Litseen

Andrea Abi-Karam
2018-04-10 17:30 - 19:00 UTC | Mills Hall Living Room, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland , CA, 94613, United States
Andrea Abi-Karam is an Arab American genderqueer punk poet cyborg. Their first full-length book Extratransmission is forthcoming from Kelsey Street Press in early 2018. Abi-Karam’s previous work,The Aftermath (Commune Editions) attempts to queer Fanon’s vision of how poetry fails to inspire revolution. Abi-Karam is also a printer and publisher whose small press project Mes Editions seeks to publish emerging writings from queers, people of color, and those involved in social movements yet uninvolved in poetry and art scenes. Catch them on the 2018 Sister Spit tour.

Michelle Cruz Gonzales
2018-04-10 17:30 - 19:00 | Mills Hall Living Room, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland , CA, 94613, United States
Michelle Cruz Gonzales is the author of The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band. Before attending Mills College, Gonzales played drums in and wrote lyrics for the groundbreaking 90s femme punk band Spitboy— the subject of the 2017 documentary, Turn it Around: Story of East Bay Punk. Gonzales holds a BA and MFA in English and creative writing from Mills and is an English instructor at Las Positas College.

Steve Zolno: The Future of Democracy
2018-04-10 18:30 - 20:00 | Rockridge Branch, 5366 College Avenue, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
What is democracy and where did it come from? Is it a new development or was it always present in human society? And perhaps the most important question: what can we do to preserve and strengthen democracy among the forces that oppose it?
In this book we explore trends throughout history that have brought democratic – and undemocratic – government to people wherever civilization exists. We discuss where democracy has been most, and least, successful and why. But our most important task is to clarify what each of us can do, as politicians or ordinary citizens, to bring the benefits of democracy more fully into the personal and political lives of those who cherish it.

Perfectly Queer: National Poetry Month
2018-04-10 19:00 - 20:00 | Dog Eared Books Castro, 489 Castro Street, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
Join us in celebrating National Poetry Month with San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck, Aja Couchois Duncan, Luna Merbruja, and Lourdes Figueroa

Weekday Wanderlust
2018-04-10 19:00 - 20:00 | Weekday Wanderlust, 562 Sutter Street, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Hello Wanderlusters. Mark your calendars for TUESDAY APRIL 10. We have a superb line-up waiting just for you with Julia Scott, John Ellis, and Amanda Jones reading. Woot! Check out their bios on the FB page as we get closer to the event.
A reminder: We are at the Mystic Hotel —417 Stockton Street.
Readings start at 7 p.m. but a group of thirsty travelers and writers can always be found in the Burritt Room (upstairs) at 6 p.m.
Drop in and say hi, and come give a warm Weekday Wanderlust welcome to Julia, John and Amanda.
See you on Tuesday, April 10.

Maw Shein Win
2018-04-10 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Maw Shein Win

celebrating the release of her new collection of poetry
Invisible Gifts: Poems
published by Manic D Press
Themes of vulnerability and power emerge through reflections on family, art, and loss from an award-winning poet.
In her full-length collection of poems, Win depicts a colorful world imbued with unexpected paradoxes: nature is both comforting and savagely unnerving; love is permanent and fleeting; and the accuracy and flaws of memory abound. Her experiences with illness and recovery intertwine with her identity as a Burmese American daughter of immigrant doctors. For instance, in poems like “Hands”: My father’s hands, frail birds, shaking wings. / In Burmese, “win” means bright. / Hands that stitched skin together and brought back life. Win’s unique perspective and artful language offer readers insight into how the heart can bend and mend without breaking.
Maw Shein Win is a Burmese American poet, editor, and educator who lives and works in the Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in many journals and several anthologies, including Cimarron Review, Fanzine, The Fabulist, and others. She was an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers. Along with composer and musician, Amanda Chaudhary, she is part of musical duo Pitta of the Mind that combines poetry with abstract electronic music. A collaborative book with paintings by Los Angeles artist Mark Dutcher, Ruins of a glittering palace, was published by SPA/Commonwealth Projects. Her most recent poetry chapbook is Score and Bone on Nomadic Press, and her poetry was featured in artist Megan Wilson’s mural, Flower Interruption, a public artwork in the exhibition Flower Power at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. She is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito. http://www.el-cerrito.org/poets

Rachel Levin
2018-04-10 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Rachel Levin celebrates the release of her new book Look Big: And Other Tips for Surviving Animal Encounters of All Kinds.

About Look Big

A humorous and helpful illustrated field guide to avoiding interactions–both dangerous and annoying–with 50 wild animals, including survival techniques, wildlife etiquette, and other essential advice.
As humans encroach on wild places, encounters with animals–from bears, bison, mountain lions, and mice to turkeys, ticks, rats, and raccoons–have become increasingly commonplace. But, wait, what are the rules for facing a moose up close? Do you run from a coyote or stand your ground? How deadly, really, are black widow spiders, rattlesnakes, and sharks? Packed with expert tips, fascinating animal facts, and harrowing true tales, Look Big is a must-have survival guide for outdoor, urban, and suburban adventurers alike. If you have ever feared the approach of a grizzly, the spray of a skunk, or an army of cockroaches in the kitchen, this book is for you.

Emerging Writers Festival
2018-04-10 19:45 - 21:00 | Fromm Hall – FR 120 – Xavier Auditorium, USF, 2130 Fulton St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
TUESDAY, APRIL 10 7:45 – 9:30 p.m.
Fromm Hall – FR 125 – Maraschi Room

Elizabeth Greenwood is the author of the nonfiction book Playing Dead: A Journey through the World of Death Fraud (Simon & Schuster). Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, O, the Oprah Magazine, Glamour, Longreads, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Al Jazeera America, and Dissent, among others. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, the Ucross Foundation, the Norman Mailer Center and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. She holds a BA in history from the University of San Francisco and an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University, where she teaches.
Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, IL native and author of Thief in the Interior, winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He received a 2017 Whiting Award and 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. Phillip is the co-editor in chief of the online journal Vinyl. He is currently visiting professor in English at Bennington College.

A Talk with The Black Aesthetic
2018-04-11 12:00 - 13:30 | Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center St., Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
A Talk with The Black Aesthetic
Wednesday / 4.11.18 / 12:00
Free, no ticket needed.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
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The Black Aesthetic is an Oakland-based artist collective of artists, writers, filmmakers and designers who curate film screenings and publish a journal of essays about black film and culture.
Jamal Batts
Ryanaustin Dennis
Malika “Ra” Imhotep
Zoé Samudzi
Leila Weefur
The Black Aesthetic is a creative organization, whose mission is to curate and assemble both a collective and distinct understanding of Black visual culture. We post the question: What is the Black aesthetic sensibility and what does it look like to you?
By working with artists, writers, filmmakers and designers, we cultivate work that asks our audience to consider their relationship to Black art. Based in Oakland, we are invested in developing a community who will participate and engage with our mission. When you support The Black Aesthetic, you are actively supporting a network of Black Artists. Through film screenings, publications and product development, we want to add to a growing collection of artistic visions that are grounded in place, body, lived-experience and are responsive to its respective environment.
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Arts + Design Wednesdays @ BAMPFA is a public lecture series embedded inside our Creative Gateway undergraduate course.
Berkeley Arts + Design features, fortifies, and mobilizes existing excellence in the arts and design at Berkeley, while fostering dynamic collaboration, innovation, and public access across all arts and design fields, on campus and in public life.
Learn more at: http://artsdesign.berkeley.edu/wednesdays
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Arts + Design Wednesdays @ BAMPFA is organized and sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Arts + Design Initiative in partnership with Big Ideas courses. The series is co curated by the Arts Research Center; Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium; Berkeley Center for New Media; Graduate School of Journalism; Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation; Regents’ Lectureship Program; Department of Art Practice; Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities; and Department of English, all at UC Berkeley.
The spring 2018 series of Arts + Design Wednesdays is made possible thanks to a generous donation from Jan and Buzz Wiesenfeld. In-kind support is provided by BAMPFA.

This is Now with Angie Coiro Presents: Leslie Jamison on Alcoholism
2018-04-11 19:30 - 20:30 | Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park , CA, 94025, United States
Leslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, among others, and she is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review.
With comparisons to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, Jamison has turned the traditional addiction narrative on its head in this deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and journalistic reportage. Join us for an evening on addiction and learn more about the writers whose work was shaped by alcohlism and substance dependence, including Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, and others.
“Leslie Jamison has written an honest and important book. It will be important to recovering alcoholics who wonder if there really is life after booze, and I think it will be important to writers and critics, because she weaves her story of recovery into those of other artists”… “The most important thematic thread may be its insistence that the talented artist who needs booze or drugs to support his work and withstand his own vision does not, in fact, exist. All in all, vivid writing and required reading.” ―Stephen King

Caspar Henderson
2018-04-11 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Caspar Henderson, author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, discusses his new book A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Modern Marvels.

Praise for A New Map of Wonders

“This book does exactly what it says on the cover, and shows us where wonder is to be found. His account of familiar phenomena shows how unfamiliar and extraordinary they really are.” Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy

“A wondrous brew of science, history, and sheer exhilaration. Read it and marvel.” Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Café

“For Henderson, the universe is constantly birthing wonders. A book that tries to give articulate voice to the gasps of astonishment at each birth is almost bound to fail. Yet this is a glorious success: breathless but musical; humble but confident; smart, kind, and glittering. It will turn the most jaded reductionist into a delighted child.” Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast

About A New Map of Wonders

We live in a world that is known, every corner thoroughly explored. But has this knowledge cost us the ability to wonder? Wonder, Caspar Henderson argues, is at its most supremely valuable in just such a world because it reaffirms our humanity and gives us hope for the future. That’s the power of wonder, and that’s what we should aim to cultivate in our lives. But what are the wonders of the modern world?
Henderson’s brilliant exploration borrows from the form of one of the oldest and most widely known sources of wonder: maps. Large, detailed mappae mundi invited people in medieval Europe to vividly imagine places and possibilities they had never seen before: manticores with the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the stinging tail of a scorpion; tribes of one-eyed men who fought griffins for diamonds; and fearsome Scythian warriors who drank the blood of their enemies from their skulls. As outlandish as these maps and the stories that went with them sound to us today, Henderson argues that our views of the world today are sometimes no less incomplete or misleading. Scientists are only beginning to map the human brain, for example, revealing it as vastly more complex than any computer we can conceive. Our current understanding of physical reality is woefully incomplete. A New Map of Wonders explores these and other realms of the wonderful, in different times and cultures and in the present day, taking readers from Aboriginal Australian landscapes to sacred sites in Great Britain, all the while keeping sight questions such as the cognitive basis of wonder and the relationship between wonder and science.
Beautifully illustrated and written with wit and moral complexity, this sequel to The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is a fascinating account of the power of wonder and an unforgettable meditation on its importance to our future.

Meg Wolitzer / The Female Persuasion
2018-04-11 19:30 - 21:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
To be admired by someone we admire—we all yearn for this: the private, electrifying pleasure of being singled out by someone of esteem. But sometimes it can also mean entry to a new kind of life, a bigger world.
Greer Kadetsky is a shy college freshman when she meets the woman she hopes will change her life. Faith Frank, dazzlingly persuasive and elegant at sixty-three, has been a central pillar of the women’s movement for decades, a figure who inspires others to influence the world. Upon hearing Faith speak for the first time, Greer—madly in love with her boyfriend, Cory, but still full of longing for an ambition that she can’t quite place—feels her inner world light up. And then, astonishingly, Faith invites Greer to make something out of that sense of purpose, leading Greer down the most exciting path of her life as it winds toward and away from her meant-to-be love story with Cory and the future she’d always imagined.
Charming and wise, knowing and witty, Meg Wolitzer delivers a novel about power and influence, ego and loyalty, womanhood and ambition. At its heart, The Female Persuasion is about the flame we all believe is flickering inside of us, waiting to be seen and fanned by the right person at the right time. It’s a story about the people who guide and the people who follow (and how those roles evolve over time), and the desire within all of us to be pulled into the light.
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Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Interestings, The Uncoupling,The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking. She is also the author of the young adult novel Belzhar. Wolitzer lives in New York City.

Emerging Writers Festival
2018-04-11 19:30 - 21:00 | Fromm Hall – FR 120 – Xavier Auditorium, USF, 2130 Fulton St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11 7:30 – 9 p.m.
Fromm Hall – FR 125 – Maraschi Room

Patricia Horvath is the author of the memoir All the Difference (Etruscan Press). Her stories and essays have been published widely in literary journals including Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Confrontation. She is the recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in both fiction and literary nonfiction and the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction at Bellevue Literary Review, and has held residency fellowships at Hedgebrook, The Millay Colony for the Arts, and The Blue Mountain Center. She teaches creative writing at Framingham State University in Massachusetts.
Christopher Kempf is the author of Late in Empire of Men, which won the 2015 Levis Prize from Four Way Books. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, his work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, PEN America, and Ploughshares, among other places. He is currently a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Chicago.
Jung Yun is the author of Shelter, published by Picador in 2016. Her work has appeared in Tin House (the “Emerging Voices” issue); The Best of Tin House: Stories; The Massachusetts Review; The Atlantic Monthly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the recipient of two Artist Fellowships in fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English at the George Washington University.

Marcel Schwob: Chris Clarke and Kit Schluter
2018-04-12 19:00 - 20:30 | THE LAUNDRY, 3359 26th Street, San Francisco, 94110
Join translators Chris Clarke and Kit Schluter in an overdue celebration of the beguiling French writer Marcel Schwob, a cult phenomenon who secretly influenced a generation of writers from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño.

Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, translated by Chris Clarke, remains, over 120 years since its original publication in French, one of the secret keys to modern literature: under-recognized, yet a decisive influence on such writers as Guillaume Apollinaire, Jorge Luis Borges, Alfred Jarry, and Antonin Artaud, and more contemporary authors such as Roberto Bolaño and Jean Echenoz. Drawing from historical influences such as Plutarch and Diogenes Laërtius, and authors more contemporary to him such as Thomas de Quincy and Walter Pater, Schwob established the genre of fictional biography with this collection: a form of narrative that championed the specificity of the individual over the generality of history, and the memorable detail of a vice over the forgettable banality of a virtue.
These twenty-two portraits present figures drawn from the margins of history, from Empedocles the “Supposed God” and Clodia the “Licentious Matron” to the pirate Captain Kidd and the Scottish murderers Messrs. Burke and Hare. In his quest for unique existences, Schwob also formulated an early conception of the anti-hero, and discarded historical figures in favor of their shadows, be they divine, mediocre, or criminal. These “imaginary lives” thus acquaint us with the “Hateful Poet” Cecco Angiolieri instead of his lifelong rival, Dante Alighieri; the would-be romantic pirate Major Stede Bonnet instead of the infamous Blackbeard who would lead him to the gallows; the false confessor Nicolas Loyseleur rather than Joan of Arc, whom he cruelly deceived; or the actor Gabriel Spenser in place of the better-remembered Ben Jonson who ran a sword through his lung.
Marcel Schwob’s 1896 novella The Children’s Crusade, translated by Kit Schluter, retells the medieval legend of the exodus of some 30,000 children from all countries to the Holy Land, who traveled to the shores of the sea, which instead of parting to allow them to march on to Jerusalem, instead delivered them to merchants who sold them into slavery in Tunisia or to a watery death. It is a cruel and sorrowful story mingling history and legend, which Schwob recounts through the voices of eight different protagonists: a goliard, a leper, Pope Innocent III, a cleric, a qalandar, and Pope Gregory IX, as well as two of the marching children, whose naïve faith eventually turns into growing fear and anguish.
Though it is a tale drawn from the early thirteenth century, Schwob presents it through a modern framework of shifting subjectivity and fragmented coherency, and its subject matter and its succession of different narrative perspectives has been seen as an influence on and precursor to such diverse works as Alfred Jarry’s The Other Alcestis, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Grove,” William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Jerzy Andrzejewski’s The Gates of Paradise. It is a tale told by many yet understood by few, a mosaic surrounding a void, describing a world in which innocence must perish.

Peter Balakian
2018-04-12 19:00 - 21:00 | Hammer Theater Center, 101 Paseo De San Antonio Walk, San Jose, CA, 95113, United States
Peter Balakian is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Ozone Journal, which recounts the speaker’s memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists. He is the author of five other poetry collections and the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand Prize for memoir, and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response. Balakian has published essays on poetry, culture, art, and social thought, and he’s appeared widely on national television and radio: ABC World News Tonight, The Charlie Rose Show, Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air”; NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” and CNN. He teaches at Colgate University.

Get Lit Spring Reading!
2018-04-12 19:00 - 21:00 | Aqus Petaluma, 101 H St, Petaluma, CA, 94952, United States
Come join us April 12 as we celebrate spring reads with a fun night of literary storytelling with featured readers Christine No, Patty Somlo and Paul Corman-Roberts (and YOU on the open mic)!
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+ Christine No is a writer/organizer with work shown work at the Sundance Film Festival, in publications including: The Rumpus, sPARKLE+bLINK, Columbia Journal, Atlas And Alice, Apogee, The Brooklyn Quarterly & various anthologies. She is a VONA/Voices Fellow, a Pushcart Prize & Best of The Net 2017 Nominee. She believes in radical kindness, that magic exists, and that “the only way out is through”. (She’s also a total dork and looks way better on paper.) She lives in Oakland with her dog, Brandeh.www.christineno.com
+ Patty Somlo’s most recent book, Hairway to Heaven Stories, a linked short story collection set in a gentrifying African American neighborhood, was just published by Cherry Castle Publishing. Her previous books have beenFinalists in the International Book Awards, the Best Book Awards, the National Indie Excellence Awards, and the Reader Views Literary Awards. She won Honorable Mention for Fiction in the Women’s National Book Associat ion Contest, was a Finalist in the Adelaide Voices Literary Award for Short Story, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and the storySouth Million Writers Award, and had an essay selected as Notable for Best American Essays 2014.
+ Paul Corman-Roberts is the author of the Nomadic Press chapbook “We Shoot Typewriters” which was nominated for a Northern California Book award. He is also a core-founder of the Beast Crawl Literary Festival in Oakland CA where he lives. He serves as fiction editor for the online zine Full of Crow as well as timekeeper for several East Bay rock bands. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Sparkle and Blink, Red Fez, Cherry Bleeds, Buddy and many others.
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Get Lit is a FREE quarterly literary event hosted by Dani Burlison and Kara Vernor at Aqus Café in Petaluma. All ages are welcome but DISCLAIMER: our readers may share adult content and we don’t provide ear muffs.

Leslie Jamison
2018-04-12 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Leslie Jamison discusses her new book, The Recovering: Intoxication And Its Aftermath.

Praise for The Recovering

“Leslie Jamison has written an honest and important book. It will be important to recovering alcoholics who wonder if there really is life after booze, and I think it will be important to writers and critics, because she weaves her story of recovery into those of other artists (mostly writers, but also Billie Holiday and Amy Winehouse) who also made the jump from soused to sober. And some who didn’t. The most important thematic thread may be its insistence that the talented artist who needs booze or drugs to support his work and withstand his own vision does not, in fact, exist. It’s important to debunk what Todd Rundgren called ‘the ever popular tortured artist effect.’ All in all, vivid writing and required reading.”―Stephen King

“Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering is a definitive investigation of both the romance of intoxication and the possibilities for recovery. Whether interviewing veterans of a communal rehab house, digging through the archives of alcoholic writers, or examining her own motives and thoughts, Jamison shows ways of living alongside contradictions without diminishing their confusion and pain. Graceful, forensic, and intimate, The Recovering sets a new bar in addiction studies. It is a courageous and brilliant example of what nonfiction writing can do.”―Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

“You don’t need to be an addict to be enthralled by The Recovering. This book is for anyone interested in a dazzlingly brilliant, uncommonly compassionate, and often hilarious study of human nature. Leslie Jamison’s work will definitely make you feel smarter–I’d like to borrow her brain to pick a fight with a couple of people–but The Recovering also reads like a gripping mystery as written by a subversive and deeply passionate philosopher. Her writing is unexpected, profound, and perverse–in short, a thrill to read. Best of all, for a writer so gifted at locating the excruciating commonalities of isolation, Jamison manages this greatest feat of magic: when I read her words, I come away feeling less alone.”―Mary-Louise Parker, author of New York Times bestseller Dear Mr. You

About The Recovering

With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and journalistic reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction–both her own and others’–and examines what we want these stories to do, and what happens when they fail us.
All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, David Foster Wallace, and Denis Johnson, as well as brilliant figures lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here.
For the power of her striking language and the sharpness of her piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. Yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.

Kathleen Belew
2018-04-12 19:30 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Kathleen Belew

discussing the subject of her new book
Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
from Harvard University Press

The white power movement in America wants a revolution. It has declared all-out war against the federal government and its agents, and has carried out—with military precision—an escalating campaign of terror against the American public. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but are highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview of white supremacy, anticommunism, and apocalypse. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the first full history of the movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City.
Returning to an America ripped apart by a war which, in their view, they were not allowed to win, a small but driven group of veterans, active-duty personnel, and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, mercenary soldiering, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place in brokering intergroup alliances and bearing future recruits.
Belew’s disturbing history reveals how war cannot be contained in time and space. In its wake, grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action for some. Bring the War Home argues for awareness of the heightened potential for paramilitarism in a present defined by ongoing war.
Kathleen Belew is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the College at the University of Chicago.
Kathleen Belew on This American Life and The New York Times

Jami Attenberg & Friends / All Grown Up
2018-04-12 19:30 - 21:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
Join us as we celebrate the paperback launch of Jami Attenberg’sAll Grown Up, with local superheroes Charlie Jane Anders, Rachel Khong, and Esmé Weijun Wang all talking on the themes of adulthood and what it means to be a grown up.
“I’m alone. I’m a drinker. I’m a former artist. I’m a shrieker in bed. I’m the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh.”
Andrea Bern is a whip-smart woman in NYC “who is doing what she wants with her life, right or wrong, and not apologizing for it… at times she is a wise sage, and at other times, a selfish mess. It makes her so achingly human” (Liberty Hardy, Book Riot). Andrea’s single, she’s childfree, she’s successful and yet not entirely devoted to her career. Everyone around her seems to have an entirely different idea of what it means to be an adult: marriage, babies, ambition. But what if those things aren’t what you want? What does it actually mean to be a woman and a grown up, in this day and age?
Andrea’s brother seems unscathed by their shared tumultuous childhood, but when he and her sister-in-law have a baby born with a heartbreaking ailment, Andrea and her family have to confront everything they haven’t wanted to face, and reexamine what really matters. In a world that still expects women to gravitate toward partnership and motherhood, Jami Attenberg gives us a pithy and sharp novel of living life on your own terms, and a character who is witty, winning, sexy and complicated.
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“I read it twice, laughing, cringing, and even tearing up.” — Judy Blume, New York Times
“Jami Attenberg’s sharply drawn protagonist, Andrea, has such a riveting, propulsive voice that All Grown Up is hard to put down, but I urge you to resist reading it in one sitting. Both the prose and the author’s knowing excavation of one woman’s desires, compromises, strengths, and fears deserve closer attention. Like Andrea herself, this novel is beautiful and brutal, intelligent and funny, frank and sexy.” — Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times best-selling author of The Nest
“Hilarious, courageous, and mesmerizing from page one, All Grown Up is a little gem that packs a devastating wallop. It’s that rare book I’m dying to give all my friends so we can discuss it deep into the night. I’m in awe of Jami Attenberg.” — Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette
“Jami Attenberg’s Andrea is the most addicting female protagonist voice I have read in years, with her cutting observations on human relationships. This witty journey through a mess of men, female friendships, family, and boozy urban existence positions the single girl not as object to be fixed but as contemporary sage and seer: the ultimate witness of truth in love today.” — Melissa Broder, author of So Sad Today
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Jami Attenberg is the New York Times best-selling author of five novels, including The Middlesteins and Saint Mazie. She has contributed essays about sex, urban life, and food to theNew York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and Lenny Letter, among other publications.
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, out now. She’s the organizer of the Writers With Drinks reading series, and she was a founding editor of io9, a website about science fiction, science and futurism. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction,The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, and several anthologies. Her novelette Six Months, Three Days won a Hugo award.
Rachel Khong grew up in Southern California, and holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Florida. From 2011 to 2016, she was the managing editor then executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland,American Short Fiction, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, and California Sunday. She lives in San Francisco. Goodbye, Vitamin is her first novel.
Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017, and is the recipient of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for her forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco, and can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang.

Angel Dominguez and Kit Schluter
2018-04-13 18:00 - 20:00 | Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center St., Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Two renowned poets, Dominguez and Schluter read their work.

Half Past the Unlucky: A Friday the 13th Reading
2018-04-13 19:00 - 21:00 | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
& DRAWING FOR POEMS UNDER THE DOME
FRI. APRIL 13TH, 7PM
On Friday the 13th, join us for an auspicious evening of poetry in celebration of National Poetry Month.
This event will also include the only drawing for a guaranteed spot to read at the13th Annual Poems Under the Dome at City Hall!

DAPHNE GOTTLIEB

Daphne Gottlieb

Daphne Gottlieb stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the award-winning author of 10 books including Pretty Much Dead, short stories about the people hanging on to the edge of the world in San Francisco. Previous works include Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in her Own Words, letters from Death Row by the “first female serial killer”. She has won a bunch of awards, and recently finished her first novel, which is sort of about anonymous sex.

THE POET I

the poet i

A lyrical powerhouse, “-i-” has the ability to transform any room into a sanctuary. Voted Sacramento, California’s Best Female Spoken Word artist and often called “The Storyteller” this award winning poet can take you on an emotional journey and back again in minutes. Though an Oakland, CA native, the mother of 8 currently resides in Carmichael, CA.

KIMBERLY DARK

Kimberly Dark

Kimberly Dark is a writer, professor and raconteur, working to reveal the hidden architecture of everyday life one clever essay, poem, and story at a time. She uses humor, surprise and intimacy to help audiences discover their influences, and reclaim their power as social creators. Kimberly teaches in Sociology and Women’s Studies at CSU San Marcos, and writing and theatre courses for Cal State Summer Arts. Kimberly Dark has written award-winning plays, taught and performed for a wide range of audiences in various countries over the past two decades. She is the author of Love and Errors, a book of poetry and co-editor of the anthology Ways of Being in Teaching. Her essays appear in popular online publications such as Everyday Feminism and Ravishly.

…PLUS SPECIAL GUEST
E.K. KEITH

E.K. Keith

E.K. Keith shouts her poems on the street corner and takes the mic at bars, coffee shops, and radio stations. For the love of poetry, she organizes and hosts Poems Under the Dome, San Francisco’s annual open mic celebration of National Poetry Month inside City Hall. Print & online journals publish her poetry on all three coasts and places beyond. E.K. is currently turning internal cartwheels about Nomadic Press releasing Ordinary Villains in September 2018.

CHARLIE GETTER

Charlie Getter

Charlie Getter’s work was described in the San Francisco Chronicle (8/25/2011) “as beguiling as Dr. Seuss.” He’s performed for the past fourteen years at the corner of 16th & Mission every Thursday night, and holds an MFA in Poetics from the New College of California. His latest collection is titled How to Arrange Physics and Geography to Your Advantage(seventh tangent, 2016).

Cliterary Salon: Unlucky in Love
2018-04-13 19:00 - 21:00 | SOMA
Cliterary Salon is a show of ribald and rowdy stories about the clitoris, bringing a spirit of fun sexuality to a literary scene that’s traditionally been focused on cis male experience. (Note: Not all women have clits, not all clits belong to women.)
It’s Friday the 13th and Cliterary Salon’s theme will be Unlucky in Love. Bring your ex, your diary, all those old love letters, and prepare to dump them in the trash as our lineup of writers pour out their hearts, souls, and sexy bits for a night of entertainment.
Enjoy an evening of readings by Bay Area Cliterary Types in a secret Speakeasy in Soma (location and passwords will be emailed out a week prior to the event! Doors open at 6pm.)
Readers: Lauren Parker, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Louis Evans, Meg Elison and MORE!
Assistance is available upon request, however, the venue is patently inaccessible for most chair-users.

POETRY EVENT! Perversions / Perversións / Perverseco
2018-04-14 18:00 - 19:30 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States

Celebrating The Collected Letters of Alan Watts, and Zen Odyssey with Anne Watts, Janica Anderson, and Steven Zahavi Schwartz
2018-04-15 16:00 - 17:30 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts a special celebration of two new books: The Collected Letters of Alan Watts, edited by two of his daughters, Joan and Anne Watts, and Zen Odyssey: The Story of Sokei-An, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, and the Birth of Zen in America, by Janica Anderson andSteven Zahavi Schwartz, who will be in conversation with Anne. Please join us!

The Collected Letters of Alan Watts
Philosopher, author, and lecturer Alan Watts (1915–1973) popularized Zen Buddhism and other Eastern philosophies for the counterculture of the 1960s. Today, new generations are finding his writings and lectures online, while faithful followers worldwide continue to be enlightened by his teachings. The Collected Letters of Alan Watts reveals the remarkable arc of Watts’s colorful and controversial life, from his school days in England to his priesthood in the Anglican Church as chaplain of Northwestern University to his alternative lifestyle and experimentation with LSD in the heyday of the late sixties. His engaging letters cover a vast range of subject matter, with recipients ranging from High Church clergy to high priests of psychedelics, government officials, publishers, critics, family, and fans. They include C. G. Jung, Henry Miller, Gary Snyder, Aldous Huxley, Reinhold Niebuhr, Timothy Leary, Joseph Campbell, and James Hillman. Watts’ letters were curated by two of his daughters, Joan Watts and Anne Watts, who have added rich, behind-the-scenes biographical commentary.
Anne Watts’ philosophies were strongly shaped by her experience as the daughter of Alan Watts. Anne is a certified hypnotherapist and an educator and counselor in the areas of human sexuality, sexual abuse, family stress, self-esteem, and healing the inner child. She also works with financial and aging issues. Since 1985 she has led hundreds of human growth workshops in the United States, Canada, Australia, Japan, England, and Germany as a facility with the Human Awareness Institute. Anne lives in Santa Rosa, California with her long-time partner and husband.

Zen Odyssey: The Story of Sokei-An, Ruth Fuller Sasaki, and the Birth of Zen in America
Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Sokei-an Shigetsu Sasaki: two pioneers of Zen in the West. Ruth was an American with a privileged life, even during the height of the Great Depression, before she went to Japan and met D. T. Suzuki. Sokei-an was one of the first Zen priests to come to America; he brought the gift of the Dharma to the United States but in 1942 was put in an internment camp. One made his way to the West and the other would find her way to the East, but together they created the First Zen Institute of America and helped birth a new generation of Zen practitioners: among them, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, and Burton Watson. They were married less than a year before Sokei-an died, but Ruth would go on to helm trailblazing translations in his honor and to become the first foreigner to be the priest of a Rinzai Zen temple in Japan.

With lyrical prose, Janica Anderson and Steven Zahavi Schwartz bring Ruth and Sokei-an to life. Two dozen intimate photographs show us two people who aren’t mere historical figures, but flesh and blood people, walking their paths.

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Janica Anderson, a master falconer, has been a student and teacher of esoteric traditions for fifty years, which included being a research assistant in the psychology department at Harvard University and an instructor at Esalen Institute. She founded Big Sur Tapes, which preserved and published audio archives of institutes such as Esalen and individuals such as Aldous Huxley and Alan Watts.

Steven Zahavi Schwartz is a writer, editor, visual artist, and teacher with many years of immersion in Buddhist study and practice, including a year in Asia during which he was a student of Ajahn Buddhadasa at Wat Suan Mokh in Southern Thailand. He is the author of “Making Sanctuary: Craft, Nature, and the Architecture of Attention.” He lives in Sonoma, where he runs Meantimes Press.

POETRY! C. Arellano / Estela de la Cruz / Lorenzo Herrera y Lozano
2018-04-15 18:30 - 19:30 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States

East Bay Launch for "Invisible Gifts, Poems" with Maw Shein Win and Guests
2018-04-15 19:30 - 21:00 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
Join us for the launch of Maw Shein Win’s first full-length poetry collection Invisible Gifts, Poems.
With readings by:
MK Chavez
Sharon Coleman
Cassandra Dallett
Tim Donnelly
Tongo Eisen-Martin
Maw Shein Win
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Invisible Gifts, Poems by Maw Shein Win
Manic D Press April 2018
Themes of vulnerability and power emerge through reflections on family, art, and loss from an award-winning poet.
In her full-length collection of poems, Win depicts a colorful world imbued with unexpected paradoxes: nature is both comforting and savagely unnerving; love is permanent and fleeting; and the accuracy and flaws of memory abound. Her experiences with illness and recovery intertwine with her identity as a Burmese American daughter of immigrant doctors. For instance, in poems like “Hands”: My father’s hands, frail birds, shaking wings. / In Burmese, “win” means bright. / Hands that stitched skin together and brought back life. Win’s unique perspective and artful language offer readers insight into how the heart can bend and mend without breaking.

Michael Hoerman
2018-04-16 19:00 - 21:00 | Himalayan Flavors, 1585 University Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94703, United States
Born and raised in the Ozarks and now residing in Fayetteville, Michael’s award-winning poetry embodies the bone-deep passion he feels for our rural culture and his reverence for the power of imagination. Michael is listed in A Readers’ Map of Arkansas for his groundbreaking cultivation of Fayetteville’s literary landscape. In 1995 he co-founded Arkansas’s first National Poetry Slam team. In 1997 he edited a Frank Stanford feature entitled “Death in the Cool Evening” that brought renewed critical attention to the legendary poet.
Michael is touring to share a selection of earlier and never-heard-before poems in his new chapbook, Disoriented Fascination, featuring three poems nominated and now under consideration for Pushcart Prizes.
A poet active since 1985, Michael’s publication history and critical recognitions include a Massachusetts Artists Fellowship in the category of Poetry, Bad Rotten, his debut chapbook published by Pudding House Publications, inclusion in Lavender Ink’s 2012 anthology entitled Fuck Poems and four other anthologies, journals including Arkansas Literary Forum and Eureka Literary Magazine, and residencies at Spiva Center for the Arts and Sedona Summer Colony among many others.
Born into rural poverty in the Ozarks, Michael is a survivor. Though living in poverty, disabled by PTSD, a formerly incarcerated person, with only a GED, Michael’s poetry has broken through barriers that have too long kept the poor, the disabled, the uncredentialed and the formerly incarcerated out in the cold. His story will empower others like him, and challenge those who would keep them down and out in the communities where they are integral.

Book Launch with Christopher Moore at Opera Plaza!
2018-04-16 19:00 - 21:00 | Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness, San Francisco , CA, 94107, United States
New York Times-bestselling author Christopher Moore joins us in celebration of his hilarious new novel, Noir. One day before the book’s official release, this very special event gives fans a chance to grab their copy of Noir before anyone else!
*Please note: A Books Inc. receipt for Noir is required for a place in the signing line*

Samantha Irby / Meaty
2018-04-16 19:30 - 21:00 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith is thrilled to host Samantha Irby, in town to read from her beloved first collection of essays—and the basis for the upcoming FX Studios series—Meaty! Please join us.
Samantha Irby exploded onto the printed page with this debut collection of essays about trying to laugh her way through failed relationships, taco feasts, bouts with Crohn’s disease, and more. Every essay is crafted with the same scathing wit and poignant candor thousands of loyal readers have come to expect from visiting her notoriously hilarious blog, bitchesgottaeat.com.

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“Raunchy, funny and vivid…Those faint of heart beware…strap in and get ready for a roller-coaster ride to remember.”—Kirkus Reviews

“Amazingly crass, defiant, witty, terrifying, and wondrous…[Irby] cuts the bawdy, wickedly funny pieces with some truly poignant palate cleansers…Irby’s voice is raw, gripping, and …Delicious.”—Booklist

“Her candor in style and subject matter–mostly sex, dating, and the general lousiness of men–has earned Samantha Irby a cult following… Honesty mixed with self-deprecating humor is what propels reader.”—Time Out Chicago

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Samantha Irby writes a blog called bitches gotta eat and is the author of the essay collections Meaty and the New York Times Bestseller We Are Never Meeting in Real Life.

Queer Words: In Conversation with Natasha Dennerstein
2018-04-17 19:00 - 20:00 | Folio Books, 3957 24th St, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
Celebrate National Poetry Month with Australian-born poet Natasha Dennerstein, as she shares with us snippets from her various books, “Anatomize,” “Triptych Caliform,” “Seahorse,” and “About a Girl,” a novella in verse.
