Vernon Dwelly
2016-11-17 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
The author has lived a remarkable life across the globe. He now invites you to share some of his experiences in the USA and on far-afield foreign assignments with his poems and short stories in Until the Gods Say No. Humor, surprises, challenges, nature and human observations, illustrate a poet’s sensitivities as well as the realities of life in different global environments.
Vernon I. Dwelly was born in Liverpool, England, in 1921, and attended Buxton College, Derbyshire, and the London School of Economics. His studies were interrupted by WWII, where he rose to the rank of captain with the British Special Services Brigade Commandos. His responsibilities included training U.S. Rangers in night warfare. After the war, he performed intelligence duties, with both anti-Nazi and anti- Russian assignments.
His thirty-three year management career with American Express yielded him projects in Latin America, the Orient, Europe, and the U.S.A. On retiring in 1984, Dwelly invented, designed, and produced the “Pocket Pillow,” a two-chamber light, versatile mountaineering and medical support cushion, now licensed in the U.S. and Holland.

Michael McClure
2016-11-17 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
celebrating the release of his new collection of poetry
Mephistos and Other Poems
published by City Lights!

InsideStorytime Ignominy
2016-11-17 19:00 - 21:00 | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Will feature Molly Giles (All The Wrong Places), Arisa White (You’re The Most Beautiful Thing That Happened), Peter Bullen (Wallflower), Zach Wyner (What We Never Had), and Darothy Durkac. MCd by James Warner (All Her Father’s Guns).

Peter Dale Scott
2016-11-17 19:30 - 21:30 | Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
Peter Dale Scott’s poems have been praised by Robert Hass, Thom Gunn, and Robert Pinsky; and in 2002 he won the Lannan Poetry Award. His eighth book of poems looks back on six decades of experiences as a confused student in Paris, a diplomat in Poland, Vienna and New York, a professor of English at UC Berkeley in the tumultuous sixties, and after retirement a tutor in Buddhist Thailand- all of the poems in search of “this oxymoron/ the meaning of life”.
Peter Dale Scott is a former Canadian diplomat and Professor Emeritus of English at UC Berkeley. In addition to numerous volumes of poetry, including Coming to Jakarta: A Poem about Terror, his books include The American Deep State: Wall Street, Big Oil, and the Attack on U.S Democracy and Tilting Point.

CA Conrad
2016-11-18 16:30 - 18:30 | Writers’ Studio, SF Campus, 195 De Haro Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
CA Conrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of eight books of poetry and essays, the latest ECODEVIANCE: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness (Wave Books) is the winner of the 2015 Believer Magazine Book Award.
He is a Pew Fellow and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff, and Ucross.
Visit CA Conrad’s website for more info, including about the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films, 2016).

Haight Ashbury Literary Journal 40th Issue
2016-11-18 19:00 - 21:00 | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Join us at the Beat Museum for a celebration of our latest issue, an event that features poets Joanne Mallari, Cesar Love, Alice Rogoff, Will Walker and others.

Kelly Luce
2016-11-18 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Praise for Kelly Luce:
“Kelly Luce makes a persuasive case for why she should be one of your favorite new short-story writers.” – SF Chronicle on Three Scenarios in Which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail

“Luce manages to effortlessly capture both what it’s like to be a foreigner in Japan & to write in a believable way from the perspective of a native.” – The Japan Times

About Pull Me Under:
A searing debut novel from one of the most imaginative minds in fiction.
Kelly Luce’s “Pull Me Under” tells the story of Rio Silvestri, who, when she was twelve years old, fatally stabbed a school bully. Rio, born Chizuru Akitani, is the Japanese American daughter of the revered violinist Hiro Akitani–a Living National Treasure in Japan and a man Rio hasn’t spoken to since she left her home country for the United States (and a new identity) after her violent crime. Her father’s death, along with a mysterious package that arrives on her doorstep in Boulder, Colorado, spurs her to return to Japan for the first time in twenty years. There she is forced to confront her past in ways she never imagined, pushing herself, her relationships with her husband and daughter, and her own sense of who she is to the brink.
The novel’s illuminating and palpably atmospheric descriptions of Japan and its culture, as well its elegantly dynamic structure, call to mind both Ruth Ozeki’s “A Tale for the Time Being “and David Guterson’s “Snow Falling on Cedars.” “Pull Me Under” is gripping, psychologically complex fiction–at the heart of which is an affecting exploration of home, self-acceptance, and the limits of

Once in a Lifetime Event: Judy Grahn, CA Conrad, + Katie Ebbitt
2016-11-19 19:00 - 21:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
CAConrad, Judy Grahn, and Katie Ebbitt will read poetry on Saturday, November 19, 2016 at 7 p.m, for a “Once in a Lifetime” event organized by San Francisco poet and novelist Kevin Killian. CAConrad and Judy Grahn are mutual admirers of each other, but have not yet actually met, so this reading will be practically historic, while Katie Ebbitt will be able to tell future generations that she was there too, and she gave her first reading in San Francisco with two giants.
CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for his mother and helping her shoplift. He is the author of 9 books of poetry and essays the latest While Standing In Line For Death is forthcoming from Wave Books in September 2017. He is a Pew Fellow and has also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff, RADAR, Flying Object and Ucross. For his books, essays, and details on the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films, 2016), please visit http://CAConrad.blogspot.com/
Judy Grahn is perhaps best known as a poet, and also as author of Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds, and her memoir A Simple Revolution, the Making of an Activist Poet. She teaches creative writing, mythology, Women’s Spirituality, LGBTQ studies, and new origin stories when the spirit moves her.
Katie Ebbitt is author of the chapbook ANOTHER LIFE (Counterpath Press). Her work is available at Tarpaulin Sky, The FanZine, and Queen Mob’s. She is a LMSW in New York City and is writing a full length book on illness, disability, and disease remission.
THANKS to Alley Cat Books for hosting us; THANKS to Steve Dickison for the use of his 2014 photo of Judy Grahn, and THANKS to Melissa Buzzeo for her recent photo of CA Conrad.

Final Odd Mondays of the Season!
2016-11-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Folio Books, 3957 24th St, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
A Pot Pourri for A Post-Election World
Nicole Wong, Andrew McIntyre, and Gerald Heather
FREE ADMISSION
See the world through the eyes of Nicole Wong, children’s writer, health adviser. “Balm to our souls” is what we say of her writing, and her volunteer cooperation with Odd Mondays.
Andrew McIntyre: bibliophile, book merchant at Folio’s Bookstore and writer of The Short, The Long, and The Tall. He will share his always-humorous tales.
And
Our witty political commentator and TV interviewee, Gerald Heather, Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State, will host questions and answers about the election.
Please join us in shared community in a tough, post-election world!

Henrietta Rose-Innes + Julie Shigekuni w/ Aaron Bady
2016-11-21 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
About Nineveh:
Katya Grubbs is Cape Town’s only ethical pest removal specialist. She expertly wrangles every manner of wild critter, creature or beast with the help of her unwitting nephew, Toby. When she is hired to remove the exotic beetles that have overrun Nineveh, a new luxury housing development on the coast, Katya finds that bugs aren t the only unwelcome creatures hiding in the new (but inhabited) apartments. As she investigates further, it becomes clear that Nineveh is fast becoming an environmental, not to mention architectural, blunder. With marshlands encroaching on its borders, and the nearby seaside more menace than attraction, Katya becomes immersed in the world of Nineveh’s few residentsthe mysterious caretakers and scavenger crews that survive in its shadow. It is only when her estranged fathera professional exterminator fallen on hard timesreappears in her life, that Nineveh’s deeper secrets are exposed.

About In Plain View:
Daidai and her husband Hiroshi have what many of their friends believe is a perfect life. Daidai has recently left her job as curator of the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles’s Little Tokyo so that she and Hiroshi, a university professor, can try for a baby. Frustrated by their lack of success so far, and by their increasingly clinical love life, Daidai befriends Satsuki, one of Hiroshi’s graduate students. Newly arrived from Japan, Satsuki clings to her friendship to Daidai and quickly becomes a mainstay in their household.
Spurred by a revelation concerning Satsuki’s estranged mother and a disturbing trip to Japan where Daidai discovered Satsuki’s father was engaged in illegal, and illicit, activities, Daidai begins to seriously question Satsuki’s seemingly innocent connection to three possible murders.
Daidai’s concerns about Satsuki are dismissed as jealousy by her husband until Daidai’s investigation will lead to a harrowing confrontation between the two women, and Satsuki’s true intentions will be revealed. At once a taut psychological thriller and examination of cultural divides, Shigekuni’s “In Plain View” is never as it appears.

ABBW Presents: The Hydra #8
2016-11-22 19:00 - 21:30 | Woods Bar & Brewery, 1701 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
Join us for the Association of Black and Brown Writers’ (Nomadic Press’) eighth experimental, flash, and science fiction reading series at the beautiful Woods Bar & Brewery on 17th and Telegraph in Uptown, Oakland.
This month features science-fiction author TBD and our Outsider of the Month TBD and five (5) open mic slots! Emceed by Elwin Michael Cotman and Vernon Keeve III. Music by the ever-so-talented Oakland Future Trio.
Donations will be called for throughout the night, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.
Genesis
At one time it was believed that Hercules downed the six-headed beast, discovering in the process that the removal of one head meant that two would grow in its place. It was only with help from Iolaus that the death of the beast was exposed in the marrying of decapitation and cauterization, so that more heads could not sprout. Hercules buried the taproot of the beast under a huge rock, known today as Mount Diablo.
For 27 centuries, the Hydra has remained dormant, until the 1940s when copious amounts of poetry began to stir the sleeping heart of the behemoth, and slowly but surely the heads of the beast began to grow back despite the sealed wounds.
Octavia Butler, Samuel R. Delaney, and Ursula K. Le Guin were knighted as keepers of the beast, but the trio’s powers were greatly weakened with the passing of Octavia.
Ursula recently said, “with the popularity of poetry readings in the Bay Area the heads of the beast are growing back at an alarming rate, and the only thing that will slow down the beast is the inclusion of more fiction in the literary scene. We need stories of mythical beasts stronger than the Hydra. We need stories of worlds that is not the world it remembers, or maybe stories of lands the Hydra knows all too well. We need stories of heroes that can destroy it, and villians greater than it. We need experimental stories, we need short stories, we need fiction. Fiction is the only thing that will down the beast for once and for all. Counteract the poetry that is making the beast grow, and do it now.”
The Setup
With all that being said, we would like to invite you all to The Association of Black and Brown Writers’ (Nomadic Press’) The Hydra: A Reading Series of Experimental, Flash, and Science Fiction. This event will come to you on the last Tuesday of every month at Woods Bar & Brewery in Uptown Oakland.
Hydra will always have a featured reader who writes within the genre of fiction, as well as, an Outsider of the Month. The Outsider of the Month is someone who usually writes what cannot be classified as fiction, but who will be asked to write a piece of fiction and share it with the audience. We’ve learned that this sacrifice is one that slows down the growth of the heads the most.
There will also 5 slots available for sacrificial (open-mic) readings (4 minutes per reading), so come out to listen, to share, to join us in ceremony.
PSA: This series is still not affiliated with H.Y.D.R.A. the criminal organization, but they want in

Saturday Night Special, A "Surreal" Open Mic
2016-11-26 19:00 - 21:30 | Nick’s Lounge, 3218 Adeline St., Berkeley, CA, 94703, United States
At Saturday Night Special, we have always valued diversity, inclusivity, fairness, and social justice. In the wake of recent events, it feels important to reaffirm this commitment.
When choosing the “surreal” theme for the final Saturday Night Special of 2016, there was no way of knowing how appropos it would turn out to be. According to Merriam Webster, “surreal” means “marked by the intense irrational reality of a dream; also : unbelievable, fantastic.” Sound about right?
In a time when so many of us have been casting about for light, let’s gather together in the stuffed afterglow of the Thanksgiving holiday, to drink and share some words. This month, you are invited to bring us your surreal poems, your irrational rants, your unbelievable stories, or whatever you like.
As always, we’d love to hear your (three-minute) poems, stories, comedic sketches, songs, or dances on our optional theme (or any topic).
Our November features are: Hugh Behm Steinberg +TBA
—
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. Dance!
After the reading, stick around for karaoke starting at 10pm
Saturday, November 26th, 2016
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
Hugh Behm-Steinberg is the author of two books of poetry: Shy Green Fields (No Tell Books) and The Opposite of Work (JackLeg Press), as well as three Dusie chapbooks, Sorcery, Good Morning! and The Sound of Music. His prose can be found in Psychopomp, The East Bay Review, Joyland, Gravel, Sand, Vestal Review and Gigantic. His short story “Taylor Swift” won the 2015 Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast. He is a member of the non-ranked faculty collective bargaining team at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he edits the journal Eleven Eleven.

Bay Area Generations
2016-11-28 19:00 - 21:00 | Hotel Rex, 562 Sutter Street, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
BAY AREA GENERATIONS #39, November 28 at the Hotel Rex.
Community Guest Curator: Jennifer Lewis
Bay Area Generations Board Curators: Sandra Wassilie + Bonnie McManis
READERS
Shizue Seigel + April Yee
Justice Morríghan + Ryanaustin Dennis
John Haggerty + Katrin Gibb
Peter Bullen + Sarah Bethe Nelson
Keith Donnell + Lisa Alden
Jessica Hahn + Barbara Campbell
MUSICAL GUEST
Justin Frahm

Eavan Boland + Ari Banias
2016-11-29 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Celebrating the release of two new books of poetry
A Poet’s Dublin – by Eavan Boland
Anybody: Poems – by Ari Banias
both published by W.W. Norton
A rare evening of reading and discussion betweem teacher and student.
about A Poet’s Dublin:
Written over years, the transcendent and moving poems in A Poet’s Dublin seek out shadows and impressions of a powerful, historic city, studying how it forms and alters language, memory, and selfhood. The poems range from an evocation of the neighborhoods under the hills where the poet lived and raised her children to the inner-city bombing of 1974, and include such signature poems as “The Pomegranate,” “The War Horse,” and “Anna Liffey.” Above all, these poems weave together the story of a self and a city—private, political, and bound by history. The poems are supported by photographs of the city at all times and in all seasons: from dawn on the river Liffey, which flows through Dublin, to twilight up in the Dublin foothills.
Praise for the work of Eavan Boland:
“For Boland, one feels poetry has to be honorable and natural, though at times as terrifying as giving birth alone in the open meadow, and that it is also made of blood and the guilt of being human.” — Yusef Komunyakaa
about Anybody:Poems:
In Anybody, Ari Banias takes up questions of recognition and belonging: how boundaries are drawn and managed, the ways he and she, us and them, here and elsewhere are kept separate, and at what cost identities and selves are forged. Moving through iconic and imagined landscapes, Anybody confronts the strangeness of being alive and of being a restlessly gendered, queer, emotive body. Wherever the poet turns—the cruising spaces of Fire Island, a city lake, a Greek island, a bodega-turned-coffee-shop—he finds the charge of boundedness and signification, the implications of what it means to be a this instead of a that. Witty, tender, and original, these poems pierce the constructs that define our lives.
Praise for the work of Ari Banias:
“I’m so impressed by the range and grace of Ari Banias’ Anybody. It’s discursive, straight-talking, and thinky, then ghostlike, elliptical, and mischievous. It takes its time, then rushes; it’s quiet, then bold; it’s steeped in sociality, then ringing with solitude. I happily recognize its arrival, even if I know (as does Banias, quoting Berlant) that recognition may be but the misrecognition we can bear.” — Maggie Nelson
“Born late in the twentieth century, tutored under the twin suns of Frank O’Hara and Guillaume Apollinaire, vexed by ‘this set of meanings on my body,’ Ari Banias is a poet for this hour—bewildered, hopeful, and cracklingly alive, a citizen of the possible. How many utopias? (keep imagining them).” — Mark Doty
“Here is Anybody with its syntax of rupture and suture, its restless questions and metaphysical balloons. What a thrilling, original, generous, openhearted book. A book we have waited for, whoever we are.” — Donna Masini
“Ari Banias has written one of the finest first books (OK, any book!) that I’ve ever read… These poems stake a claim on the future: they give us a poet who understands to the bone how syntax and line and music embody emotion, and how the integrity of the spirit is the maker’s integrity.” — Tom Sleigh
Eavan Boland is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry and nonfiction. A professor and the director of the creative writing program at Stanford University, she is the winner of a Lannan Foundation Award. She lives in Stanford, California, and Dublin, Ireland.
Ari Banias has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford University, where he was most recently a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He received an MFA in poetry from Hunter College and lives in Berkeley, California.

Hand To Mouth/WORDS SPOKEN OUT #84
2016-11-30 19:00 - 21:00 | Rebound Bookstore, 1611 4th Street, San Rafael, CA, 94901, United States
Join us for our last reading of the year as we welcome writers Angelika Quirk, who reads from her just released book, Unspooling, and Melanie Maier.
Angelika Quirk was born and raised in Hamburg, Germany. She immigrated to the U.S. at the age of 18 and received a degree in German literature from UC Berkeley. Her poems have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies. She has published three books: After Sirens, Of Ruins and Rumors, and Unspooling which was published this year. Two of her books have been accepted for the library of the German American Heritage Museum, in Washington DC.
Melanie Maier’s poetry has been published in the Southern California Review, and South Carolina Review. Her first chapbook, The Land of Us, was published by Pudding House Press. She is the author of two other chap books, Scattering Wind, and Night Boats, from Conflux Press.
We will have light refreshments, including hot apple cider to keep out the chill, and our popular open mic after our features read. Tell your friends to come by, and share the magic of words and friends in our welcoming salon. Also, our partnership with neighborhood restaurants continue with a discount on the evening of the reading. Come in early if you want to grab a bite before hand!
Participating restaurants are:
Whipper Snapper– $3.00 Glass of Sangria, or $3.00 off a pitcher.
Cafe Arrivederci– 10% off dinner.
Lotus Chaat and Spices– 10% off dinner.
The Mayflower Pub– 25% off dinner.

Juan Felipe Herrera
2016-12-01 12:10 - 12:50 | Morrison Library, UC Berkeley, 2000 Carleston Street, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
Juan Felipe Herrera is currently the 21st Poet Laureate of the United States and is the first Latino to hold the position. From 2012 to 2014, Herrera served as California State Poet Laureate. Herrera’s many collections of poetry include Notes on the Assemblage, Senegal Taxi, and Half of the World in Light: New and Selected Poems which received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Herrera is also a performance artist and activist on behalf of migrant and indigenous communities and at-risk youth.

Cary Groner
2016-12-01 17:00 - 18:00 | Morrison Library, UC Berkeley, 2000 Carleston Street, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
Cary Groner grew up in the Midwest and has worked as a journalist and photographer for many years. He earned his MFA in fiction writing from the University of Arizona in 2009, and his debut novel, Exiles, was a Chicago Tribune “best book” of 2011. His short stories have won numerous awards, including the Glimmer Train fiction open, and have appeared there and in other venues including American Fiction,Mississippi Review, Sycamore Review, and Southern California Review. Cary teaches at the Writing Salon and is completing a new novel and a story collection. His website is www.carygroner.com.

Kuwentuhan (Talkstory)
2016-12-01 19:00 - 21:00 | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
Barbara Jane Reyes and Oscar Bermeo read from their poetry, continuing a collaboration between artists, audiences and The Poetry Center, as a way of enlarging this circle beyond ethnic boundaries, in contested urban spaces.
Kuwentuhan (Talkstory) takes the Tagalog term, a phoneticized form adapted through the colonial Spanish, as its title, proposition, and starting point. Kuwentuhan (“necessary step toward big talk,” by one definition) is orally based, informal in nature, usually spontaneous, and is always an opportunity for people to converge and share. It occurs in all kinds of social spaces as talkstory circle.
The project’s aim is to open up precisely the kind of human space that barely exists in our technological and “globalized” culture, by allowing a select group of American poets out of widely disparate and polyglot cultural and geographic backgrounds to actually talk face to face, sharing stories, poetry and conversations among themselves and with audiences. They are interested in work that originates from a communal basis, and in shaping a project that encourages collective creation, by putting into action mechanisms for creating “live” person-to-person exchange between and among artists and audiences.
Kuwentuhan (Talkstory) is a project of The Poetry Center and Reyes, supported by the Creative Work Fund.

Flash Fiction Collective Flashathon
2016-12-01 19:00 - 21:00 | Flash Fiction Collective, 3036 24th Street, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Come on out for our second annual end-of-the-year flashathon, featuring a few of our amazing past readers!
Lynn Mundell
Andrew O. Dugas
Thaisa Frank
Chad Koch
Christopher Cook
Molly Giles
Jane McDermott
Heather Bourbeau
Mardi Louisell
Jenny Bitner
Noah Sanders
Tony Press
Jon Sindell

Max Ritvo Celebration
2016-12-01 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Read about Max’s life at NPR.
Praise for Four Reincarnations:
“Marked by intellectual bravado and verbal extravagance. . . .One of the most original and ambitious first books in my experience.” —Louise Glück

“A Max Ritvo poem is:
A map drawn by hand to show where the body is buried.
A card trick with words. . . ‘Don’t show me how you did it.’
Like reading the last sentence in a book first.
Dragging words across the page like a bow across a string.
A piece of candy covered with ants.
Like silverfish ate the words off a page . . . and left you a riddle.
All of the above.”
—Tom Waits

About Four Reincarnations:
Reverent and profane, entertaining and bruising, Four Reincarnations is a debut collection of poems that introduces an exciting new voice in American letters.
When Max Ritvo was diagnosed with cancer at age sixteen, he became the chief war correspondent for his body. The poems of Four Reincarnations are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss. And yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned to possibility and desire, to everything living / that won t come with me / into this sunny afternoon. Ritvo explores the prospect of death with singular sensitivity, but he is also a poet of life and of lovea cool-eyed assessor of mortality and a fervent champion for his body and its pleasures.
Ritvo writes to his wife, ex-lovers, therapists, fathers, and one mother. He finds something to love and something to lose in everything: Listerine PocketPak breath strips, Indian mythology, wool hats. But in these poemsfrom the humans that animate him to the inanimate hospital machines that remind him of deathit’s Ritvo’s vulnerable, aching pitch of intimacy that establishes him as one

Mariela Griffor + Lynne Knight
2016-12-01 19:30 - 21:30 | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Mariela Griffor’s new book is a translation of Pablo Neruda’s Canto General: Song of the Americas, edited by Jeffrey Levine, perhaps Neruda’s most daring and ambitious project, depicting history as a vast, continuous struggle against oppression. Griffor was born in Concepción in southern Chile. She left Chile for an involuntary exile in Sweden and now lives in the U.S., in Michigan and Washington D.C., where she is Honorary Consul of Chile. She is the founder of Marick Press and is the author of three books of poems, Exiliana, House, and The Psychiatrist.
Lynne Knight’s new book of poems is The Persistence of Longing. Cecilia Woloch says, “I’ve never read poems that seem to me more accurate about love and desire and sexual relationships and their almost-inevitable shattering—darkly gorgeous and expertly-crafted poems, with a white-hot lyric intensity and a narrative pull that becomes cumulative, an erotic veering toward doom.” She is the author of four full-length poetry collections and four chapbooks, and translator of I Know (Je sais), by Ito Naga, from the French. Among her honors are publication in Best American Poetry, the Prix de l’Alliance Française 2006, the 2009 Rattle Poetry Prize, a Poetry Society of America Lucille Medwick Memorial Award, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.

San Francisco Grotto Writers: 3 Minute Reads
2016-12-02 18:00 - 20:00 | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
Join us for a fast-paced and irreverent evening, showcasing new work from the students of the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto writing classes. On this Friday evening, both fiction and nonfiction writers will read their work — but only for 3 minutes each! Their instructors (Grotto authors) will enforce the time limit. Join us for wine, fun, and fresh new writing.

Laura Levin + Eric Sneathen
2016-12-02 18:00 - 20:30 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Please join Krupskaya Book for the release of our two new titles, Lauren Levin’s THE BRAID and Eric Sneathen’s SNAIL POEMS! We are so thrilled to see these books in the world and celebrate with Lauren and Eric at Alley Cat Books! Doors are at 6PM, reading at 7PM.
Lauren Levin grew up in New Orleans and lives in Richmond, CA with her family. Her first full-length book The Braid is out now from Krupskaya Books, and her second full-length, Two Essays, is forthcoming from Timeless, Infinite Light in 2018. Recent work can be found in the chapbook Only the Dead Are Never Anxious (Mondo Bummer), on the Poetry Project website, and forthcoming in the journal Hold.
Eric Sneathen splits his time between Oakland and UC Santa Cruz, where he is a PhD student in Literature. His poetry has been published by Mondo Bummer, littletell, Faggot Journal, and The Equalizer, and his first collection, Snail Poems, is out now from Krupskaya. He is also the editor and producer of Macaroni Necklace, a DIY literary zine and reading series featuring (mostly) writers who have not yet published a book-length manuscript.

Ambush Review Five
2016-12-02 19:00 - 21:00 | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Book release of the new Ambush Review Five, with readings from the following contributors:

David Beckman
Sharon Coleman
Grace Marie Grafton
Jose Luis Gutierrez
Ken Saffran
Kim Shuck

…and others

Randa Jarrar
2016-12-02 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Praise for Randa Jarrar:
“Jarrar does what every brave storyteller should do-she makes sense of what other writers leave outside the bounds. She connects us with that which others have left unsaid.” – Colum McCann, author of Transatlantic

“Him, Me, Muhammad Ali is a searing collection of short stories about loving, lusting, losing, and surviving. Randa Jarrar is one of the finest writers of her generation. Her voice is assured, fiercely independent, laced with humor and irony–and always, always, honest.” – Laila Lalami, author of The Moor’s Account

“Randa Jarrar’s prose is bold and luscious and makes the darkly comic seem light. The voices in Him, Me, Muhammed Ali are powerful individually, and overwhelming as a chorus. This wonderful work isn’t just a collection: it’s a world.” – Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day

“Wow! These vibrant, funny, earthy, and above all yearning (for love, for family, for home) stories are a revelation. Jarrar combines the invention of Calvino, the sprung style of Paley, the poetic imagery of Babel. But that mash-up isn’t mere stylistic exuberance; it’s a restless, relentless and deeply affecting effort to forge identity out of fragments, to make a whole out of halves. These are the stories we need right now.” – Peter Ho Davies, author of The Welsh Girl

“Fearless, funny, and sad, soaring and earthly, fable-like and visceral, full of families, lovers, friends, strangers and lonely children. These stories laugh with and think through and rise against, which is just to say they brilliantly demonstrate Jarrar’s huge talent, compassion and range. “Him, Me, Muhammad Ali astonishes from start to finish.” – Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask

About Him, Me, Muhammad Ali:
Award-winning novelist Randa Jarrar’s new story collection moves seamlessly between realism and fable, history and the present, capturing the lives of Muslim women and men across myriad geographies and circumstances. With acerbic wit, deep tenderness, and boundless imagination, Jarrar brings to life a memorable cast of characters, many of them “accidental transients”a term for migratory birds who have gone astrayseeking their circuitous routes back home. Fierce and feeling, Him, Me, Muhammad Ali is a testament to survival in the face of love, loss, and displacement.
Randa Jarrar is the author of a highly successful novel, A Map of Home, which received an Arab-American Book Award and was named one of the best novels of 2008 by the Barnes & Noble Review. She grew up in Kuwait and Egypt, and moved to the United States after the first Gulf War. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Utne Reader, Salon.com, Guernica, the Rumpus, the Oxford American, Ploughshares, and more. She blogs for Salon, and lives in California.

Studio One: Perez, Siegel, Burghardt, + Videtta
2016-12-02 19:30 - 21:30 | Studio One Arts Center, 365 45th Street, Oakland, CA, 94609, United States
Please join us on Friday, December 2nd @ 7:30 pm
for a reading featuring Robert Andrew Perez, Matthew Siegel
and Peter Burghardt, plus art by Peg Videtta!

Event is FREE.
Lagunitas beer, wine and snacks will be served.

Robert Andrew Perez lives in Berkeley and is an associate editor & book designer for speCt! in Oakland, where he also curates readings. He is an alum of the Lambda Literary fellowship & a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for poetry. His poetry has appeared in print & online in publications such as DIAGRAM, The Awl, The Laurel Review & The Cortland Review, and has forthcoming work in Vinyl. His first collection, the field, was published with Omnidawn in their pocket book series. He is currently writing a movie about a divorce and wine tasting; it’s a comedy. More at robertandrewperez.com.
Matthew Siegel is the author of Blood Work (University of Wisconsin/CBe) which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for best first collection. His poems and essays have appeared in The Guardian, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, The Rumpus and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, he teaches literature and writing at San Francisco Conservatory of Music.
Peter Burghardt lives in Oakland, California, where he co-publishes speCt! books, and edits OAR, a print journal of poetry and prose. His recent work has appeared in such publications as the Offending Adam, Tammy, The Laurel Review, and White Stag. His chapbook, Cosmic American Music, is forthcoming from Old Gold.
Peg Videtta brings her experience of dance, yoga, and physics into making figurative sculpture. Her work explores the energetic components of the body, especially while in movement.

Spoken Word at Naivasha
2016-12-02 19:30 - 22:00 | Naivasha Studio & Gallery, 1499 Grant Ave, San Francisco, CA, 94133, United States
Celebrate the living legacy of spoken word in North Beach as we welcome our favorite local writers to share their work.
Featuring Brandon Loberg, Charlie Getter, Daniel Vaccerelli, Kristin Kennedy, Niko Van Dyke, Jason Whitacre & Zach Roz.
BYOB

Book Passage at 40!
2016-12-03 10:00 - 18:00 | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
Please join us for a day of fun and celebration:
10:00 am
We’re starting off with the kids, inviting them to come up and read stories they have written or whatever they feel like reading. Among the many who will be there reading, we expect the kids from INK to be there with their first book Dragon Mist and its new sequel. Come hear some of our local students read their work! We are showcasing the writers of tomorrow as part of our 40th Anniversary celebration. This is entirely selfish on our part. We’re hope that they will get the feel for how much fun it is to read in front of a bookstore audience. If so, they might just be coming back for years to come with books they have written. Time will be limited. So please contact Joy (joy@bookpassage. com) to let us know you will be a reader! (But we warn you! Famous authors have told us it could be habit-forming.)
3:00 pm
In the afternoon there will be a reception in the café for Tom Killion’s new collection of graphic arts that will be displayed both in the cafe and the gallery. Tom Killion is a native of Marin County who has been producing acclaimed Japanese-style woodcut prints of the California landscape for over forty years. Killion has created over 400 relief prints, and has produced five handmade art books depicting landscapes from California to Europe and Africa. Killion’s most recent book, California’s Wild Edge, is a fresh collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder.
4:00 pm
Isabel Allende, Anne Lamott and Don George will speak about the history of the bookstore and what it means to them and the community. Following that there will be a slide presentation about the store (shamelessly heaped in nostalgia!). And following that, we will break out the bubbly and celebrate
And here’s where you can help!
We are asking our friends to bring a “not too used” book to donate to our Hospice Used Book department. We will be donating a portion of the day’s new book sales to Hospice to help support their wonderful programs.

Bay Area Poets Coalition First Saturday
2016-12-03 15:00 - 17:00 | Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison Street, Berkeley, CA, 94702, United States
Addison is one block south of and parallel to University Ave.
between Acton & Bonar St.
Parking on the street (NOT in the S.C.L. parking lot)
Check in at the front desk and you will be directed to the meeting location
(usually Movie Room, or backyard garden)
All Ages Welcome
Come and enjoy a friendly and informal read-around —
3-5 minutes per poet/reader, or “just listening” is fine too 🙂

Ellingham, Stein, + Caples
2016-12-03 15:00 - 17:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Suzanne Stein, Lewis Ellingham, and Garrett Caples read at Alley Cat Books, Saturday, December 3, 2016 at 3 p.m, for an exciting event organized by San Francisco poet and novelist Kevin Killian.
Alley Cat Books in located in the Mission District of San Francisco, at 3036 24th Street (at Treat).
Garrett Caples is the author of three full-length poetry collections, including the brand-new Power Ballads (Wave Books, 2016). He has also written a book of essays, Retrievals (Wave, 2014), and a pamphlet, Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English (Wave, 2010). He co-edited Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems by Frank Lima (City Lights, 2016), Particulars of Place by Richard O. Moore (Omnidawn, 2015), and Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (California, 2013). A freelance writer, he is also an editor at City Lights, where he curates the Spotlight poetry series. He lives in San Francisco.
Lewis Ellingham: born February 27th, 1933, Fort Wayne, Indiana. By age 21, migrated to San Francisco, after living in Chicago and New York; settled in North Beach. With Kevin Killian, wrote a biography of Jack Spicer, Poet Be Like God [1995]. “My The Birds and Other Poems was published in 2009; new writing continues with a series of self-published books. My blog: “The Ellingham Digest”: http://lewellingham.wordpress.com/” He has a brand new book we launch this afternoon, SEEN, UNSEEN.
Suzanne Stein’s publications and performance documents include The Kim Game (Area Sneaks), TOUT VA BIEN (Displaced Press), and Passenger Ship (Ypolita). Poems, talk performances, and prose have appeared in War and Peace, On: Contemporary Practice, Counterpath; and at New Langton Arts, the Poetry Project, the Berkeley Art Museum, and elsewhere; audio performances are archived at PennSound. She was the founding editor of SFMOMA’s Open Space.
Facebook event is here: https://www.facebook.com/events/598929320310766/?active_tab=discussion
