shot at it, join us for this beginners poetry workshop lead by Tanea Lunsford Lynx!
Questions please email our Community Events Manager Baruch Porras Hernandez, baruch@sfaf.org or Text QTPOC to 474747
ACCESSIBILITY
There are no stairs to enter the lobby level at Strut from the street level. The building has three floors, and there is a stairwell with handrails and a wheelchair accessible elevator. There are 26 steps from the lobby to the 2nd floor and 48 steps from the lobby to the 3rd floor.
Please note, this event will be photographed and possibly filmed.

Bikes to Books Winter Beer Social
2020-01-22 18:00 - 21:00 | Bender’s Bar and Grill, 806 So. Van Ness Avenue, San Francisco, 94110
Join Nicole Gluckstern and Burrito Justice, the creators of literary bicycle tour “Bikes to Books,” for an evening of socializing, beer drinking, and map chat—the first of a series of “Bikes to Books” events and meetups planned for 2020. Bicyclists, book-ists, beer-ists, urbanists, history buffs, transit nerds, and (honestly) anyone else are welcome!
Begun as an homage to the 1988 naming of 12 streets for artists and authors who’d once called San Francisco their home, this collaboration between arts journalist and event organizer, Nicole Gluckstern, and amateur historian and professional map-maker, Burrito Justice, has grown into a beloved community organization with a whole season of free events. Help us kick off our seventh season with this lo-key beer social at one of our fave neighborhood bars. No bikes required!
21+ only (sorry kiddos).

David Talbot / Between Heaven and Hell
2020-01-22 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Acclaimed writer, bestselling author, and founder of Salon magazine, David Talbot has brought us masterful and explosive headline-breaking stories for over 25 years with books like the New York Times bestsellers Brothers, The Devil’s Chessboard, and nationally recognized Season of the Witch. Now for the first time, journalist and historian David Talbot turns inward in this intimate journey through the life-changing year following his stroke, a year that turned his life upside down, and ultimately, saved him.
In his signature voice and with powerful storytelling, Talbot examines the physical, emotional, and psychological impact his stroke has had on his identity. Along the way Talbot offers readers insider stories on the wild early days of Internet journalism, insights into the new tech culture, the down and dirty of Hollywood, and much more. This is an illuminating, often humorous, portrait of how a health crisis can truly shift one’s perspective on life and purpose.

Ian Haney López
2020-01-22 19:30 - 21:00 | Kehilla Synagogue, 1300 Grand Ave., Piedmont, CA, 94610, United States
presens Merge Left:Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America.
“The book for anyone interested in cross-racial solidarity on behalf of racial and economic justice for all!”–Jane Fonda

Wednesday, January 22, 2020 – 7:30pm

In 2014, Ian Haney López in Dog Whistle Politics named and explained the coded racial appeals exploited by right-wing politicians over the last half century–and thereby anticipated the 2016 presidential election. Now the country is heading into what will surely be one of the most consequential elections ever, with the Right gearing up to exploit racial fear-mongering to divide and distract, and the Left splintered over the next step forward. Some want to focus on racial justice head-on; others insist that a race-silent focus on class avoids alienating white voters.
Can either approach–race-forward or colorblind–build the progressive supermajorities necessary to break political gridlock and fundamentally change the country’s direction?
For the past two years, Haney López has been collaborating with a research team of union activists, racial justice leaders, communications specialists, and pollsters. Based on conversations, interviews, and surveys with thousands of people all over the country, the team found a way forward.
By merging the fights for racial justice and for shared economic prosperity, they were able to build greater enthusiasm for both goals–and for the cross-racial solidarity needed to win elections. What does this mean? It means that neutralizing the Right’s political strategy of racial division is possible, today. And that’s the key to everything progressives want to achieve.
A work of deep research, nuanced argument, and urgent insight, Merge Left: Fusing Race and Class, Winning Elections, and Saving America is an indispensable tool for the upcoming political season and in the larger fight to build racial justice and shared economic prosperity for all of us.
Ian Haney López is a law professor at the UC Berkeley, where he teaches in the areas of race and constitutional law. Haney López is the author of Dog Whistle Politics plus two other books and two anthologies. He co-founded the Race-Class Narrative Project, and also co-chaired the AFL-CIO’s Advisory Council on Racial and Economic Justice. He holds an endowed chair as the Earl Warren Professor of Public Law at UC Berkeley and lives in Richmond.
In collaboration with KPFA.

Fifteen Year Anniversary at Books Inc. Alameda
2020-01-23 17:00 - 20:00 | Books Inc. Alameda, 1344 Park Street, Alameda, CA, 94501, United States
Join us at Books Inc. Alameda to celebrate 15 years of serving our community! Come for snacks, activities for the kids, music, and fun with neighbors and friends to celebrate the New Year and 15 years of Books Inc. in Alameda! The party will run from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM. *Free and open to the public*

Tom Lutz: Born Slippy
2020-01-23 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Tom Lutz discusses his new novel, Born Slippy.
Praise for Born Slippy
“A highly literary and always engaging 21st century noir… Born Slippy confronts contemporary questions about the relativity of evil that no one can dodge.”— Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker.
“Lutz has the seven deadly sins nailed and rethought for our 2020 world. You’ve got to dig this book!” — James Ellroy
“What a pleasure, to sink under the comedic spell of Tom Lutz’s debut novel! The perfect book for a dreary day– a gleeful, twisty tale of an unlikely friendship. Its antagonist young bloviating Dmitry Heald, with his wild schemes and hair-raising tales, is the guy you can’t trust to go to the market, while the older Frank, his boss, is a man who should know better, and yet can’t resist. Infinitely entertaining. I’d put it on the shelf between Tom Robbins and Martin Amis, if a place can be cleared there.” — Janet Fitch, author of The Revolution of Marina M. and Chimes of a Lost Cathedral
About Born Slippy
A globetrotting novel about the seductions of and resistance to toxic masculinity.
“Frank knew as well as anyone how stories start and how they end. This fiery mess, or something like it, was bound to happen. He had been expecting it for years.”
Frank Baltimore is a bit of a loser, struggling by as a carpenter and handyman in rural New England when he gets his big break, building a mansion in the executive suburbs of Hartford. One of his workers is a charismatic eighteen-year-old kid from Liverpool, Dmitry, in the US in the summer before university. Dmitry is a charming sociopath, who develops a fascination with his autodidactic philosopher boss, perhaps thinking that, if he could figure out what made Frank tick, he could be less of a pig. Dmitry heads to Asia and makes a neo-imperialist fortune, with a trail of corpses in his wake. When Dmitry’s office building in Taipei explodes in an enormous fireball, Frank heads to Asia, falls in love with Dmitry’s wife, and things go from bad to worse.
Combining the best elements of literary thriller, noir and political satire, Born Slippy is a darkly comic and honest meditation on modern life under global capitalism.

Our Voices Our Stories SF presents Ingrid Rojas Contreras
2020-01-24 18:00 - 20:00 | African American Art & Culture Complex, 762 Fulton St., San Francisco, CA, United States
Ingrid Rojas Contreras will join OVOSSF founder Lisa D. Gray in a conversation about her novel Conteras’ novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree. About OVOSsf Our Voices, Our Stories SF began in 2014 with 16 amazing writers and four engaging book chats one of which featured Natalie Bazile of Queen Sugar Fame and the legendary Eunetta Boone, the first black woman showrunner on the Disney Channel. We bring you high-quality authors eager to share and discuss their work.
The evening culminates in a book chat between Lisa D. Gray (the Founder and Curator of this landmark series), and one or more of the authors. The authors write across genres, so when you come, you hear everything from fiction to travel writing and poetry to memoir. These women’s stories paint vivid pictures of what it’s like to live in the world as a woman of color. They explore themes and topics everyone can relate to and understand.
About Ingrid Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree (Doubleday) is an Indie Next selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. Rojas Contreras has received numerous awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She is the book columnist for KQED, the Bay Area’s NPR affiliate. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco, and works with immigrant high school students as part of a San Francisco Arts Commission initiative bringing writers into public schools. She is working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds.
Fruit of the Drunken Tree Seven-year-old Chula and her older sister Cassandra enjoy carefree lives thanks to their gated community in Bogotá, but the threat of kidnappings, car bombs, and assassinations hover just outside the neighborhood walls, where the godlike drug lord Pablo Escobar continues to elude authorities and capture the attention of the nation.
Inspired by the author’s own life, and told through the alternating perspectives of the willful Chula and the achingly hopeful Petrona, Fruit of the Drunken Tree contrasts two very different, but inextricable coming-of-age stories. In lush prose, Rojas Contreras sheds light on the impossible choices women are often forced to make in the face of violence and the unexpected connections that can blossom out of desperation.
About Lisa Lisa D. Gray is a writer, curator, and social justice warrior who loves to cook and sees possibilities waiting to burst free in bubbles blown into air. Her interests range from dancing (her first career goal: Rockette) to star gazing, and if an animal lived with her, it’d be a turtle. She writes about the things that intrigue and perplex her and does it with humor and insight. She earned an MFA from Mills College and completed a residency at the Vermont Studio Center and a fellowship at The Fine Arts Works Center. Her work appears in the As Us Literary Journal. Mission at Tenth and the anthology New Haven Noir for which she won an Edgar Award in 2018. She’s a member of the San Francisco Writers Grotto and a Fellow at The Ruby in San Francisco. She is completing her first novel.
We encourage you to purchase the book using the PURCHASE BOOKS link on our website. Books sales will also occur on site.

Readings from ZYZZYVA's Bay Area Issue
2020-01-24 19:00 - 20:30 | East Bay Booksellers, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 94618
EAST BAY BOOKSELLERS celebrates the latest issue of their dear friends at ZYZZYVA on Friday, January 24!
ZYZZYVA dedicates its most recent issue to the region it has called home since 1985. Join the editors of ZYZZYVA and some of its contributors from the Bay Area Issue for a night of short readings and celebration. Tonight’s feature readers include Lydia Conklin, Sara Mumolo, Andrew Roe, sam sax, Nina Schuyler, and Matthew Zapruder.
ABOUT THE READERS
LYDIA CONKLIN is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Her fiction has appeared in Tin House, The Southern Review, The Gettysburg Review, and other publications.
SARA MUMOLO is the author of the poetry collection Day Counter (Omnidawn), and is the associate director for the MFA Creative Writing Program at St. Mary’s College of California.
ANDREW ROE is the author of the novel The Miracle Girl (Algonquin Books), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction.
sam sax is a Stegner Fellow at Stanford and the author of Bury It (Wesleyan University Press), winner of the James Laughlin Award.
NINA SCHUYLER is the author of the novels The Translator (Pegasus Books) and The Painting (Algonquin Books), a finalist for the Northern California Book Award.
MATTHEW ZAPRUDER is the author of several poetry collections, most recently Father’s Day (Copper Canyon Press), as well as the nonfiction book Why Poetry (Ecco), and is an associate professor at St. Mary’s College of California.

Robert Hass - Summer Snow
2020-01-24 19:00 - 20:30 | Book Passage Corte Madera, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
A major collection of entirely new poems from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author, Robert Hass
A new volume of poetry from Robert Hass is always an event. In Summer Snow, his first collection of poems since 2010, Hass further affirms his position as one of our most highly regarded living poets. Hass’s trademark careful attention to the natural world, his subtle humor, and the delicate but wide-ranging eye he casts on the human experience are fully on display in his masterful collection. Touching on subjects including the poignancy of loss, the serene and resonant beauty of nature, and the mutability of desire, Hass exhibits his virtuosic abilities, expansive intellect, and tremendous readability in one of his most ambitious and formally brilliant collections to date.
Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials, Sun Under Wood, Human Wishes, Praise, and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Tranströmer’s Selected Poems and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Diverse Voices from Civil Liberties United
2020-01-24 19:00 - 21:30 | Oakland Center for Spiritual Living, 5000 Clarewood Dr., Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
Prose, poetry and artwork from the Civil Liberties United anthology, featuring Lorraine Bonner, Sue Granzella, Anahita Miller, Sridevi Ramanathan & Shizue Seigel, The anthology includes prose, poetry, and art by 100 writers/artists of color and allies. As civil liberties continue to be eroded nationwide, it’s more important that ever to stand together and be counted in support of multicultural understanding.

Speak, easy Vol. 12
2020-01-24 19:00 - 21:30 | Joyce Gordon Gallery, 406 14th Street, Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
An artist showcase and open mic night honoring the voices of black women.

Saturday Write-In!
2020-01-25 10:00 - 12:00 | Farley’s East, 33 Grand Avenue, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Come Write With Us!
Novelists, poets, nonfiction writers, artists, all genre/ genrequeer/ no genre.
We’ll bring a few writing prompts/ poems to help start you off if you’d like, or just bring a current project.
Just show up, the writing will take care of itself!

Saturday Night Special presents: Out of the Dark
2020-01-25 19:00 - 21:30 | Nick’s Lounge, 3218 Adeline St., Berkeley, CA, 94703, United States
Welcome back! I’m excited to see my SNS family following our annual holiday hiatus, for our first reading of 2020. Our January theme (suggested by Lisa Martinovic) is “Out of the Dark” and it can’t come soon enough. Whether it’s the dark of winter you’re tired of, politics, ennui, a mono-chromatic fashion sense, the cave of your own dirty mouth, or something darker you’re exiting, this month we’ll explore emergence—wake up from your long sleep; unfold your wings; turn on the sun! Write something.
January featured writers: Vernon Keeve III and Alvin Orloff
Bring your (three-minute) poems, stories, comedic sketches, songs, or dances, on our (optional) theme (or any topic).
First come first served. Sign-up starts at 7pm and closes when it fills up or when the reading starts, so get there early if you want to read! (Note: Sometimes the list is full by 7:03pm)
Each reader will have 3 minutes maximum. For prose writers this is about one and a half double-spaced pages.
PLEASE NOTE: We are strict about the 3 minute max. When you reach your time limit at SNS, we turn on the disco lights! So, please plan ahead. Practice your piece out loud. Time yourself!
After the reading, stick around for karaoke starting at 10pm
Saturday, January 25, 2020
7 – 9:30 pm
Nick’s Lounge (21+)
3218 Adeline Street, Berkeley, CA
1 block south of Ashby BART
Between Fairview St & Martin Luther King Jr Way
FREE!
But bring CASH if you want to buy drinks (which you sort of have to, because there’s a 1-drink minimum!)
Hosted by: Hollie Hardy
Please help out by liking our FB page, where you can also find more details and photos from past events:
https://www.facebook.com/Saturday-Night-Special-an-East-Bay-open-mic-112174188880786/
BIOS forthcoming

Silent Book Club SF
2020-01-26 16:00 - 18:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
Bring a book, bring a friend, and join Silent Book Club for an afternoon of reading! At Silent Book Club, there’s no assigned reading. All books and all ages are welcome.
We’ll kick off introvert happy hour at 4pm with some light chatter and informal book recommendations before settling in to read quietly, but if you’d rather just pull up a chair and read, by all means do so. No one will be shushed or shamed. The bar will be open for late afternoon libations.
Happy reading and hope to see you there!

Please note: this event will be at The Bindery, 1727 Haight.
RSVP appreciated but not required.
Photo by Cody Pickens for O Magazine

Bazaar Writers Salon
2020-01-26 18:00 - 20:00 | Bazaar Cafe, 5927 California St, San Francisco, CA, 94121, United States
Readings by Susan Browne, Peter Kline, Emily Pinkerton, and Marco Rafalà
Hosted by Brittany Perham
Susan Browne’s poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, The Sun, Subtropics, The Southern Review, Superstition Review, Rattle, New Ohio Review, B O D Y, American Life in Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Love’s Executive Order, and 180 More, Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. She has published two books of poetry, Buddha’s Dogs and Zephyr. Awards include prizes from Four Way Books, the Los Angeles Poetry Festival, the River Styx International Poetry Contest, and The Fischer Poetry Prize. She received a fellowship from the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and her work has been nominated for three Pushcart Awards. She has also collaborated to create a word/music CD. Her third collection, Just Living, recently won the Catamaran Poetry Prize. She lives in Oakland, California. www.susanbrownepoems.com
Peter Kline teaches writing at the University of San Francisco and Stanford University. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he has also received residency fellowships from the Amy Clampitt House, James Merrill House, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Foundation. His poetry has appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Tin House, and many other journals, as well as the Best New Poets series, the Verse Daily website, and the Random House anthology of metrical poetry, Measure for Measure. Since 2012 he has directed the San Francisco literary reading series Bazaar Writers Salon. He is the author of two poetry collections, Deviants (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2013), and Mirrorforms, published by Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions in November 2019. www.peterklinepoetry.com
Emily Pinkerton holds an MFA from San Francisco State University, and her writing has previously appeared in ZYZZYVA, Juked, BlazeVOX, and Berkeley Poetry Review, among others. Emily is the author of three chapbooks: Natural Disasters (Hermeneutic Chaos Press, 2016), Bloom (Alley Cat Press, 2018) and Adaptations (Nomadic Press, 2018). She was a 2017-2018 Writer in Residence at Alley Cat Books in San Francisco and is a 2020 Fellow at The Writers Grotto. More of Emily’s publications can be found at thisisemilypinkerton.tumblr.com, and she tweets as @neongolden.
Marco Rafalà is a first-generation Sicilian American novelist, musician, and writer for award-winning tabletop role-playing games. He earned his MFA in Fiction from The New School and is a cocurator of the Guerrilla Lit Reading Series in New York City. Born in Middletown, Connecticut, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review and LitHub. How Fires End is his debut novel.

Anna Wiener: Uncanny Valley
2020-01-27 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Anna Wiener discusses her new memoir Uncanny Valley.
Praise for Uncanny Valley
“I’ve never read anything like Uncanny Valley, which is both a searching bird’s-eye study of an industry and a generation, as well as an intimate, microscopic portrait of ambition and hope and dread. Anna Wiener writes about the promise and the decay of Silicon Valley with the impossibly pleasurable combination of a precise, razored intellect and a soft, incandescent heart. Her memoir is diagnostic and exhilarating, a definitive document of a world in transition: I won’t be alone in returning to it for clarity and consolation for many years to come.” —Jia Tolentino, author of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion
“Uncanny Valley is a generation-defining account of the amoral late-capitalist tech landscape we are fatally enmeshed in. With grace and humor, Anna Wiener shows us the misogyny, avarice, and optimistic self-delusion of our cultural moment, wrapped up in the gripping story of a young woman navigating the blurred boundaries of a seductive world. Insightful, compelling and urgent.” —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter: A Novel
“Like Joan Didion at a startup.”—Rebecca Solnit, author of Call Them By Their True Names
“A rare mix of acute, funny, up-to-the-minute social observation, dead-serious contemplation of the tech industry’s annexation of our lives, and a sincere first-person search for meaningful work and connection. How does an unworn pair of plain sneakers ‘become a monument to the end of sensuousness’? Read on.”—William Finnegan, author of Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
About Uncanny Valley
The prescient, page-turning account of a journey in Silicon Valley: a defining memoir of our digital age
In her mid-twenties, at the height of tech industry idealism, Anna Wiener—stuck, broke, and looking for meaning in her work, like any good millennial–left a job in book publishing for the promise of the new digital economy. She moved from New York to San Francisco, where she landed at a big-data startup in the heart of the Silicon Valley bubble: a world of surreal extravagance, dubious success, and fresh-faced entrepreneurs hell-bent on domination, glory, and, of course, progress.
Anna arrived amidst a massive cultural shift, as the tech industry rapidly transformed into a locus of wealth and power rivaling Wall Street. But amid the company ski vacations and in-office speakeasies, boyish camaraderie and ride-or-die corporate fealty, a new Silicon Valley began to emerge: one in far over its head, one that enriched itself at the expense of the idyllic future it claimed to be building.
Part coming-age-story, part portrait of an already-bygone era, Anna Wiener’s memoir is a rare first-person glimpse into high-flying, reckless startup culture at a time of unchecked ambition, unregulated surveillance, wild fortune, and accelerating political power. With wit, candor, and heart, Anna deftly charts the tech industry’s shift from self-appointed world savior to democracy-endangering liability, alongside a personal narrative of aspiration, ambivalence, and disillusionment.
Unsparing and incisive, Uncanny Valley is a cautionary tale, and a revelatory interrogation of a world reckoning with consequences its unwitting designers are only beginning to understand.

Andre Perry / Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now
2020-01-28 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from his new book
Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now: a collection of essays
published by 2 Dollar Radio
With luminous insight and fervent prose, Andre Perry’s debut collection of personal essays, Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now, travels from Washington DC to Iowa City to Hong Kong in search of both individual and national identity. While displaying tenderness and a disarming honesty, Perry catalogs racial degradations committed on the campuses of elite universities and liberal bastions like San Francisco while coming of age in America.
The essays in Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now take the form of personal reflection, multiple choice questions, screenplays, and imagined talk-show conversations, while traversing the daily minefields of childhood schoolyards and Midwestern dive-bars. The impression of Perry’s personal journey is arresting and beguiling, while announcing the author’s arrival as a formidable American voice.
What has been said about Some of Us Are Very Hungry Now:
*A “Most Anticipated Book of 2019” —LitReactor, The A.V. Club, Big Other
“Beautiful, brilliant, bold… Tantamount to a slice from the Americana songbook. These essays are ballads, images from the self, isolated and marginalized in other countries and in his own land. These are songs of identity and sexuality and expectations the world has of African American males from those perspectives. Here’s hoping this book will mark the start of a long and varied journey for Perry. If the goal of a literary traveler is to show how connected we are to one another, his debut collection is an assured indication of deeper glories yet to come.”
—Christopher John Stephens, PopMatters
Andre Perry is an essayist and arts advocate. He received his MFA from the University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program and his work has appeared in The Believer, Catapult, Granta and other journals. He co-founded Iowa City’s Mission Creek Festival, a celebration of music and literature, as well as the multidisciplinary festival of creative process, Witching Hour. He continues to live and work in Iowa City. This is his first book.

Peggy Orenstein, Boys & Sex
2020-01-28 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz , CA, 95060, United States
This is an advanced event listing. Please check back for updated information, or sign up for our events emails.
This free event will take place at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Chairs for open seating are usually set up about an hour before the event begins. If you have any ADA accommodation requests, please email info@bookshopsantacruz.com by January 26th.

The author of the groundbreaking New York Times bestsellers Girls & Sex and Cinderella Ate My Daughter now turns her focus to the sexual lives of young men, once again offering “both an examination of sexual culture and a guide on how to improve it” (Washington Post).
Peggy Orenstein’s Girls & Sex broke ground, shattered taboos, and launched conversations about young women’s right to pleasure and agency in sexual encounters. It also had an unexpected effect on its author: Orenstein realized that talking about girls is only half the conversation. Boys are subject to the same cultural forces as girls–steeped in the same distorted media images and binary stereotypes of female sexiness and toxic masculinity–which equally affect how they navigate sexual and emotional relationships. In Boys & Sex, Peggy Orenstein dives back into the lives of young people to once again give voice to the unspoken, revealing how young men understand and negotiate the new rules of physical and emotional intimacy.
Drawing on comprehensive interviews with young men, psychologists, academics, and experts in the field, Boys & Sex dissects so-called locker room talk; how the word “hilarious” robs boys of empathy; pornography as the new sex education; boys’ understanding of hookup culture and consent; and their experience as both victims and perpetrators of sexual violence. By surfacing young men’s experience in all its complexity, Orenstein is able to unravel the hidden truths, hard lessons, and important realities of young male sexuality in today’s world. The result is a provocative and paradigm-shifting work that offers a much-needed vision of how boys can truly move forward as better men.
Peggy Orenstein is the New York Times bestselling author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Waiting for Daisy, Flux, and Schoolgirls. A contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, she has been published in USA Today, Parenting, Salon, the New Yorker, and other publications, and has contributed commentary to NPR’s All Things Considered. She lives in Northern California with her husband and daughter.
“Expertly written…. [A] candid and fascinating portrait of young American masculinity.”– Publishers Weekly, starred review

“Peggy Orenstein has done something rare. She has listened to young men in ways that have allowed them to speak candidly about the fraught world of their sexuality, and she has been true to the complexities of their experiences — their hopes but also the fears, shame, pressures and angers that cause them to violate others and corrode their capacity for care and love. What they say is scary and heartbreaking and vitally important for us all to hear. This is a bracing, insightful, humane, engaging, invaluable book. And it charts the course for real change.”–Richard Weissbourd, Senior Lecturer and Faculty Director of Making Caring Common, Harvard Graduate School of Education
“As a psychotherapist who’s raising a boy, I can’t think of a more important book for our times. Eye-opening and nuanced, this compassionate exploration of boys’ sexual lives gives voice to their deepest struggles and should be mandatory reading for anyone who cares about the next generation–which is to say, all of us.”–Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
“Peggy Orenstein dared to do what so many of us are afraid of: actually ask boys about sex and then listen to what they had to say. She has given boys the opportunity to speak honestly about their feelings around sexuality, pornography, gender, consent and so much more. Their answers are illuminating, often times surprising–and essential.”–Nick Kroll, co-creator, writer, and star of Big Mouth

“Forget what you thought you knew about boys and sex. Here, at last, is an honest book about the sexual lives of boys and young men; the good, the bad, the endlessly complicated and emotionally fraught. Peggy Orenstein has peeled back typical male bravado and exposed the raw hearts of boys struggling to navigate a confusing sexual landscape. Boys & Sex is a crucial contribution to the long overdue conversation about masculinity.”–Michael Ian Black, author, comedian, and actor

Bob Perelman, Norman Fischer, James Sherry
2020-01-28 19:00 - 20:30 | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, BERKELEY, 94704-2322
Norman Fischer is a poet, essayist, and Zen Buddhist priest. The latest of his more than twenty-five prose and poetry titles are the serial poems On a Train at Night and Untitled Series: Life As It is. His latest prose works are Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language and Religion and The World Could Be Otherwise: Imagination and the Bodhisattva Path. His website is http://www.normanfischer.org/
Bob Perelman will be reading from his new book, Jack and Jill in Troy (Roof, 2019). He is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Iflife, Virtual Reality, The First World and Ten to One: Selected Poems. He collaborated with his wife, the painter Francie Shaw, on Playing Bodies. His latest critical book is Modernism the Morning After. He taught at UPenn for 25 years and now lives in Berkeley.
James Sherry is the author of 10 books of poetry and prose. He is editor of Roof Books and president of the Segue Foundation, Inc. in New York City. … He lives in New York City with his wife, Deborah Thomas, publisher of Extra!, the magazine of Fairness And Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

Crissy Van Meter: Creatures
2020-01-28 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Crissy Van Meter discusses her new novel, Creatures.
Praise for Creatures
“Creatures is the kind of beautiful book that makes you want to lick the salt from its pages. It’s so physically present you can feel the waves hit your body, smell the sea life, hear the roar of the ocean as your hair whips around your face in the breeze. Crissy Van Meter has written a book about the complexities of love and families, yes, but it’s also a careful look at intimacy through the lens of a person learning and relearning how to love the people who continually let us down. It’s inventive and surprising. The text is tactile; a punch to the heart. It’s one of the best novels I’ve read this year.”—Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things
“Crissy Van Meter pulls us into depths of loneliness, sweetness, pain, history, and pulsing vulnerability in prose swift and clear as an ocean current, in Creatures. On Winter Island, time and landscape ache with memory; need spills over in subtle moments of intense connection, fracture, deprivation, and wound; unconditional love may be a concept as unreachable as the mainland, and as isolating. Like water, loss and longing fill the space between each prism of a word in this gorgeous, jewel-tone debut.” —Sarah Gerard, author of Sunshine State
“At the intersection of the natural world and the human heart, Van Meter explores alcoholism, absence, daughterly loyalties and longing in this slim and beautiful tale that contains a whole aqueous universe in its depths.”—Melissa Broder, author of The Pisces
About Creatures
On the eve of Evangeline’s wedding, a dead whale is trapped in the harbor of Winter Island, the groom may be lost at sea, and Evie’s mostly absent mother has shown up out of the blue. From there, in this mesmerizing, provocative debut, Evie remembers and reckons with her complicated upbringing in this lush, wild land off the coast of Southern California.
Evie grew up with her well-meaning but negligent father, surviving on the money he made dealing the island’s world-famous strain of marijuana, Winter Wonderland. Although he raised her with a deep respect for the elements, the sea, and the creatures living within it, he also left her to parent herself. With wit, love, and bracing ashes of anger, Creatures probes the complexities of love and abandonment, guilt and forgiveness, betrayal and grief—and the ways in which our ability to love can be threatened if we are not brave enough to conquer the past.
Lyrical, darkly funny, and ultimately cathartic, Creatures exerts a pull as strong as the tides.

Journalism and Politics in the Corn Belt: Art Cullen in conversation with Michael Pollan
2020-01-29 18:00 - 19:30 | Sibley Auditorium, University of California, Berkeley, Bechtel Engineering Center, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Art Cullen in conversation with Michael Pollan
Art Cullen is editor of The Storm Lake Times, a family-run newspaper published in Storm Lake, Iowa (population 10,076). In 2017, Cullen won a Pulitzer prize for his reporting on polluted water, fertilizer runoff, and powerful corporate agricultural interests. Just a few days before the Iowa Caucuses, Cullen and Pollan will sit down together to discuss Trump and the farm vote; trade wars; journalism in rural America; immigration; agricultural consolidation and antitrust laws; regenerative agriculture; and the potential for farmers to sequester carbon and help curb climate change.
This event is sponsored by the UC Berkeley-11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship.

Author Talk: Lincoln Mitchell
2020-01-29 18:30 - 20:00 | Latino/Hispanic Meeting Room, SF Main Library, 100 Larkin St, San Francisco, 94102
San Francisco native Lincoln Mitchell will discuss his new book with Penelope Houston, the singer for the seminal San Francisco punk band The Avengers and accomplished solo artist.
In San Francisco Year Zero: Political Upheaval, Punk Rock and a Third Place Baseball Team, Mitchell deftly weaves together the personal and the political, tracing the city’s current state back to three key events that all occurred in 1978: the assassination of George Moscone and Harvey Milk (occurring fewer than two weeks after the massacre of Peoples Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana); the explosion of the city’s punk rock scene; and a breakthrough season for the San Francisco Giants.
Sponsored by the San Francisco History Center
A book sale follows the event.
