Holloway Reading Series: A Memorial for Sean Bonney
2020-04-01 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Maude Fife Room, UC Berkeley, 2000 Carleston Street, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States

Lyric & Dirges: Ether Edition #1
2020-04-01 19:00 - 20:00
Join us for the launching of Lyrics & Dirges: Ether Edition
We have a new format and the same literary wonderland.
Our inaugural virtual reading is happening on April 1st with three amazing writers Norma Liliana Valdez, Georgina Marie, and Nick Johnson
We will be meeting on Zoom, specific details below and if you’re new to Zoom you can download the app here:
https://zoom.us/ and here’s a handy
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Beth Lisick
2020-04-01 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reads from
Edie On The Green Screen: A Novel
published by 7.13 Books
City Lights welcomes back Beth Lisick to celebrate her debut novel from 7.13 Books.
Edie Wunderlich was the It girl, on the covers of the city’s alt-weeklies, repping the freak party scene on the eve of the first dot-com boom. Fast-forward twenty years, and Edie hasn’t changed, but San Francisco has. Still a bartender in the Mission, Edie now serves a seemingly never-ending stream of tech bros while the punk rock parties of the millennium’s end are long gone. When her mother dies, leaving her Silicon Valley home to Edie, she finds herself mourning her loss in the heart of the Bay Area’s tech monoculture, and embarks on a last-ditch quest to hold on to her rebel heart. New York Times bestseller Beth Lisick’s first novel EDIE ON THE GREEN SCREEN chronicles Silicon Valley’s rapidly changing culture with biting observational humor, an insider’s wisdom, and disarming pathos, while asking, “What comes after It?”
Beth Lisick is a writer and actor from the San Francisco Bay Area, currently living in Brooklyn. She is the author of five previous books, including the New York Times bestseller Everybody Into the Pool, and co-founder of the Porchlight Storytelling Series. Beth has also worked as a baker, a promotional banana mascot, a background extra for TV and film, and an aide to people with developmental disabilities and dementia. This is her first novel.

Jane Hirshfield / Ledger
2020-04-01 19:30 - 21:00 | Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
reads from her new volume of poetry Ledger, a book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning from the internationally renowned poet named “among the modern masters” (Washington Post).

Wednesday, April 1, 2020 – 7:30pm

From one of our most celebrated contemporary poets–long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T.S. Eliot Prize–comes Jane Hirshfield’s Ledger, her most important work yet. From its already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance (“Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw.”), Hirshfield’s poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments, and call us to action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider “the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap,” recognize the intimacy of interconnection (“lichens, burdocks, mycelial mats between trees– / forgive this hubris”), and apply the lever of questions (“How came separation to chisel, / to cherish, to chafe?”) by which we might begin to find a way forward. Finally, it is the human spirit and words themselves–loyal instruments of recognition, humility, and praise–that triumph in this stunning accounting by an essential poet.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine books of poetry, including Ledger; The Beauty; Come, Thief; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She is also the author of two now-classic collections of essays, Nine Gates and Ten Windows, and has edited and co-translated four books of world poets from the past. Her books have received the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Hirshfield has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets, and presents her work at literary and interdisciplinary events worldwide. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The New York Times, New Republic, Harper’s, and Poetry, and have been selected for ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A resident of Northern California, she is a 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Hilary Leichter, Mary South, Rita Bullwinkel, & R.O. Kwon
2020-04-01 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Hilary Leichter and Mary South discuss their new works, Temporary and You Will Never Be Forgotten, with Rita Bullwinkel and R.O. Kwon.
Praise for Temporary
“A narrative so deliciously allusive and disarmingly literal that this reader kept thinking maximum glee had been attained, only for the glee to somehow grow even more maximal just a few sentences later.” —Helen Oyeyemi
“Temporary took me by storm. Each short chapter is a wallop of topsy-turvy wisdom and humor, and together they build a strange and sparkling universe. The novel is about work and identity and the masks we wear, but it’s also about our weird little human hearts and what they can bear. I am a Hilary Leichter superfan.”—Ramona Ausubel
“In Temporary, the quest for gainful employment is epic; operatic; deliciously, sunnily, terrifyingly entertaining. Hilary Leichter is a conjurer of rare talent.” —Kelly Link
About Temporary
In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”
This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.
Praise for You Will Never Be Forgotten
“Mary South gets it. With dark humor, she knocks down like so many lined-up ducks all the consoling pieties that nurture humanist fiction, and sets up in their place a vision of subjects irremediably mediated, strung out along networks that far exceed them. Her universe is glitchy, full of weakly-encrypted memory, open-source desire, self-replicating fantasy: the human in hock to the algorithm.” —Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island
“Mary South’s stories are a vital mix of wry humor, cunning provocation, disturbing prophecy and deep feeling. A brilliant and brilliantly strange and strangely funny and menacing debut!” —Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark
“Mary South’s wickedly, exquisitely hilarious collection dwells in the intimate aches of modern life, writ large in strange, delightful stories that include, but are not limited to, clones, brain surgery, internet trolls, and warehouses full of spare men. Dazzlingly imagined and full of wit, You Will Never Be Forgotten is a gift to readers everywhere, a ferocious transmission from one of the most audacious, most original new voices in fiction.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of Intimations
About You Will Never Be Forgotten
In this provocative, bitingly funny debut collection, people attempt to use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief or rage or despair, only to reveal their most flawed and human selves
An architect draws questionable inspiration from her daughter’s birth defect. A content moderator for “the world’s biggest search engine,” who spends her days culling videos of beheadings and suicides, turns from stalking her rapist online to following him in real life. At a camp for recovering internet trolls, a sensitive misfit goes missing. A wounded mother raises the second incarnation of her child.
In You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South explores how technology can both collapse our relationships from within and provide opportunities for genuine connection. Formally inventive, darkly absurdist, savagely critical of the increasingly fraught cultural climates we inhabit, these ten stories also find hope in fleeting interactions and moments of tenderness. They reveal our grotesque selfishness and our intense need for love and acceptance, and the psychic pain that either shuts us off or allows us to discover our deepest reaches of empathy. This incendiary debut marks the arrival of a perceptive, idiosyncratic, instantly recognizable voice in fiction—one that could only belong to Mary South.

Lunch Poems: Mary Jo Bang
2020-04-02 12:10 - 12:50 | Morrison Library, UC Berkeley, 2000 Carleston Street, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
Mary Jo Bang is the author of eight books of poems—including A Doll For Throwing, Louise in Love, The Last Two Seconds, and Elegy, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award—and a translation of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher. She has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy of Berlin. She teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.

Screenside Chat #1: Thea Matthews, MK Chavez, JP Howard
2020-04-02 18:00 - 19:00
Join us for our first Screenside Chat, a new limited-run series where Nomadic Press partners with other publishers to bring you “fireside chat”-esque engaging readings and conversations between 2–3 writers, all from the comfort of your home. There will be a brief Q&A at the end, as well, for audience members to ask our writers
questions.
For this iteration of Screenside Chat, we have paired up with the wonderful Red Light Lit (founded and run by Jennifer Lewis). Our writers are Thea Matthews (author of Unearth [The Flowers], forthcoming with Red Light Lit), Mk Chavez (author of Dear Animal, and Mothermorphosis published by Nomadic Press), and JP Howard (author of SAY/MIRROR published by The Operating System & Liminal Lab). Jennifer Lewis will emcee, and J. K. Fowler will be working tech and handling the chat.
Free and welcome to all. For those that can, please show your monetary support so that we can continue our work. You can do so via Cash App at $NomadicPress or https://cash.app/$NomadicPress. You can also “purchase” a ticket through this Facebook event to donate any amount that is feasible for you in this moment.
Zoom Joining Information
Time: Apr 2, 2020 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
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Canceled: Cowboy & Other Poems: Alejandro Albarrán Polanco and Rachel Galvin
2020-04-02 19:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Mexican poet Alejandro Albarrán Polanco joins poet and translator Rachel Galvin to talk about his chapbook, Cowboy & Other Poems, from Ugly Duckling Presse.
About Cowboy & Other Poems, Maricela Guerrero writes “Prosthesis poems raising questions about the means by which the discourse of terror erodes our conversations. Piles of poems bursting into piles of words, crashing against the univocal: Albarrán’s work is an ensemble of voices resonating from the most sincere tenderness to the most terrible and terrifying ways in which the contemporary world of crime and horror is narrated. In this book a cowboy gallops on a thousand prairies of senseless sense, carrying us mounted on the rump, expectant.”

CONTACT:

Leslie-Ann Woofter
lwoofter@catranslation.org
415.512.8812

AUTHOR
Alejandro Albarrán Polanco

Alejandro Albarrán Polanco (b. Mexico City) is the author of Algunas personas no son caballos, which won the Premio Internacional Manuel Acuña in 2018. He is a founding editor of the press Canón Accidental and co-director of the radio program Radio Rara. He is also a musician and conceptual artist whose performances, installations, and artist’s books have been featured in numerous art exhibitions.

TRANSLATOR
Rachel Galvin

Rachel Galvin is an award-winning poet, translator, and scholar. Her books include two collections of poetry, Pulleys & Locomotion and Elevated Threat Level; a work of criticism, News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945; and Hitting the Streets, a translation from the French of Raymond Queneau. She is a co-founder of the Outranspo, an international creative translation collective, and assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: POETRY, PROSE & EVERYTHING GOES... ONLINE!
2020-04-02 19:00
You’re Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes Online!
an ONLINE Open Mic w/Ned Buskirk & the You’re Going to Die Team!
Yeah. It’s an ONLINE OPEN MIC.
I need it. You need it. Let’s do it.
Thursday, April 2nd
Virtual Doors at 7pm
Show at 7:30pm
Seating is first come, first served… to the person who gets the seat in your house.
REGISTER HERE: https://bit.ly/33US8Gz
PLEASE NOTE:
Registration DOES NOT guarantee a spot on the call!!!
There are only 100 call spots – our commitment is to keep it intimate, so whoever needs to share, gets to share…
Do not wait – don’t be late!!
TICKETING:
Like so many other artists & nonprofits with an event focus, much of our work for the foreseeable future is cancelled. For this special online event we suggest that people pay between $10-50, but don’t hesitate to go above or below based on what feels possible. And PLEASE, if you are suddenly in financial danger, DO NOT pay us. We’re just happy you’re alive & able to join. If you’re still earning income (or are just generally resourced), we very much welcome your generosity.
Venmo: @Peter-Buskirk
Paypal: chelsea@yg2d.com
You’re Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes ONLINE!
is an ONLINE open mic event, the communal offering for us to explore the conversation of death & dying, to embrace our losses & mortality, to grieve, bereave & honor what we’ve lost & love… while all the while making room for simply being ALIVE.
Sign-ups will be during the Zoom Call & the list will fill up quickly, so if you want to share, say so sooner rather than later.
If you’re going to perform, keep it under 5 MINUTES. That’s right: 5 MINUTES. WE WILL TIME YOU. And YES – NED WILL VIRTUALLY HUG YOU IF HE HAS TO!
Poetry, prose, music, dancing, comedy, drama, happy, sad, & on & on & on… Remember: EVERYTHING GOES… so share whatever you want. And you don’t have to perform anything; the audience is as essential as the performers.
Please contact ned@yg2d.com with any questions, concerns or feedback!
Looking forward to sharing a special evening together…
Mortally Yours,
the You’re Going to Die Team
www.yg2d.com

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
2020-04-02 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from
The Mountains Sing
from Workman Publishing Company
“An epic account of Việt Nam’s painful 20th century history, both vast in scope and intimate in its telling . . . Moving and riveting.” —VIET THANH NGUYEN, author of The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the lyrical beauty of Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, The Mountains Sing tells an enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Trần family, set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War. Trần Diệu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Nội, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that tore not just her beloved country, but her family apart.
Vivid, gripping, and steeped in the language and traditions of Việt Nam, The Mountains Sing brings to life the human costs of this conflict from the point of view of the Vietnamese people themselves, while showing us the true power of kindness and hope.
The Mountains Sing is celebrated Vietnamese poet Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s first novel in English.
Born into the Viet Nam War in 1973, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai grew up witnessing the war’s devastation and its aftermath. She worked as a street seller and rice farmer before winning a scholarship to attend university in Australia. She is the author of eight books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction published in Vietnamese, and her writing has been translated and published in more than 10 countries, most recently in Norton’s Inheriting the War anthology. She has been honored with many awards, including the Poetry of the Year 2010 Award from the Ha Noi Writers Association, as well as many grants and fellowships. Married to a European diplomat, Quế Mai is currently living in Jakarta with her two teenage children.
For more information about Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, visit her at www.nguyenphanquemai.com

Carolyn Forche, In the Lateness of the World at Bookshop Santa Cruz
2020-04-02 19:00 - 21:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz , CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz is delighted to welcome celebrated poet Carolyn Forché for a reading and signing of In the Lateness of the World—her new poetry collection of uncanny grace and moral force.
Over four decades, Carolyn Forché’s visionary work has reinvigorated poetry’s power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other.
Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World, is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The poems call to the reader from the end of the world where they are sifting through the aftermath of history. Forché envisions a place where “you could see everything at once … every moment you have lived or place you have been.” The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and “there is nothing that cannot be seen.” In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, and memoirist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. Her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, was published by Penguin Press in 2019. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.

Monica Sok: A Nail the Evening Hangs On
2020-04-02 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Monica Sok discusses her debut poetry collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs On, with Barbara Jane Reyes.
Praise for A Nail the Evening Hangs On
“Sok’s reflective debut teases out how the trauma of the Khmer Rouge is remembered and retained in the fabric of the country and within her own family… Weaving the threads of her family’s stories, history, place, and identity, these poems glimmer with strength and presence.” —Publishers Weekly
“An unsettling, powerful, important debut.” —Booklist
“The poet is able to offer quiet wisdom without sentimentality. Ultimately this poet refuses to surrender to victimhood. The chapbook ends optimistically in the borough of Brooklyn, where the young speaker lives happily, sometimes seen in the neighborhood eating bagels with friends and writing new poems. She has found her way to ‘the healing fields.’” ―Marilyn Chin
About A Nail the Evening Hangs On
In this staggering poetry debut, Monica Sok illuminates the experiences of Cambodian diaspora and reflects on America’s role in escalating the genocide in Cambodia. A Nail the Evening Hangs On travels from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, where Tuol Sleng and other war museums reshape the imagination of a child of refugees; to New York City and Lancaster, where the dailiness of intergenerational trauma persists on the subway or among the cornfields of a small hometown. Embracing collective memory, both real and imagined, these poems move across time to break familial silence. Sok pieces together voices and fragments—using persona, myth, and imagination—in a transformative work that builds towards wholeness.

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #3
2020-04-03 18:00 - 19:30
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!
Donate (only if you can swing it) by clicking on the “ticket” link or dropping donations via the $Cash app to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress
90 minutes
30 readers
3 minutes each
On Zoom!
It feels really important to gather in these times, and we need to prioritize the health of most vulnerable community members (our elders, those who work with elders, and those with suppressed immune systems). So we are hosting another virtual open mic (this time a little earlier for our east coast friends)! Feel free to join just to listen, too! We can hold up to 100 people.
Hosted by Nazelah Jamison (with J. K. on tech). It’s a continuing experiment, and we hope you can join us!
SIGN-UP SHEET:
https://forms.gle/1ZNKSnnzRZpXxvUE7
Our safe space process still applies to our collective virtual space, so please read this by visiting https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess.
Joining information
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Virtual Open Mic #3
Time: Apr 3, 2020 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/787778071
Meeting ID: 787 778 071
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Meeting ID: 787 778 071
Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/aeh5cBayx5

Bess Kalb / Nobody Will Tell You This But Me
2020-04-03 19:00 - 20:30
Booksmith hosts a live-stream with Bess Kalb for her new book Nobody Will Tell You This but Me.
Please join us … we’ll be streaming on our Facebook page!

“When I stop crying, I’m calling my mother immediately and making her read it.” – Jodi Picoult
“Comic lines as good as in any movie, and pathos as deep as in any novel” – Mike Birbiglia
Bess Kalb, Emmy-nominated TV writer and New Yorker contributor, saved every voicemail her grandmother Bobby Bell ever left her. Bobby was a force–irrepressible, glamorous, unapologetically opinionated. Bobby doted on Bess; Bess adored Bobby. Then, at ninety, Bobby died. But in this debut memoir, Bobby is speaking to Bess once more, in a voice as passionate as it ever was in life.
Recounting both family lore and family secrets, Bobby brings us four generations of indomitable women and the men who loved them. There’s Bobby’s mother, who traveled solo from Belarus to America in the 1880s to escape the pogroms, and Bess’s mother, a 1970s rebel who always fought against convention. Then there’s Bess, who grew up in New York and entered the rough-and-tumble world of L.A. television. Her grandma Bobby was with her all the way–she was the light of Bess’s childhood and her fiercest supporter, giving Bess unequivocal love, even if sometimes of the toughest kind.
In Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, Bobby reminds Bess of the experiences they shared, and she delivers–in phone calls, texts, and unforgettable heart-to-hearts brought vividly to the page–her signature wisdom:
If the earth is cracking behind you, you put one foot in front of the other.
Never. Buy. Fake. Anything.
I swear on your life every word of this is true.
With humor and poignancy, Bess Kalb gives us proof of the special bond that can skip a generation and endure beyond death. This book is a feat of extraordinary ventriloquism and imagination by a remarkably talented writer.

Bess Kalb is an Emmy-nominated writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live. Her writing for the show earned her a Writer’s Guild Award in 2016. She has also written for the Oscars and the Emmys. A regular contributor to The New Yorker‘s “Daily Shouts,” her work has been published in The New Republic, Grantland, Salon.com, Wired, The Nation, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles. Author photo by Lucas Foglia.

This event is free and all ages.
RSVP appreciated but not required.

Luiza, Colleen, and Audra Have a Book Party at Wolfman Books
2020-04-03 19:00 - 21:00 | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, winner of the Charlotte Mew Prize, and Colleen McKee and Audra Puchalski, finalists for the Charlotte Mew Prize, read from their chapbooks, all published in January by Headmistress Press.
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett’s chapbook Tender Age won the 2019 Headmistress Press Charlotte Mew contest. She is also the author of the forthcoming collection Look Alive, winner of the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press, along with five other chapbooks, most recently Shadow Box, winner of the 2019 Madhouse Press Editor’s Prize. Her poetry can be found in Third Coast, Pleiades, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She serves as editor-in-chief of Foglifter and lives in sunny Oakland, California.

Bay Area Poets Coalition
2020-04-04 15:00 - 17:00 | Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison Street, Berkeley, CA, 94702, United States
STRAWBERRY CREEK LODGE
1320 Addison St., Berkeley, CA

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 🙂

After the reading, join us for dinner if you’d like at a nearby restaurant

Smack Dab Queer Open Mic Online!
2020-04-05 17:00 - 19:00
We are giving ONLINE Smack Dab Queer & Trans Open Mic a try. Meet us on Zoom at our usual time 🙂
Smack Dab Queer Open Mic is a free LGBTQ2SIA community event. Our slogan? “All ages, all genders, all the time.” We’re the longest running Q/T Open mic in the bay and we welcome YOU to join us to share: stories, poems, a song, dance, your visual art or your latest manifesto. Want to simply join us as friends, family and supportive allies in Queer and Trans community? Our hosts Larry-bob Roberts {he/him} and Dana Hopkins {she/her} welcome you to come on in!
If you’d like to perform at the open mic, please come sign up at 4:45 pm and bring five minutes of whatever you want to share {we do pay attention to time.}
For Zoom details and instructions about how to join in message us here at Smack Dab Queer Open Mic OR stay tuned to this space for those details. We will post them here on Sunday .

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight / Hex
2020-04-06 19:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts Rebecca Dinerstein Knight (The Sunlit Night) for her new novel Hex. Please join us!
Nell Barber, an expelled PhD candidate in biological science, is exploring the fine line between poison and antidote, working alone to set a speed record for the detoxification of poisonous plants. Her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas, is the hero of Nell’s heart. Nell frequently finds herself standing in the doorway to Joan’s office despite herself, mesmerized by Joan’s elegance, success, and spiritual force.
Surrounded by Nell’s ex, her best friend, her best friend’s boyfriend, and Joan’s buffoonish husband, the two scientists are tangled together at the center of a web of illicit relationships, grudges, and obsessions. All six are burdened by desire and ambition, and as they collide on the university campus, their attractions set in motion a domino effect of affairs and heartbreak.
Meanwhile, Nell slowly fills her empty apartment with poisonous plants to study, and she begins to keep a series of notebooks, all dedicated to Joan. She logs her research and how she spends her days, but the notebooks ultimately become a painstaking map of love. In a dazzling and unforgettable voice, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight has written a spellbinding novel of emotional and intellectual intensity.

“In her brilliant second novel, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight cannily explores both the poisons and the antidotes of love, ambition, mentorship, and yearning, and she does it all in prose so lively that I often found myself laughing with pleasure. Hex is some dark and joyous witchery.” – Lauren Groff, author of Florida
“Rebecca has written a book that examines our natural and absolutely astounding reactions to each other. The language of this novel is so finely tailored, so elegant yet organic, so absorbing that it takes the reader a moment to realize that this is not just a deliciously engaging tale of what it is like to be social and sexual, but that this writing is an actual incantation in itself. It is a beautiful, spooky spell that divides and processes our innate potential for poison or pleasure.” – Jenny Slate, actress and author of Little Weirds
“Hex reads like a botanist’s cross-breeding of The Secret History and Department of Speculation, full of brilliant and bodily obsession. Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is both a scientist and a magician, and she conjures this beautiful spell of a novel with total control.” – Emma Straub, author of Modern Lovers

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is the author of the novel and screenplay The Sunlit Night, and a collection of poems, Lofoten. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker online, among others. Born and raised in New York City, she lives in New Hampshire. Photo by Nina Subin.

Please note: this event will be held at The Bindery, 1727 Haight.
This is a free, all-ages event. The bar opens at 6:30pm; event starts at 7pm.
RSVP appreciated but not required.
As with all of our events, seating may be limited; you can guarantee a seat by pre-purchasing the book below — when checking out, just be sure to include a note that you’d like to attend the event. If you cannot attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of Hex, order below and be sure to put your request in the comments field.
Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs please let us know and we’ll do our absolute best to accommodate you: events@booksmith.com.

D. A. Powell and Paola Capó-García
2020-04-06 19:00 | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, 94704
Paola Capó-García is the author of CLAP FOR ME THAT’S NOT ME (Rescue Press, 2018), selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of Rescue Press’ 2017 Black Box Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Volta, Puerto Rico en mi corazón, Latino Book Review, jubilat, Poetry Society of America, Academy of American Poets, and others. Originally from San Juan, PR, she now lives in San Diego, CA, where she teaches 12th grade English.
D. A. Powell’s books include Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys and Repast, both from Graywolf Press. He received the 2019 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at University of San Francisco.

Malcolm Harris - - Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit w/Robin Sloane
2020-04-06 19:00 | East Bay Booksellers, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 94618
EAST BAY BOOKSELLERS is excited to welcome Malcolm Harristo read from his new book, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit on Tuesday, April 7th at 7pm. He will be joined in conversation by Robin Sloane.
From the writer hailed for giving voice to a generation in Kids These Days comes a bold rejection of a society in which inequality, student debt, and exploitation have come to define our lives
Our economic situation, political discourse, and future prospects have gotten much worse since a guy brought a sign that said “Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit” to the Occupy Wall Street protests. We all knew what he meant then . . . but where are we now? And how has so much happened since the so-called end of history?
Malcolm Harris, one of our sharpest and most versatile critics, tackles these questions in over 30 new and selected pieces, examining everything from the lowering of wages to the rise of fascism–and the maddening cultural landscape in between. Along the way, he cops to being the guy who tricked protestors into thinking Radiohead was playing Occupy Wall Street; investigates why the robots that will replace us so often look like sex objects; and, most comfortingly, assures us that Marx saw the necessity of a crisis moment just like the one we’re in.
Rarely does a writer come along who can turn our world so thoroughly upside-down that we can finally understand it for what it really is, but Harris’s wry and biting essays do just that, and help us laugh at what we see.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and an editor at The New Inquiry. His work has appeared in the New Republic, Bookforum, the Village Voice, n+1, and the New York Times Magazine. His first book was Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials. He lives in Philadelphia.
Robin Sloan grew up in Michigan and now splits his time between San Francisco and the Internet. He is the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.

Escape From Quarantine Reading - a weekly online thing
2020-04-06 19:00 - 20:30
a weekly digital gathering and poetry reading.
join our weekly zoom chat to meet with friends without having to leave your house. this is a space to just talk about what’s going on and how we feel about it and also share our work.
Topic: escape from quarantine reading
Time: Mar 23, 2020 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Every week on Mon, until May 4, 2020, 7 occurrence(s)
Mar 23, 2020 07:00 PM
Mar 30, 2020 07:00 PM
Apr 6, 2020 07:00 PM
Apr 13, 2020 07:00 PM
Apr 20, 2020 07:00 PM
Apr 27, 2020 07:00 PM
May 4, 2020 07:00 PM
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/293972268
Meeting ID: 293 972 268
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Meeting ID: 293 972 268
Find your local number: https://us04web.zoom.us/u/ftXvyehuU

WHY WE SWIM with Bonnie Tsui, Daniel Handler, and Andrew Sean Greer
2020-04-07 17:00 - 18:00
Join these three author-swimmers in a discussion of Bonnie Tsui’s fascinating new book, Why We Swim.
Join us here at 5pm PDT on Tueday, April 7!
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/476150449?pwd=[REDACTED]

MFA Alumni Reading Featuring mai c. doan & Aiden Thomas
2020-04-07 17:30 | Mills Hall Living Room, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland , CA, 94613, United States
Reception at 5:15 pm for newly admitted Mills graduate students, followed by readings.

mai c. doan is poet and writer from Southern California. Her first full-length collection, water/tongue, was published by Omnidawn in 2019. She has published and performed her work though the National Queer Arts Festival, RADAR Productions, Entropy Magazine, Mixed Up!: A Zine about Mixed Race Queer and Feminist Experience, and more. She holds an MFA from Mills College, where she attended as a Community Engagement Fellow.

Aiden Thomas is a YA author with an MFA in Creative Writing from Mills College. Originally from Oakland, California, they now make their home in Portland, OR. As a queer, trans Latinx, Aiden advocates strongly for diverse representation in all media. Aiden’s debut novel, Cemetery Boys, is a Dia de Muertos paranormal romance about Yadriel (a gay, trans brujo) who accidentally summons the wrong ghost. Cemetery Boys is forthcoming from Macmillan in July 2020.

Benicia First Tuesday Poets
2020-04-07 18:45 - 20:45 | Benicia Public Library, 150 East L St., Benicia, 94510
Benicia Public Library in the Dona Benicia Room.
Hosted by Benicia Poet Laureate Tom Stanton.
Mystery Poet followed by open mic!
Founded in 2003.

Litquake on Lockdown: ZYZZYVA's 35th Anniversary Issue Release
2020-04-07 19:00
Celebrate ZYZZYVA’s 35th anniversary issue, to be released in early April, with contributors from the issue which includes such authors and writers as Bryan Washington, Lauren Markham, Margaret Wilkerson Sexton, Kristen Iskandrian, Lysley Tenorio, Dave Madden, Peter Orner, Meg Hurtado Bloom, and many others.
All authors’ books available from your favorite indie bookstores, order from bookshop.org!
Livestream link to be posted the morning of!

Ellen Bass, Indigo at Bookshop Santa Cruz
2020-04-07 19:00 - 21:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz , CA, 95060, United States
Indigo merges elegy and praise poem in an exploration of life’s complex grey areas. Whether her subject is oysters, high heels, a pork chop, a beloved dog, or a wife’s return to health, Bass pulls us in with exquisite immediacy. Her lush and precisely observed descriptions allow us to feel the sheer primal pleasure of being alive in our own “succulent skin,” the pleasure of the gifts of hunger, desire, touch. In this book, joy meets regret, devotion meets dependence, and most importantly, the poet so in love with life and living begins to look for the point where the price of aging overwhelms the rewards of staying alive. Bass is relentless in her advocacy for the little pleasures all around her. Her gaze is both expansive and hyperfocused, celebrating (and eulogizing) each gift as it is given and taken, while also taking stock of the larger arc. She draws the lines between generations, both remembering her parents’ lives and deaths and watching her own children grow into the space that she will leave behind. Indigo shows us the beauty of this cycle, while also documenting the deeply human urge to resist change and hang on to the life we have, even as it attempts to slip away.
Ellen Bass is co-author of the best-selling The Courage to Heal, which has sold more than one million copies and has been translated into nine languages. She has also published several volumes of poetry, including The Human Line, and her poems have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The New Republic. A Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she lives in Santa Cruz, and teaches in the MFA program at Pacific University.
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 April 18th.

C Pam Zhang: How Much of These Hills is Gold
2020-04-07 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
C Pam Zhang discusses her debut novel How Much of These Hills is Gold.
Praise for How Much of These Hills is Gold
“C Pam Zhang’s debut is ferocious, dark and gleaming, a book erupting out of the interstices between myth and dream, between longing and belonging. How Much of These Hills Is Gold tells us that stories–like people, like the rough and stunning landscape of California itself–are constantly in the process of being made, broken, and finally remade into something tender and new.” —Lauren Groff, New York Times-bestselling author of Fates and Furies

“A haunting, riveting and truly remarkable debut. Zhang writes with the clear-eyed lucidity of ancient myth-makers whose eyes are attuned to the vicissitudes of nature and humanity.”—Chigozie Obioma, author of Booker Prize finalist An Orchestra of Minorities
“This exhilarating novel unweaves the myths of the American West and offers in their place a gorgeous, broken, soulful, feral song of family and yearning, origin and earth. C Pam Zhang is a brilliant, fearless writer. This book is a wonder.” —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
About How Much of These Hills is Gold
An electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home.
Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future.
Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and re-imagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it’s about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.

Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman in Conversation
2020-04-08 12:00 - 13:00
A fundraiser for Pegasus Books

About this Event

It’s a tough time for local bookstores, what with the social distancing and the sheltering in place. So we’re raising funds to help local Bay Area bookstores stay in business. First up: Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon in conversation, including a Q&A.
Ayelet Waldman is the author of the novels Love and Treasure, Red Hook Road, and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits. Plus the memoir A Really Good Day: How Microdosing Made a Mega Difference in My Mood, My Marriage, and My Life.
Michael Chabon is the author of several novels, including Moonglow, Telegraph Ave., the Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Wonder Boys and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.
Both Chabon and Waldman wrote for the recent TV series, Star Trek: Picard.
The beneficiary
Pegasus Books has been delivering books and dreams to the Berkeley area since 1969, and they’re a vital part of our book-loving community. They have an amazing selection of new and used books and a warm, friendly atmosphere, complete with adorable cats. They give dog treats to dogs, and stickers to kids, and they have some of the most fun events in the city, and we’d be lost without them.
Every penny you spend on tickets to this event goes directly to Pegasus Books.
How does it work?
We use the conferencing system Zoom. After you sign up you’ll get an email with the Zoom access code. (Check that Eventbrite is using your current email address.) You don’t have to join with video, but it’s nice to see faces.

Mari Coates with Peg Alford Pursell / Launch for The Pelton Papers
2020-04-08 19:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts the launch party for Mari Coates and her new novel The Pelton Papers. She’ll be in conversation with Peg Alford Pursell (A Girl Goes into the Forest). Join us!
A richly imagined novel based on the life of artist Agnes Pelton, whose life tracks the early days of modernism in America. Born into a family ruined by scandal, Agnes becomes part of the lively New York art scene, finding early success in the famous Armory Show of 1913. Fame seems inevitable, but Agnes is burdened by shyness and instead retreats to a contemplative life, first to a Long Island windmill, and then to the California desert. Undefeated by her history—family ruination in the Beecher-Tilton scandal, a shrouded Brooklyn childhood, and a passionate attachment to another woman—she follows her muse to create more than a hundred luminous and deeply spiritual abstract paintings.

Mari Coates lives in San Francisco, where, before joining University of California Press as a senior editor, she was an arts writer and theater critic. Her regular column appeared in the SF Weekly with additional profiles and features appearing in the San Francisco Chronicle, East Bay Monthly, Advocate, and other news outlets. Her stories have been published in the literary journals HLLQ and Eclipse, and she is grateful for residencies at I-Park, Ragdale, and Hypatia-in-the-Woods, which allowed her to develop and complete The Pelton Papers. She holds degrees from Connecticut College and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. Find her online at maricoates.com. Author photo by Lynn Shepodd.

Peg Alford Pursell is the author of A Girl Goes into the Forest and of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow, the 2017 Indies Book of the Year for Literary Fiction. Her work has appeared in Permafrost, the Los Angeles Review, Joyland Magazine, and other journals and anthologies. She is the founder and director of the national reading series Why There Are Words and of WTAW Press.

Please note: this event will be held at The Bindery, 1727 Haight.
This is a free, all-ages event. The bar opens at 6:30pm; event starts at 7pm.
RSVP appreciated but not required.
As with all of our events, seating may be limited; you can guarantee a seat by pre-purchasing the book below — when checking out, just be sure to include a note that you’d like to attend the event. If you cannot attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of The Pelton Papers, order below and be sure to put your request in the comments field.
Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs please let us know and we’ll do our absolute best to accommodate you: events@booksmith.com.

Litquake on Lockdown: We All Want to Change the World
2020-04-08 19:00
Fiction writers are often told – by teachers, editors, and agents – that politics and literature don’t mix. But in these times of political polarization and dissatisfaction, many writers are reconsidering this conventional wisdom. How can ambitious writers find a space to explore the matters of life and death, wealth and poverty, war and governance, that affect us all? How should art respond to the terrors of modern life? Join five accomplished writers as they share work that has grappled with these questions.
All authors’ books available from your favorite indie bookstores, order from bookshop.org!
Livestream link to be posted the morning of!

Speakers

Kirstin Chen
Kirstin Chen‘s second novel, Bury What We Cannot Take (Little A, March 2018), was named a best book of the year by Entropy, Popsugar, and Book Bub, and a top pick of the season by Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, Harper’s Bazaar, and InStyle. She is also the aut… Read More →

Andrew Altschul
Andrew Altschul’s third novel, The Gringa, was published in March. In a starred review, Booklist called it “a captivating depiction of passion, disenchantment, and hope gone violently awry.” His previous novels are Deus Ex Machina and Lady Lazarus. His work has appeared in Best… Read More →

Ramona Ausubel
Ramona Ausubel is the author of two novels and two story collections. Her most recent book, Awayland, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection, a Finalist for the California Book Award, Colorado Book Award and long-listed for the Story Prize. She is the recipient of the PEN/USA… Read More →

Danielle Evans
Danielle Evans is the author of the story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, and the forthcoming collection The Office of Historical Corrections. She is the winner of the PEN American Robert W. Bingham Prize and the Hurston-Wright award for fiction, a National Book… Read More →

Joshua Furst
Joshua Furst’s critically acclaimed novel Revolutionaries was published last year. He’salso the author of The Sabotage Café—named to the 2007 year-end best-of lists of the Chicago Tribune, the Rocky Mountain News and the Philadelphia City Paper, as well as being awarded the… Read More →
