Litseen

Loretta Diane Walker + Open Mic
2016-07-21 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Willow Glen Library, 1157 Minnesota Ave, San Jose , CA, 95125, United States
Loretta Diane Walker, a two-time nominee for the Pushcart Prize for poetry, has published two collections of her work. Her poetry can also be found in the new anthology of 60 Texas women poets entitled Her Texas and within her manuscript In This House, soon to be published by Bluelight Press, 1st World Publishing. Her manuscript Word Ghetto won the 2011 Bluelight Press Book Award. Her work has been honored many times and has appeared in numerous publications. A very dear fried asked Loretta, “When are you going to write a novel and make some real money? You have some great ideas.” Her answer for now is this: “There is great joy in what I do.” One day she hopes to write a novel, but today she is a poet and music teacher at Reagan Elementary in Odessa, Texas. She graduated from Ector High School. received a Bachelor of Music Education degree from Texas Tech University and earned a Master’s of elementary Education from the University of Texas at the Permian Basin. For more information, check her website at lorettadianewalker.weebly.com.

Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan: Sarong Party Girls
2016-07-21 19:30 - 21:30 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan presents Sarong Party Girls, a brilliant and engaging novel—Emma set in modern Asia—about a young woman’s rise in the glitzy city of Singapore, where old traditions clash with modern materialism. Jazzy is a bombastic yet tenderly vulnerable gold-digger who reveals the contentious gender politics and class tensions thrumming beneath the shiny exterior of Singapore’s glamorous nightclubs and busy streets. Moving through Jazzy’s colorful, stratified world, she realizes she cannot ignore the troubling incongruity of new money and old-world attitudes which threaten to crush her dreams.Vividly told in Singlish— Singaporean English with its distinctive cadence and slang—Sarong Party Girls brilliantly captures the unique voice of this young, striving woman caught between worlds. With remarkable vibrancy and empathy, Cheryl Tan brings not only Jazzy, but the city of Singapore, to dazzling, dizzying life.

Born and raised in Singapore, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is a New York–based journalist and author of A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family, and edited the fiction anthology Singapore Noir. She has been a staff writer at the Wall StreetJournal, InStyle magazine, and the Baltimore Sun.

Laurel Ann Bogen + Mk Chavez
2016-07-21 19:30 - 21:30 | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Laurel Ann Bogen’s new book is Psychosis in the Produce Department: New and Selected Poems, 1975-2015. Steve Kowit said, “Laurel Ann Bogen’s poems are lethal and smoking…an exuberant mix of human passions, a collection of poems that are at once mad with voltage and utterly sane.” Her collections include Washing a Language and The Last Girl in the Land of Butterflies. Ranging in themes as diverse as horrific beauty and exquisite madness, dysfunctional families, love and anti-love, life in Los Angeles and Hollywood, and growing up as a Baby Boomer, these poems offer sly, humorous, surreal, and genre-busting work that can only be called Vintage Bogen. She was also a founding member of the celebrated performance group Nearly Fatal Women.
Mk Chavez’s new book is Mothermorphosis. Blas Falconer says, “The extraordinary poems in Mothermorphosis place readers in the particular life of a daughter and her schizophrenic mother; however, a larger world, full of war and tenderness, misunderstanding and clarity, vulnerability and empowerment…is present, too, so the book speaks with great urgency for all and to all of us.” She is author of Virgin Eyes and several other chapbooks; a new full-length collection, Dear Animal, is forthcoming this fall. Co-founder and co-curator of Lyrics & Dirges, the Berkeley-based monthly reading series, she is also co-director of the Berkeley Poetry Festival and a proud member of the Association of Black & Black Writers

SF Art Book Fair
2016-07-23 11:00 - 18:00 | Minnesota Street Project, 1275 Minnesota Street, San Francisco , CA, 94107, United States
We are pleased to announce the inaugural San Francisco Art Book Fair. The list of 2016 participants is now online!
Scroll down to PARTICIPANTS to see the 70+ publishers, artists and booksellers joining us this year.
Registration for 2016 is closed at this time, but we will be taking applications for 2017 very soon.
Follow us on instagram @sfartbookfair for fair updates, previews of featured publishers and more.
The 2016 San Francisco Art Book Fair
Saturday, July 23rd: 11am – 6pm Sunday, July 24th: 11am – 5pm
Preview on Friday, July 22nd: 6pm – 10pm
The 2016 San Francisco Art Book Fair is the inaugural event of an annual multi-day festival of artists’ publications. The fair includes artists’ books, art catalogs, monographs, periodicals, zines, printed ephemera, and artists’ multiples presented by independent publishers, antiquarian dealers, artists, collectors, and enthusiasts, as well as a diverse range of programs and live performances.
The mission of the fair is to foster the unique art publishing community of the Bay Area while providing a platform for national and international publishers to exhibit their work to a new audience.
1275 Minnesota Street is a 35,000 square-foot building in San Francisco’s Dogpatch neighborhood that houses 11 galleries, temporary exhibitions spaces, a media room, and a cafe.

Conditional Love w/ Doan, Okyomon + Young
2016-07-23 14:00 - 18:00 | Small Press Distribution, 1341 7th Street, Berkeley , CA, 94710, United States
SPD PRESENTS is a monthly reading series with the aim of fostering relationships between emerging writers and readers in our national small press community.
MAI DOAN is the author of the chapbook, transgression: “things i have learned from my body”. Her work is grounded in the imaginative, intuitive, ancestral, and the felt and works towards resisting state-sponsored narratives around history, identity, healing, and trauma. mai has poetry in the upcoming issue of HOLD: a journal and is a performing artist in this year’s National Queer Arts Festival. She holds an MFA in Poetry from Mills College where she attended as a Community Engagement Fellow and is based on Oakland, CA.
PRECIOUS OKOYOMON is the author of “Ajebota” (Bottlecap Press. 2016) Her work has been featured in Metatron, Fanzine, Reality Beach and other places online and in print. She’s just a lil lamb leaking milk.
STEPHANIE YOUNG’s most recent book is “Ursula or University” (Krupskaya, 2013). She edited the anthology Bay Poetics and is a founding editor of Deep Oakland. With Juliana Spahr she coedited A Megaphone: Some Enactments, Some Numbers, and Some Essays about the Continued Usefulness of Crotchless-pants-and-a-machine-gun Feminism.

Bay Area Poetry Marathon
2016-07-23 18:30 - 20:30 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Guest curator: Chloe Veylit
Readers: Brandon Brown
Kazumi Chin
Vanessa Flores
Nick Johnson
Joseph Lease
Michelle Lin
Carrie Murphy
Denise Newman

Christopher Bernard + Clara Hsu
2016-07-24 14:00 - 15:30 | Bird & Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery St, San Francisco , CA, 94131, United States
Christopher Bernard’s new novel, “Voyage to a Phantom City,” is a spine-tingling adventure across the Sahara and a heart-breaking romance, provoking haunting memories of war and a long-lost America after the tragedy of September 11th. It is a spiritual quest into the heart of darkness that discovers the supremely redemptive power of love. Bernard’s previous books include the novel “A Spy in the Ruins,” the short-story collections “Dangerous Stories for Boys” and “In the American Night,” and “The Rose Shipwreck: Poems and Photographs.” He is co-editor of “Caveat Lector” and a regular contributor to “Synchronized Chaos.” Bernard writes fiction, poetry, essays, plays, and criticism. His poetry can be found online at “The Bog of St. Philinte.” He lives in San Francisco.
Clara Hsu is a poet and a traveller. She caught the travel bug some years ago and it has been feeding her ever since. When she is home she teaches piano and stays glued to the computer. When she travels she brings only a note book and pen. Between writing and cooking, her mind wanders like a nomad.

Bill Berkson Memorial
2016-07-24 14:00 - 16:00 | Lecture Hall, SF Art Institute, 800 Chestnut Street, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Dear Friends,
Please join San Francisco Art Institute in remembering and honoring the life of poet, art critic, and much-loved SFAI professor emeritus Bill Berkson.
Memorial Service
Sunday, July 24, 2016 | 2pm
Lecture Hall | 800 Chestnut Street
Reception to follow
Questions?
Contact Sarah Morrison by email or call 415.749.4516.
The memorial is open to the public and we anticipate high attendance. Seating in the Lecture Hall is limited; overflow seating with a simulcast of the program will be available in the SFAI Café.
Bill Berkson moved through life with compassion, grace, and humor. His generous spirit nourished and inspired those around him. He is remembered with special fondness and admiration by the students, faculty, and staff at SFAI, where he taught from 1984 to 2008.
All words are prophetic
Bare the thread, swallow the cloud
Reflected glory drives off
Leaving the original in demand
Repeat after me
– Bill Berkson, from his poem Lady Air
A luminary of our time, Bill’s eloquence with language was surpassed only by the depth of his kindness. He will be greatly missed.

Kim Stanley Robinson: Aurora
2016-07-25 19:00 - 21:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz , CA, 95060, United States
Kim Stanley Robinson is a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards. He is the author of more than twenty books, including the bestselling Mars trilogy and the critically acclaimed Forty Signs of Rain, The Years of Rice and Saltand 2312. In 2008, he was named a “Hero of the Environment” by Time magazine, and he works with the Sierra Nevada Research Institute. He lives in Davis, California.
Aurora is a major new novel from one of science fiction’s most powerful voices that tells the incredible story of our first voyage beyond the solar system.
“Aurora may well be Robinson’s best novel…breaks us out of our well-ingrained, supremely well-rehearsed habits of apocalypse–and lets us see the option of a different future than permanent, hopeless standoff.”—Los Angeles Review of Books on Aurora

Porchlight Open Door: Identity Crisis
2016-07-25 19:00 - 21:00 | Hemlock Tavern, 1131 Polk Street, San Francisco , CA, 94109, United States
Who are you? No, I mean today. Not the you with the asymmetrical bob and overalls. Not the you so obsessed with Stanley Kubrick people stopped inviting you to dinner. Definitely not the you sporting the black Neo trench coat and goatee. We’ll forget about those you’s. At this month’s Open Door we celebrate identities in crisis. Bring your five-minute story about “finding yourself” and you could win a slot on Porchlight’s 14th Anniversary Romp alongside Writer Mary Roach, Mythbuster Adam Savage and performer Moon Zappa!
Porchlight Open Door is a small stage open mic event launched by Porchlight in September 2009. Storytellers add their names to a sign-up sheet, receive a free drink, and then have five minutes to spiel on the monthly theme. The evening’s top storyteller, will win a slot on Porchlight’s 14th Anniversary Romp and a pound of coffee from local roaster Nomadic Ground. And this month, a slot on Porchlight’s 14-year Anniversary show at the Verdi on August 11th.

Heather Young: The Lost Girls
2016-07-26 19:00 - 21:00 | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
In The Lost Girls, six-year-old Emily Evans vanishes from her family’s vacation home on a remote Minnesota lake. Her disappearance destroys the family—her father commits suicide, and her mother and two older sisters spend the rest of their lives at the lake house, keeping a decades-long vigil for the lost child.
Sixty years later Lucy, the quiet and watchful middle sister, lives in the lake house alone. Before her death, she writes the story of that devastating summer in a notebook that she leaves, along with the house, to the only person who might care: her grandniece, Justine.
For Justine, the lake house offers freedom and stability—a way to escape her manipulative boyfriend and give her daughters the home she never had. But the long Minnesota winter is just beginning. The house is cold and dilapidated. The dark, silent lake is isolated and eerie. Her only neighbor is a strange old man who seems to know more about the summer of 1935 than he’s telling.
Soon Justine’s troubled oldest daughter becomes obsessed with Emily’s disappearance, her mother arrives to steal her inheritance, and the man she left launches a dangerous plan to get her back. In a house haunted by the sorrows of the women who came before her, Justine must overcome their tragic legacy if she hopes to save herself and her children.
Heather Young earned her law degree from the University of Virginia, and practiced law in San Francisco before beginning her writing career. She received an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars, and has studied at the Tin House Writers’ Workshop and the Squaw Valley Writers’ Workshop. She lives in Mill Valley, California, with her husband and two children.

Happy Hour Stories
2016-07-26 19:30 - 21:30 | Pegasus Books on Solano, 1855 Solano Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94707, United States
Created in 2014 by Pegasus on Solano’s Elizabeth Freeman and Manuela Aronofsky, Happy Hour Stories is a special story time – for adults!

Every last Tuesday of the month, short stories on a theme are read aloud by Pegasus employees and friends…. Served up with a refreshing drink, and light snacks.
Past Happy Hour Stories themes have included a celebration of Black History Month, LGBTQ Pride, California-inspired fiction, and school stories; with special guests such as local authors Elizabeth Rosner, Darryl Brock, Nia King, and Alex Gino, as well as the Oakland-based band Halcyonaire, and various professional actors.

Get Lit! July 2016 Edition
2016-07-27 19:00 - 21:00 | Corkscrew Wine Bar, 100 Petaluma Blvd N #103, Petaluma, CA, 94952, United States
Get Lit celebrates HOT summer lit with special guest readers Michelle Cruz Gonzales, Daniel Riddle Rodriguez and Hilary Zaid! We sure hope you’ll join us!
Following our guest readers, we’ll have time for schmoozing, buying books and drinks and then YOU can read on the open mic (3-5 minute limit).
* Michelle Cruz Gonzales is the author of the Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band, a memoir about her days in the groundbreaking 1990s female hardcore band Spitboy. Michelle has been a regular contributor to Hip Mama Magazine, published in anthologies, and her story “Juan, El Pájaro” one Honorable Mention in Riversedge Literary Journal contest. She teaches English and creative writing at Las Positas College and lives in Oakland with a jazz pianist, a Mexican nationalist, and three Mexican dogs.
* Daniel Riddle Rodriguez’s real name is Daniel Riddle Rodriguez. A full-time student and father, he is from San Lorenzo, California, where he lives with his son. He is the author of Low Village (CutBank 2016). Previous publications include Juked, Prairie Schooner, Gulf Stream Magazine, Fourteen Hills, and others.
* Hilary Zaid is a writer who prefers candy to alcohol. She is a novelist whose short fiction has appeared in Lilith Magazine, The Southwest Review, CALYX, The Utne Reader and other, funkier venues. She is super stressed out about the possibility of being evicted from her home in Oakland and she is reading tonight from her story “Dark Between the Stars,” the BLOOM Literary Chapbook Prize winner chosen by Judge Lucy Jane Bledsoe.
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*NEW FOR 2016: Join hosts Dani Burlison and Kara Vernor the 4th Wednesday of January, April, July and October for the Get Lit reading series at Corkscrew Wine Bar in Petaluma!
Each event features three guest readers with a short open mic immediately following. Authors will have books and other materials available to purchase. Corkscrew will have fantastic wine, beer, non-alcoholic beverages, appetizers and desserts for sale at the bar, as well.
Get Lit is a free, 21+ event

InsideStoryTime: THE UNWINDING
2016-07-27 19:30 - 21:30 | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
InsideStorytime THE UNWINDING will feature Melissa Cistaro (Pieces of my Mother), Variny Yim (The Immigrant Princess), Genanne Walsh (Twister), Nick Johnson (Music for Mussolini), and Alex Moran.

Alina Smiotanko + James Tracy
2016-07-28 18:30 - 20:30 | Readers Bookstore, Fort Mason Center, Building C, San Francisco, CA, 94123, United States
Join us every Thursday at 6:30 p.m. in our Readers Bookstore Fort Mason for our weekly FREE poetry series!
Browse books while listening to internationally acclaimed poets and artists such as Jonathan Richman, David Meltzer, Diane di Prima and California Poet Laureate Al Young. The series is curated by Friends’ Resident Poet Jack Hirschman. (For a list of the scheduled readers, please see the line up below.)
Proceeds from our bookstores benefit the San Francisco Public Library.

Martinis & Writers - Literary Speakeasy!
2016-07-28 19:00 - 20:30 | Martuni’s, 4 Valencia St, San Francisco , CA, 94103, United States
It’s time to refill those martini glasses — Literary Speakeasy returns to Martuni’s on July 28. Come order up one of the best drinks in town as we bring you some of the best literary talent in the Bay Area. This month’s featured guests include Tusiata Avia, Jason Bayani, Natasha Dennerstein, Bill Dupp, and Soma Mei Sheng Frazier. Your host and curator is James J. Siegel
As always, Literary Speakeasy is a FREE event with NO drink minimum. All attendees will receive a FREE raffle ticket for a chance to win the night’s secret Speakeasy prize. It’s our way of saying “thanks for coming out!”
Come like our page at www.facebook.com/literaryspeakeasy.
Tusiata Avia is a Samoan-New Zealand poet, performer, and writer. She has published three books of poetry: Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, Bloodclot, Fale Aitu/ Spirit House and two
children’s books, Mele and the Massage and The Song. Her one-woman theatre show (also called Wild Dogs Under My Skirt) toured internationally from 2002 to 2008 and shows again in 2016 as a play for six actors. Tusiata has held a number of writers’ residencies and awards, including a Fulbright Pacific Artist Fellowship at the University of Hawai’i and the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand, with her daughter, Sepela and teaches Creative Writing and Performing Arts at Manukau Institute of Technology.
Jason Bayani is the author of Amulet from Write Bloody Press. He’s an MFA graduate from Saint Mary’s College, a Kundiman fellow, and is currently the Program Manager for Kearny Street Workshop.http://jasonbayani.com/
Natasha Dennerstein was born in Melbourne, Australia, to a family originating in Belarus. She worked as a psychiatric nurse for 20 years, which gave her an interesting perspective on the human condition. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University and has had poetry published in Fourth Floor, Landfall, Snorkel, JAAM, Takahe, Shenandoah, Bloom, Transfer, Red Light Lit, Spoon River Poetry Review, Foglifter and sPARLKE + bLINK. Her collection “Anatomize” was published by Norfolk Press in San Francisco in October 2015 and her new collection “Triptych Caliform” will be launched in September this year.
Bill Dupp lives and works in the heart of The Castro as a VJ at Midnight Sun. A lover of fiction and storytelling he has been writing, producing, and acting in theater and film his entire life. As a graduate of UCSB Film, and having worked at both Discovery and Warner Brothers, he left Los Angeles behind and is now celebrating his sixth year in San Francisco! He can be found performing at Oasis and DJing all over town when not manning the VJ booth.
Soma Mei Sheng Frazier is an East Coast native living in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her two fiction chapbooks, Salve (Nomadic Press) and Collateral Damage: A Triptych (RopeWalk Press), earned praise from Nikki Giovanni, Daniel Handler, Antonya Nelson, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Molly Giles, Michelle Tea, and others. You can find her work online at Eclectica Magazine, Carve Magazine, Eleven Eleven, and Kore Press. New work is available in the current issues of Glimmer Train and ZYZZYVA, and forthcoming in Eclectica’s anthology. Soma is at work on a novel and a screenplay.
James J. Siegel is the monthly curator and host of Literary Speakeasy. His first poetry collection, How Ghosts Travel, was published earlier this year by Spuyten Duvyil Press.

Anything But Rock 'n' Roll's Fine: An Evening of Words & Music
2016-07-29 19:00 - 21:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Writer in residence Denise Sullivan will be joined by Victor Krummenacher and Peter Case to read from their respective works in progress!
Arts and culture reporter and author of five books of music
history and biography, “Denise Sullivan represents the insider intellectual stamina of rock ‘n’ roll journalism without the pomp and pretense. She is the past and future of the form, rolled into one uncanny style,”–Pop Matters
Peter Case is a founding member of the Nerves, leader of the Plimsouls, and first troubadour of the post-punk era. He is a Grammy-nominated songwriter, performer and producer (his 13th solo album is titled HWY 62) and the author of several books including a memoir, As Far As You Can Get Without A Passport (Everthemore Books).
Victor Krummenacher is a musician and founding member of the alternative rock band Camper Van Beethoven. He helped form the bands Monks of Doom, Camper Van Chadbourne, McCabe & Mrs. Miller and has pursued a solo career as a singer-songwriter. He also played bass with Cracker for several years. Krummenacher was Art Director of the San Francisco Bay Guardian for six years and is currently the Managing Art Director for Wired.

Book Release Party: Uptown Thief by Aya de Leon
2016-07-30 15:00 - 17:00 | La Peña Cultural Center, 3105 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
Come celebrate the breakthrough sexy social justice novel that’s been 8 years in the making! The event will include a reading by Aya de Leon from UPTOWN THIEF, a performance by Vixen Noir, and Aya will be interviewed by Carolina De Robertis. Books will be available for sale! UPTOWN THIEF by Aya de Leon releases August 2016!
About the book:
A FEMALE ROBIN HOOD WHO ROBS THE RICH AND PROTECTS THE EXPLOITED- UNTIL ONE HEIST TOO MANY PUTS EVERYTHING AT STAKE
Marisol Rivera barely survived being abused with nowhere to turn. So there’s nothing she won’t do to keep her Lower East Side women’s health clinic open and give disadvantaged women new lives. Running an exclusive escort service for New York City’s rich and powerful 1% is the perfect way to bankroll her business—not to mention the perfect cover for robbing corrupt CEOs. And when times get even tougher, pulling a heist on a mega-billionaire will secure the clinic’s future—and her gorgeous crew’s—for good…
There’s just one problem: Marisol didn’t anticipate bad news even more dangerous than her curves. A sexy ex-cop who’s too close for comfort, and a powerful thug with a score to settle, are turning Marisol’s precise planning and seductive fail-safes into insidious traps. Now this beautiful modern-day Robin Hood will have to play some lethal wild cards without rules or limits to save those she loves—and live to steal another day…
“Uptown Thief is a smart, sexy, sizzling good time of a novel–a daring and irresistible blend of high-voltage action and deeply human storytelling. The women in this book blaze so brightly, you could almost burn your fingers on the pages.” – Carolina De Robertis, author of The Gods of Tango
“Staking out space for women of color in the heist-fiction genre, Aya de Leon’s smart, sly writing is a knockout.” – Andi Zeisler, Bitch Magazine
About the Author:
AYA DE LEON Writer. Spoken Word Artist. Activist. She teaches creative writing in UC Berkeley’s African American Studies Department. Her work has been acclaimed in The Village Voice, The Washington Post, and American Theatre Magazine. Her writing has been featured in Guernica, Essence, Ebony, The Huffington Post, xojane and Bitch Magazine. She is an alumna of Cave Canem and VONA.
“Aya de Leon is a feminist writer to watch.” – Sarai Walker, author of DIETLAND

Rolling Writers: R-Dub Love
2016-07-30 18:30 - 20:30 | Rolling Out Cafe, 1722 Taraval St, San Francisco, CA, 94116, United States
“Even or odd, of all days in the year,
Come Lammas Eve at night shall she be fourteen.”

In honor of Juliet’s birthday, Rolling Writers express and reflect on romantic love the evening before Lammas Eve (not wishing to compete with the myriad celebrations of Juliet’s birthday that will undoubtedly take over the city on Lammas Eve itself, July 31; besides which, we don’t show on Sundays).
Readers
Lucille Lang Day
Richard Levine
Roy Mash
Kathleen McClung
Colleen McKee
Sarah Paris
Laura Zink
Music
Ellisa Sun with Michael Crabtree

Entwined: Sisters and Secrets
2016-07-31 14:00 - 15:00 | Bird & Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery St, San Francisco , CA, 94131, United States
The remarkable story of outsider artist Judith Scott, who was institutionalized for more than thirty years before being rescued by her sister. From birth, fraternal twins Judith and Joyce Scott lived as if they were one person in two bodies, understanding instinctively what the other wanted and felt, despite the fact that Judy had Down syndrome, profound deafness, and never learned to speak or sign. But this idyllic childhood of color, texture, and feeling ended abruptly when, at age seven, Judy was taken from their shared bed while Joyce slept, not knowing that the wholeness they had known was being shattered.
For the next three decades, Joyce is left without her other half and must grieve unexpected loss while navigating her relationship with an emotionally distant mother alone. Even so, her life parallels her twin’s in surprising ways. While in college, Joyce too is sent away, pressured to relinquish the secret daughter she bore in hiding to adoption.
Decades later, Joyce resolves to reunite with her sister and fill their remaining years with joy. After winning the struggle to become Judy s legal guardian, she enrolls her in an art center for adults with disabilities in Oakland, California. Judy is hesitant at first, but after two years of uninterested painting and drawing, her untapped creativity suddenly ignites when she is introduced to fiber art, and she begins carefully and intentionally winding yarn and other materials around found objects. With unflagging intensity, Judy works five days a week for the next eighteen years, producing more than two-hundred astoundingly diverse fiber sculptures. Unconcerned with her growing fame, she remains fully immersed in her artistic vision until her death in 2005. Today, Judith Scott s work is displayed in museums and galleries around the world, in some of the most prestigious collections of contemporary art.
“Entwined” is a penetrating personal narrative that explores a complex world of disability, loss, reunion, and the resiliency of the human spirit. Part memoir, part biography, it s a poignant and astonishing story about the art of embracing life.”

Poetry Express: Diane Moomey
2016-08-01 19:00 - 21:00 | Himalayan Flavors, 1585 University Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94703, United States
Diane has lived and wandered around the US and Canada. Now she dips her gardener’s hands in California dirt . . . and reads at poetry venues throughout the San Francisco Bay Area.
Her poetry and short prose have appeared, or are scheduled to appear this year, in Red Wheelbarrow,Perfume River Poetry Review, The Sand Hill Review, Caesura, Glass: a Journal of Poetry; the Faultzoneseries, (California Writers’ Club anthologies); No Ordinary Language and Third Thursdays (the Willow Glen Poetry Project anthologies); Not Somewhere Else But Here, Sundress Publications; Northwest Literary Forum, Earth Prayers, (Roberts/Amidon, Harper-Collins, 1991,) Two-Twenty-Four Poetry Quarterly, Blis, Icon, The Love Project (Anabasis), and Writing For Our Lives. One prose piece from this last, “Grandmother, Geothermally Yours,” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Diane has published three books under her own imprint, Day’sEye Press and Studios:
Figure in a Landscape, a ten-year collection of poems, in 2015
Silk Road, Iron Bird, a long poem of pilgrimage, 2011
. . . Place . . . , a collection of prose and poetry, 2010
Page on Poets and Writers’ Site: https://www.pw.org/content/diane_moomey
Diane is also a watercolorist and collage artist, an experience that both seeds and is seeded by, her poetic imagery. To view her artwork, please visit www.dianeleemoomeyart.com

Aaron Burch, Colin Winnette + Uzodinma Okehi
2016-08-01 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Aaron Burch, Uzodinma Okehi, and Colin Winnette read from their latest books.

Lori Ostlund
2016-08-02 19:00 - 21:00 | Books Inc. Berkeley, 1491 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94710, United States
California Book Award-winner Lori Ostlund celebrates the paperback release of her critically-acclaimed debut novel, After the Parade. Sensitive, bighearted, and achingly self-conscious, forty-year-old Aaron Englund long ago escaped the confinements of his Midwestern hometown, but he still feels like an outcast. After twenty years under the Pygmalion-like care of his older partner, Walter, Aaron at last decides it is time to take control of his own fate. But soon after establishing himself in San Francisco, Aaron sees that real freedom will not come until he has made peace with his memories of Mortonville, Minnesota: a cramped town whose four hundred souls form a constellation of Aaron’s childhood heartbreaks and hopes.

Baruch Porras Hernandez hosts The News
2016-08-02 19:30 - 21:00 | SOMArts, 934 Brannan Street, San Francisco , CA, 94103, United States
On Tuesday, August 2, Baruch Porras-Hernandez hosts a night of queer/punk culture-fucking liberation w/sonic beats, 6-inch heels & colorful explosions. Drawing from personal stories and experiences, the artists writhe all over the map with Bollywood inspired dance, machismo resistance, comedic storytelling, sonic mantras, femme fierceness, and kink infused poetry. Live performances by:
• Fiera!
• Kohinoorgasm
• SNJV
• Baruch Porras Hernandez
• Wonder Dave
Tickets
Admission is FREE! SOMArts is offering free admission in hopes that if you can afford to donate, you will support the artists onstage when the hat passes. We recommend reserving tickets on Eventbrite to guarantee your seat: http://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-newsan-evening-of-fresh-queer-performance-tickets-25214461132!
Performer biographies and links: http://www.somarts.org/thenewsaugust2016
About The News
On the first Tuesday of each month The News, presented by SOMArts Cultural Center, features new, queer work by Bay Area artists. The News is a monthly cabaret style evening that spotlights 10-minute or less performance pieces, experiments, and works in progress by pre-selected solo artists, groups, or troupes.
In addition to artists selected by a guest curator, a “wild card” performer or two appears in each line-up at The News. “Wild cards” are artists who may not have been selected by the guest curators, but join in the evening to share new work. Artists interested in performing as a “wild card” at The News can find more information here: http://www.somarts.org/programs/thenews/

Dave Madden, Theodore Wheeler, + Amina Gautier
2016-08-02 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Theodore Wheeler’s Bad Faith
With results both liberating and disastrous, the characters of Bad Faith flee the trappings of contemporary domestic life. A young father visits a college friend in San Salvador rather than face the anticipated difficult birth of his third child. A boy comes to terms with his fractured family and the disabled father responsible for him after his soldier mother is stationed overseas. A biracial man journeys across Nebraska for the funeral of his white mother and strikes up an improbable if dishonest relationship with a centenarian Irish woman. And in the collection’s title story, the running narrative of a pathetic yet oddly compelling ladies man culminates in an unexpected and deadly confrontation. In Theodore Wheeler’s collection of prizewinning stories, the herd can’t always outpace the predator.
“These stories turn the reader’s expectations on their head as Wheeler spins stunning arabesques, scoring the surface of his characters’ reality to reveal the malice, confusion, and ultimate frailty of us all.”
– Jonis Agee, author of The Bones of Paradise
Dave Madden’s If You Need Me I’ll be Over There
This debut collection of short stories tells the tale of a different kind of difference—one not set in the glittering lights of New York or Los Angeles, but in the grand and wide American Midwest. For these characters, queerness is part of the environment, like the soil, the sky, and the supermarket: an HIV-positive chemist uses football to connect with his brothers; a 17-year-old girl tussles with a cartoon cobra to avoid thinking about the mother who abandoned her; and a hotel concierge starts attending Mass even though his partner was molested by a priest. In seeking out the ordinary struggles of extraordinary people trying to figure out their place within families and communities, I explore what it means to be an outsider always looking in.
“Dave Madden has again given us a wonder of a book. These charismatic stories, as funny as they are sad, are attuned to the possibility of disorder beneath every human aspiration.”
—Paul Lisicky , author of The Narrow Door
Amina Gautier’s The Loss of All Things Lost
Amina Gautier’s The Loss of All Lost Thigns won the Elixir Press 2014 Fiction Award. It is a short story collection that illuminates the beauty that can be found in inconsolable loss. Gautier leads us through terrible reality but leaves us with the promise of hope and redemption. Contest judge, Phong Nguyen had this to say about it: “Literary fiction that grips us and won’t let us go is notoriously rare. To offer us complex emotional experience and riveting narrative momentum, and then to leave the reader in contemplation of its sophisticated themes and subtle weave of objective correlatives that is the stuff of literary greatness, of art that demands to be read in conversation with the canon .Gautier’s stories have you by the throat, and they surprise you with their mercy.
“Quiet, subtle, observant–the stories of The Loss of All Lost Things are pictures of sadness that enrich an understanding of separation and despair. One after another they do what short fiction does so well: capture a character, scene or place that together are much bigger than they seem.” —Shelf Awareness

Krys Lee w/ Adam Johnson
2016-08-02 19:30 - 21:30 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Krys Lee presents How I Became a North Korean, a debut novel that follows the lives of three characters as they struggle to survive in the complex and dangerous Chinese territory bordering North Korea. In order to escape their circumstances, Yongju, Jangmi and Danny cross borders—struggling against informants, spouses, thieves, abductors, and even missionaries in the process—and eventually cross paths with one another. Against a harsh and unforgiving backdrop, they form a kind of adoptive family while they struggle to create better lives. How I became a North Korean is inspired by Lee’s personal experiences as a humanitarian helping North Korean refugees and it is a brilliant exploration of the persistence of humanity under dire circumstances.
Krys Lee was born in Seoul, South Korea, raised in California and Washington, and studied in the United States and England. Her debut story collection, Drifting House, was awarded the 2012 Story Prize Spotlight Award and was a finalist for the 2012 BBC International Story Prize. Her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, Granta (New Voices), The Guardian, Financial Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Conde Nast Traveller, UK, and other publications. She is a professor of creative writing at Yonsei University’s Underwood International College in Seoul.
Adam Johnson is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son and the National Book Award winning short story collection Fortune Smiles . He teaches creative writing at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Esquire,The Paris Review, Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories. His other works include Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. He lives in San Francisco.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa
2016-08-03 19:00 - 21:00 | Books Inc. Berkeley, 1491 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94710, United States
Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, the first Tibetan female poet to be published in English, shares her beautifully written memoir, Coming Home to Tibet: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Belonging. After her mother dies in a car accident in India, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa decides to take a handful of her ashes back to her homeland in Tibet. Dhompa’s story is interlaced with poetic prose describing the land, people, and spirit of the country as experienced by a refugee seeing her country for the first time.

InsideStorytime FORBIDDANCE
2016-08-04 18:30 - 20:30 | Martuni’s, 4 Valencia St, San Francisco , CA, 94103, United States
Will feature S.G. Browne (Less Than Hero), Na’amen Tilahun (The Root), Rahul Kanakia (Enter Title Here), and others.
Produced by James Warner with Ransom Stephens and Yanina Gotsulsky, In our inaugural year, InsideStoryTime was voted SF Weekly BEST NEW READING SERIES 2006. A fun, cosy event where you can booze and schmooze with the San Francisco literati.

Julie Rogers + Adrian Arias
2016-08-04 18:30 - 20:30 | Readers Bookstore, Fort Mason Center, Building C, San Francisco, CA, 94123, United States

Bay Area Poets Coalition First Saturday
2016-08-06 15:00 - 17:00 | Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison Street, Berkeley, CA, 94702, United States
Addison is one block south of and parallel to University Ave.
between Acton & Bonar St.
Parking on the street (NOT in the S.C.L. parking lot)
Check in at the front desk and you will be directed to the meeting location
(usually Movie Room, or backyard garden)
All Ages Welcome
Come and enjoy a friendly and informal read-around —
3-5 minutes per poet/reader, or “just listening” is fine too 🙂
