Sky Nelson-Isaacs: Leap to Wholeness
2021-03-24 19:30 - 21:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA
The Dance Palace presents local Sky Nelson-Isaacs for a presentation of his latest book, Leap to Wholeness (North Atlantic Books).
This is a free event.
REGISTER HERE
About Leap to Wholeness
The reductionism and materialism of our modern world make it easy to imagine everything can be cleanly broken down into smaller and smaller parts. Yet the straightforward example of light in a hologram, which can’t be reduced to its parts, points to an underlying interconnected reality–a wholeness. Physicist Sky Nelson-Isaacs uses numerous familiar examples–rainbows, music, photography–to illustrate a fundamental wholeness found in nature.
Just as light is filtered as it passes through a filmstrip, Nelson-Isaacs points out that our human experience is filtered through thoughts and feelings. This view provides an explanation as to why, in our daily lived reality, we can feel so broken and not-whole. Nelson-Isaacs weaves together cutting-edge ideas into the nature of space and time and original research, with a compelling message of urgency. The filters we use to make choices everyday hide important information from us, leading us away from experiences of flow. Through synchronicities, we are led to life lessons tailored to our readiness for change. Nelson-Isaacs reconsiders the view of time itself, suggesting that we live not just in this moment but on a timeline of history, part of a wave moving from our past into our future. Every choice we make shifts what is available to us. Can we learn to rethink our lives and reality to remove our filters and realize the wholeness that we have inherent in ourselves and in our world? Yes, says Nelson-Isaacs–and once we do that, we can use the multiverse of possibilities to make choices that help us heal and grow into a greater sense of ourselves.
About Sky Nelson-Isaacs
SKY NELSON-ISAACS is a theoretical physicist, speaker, author, and musician. He has a masters degree in physics from San Francisco State University, with a thesis in String Theory, and a BS in physics from UC Berkeley. Nelson-Isaacs has dedicated his life to finding his own sense of purpose, beginning as a student of the Yogic master Sri Swami Satchidananda when he was less than five years old. Discovering an early fascination with holograms and some of the most fundamental questions in physics, he has sought for over two decades to establish a connection between synchronicity, physics, and real life using research and original ideas. His most recent research has been published in the scientific journal Quantum Reports. An educator with nine years of classroom experience, Nelson-Isaacs is also a multi-instrumentalist and professional performer of award-winning original musical compositions

Jesse McCarthy
2021-03-25 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
discussing his new book
Who Will Pay Reparation On My Soul: Essays
published by Liveright Books/W.W, Norton
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
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Ranging from Ta-Nehisi Coates’s case for reparations to D’Angelo’s simmering blend of R&B and racial justice, Jesse McCarthy’s dazzling essays capture debates at the intersection of art, literature, and politics in the twenty-first century with virtuosic intensity.
In “Notes on Trap,” McCarthy borrows a conceit from Susan Sontag to dissect the significance of trap music in American society, while in “The Master’s Tools,” Velázquez becomes a lens through which to view Kehinde Wiley’s paintings. Essays on John Edgar Wideman, Terrance Hayes, and Claudia Rankine survey the state of black letters. In “The Time of the Assassins,” McCarthy, a black American raised in France, writes about returning to Paris after the Bataclan massacre and finding a nation in mourning but dangerously unchanged. Taken together, these essays portray a brilliant critic at work, making sense of our dislocated times while seeking to transform our understanding of race and art, identity and representation.
Jesse McCarthy is assistant professor of English and African American studies at Harvard University. He is an editor at the Point and has written for n+1, Dissent, the Nation, and the New Republic. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #52
2021-03-26 18:00 - 19:30 | online
90 minutes
30 readers
3 minutes each
On Zoom!
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!
Sign up to read here:
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If you enjoy spaces like this and can swing it in these tight times, please consider supporting us via:

1) the Cash App to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress;
2) donating via the “ticket” option here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/…/nomadic-press-weekly…; OR
3) donating through the website at www.nomadicpress.org/donate
We have a short goal for the evening of $150.
Pandemic times continue in 2021 and we continue to gather our community virtually across state and country lines. Join us to read, join us to listen. All are welcome.
Hosted by Nazelah Jamison (with Tula Biederman on tech). It’s a continuing experiment, and we hope you can join us!

Our safe space process still applies to our collective virtual space, so please read this by visiting https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess.

Zoom Joining Info
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Weekly Virtual Open Mic
Time: Jan 1, 2021 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Every week on Fri, until Dec 10, 2021, 50 occurrence(s)
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HIGH DAWN 7: Ahsan / Montes / Low / Dennis
2021-03-26 18:00 - 19:30 | Virtual
Small Press Traffic and UC Berkeley Poetry Colloquium present the seventh installment of HIGH DAWN, a reading series featuring poets and musicians from the Bay Area and beyond.
Readings by Bahaar Ahsan & Lara Mimosa Montes
Introduced by Trisha Low
Music by Ryanaustin Dennis
Artist bios below
## RSVP for Zoom link: spt-march.eventbrite.com
All upcoming Small Press Traffic events: https://www.smallpresstraffic.org/upcomingevents
## Artist Bios:
Bahaar Ahsan is a poet in the Bay Area. Bahaar’s work is both speculative and deeply embedded in lineage(s). Recent work can be found in Berkeley Poetry Review, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics(forthcoming from Nightboat Books), and elsewhere.
Lara Mimosa Montes is the author of THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press, 2020). Her work has appeared in Fence, BOMB, Jacket2, and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo fellow and has been awarded residencies from Storm King: Shandaken, Marble House Project, and Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2018, Lara was awarded a McKnight Fellowship in Poetry. Currently, she is a senior editor of Triple Canopy. She lives in Minnesota.
Trisha Low is the author of The Compleat Purge (Kenning Editions 2013) and Socialist Realism (Emily Books, 2019). She lives in the East Bay.
Ryanaustin Dennis is an Oakland based art work and cultural strategist. Their practice is concerned with how 20th and 21st century experimental performance, film, and writing histories are shaped by the metaphysics of blackness. They have done curatorial work for Kadist, SFMOMA Open Space, Eastside Arts Alliance, and Soundwave Biennial. They currently co-curate the Black Life series at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Pro Arts Gallery & Commons.

Virtual Event: Shira Spector and Phoebe Gloeckner
2021-03-26 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
JOIN US ON FRIDAY, MARCH 26 AT 6PM PT WHEN SHIRA SPECTOR IS JOINED BY PHOEBE GLOECKNER TO DISCUSS HER GRAPHIC MEMOIR, RED ROCK BABY CANDY, ON ZOOM!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81360595558
Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,81360595558# or +12532158782,,81360595558#
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/km5ajZW5S
Praise for Red Rock Baby Candy
“Using lithesome, intricate drawings and mixed-media collages, Spector debuts with a graphic memoir of desire and loss that expresses emotions viscerally and with a tactile immediacy.” – Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“There are so many styles, so many layers to both the art and the story. Open it up to any page and you’re met with an explosion of color, images, and words.” – Book Riot
“Every page of this formally inventive, kaleidoscopic graphic memoir is a work of art in and of itself. … [A] book that will change the literary landscape in 2021.” – O The Oprah Magazine
“Shira Spector’s deeply moving graphic memoir is about love and sorrow, and the wondrousness of being alive despite everything. The inventive combination of text and drawing works perfectly to draw the reader in.” – Roz Chast, Can’t We talk About Something More Pleasant?
“Shira Spector has created an ecstatic book about a life lived deeply, fully, and with the extreme bravery we must all have if we want to truly love and be loved.” – Eleanor Davis, How To Be Happy
About Red Rock Baby Candy
Self-described as “an infertile, high-femme, low income, non-biological Jewish mom, dyke drama queen, and ectopic pregnancy survivor,” the author tells her story in this formally innovative graphic memoir.
Shira Spector literally paints a vivid portrait of the most eventful 10 years of her life, encompassing her tenacious struggle to get pregnant, the emotional turmoil of her father’s cancer diagnosis and eventual death, and her recollections of past relationships with her parents and her partner. Set in a kaleidoscope of Montreal and Toronto, Red Rock Baby Candy unfolds as one of the most formally inventive comics in the history of the medium. It begins in subtle, tonal shades of black ink, introduces color slowly over the next 50 pages until it explodes into a glorious full color palette. The irreverent characters begin to bloom and to live life fully, resurrecting the dead in order to map the geography among infertility, sexuality, choice, and mortality. The drawing is visceral, symbolic, and naturalistic. The visual storytelling eschews traditional comics panels in favor of a series of unique page compositions that convey both a stream of consciousness and the tactile reality of life, both the subjective impressions of the author at each moment of her life and the objective series of events that shape her narrative. It is the most formally revolutionary visual storytelling since Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters.

Eastwind Book Club: The Sympathizer
2021-03-26 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Eastwind Book Club is a community of readers connected by Asian and Asian American literature. Members gather once a month through a virtual meeting to discuss the month’s book selection. March’s book club pick is The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen. This month’s selection is part of a two-part series featuring works by Viet Thanh Nguyen.
The book club meeting will take place via Zoom on Friday, March 26 at 7pm PST. Register to receive the meeting link.
Book Club members can use coupon code EWBOOKCLUB21 for a 10% discount.
Copies of The Sympathizer are available for order at www.asiabookcenter.com. Choose to ship your orders to your home or select in-store pick up at Eastwind Books of Berkeley, 2066 University Ave., Berkeley, CA 94704.
Join our Book Club Facebook group to engage in conversation throughout the month: www.tinyurl.com/ewclub
SAVE THE DATE!
Special Series Part 2 will feature The Committed, sequel to The Sympathizer and Viet Thanh Nguyen’s newest release. Save the date for April, 2021.
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This event is co-sponsored by DVAN – Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network, UNAVSA – the Union of North American Vietnamese Student Associations) OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates Bay Area Chapters, and AsAmNews (www.asamnews.com).
About the book:
The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as seven other awards, The Sympathizer is one of the most acclaimed books of the twenty-first century. With the pace and suspense of a thriller and prose that has been compared to Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, The Sympathizer is a sweeping epic of love and betrayal. The narrator, a communist double agent, is a “man of two minds,” a half-French, half-Vietnamese army captain who comes to America after the Fall of Saigon, and while building a new life with other Vietnamese refugees in Los Angeles is secretly reporting back to his communist superiors in Vietnam. The Sympathizer is a blistering exploration of identity and America, a gripping spy novel, and a powerful story of love and friendship.
About the author:
Viet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. He is the author of The Committed, which continues the story of The Sympathizer, awarded the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, alongside seven other prizes. He is also the author of the short story collection The Refugees; the nonfiction book Nothing Ever Dies, a finalist for the National Book Award; and is the editor of an anthology of refugee writing, The Displaced. He is the Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California and a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations. He lives in Los Angeles.
Praise for The Sympathizer:
“A layered immigrant tale told in the wry, confessional voice of a ‘man of two minds’—and two countries, Vietnam and the United States.”—Pulitzer Prize Citation
“[A] remarkable debut novel . . . [Nguyen] brings a distinctive perspective to the war and its aftermath. His book fills a void in the literature, giving voice to the previously voiceless . . . The nameless protagonist-narrator, a memorable character despite his anonymity, is an Americanized Vietnamese with a divided heart and mind. Nguyen’s skill in portraying this sort of ambivalent personality compares favorably with masters like Conrad, Greene, and le Carré. . . . Both thriller and social satire. . . . In its final chapters, The Sympathizer becomes an absurdist tour de force that might have been written by a Kafka or Genet.”—Philip Caputo, New York Times Book Review (cover review)
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Eastwind Book Club is co-sponsored by OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates Bay Area Chapters, Asian Pacific American Student Development (APASD) and AsAmNews

Conversations with Authors - Lisa Scottoline with Lisa See (Virtual Event)
2021-03-27 16:00 - 18:00 | CA
Bestselling author Lisa Scottoline offers a sweeping and shattering epic of historical fiction fueled by shocking true events, the tale of a love triangle that unfolds in the heart of Rome under the creeping shadow of fascism.
Elisabetta, Marco, and Sandro grow up as the best of friends despite their differences. Elisabetta is a feisty beauty who dreams of becoming a novelist; Marco the brash and athletic son in a family of professional cyclists; and Sandro a Jewish mathematics prodigy, kind-hearted and thoughtful, the son of a lawyer and a doctor. Their friendship blossoms to love, with both Sandro and Marco hoping to win Elisabetta’s heart. But in the autumn of 1937, all of that begins to change as Mussolini asserts his power, aligning Italy’s Fascists with Hitler’s Nazis and altering the very laws that govern Rome. In time, everything that the three hold dear—their families, their homes, and their connection to one another—is tested in ways they never could have imagined.
As anti-Semitism takes legal root and World War II erupts, the threesome realizes that Mussolini was only the beginning. The Nazis invade Rome, and with their occupation come new atrocities against the city’s Jews, culminating in a final, horrific betrayal. Against this backdrop, the intertwined fates of Elisabetta, Marco, Sandro, and their families will be decided, in a heartbreaking story of both the best and the worst that the world has to offer.
Unfolding over decades, Eternal is a tale of loyalty and loss, family and food, love and war—all set in one of the world’s most beautiful cities at its darkest moment. This moving novel will be forever etched in the hearts and minds of readers.
Lisa Scottoline is the New York Times-bestselling author of thirty-two novels. She has 30 million copies of her books in print in the United States and has been published in thirty-five countries. Scottoline also writes a weekly column with her daughter for The Philadelphia Inquirer. Lisa has served as President of Mystery Writers of America and has taught a course she developed, “Justice in Fiction” at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, her alma mater. She lives in the Philadelphia area.
Lisa See is the New York Times bestselling author of The Island of Sea Women, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird Lane, Snow Flower and the Secret Fan, Peony in Love, Shanghai Girls, China Dolls, and Dreams of Joy, which debuted at #1. She is also the author of On Gold Mountain, which tells the story of her Chinese American family’s settlement in Los Angeles. See was the recipient of the Golden Spike Award from the Chinese Historical Association of Southern California and the Historymaker’s Award from the Chinese American Museum. She was also named National Woman of the Year by the Organization of Chinese American Women.

At The Door: Chapter Two
2021-03-27 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Join us for our monthly reading series, featuring only Black & Brown voices. We’re already a chapter in – join us for the incredible lineup we have for “Chapter Two”!

Featured Readers:
Josiah Alderete
Kathleen Naytia
Rosa De Anda
Yeva Johnson
Rebeca Flores
Brian Kim Stefans

WHEW – we just got chills thinking about what this night is gonna be like. Come through!

Southeast Asian American Poetry Reading with Monica Sok and Krysada Phounsiri
2021-03-27 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Monica Sok and Krysada Phounsiri will be joined by youth poets from Oakland’s Center for Empowering Refugees and Immigrants and UC Berkeley’s Southeast Asian Student Coalition (SASC) anthology group.

About the poets:

Monica Sok’s debut poetry collection A Nail in the Evening Hangs On uses poetry to reshape a family’s memory about the Khmer Rouge regime — memory that is both real and imagined — according to a child of refugees. Driven by myth-making and fables, the book seeks to reclaim the Cambodian narrative with tenderness and an imagination that moves towards wholeness and possibility.

Krysada Phounsiri is a Lao American professional dancer, award winning poet, engineer, and photographer from San Diego, CA. He is a Physics & Astrophysics double major, with a minor in Creative Writing from UC Berkeley. He published his debut poetry book, “Dance Among Elephants”, and 2nd poetry book, “Every Passing Minute”, under Sahtu Press. Krysada is currently a Senior Optical Engineer working in the BioTech industry. His dance resume includes various competition wins around the globe, performing in Jabbawockeez MUS.I.C show in Las Vegas, dancing on movie sets, and other creative projects. Many of his creative endeavors are connected to exploring Lao / Southeast Asian American identity and how it can be integrated in various spaces.

RSVP at https://seapoetry.eventbrite.com
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To purchase copies of the featured poets’ work, visit www.asiabookcenter.com
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Eastwind Books Multicultural Services (EBMS) is a 501(3)c non-profit dedicated to the promotion and accessibility of Asian American and Ethnic Multicultural Literature. EBMS is the community education arm of Eastwind Books of Berkeley which is comprised of a dedicated staff of booksellers, artists, poets, and community workers. Our events are for educational purposes and we appreciate your tax-deductible donations and continued support.

Learn more about Eastwind here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaSXsyGkjz8

Barbara Hamby and Barbara Ras
2021-03-28 15:00 - 16:00 | online
Poetry Flash presents a virtual poetry reading by Barbara Hamby, Holoholo, and Barbara Ras, The Blues of Heaven, online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)
MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Sunday, March 28 at 3:00 pm PDT! We are excited to bring you Barbara Ras and Barbara Hamby via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.
This reading is co-sponsored by Moe’s Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.
Barbara Ras’s new book of poems is The Blues of Heaven, both personal, dealing with grief over the death of a brother and memories of growing up in a working-class neighborhood of Polish immigrants, and national, reflecting on gun violence, the climate crisis, and the fecklessness of an ignorant, corrupt government. Naomi Shihab Nye said, “The Blues of Heaven radiates with immense tenderness—here are poems of vivid painterly wonderment, perfect pacing and weight, elegantly woven counterpoints of shimmering imagery.” Ras’s previous collections include Bite Every Sorrow, winner of the Walt Whitman Award and a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, One Hidden Stuff, and The Lost Skin. Her poetry has been published in The New Yorker, Tin House, Granta, Orion, and elsewhere, and she’s been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Rockefeller Foundation, among others. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, and is the founding director emerita of the Trinity University Press.
Barbara Hamby’s new book of poems is Holoholo, the Hawaiian word for strolling without a fixed destination. A collage of one woman’s consciousness, spoken in an American lingo, including Yiddish and street talk, its three sections motor across wars, racial tension, street violence, and other assorted national chaos. Billy Collins said, “”Barbara Hamby’s poems are wild, outspoken, seriously funny, motor-mouth rambles that take us through hoops of association to places both unexpected and unimpeachable. This collection offers a generous helping of poems so crackling with references and busy with verbal energy you might feel them buzzing in your hands.” She’s the author of seven previous collections, most recently Bird Odyssey and On the Street of Divine Love: New and Selected Poems. Her book of linked stories, Lester Higata’s 20th Century, was the winner of the 2010 University of Iowa John Simmons Award. A 2010 Guggenheim fellow, she is also co-editor, with her husband David Kirby, of Seriously Funny, an anthology of poetry.

Carribean Fragoza
2021-03-28 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
celebrating the launch of her new book
Eat the Mouth that Feeds You
published by City Lights Books
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(CLICK HERE) to register. Link to be posted soon.
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(Click Here) to purchase book.
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In gritty, sometimes fantastical stories about Latinx life, women challenge feminine stereotypes and make sense of fractured family histories
“In Carribean Fragoza’s weirdly sweet short story collection Eat the Mouth that Feeds You, eyebrows are Sharpie-thin, children say I love you with axes, and dying is an adventure. Her Chicanx gothic tales root horror in the most terrifying of places, the family. The creepiest pockets of the Brown imagination are her playground. Eat the Mouth That Feeds You renders the feminine grotesque at its finest.”—Myriam Gurba, author of Mean
“Every story in this luminous collection creates its own lush, beautiful, and utterly singular universe. Carribean Fragoza reaches deep into the bodies and souls of her subjects, and writes about desire and fear like few other writers can. Eat the Mouth That Feeds You will establish Fragoza as an essential and important new voice in American fiction.”—Héctor Tobar, author of The Barbarian Nurseries
This stunningly original collection of stories illuminates a spectrum of Latinx, Chicanx, and immigrant women’s voices. In confrontations with fraught matrilineal lines, absent or abusive fathers, and the effects of historical violence, these women and girls navigate a male-dominated world where they rely on a resilient mujer network to get them through sometimes supernatural obstacles.
In visceral, embodied prose, Fragoza’s imperfect characters are drawn with an authentic, sympathetic tenderness as they struggle against circumstances and conditions designed to defeat them. A young woman returns home from college, only to pick up exactly where she left off: a smart girl in a rundown town with no future. A mother reflects on the pain and pleasures of being inexorably consumed by her small daughter, whose penchant for ingesting grandma’s letters has extended to taking bites of her actual flesh. A brother and sister watch anxiously as their distraught mother takes an ax to their old furniture, and then to the backyard fence, until finally she attacks the family’s beloved lime tree. Victories are excavated from the rubble of personal hardship, and women’s wisdom is brutally forged from the violence of history that continues to unfold on both sides of the US-Mexico border.

The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Carribean Fragoza was raised in South El Monte, California. After graduating from UCLA, Fragoza completed the Creative Writing MFA Program at CalArts, where she worked with writers Douglas Kearney and Norman Klein. Today, Fragoza co-edits UC Press’s acclaimed California cultural journal, Boom California, and is also the founder of South El Monte Arts Posse, an interdisciplinary arts collective.
Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared numerous publications, including BOMB, Huizache, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the co-editor of East of East: The Making of Greater El Monte, published February 2020 by Rutgers University Press and Senior Writer at the Tropics of Meta. Carribean is the Coordinator of the Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Award at Claremont Graduate University, and she lives in the San Gabriel Valley in LA County.
More at Carribean’s web site: http://carribeanfragoza.com/
Advance praise for Eat the Mouth That Feeds You
“The magic realism of Eat the Mouth That Feeds You is thoroughly worked into the fabric of the stories themselves, strung through the warp and weft of family, community, and what it means as a child, as a mother, as a woman, to both belong and not belong. These are powerful stories about making one’s way, and about the things that keep a grip on you no matter where you are, even if you’re dead.”—Brian Evenson, author of Song for the Unraveling of the World
“Fragoza’s prose, a switchblade of a magical glow, cauterizes as it cuts. In a setting of barren citrus trees, poison-filled balloons, and stuccos haunted by the menace of the past, Eat the Mouth That Feeds You reinvents the sunny noir.“—Salvador Plascencia, author of The People of Paper
“I felt this collection deep in my bones. Like the Chicanx women whose voices she centers, Carribean Fragoza’s writing doesn’t flinch. It is sharp and dream-like, tender-hearted and brutal, carved from the violence and resilience of generations past and present.”—Natalia Sylvester, author of Everyone Knows You Go Home
“Carribean Fragoza goes deep. This book makes central the lives of women, whether sourced locally or rooted in Mexico, whether alive or dead to the world, surrealistic or hyper realistic, in the flesh or as spirits centuries old. This is storytelling that astonishes, passing through industrialized lives of women like gamma rays or cosmic rays—and I was not only astonished, I was moved. Kafka said, ‘A book must be an axe for the frozen sea that is within us.’ Be careful how you heft this book—it’s sharp as obsidian, this axe.”—Sesshu Foster, author of Atomik Aztex
“This collection establishes Carribean Fragoza as a new American voice to be reckoned with—her invigoratingly imaginative stories are nothing short of brilliant.”— J. Ryan Stradal, author of The Lager Queen of Minnesota

VIRTUAL: Launch for Ji Hyang Padma / Field of Blessings: Ritual & Consciousness in the Work of Buddhist Healers
2021-03-30 17:30 - 19:30 | CA
Booksmith and The Bindery are very pleased to host the virtual launch for Ji Hyang Padma and her new book Field of Blessings: Ritual & Consciousness in the Work of Buddhist Healers.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order Field of Blessings here – we’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
About the book
Ji Hyang Padma believes that we are hungry for a direct experience of the sacred in this culture. We try to fill the void with technology, and its ‘quick fix’ of images and information. This leaves us hungry for true connectivity. We don’t need more information. We need more appreciation. Gratitude opens the heart, and gives our life meaning; it becomes a form of spiritual experience that gives us strength. Field of Blessings explores how meaning-making can be approached by deep examination of the stories of our lives, which bridge the gap between the inner world and the outer world, giving shape to our experience. How can these narratives be spoken, written, or embodied? Ritual is the story brought-to-life, and a powerful vehicle for spiritual transformation, for reconnecting people with an embodied wholeness. Ji Hyang Padma shows that Chod, Medicine Buddha practices, and other Tibetan rituals are used by healers to evoke sacred energies, radical empathy, and to contact deep archetypal realms of the psyche.
About the author
Ji Hyang Padma holds a doctorate in psychology from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology/Sofia University. Her dissertation research focused on consciousness and healing, through the lens of traditional Buddhist healing practices. She recently served as Director of the Comparative Religion & Philosophy Program at the California Institute for Human Science. In response to the pandemic, she currently serves as a chaplain resident at UCSF Parnassus. She has also taught Zen at Wellesley College, Harvard University and Omega Institute. She lives in Encinitas, CA.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Virtual Event: Nick Greene
2021-03-30 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
JOIN US TUESDAY, MARCH 30 AT 6PM PT WHEN NICK GREENE DISCUSSES HIS BOOK,
HOW TO WATCH BASKETBALL LIKE A GENIUS : WHAT GAME DESIGNERS, ECONOMISTS, BALLET CHOREOGRAPHERS, AND THEORETICAL ASTROPHYSICISTS REVEAL ABOUT THE GREATEST GAME ON EARTH, WITH N. CUZZI ON ZOOM!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89717306557
Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,89717306557# or +13462487799,,89717306557#
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbgovPwsVV
Praise for How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius
“A hilarious, smart, wildly unpredictable book that will forever change the way you look at basketball.”—Sarah Spain, writer for ESPN, TV personality, and radio host
“How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius pulls off a rare trick: It makes you feel smarter as you’re reading it, but it does so without ever making you feel like you weren’t smart in the first place.”—Shea Serrano, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Basketball (and Other Things)

About How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius
A brilliant, entertaining deconstruction of basketball, drawing on the expertise of board-game creators, magicians, therapists, and more
Basketball is the second-most popular sport in the world—an insanely complicated game built on a combination of athleticism, craftiness, rules, intangibles, and superstardom. However, while it’s enjoyable to watch, the real reason it works is because it’s a game of culture, art, and all the things that make us human. How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius deconstructs the sport from top to bottom and then puts it back together again, detailing its intricacies through reporting and dozens of interviews with experts. These experts, however, are a diverse group: wine critics weighing in on LeBron’s ability to delegate on the fly, magicians analyzing Chris Paul’s mystifying dribbling techniques, cartographers breaking down Steph Curry’s deadeye three-point shooting. Every chapter treats basketball to a multi-disciplined study that adventures far beyond the lines of the court, examining key elements of the sport from some surprising and revealing angles. There’s a reason it has conquered the world, and every game is a chance to learn about pop culture, fashion, history, science, art, and anything else that bounces our way.
About the Author
Nick Greene is a contributing writer for Slate, prior to which he worked as editor at large at Mental Floss and as web editor at the Village Voice. His work has been published in Vice, Men’s Health, and Chicago Magazine. He lives in Oakland, California.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Kim Addonizio with Danusha Laméris
2021-03-30 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
VIRTUAL EVENT: Bookshop welcomes Bay Area poet Kim Addonizio for a reading and discussion of her new collection, Now We’re Getting Somewhere. Addonizio will be in conversation with Danusha Laméris, Poet Laureate emeritus of Santa Cruz County.
CLICK HERE TO REGISTER FOR THIS FREE VIRTUAL EVENT!

This is a free event. The featured book may be purchased below.
You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!
Kim Addonizio’s sharp and irreverent eighth volume, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, is an essential companion to your practice of the Finnish art of kalsarikännit–drinking at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out. Imbued with the poet’s characteristic precision and passion, the collection charts a hazardous course through heartache, climate change, dental work, Outlander, semiotics, and more.
Combatting existential gloom with a wicked, seductive energy, Addonizio investigates desire, loss, and the madness of contemporary life. She calls out to Walt Whitman and John Keats, echoes Dorothy Parker, and finds sisterhood with Virginia Woolf. Sometimes confessional, sometimes philosophical, these poems weave from desolation to drollery and clamor with raucous imagery: an insect in high heels, a wolf at an uncomfortable party, a glowing and self-serious guitar. A poet whose “voice lifts from the page, alive and biting” (Sky Sanchez, San Francisco Book Review), Addonizio reminds her reader, “if you think nothing & / no one can / listen I love you joy is coming.”
“Kim Addonizio’s poetry gives me physical energy.” — Phoebe Waller-Bridge, creator of Fleabag
“Addonizio relishes in bringing together moments of pleasure and pain, the underside of love and disaster.” — American Poets
Kim Addonizio is the author of eight poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her 2016 collection, Mortal Trash, won the Paterson Poetry Prize. Addonizio’s awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. She lives in Oakland, California.
Danusha Laméris is the author of The Moons of August (Autumn House, 2014), which was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the Autumn House Press poetry prize and was a finalist for the Milt Kessler Book Award. Some of her poems have been published in: The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, The American Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, The SUN Magazine, Tin House, The Gettysburg Review, and Ploughshares. Her second book is Bonfire Opera, (University of Pittsburgh Press), and she was the 2020 recipient of the Lucille Clifton Legacy Award. She teaches poetry independently, and is a Poet Laureate emeritus of Santa Cruz County, California.

WE RUN THE TIDES by Vendela Veda
2021-03-30 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Please join us on Tuesday, March 30, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of WE RUN THE TIDES by Vendela Veda.
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82298900093.
You can order a print copy at http://bit.ly/ggpWeRunTheTides or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at http://bit.ly/WeRunTheTidesAB.
February 2021 Indie Next List

“Wow, this book was hard to put down! The story feels so familiar, yet full of unexpected twists and turns. I was immersed in the beautiful and tumultuous world of these girls on the brink of adulthood. A fun, mysterious, compelling, and ultimately profound novel about power, truth, and growing up.”
— Sarah Fischer, Downbound Books, Cincinnati, OH
Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER
An achingly beautiful story of female friendship, betrayal, and a mysterious disappearance set in the changing landscape of San Francisco
Teenage Eulabee and her magnetic best friend, Maria Fabiola, own the streets of Sea Cliff, their foggy oceanside San Francisco neighborhood. They know Sea Cliff’s homes and beaches, its hidden corners and eccentric characters—as well as the upscale all-girls’ school they attend. One day, walking to school with friends, they witness a horrible act—or do they? Eulabee and Maria Fabiola vehemently disagree on what happened, and their rupture is followed by Maria Fabiola’s sudden disappearance—a potential kidnapping that shakes the quiet community and threatens to expose unspoken truths.
Suspenseful and poignant, We Run the Tides is Vendela Vida’s masterful portrait of an inimitable place on the brink of radical transformation. Pre–tech boom San Francisco finds its mirror in the changing lives of the teenage girls at the center of this story of innocence lost, the pain of too much freedom, and the struggle to find one’s authentic self. Told with a gimlet eye and great warmth, We Run the Tides is both a gripping mystery and a tribute to the wonders of youth, in all its beauty and confusion.
About the Author

Vendela Vida is the award-winning author of six books, including Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name and The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty. Her new novel, We Run the Tides, will be published by Ecco on February 9, 2021. She is a founding editor of The Believer and coeditor of The Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers and Confidence, or the Appearance of Confidence, a collection of interviews with musicians. She was a founding board member of 826 Valencia, the San Francisco writing center for youth, and lives in the Bay Area with her family.
Praise For…

“The year is probably too young to make this kind of pronouncement, but the new novel I know I’m going to be rereading in the coming months and spending a lot of time thinking about is Vendela Vida’s We Run the Tides. It’s a tough and exquisite sliver of a short novel whose world I want to remain lost in. . . . [A] spectacular narrator . . . [A] wonder of a novel.”
— Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

Book Passage Presents: Martha Hall Kelly - Sunflower Sisters
2021-03-31 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Martha Hall Kelly’s million-copy bestseller Lilac Girls introduced readers to Caroline Ferriday. Now, in Sunflower Sisters, Kelly tells the story of Ferriday’s ancestor Georgeanna Woolsey, a Union nurse during the Civil War whose calling leads her to cross paths with Jemma, a young enslaved girl who is sold off and conscripted into the army, and Anne-May Wilson, a Southern plantation mistress whose husband enlists.
Georgeanna “Georgey” Woolsey isn’t meant for the world of lavish parties and the demure attitudes of women of her stature. So when war ignites the nation, Georgey follows her passion for nursing during a time when doctors considered women on the battlefront a bother. In proving them wrong, she and her sister Eliza venture from New York to Washington, D.C., to Gettysburg and witness the unparalleled horrors of slavery as they become involved in the war effort.
In the South, Jemma is enslaved on the Peeler Plantation in Maryland, where she lives with her mother and father. Her sister, Patience, is enslaved on the plantation next door, and both live in fear of LeBaron, an abusive overseer who tracks their every move. When Jemma is sold by the cruel plantation mistress Anne-May at the same time the Union army comes through, she sees a chance to finally escape—but only by abandoning the family she loves.
Anne-May is left behind to run Peeler Plantation when her husband joins the Union army and her cherished brother enlists with the Confederates. In charge of the household, she uses the opportunity to follow her own ambitions and is drawn into a secret Southern network of spies, finally exposing herself to the fate she deserves.
Inspired by true accounts, Sunflower Sisters provides a vivid, detailed look at the Civil War experience, from the barbaric and inhumane plantations, to a war-torn New York City, to the horrors of the battlefield. It’s a sweeping story of women caught in a country on the brink of collapse, in a society grappling with nationalism and unthinkable racial cruelty, a story still so relevant today.
Martha Hall Kelly is the New York Times bestselling author of Lilac Girls and Lost Roses. She lives in Connecticut, where she spends her days filling legal pads with stories and reading World War II books.

Andrea Bajani and Jhumpa Lahiri Writers discuss Bajani's novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins
2021-04-01 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Andrea Bajani is joined in conversation by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Jhumpa Lahiri to celebrate the publication of his novel, If You Kept a Record of Sins (translated by Elizabeth Harris for Archipelago Books).
“One of Italy’s greatest writers . . . An elegy, a requiem, a reckoning, a broken portrait of an absent mother, If You Kept a Record of Sins is a jewel of a book. You will hold it to your heart when you are done.” — Andrew Sean Greer, winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Less
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About If You Kept a Record of Sins
A prismatic novel that records the indelible marks a mother leaves on her son after she abandons their home in Italy for a business she’s building in Romania. Lorenzo, just a young boy when his mother leaves, recalls the incisive fragments of their life – when they would playfully wrestle each other, watch the sunrise, or test out his mother’s newest scientific creation. Now a young man, Lorenzo travels to Romania for his mother’s funeral and reflects on the strangeness of today’s Europe, which masks itself as a beacon of Western civilization while iniquity and exploitation run rampant. With elliptical, piercing prose, Bajani tells a story of abandonment and initiation, of sentimental education and shattered illusions, of unconditional love.
About the participants
ANDREA BAJANI is an Italian novelist, journalist, and poet whose work has been translated into many languages. His novel, Ogni promessa (Every Promise), won the oldest and most prestigious Italian literary award, the Bagutta Prize. His collection of short stories, La vita non è in ordine alfabetico, won the Settembrini Prize in 2014. Se consideri le colpe (If You Kept a Record of Sins) won the Super Mondello Prize, the Brancati Prize, the Recanati Prize, and the Lo Straniero Prize. He teaches at Rice University in the Department of Classical and European studies.
JHUMPA LAHIRI is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland; and a work of nonfiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway Award; the PEN/Malamud Award; the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole.
About the translator
Elizabeth Harris’s translations from Italian include Mario Rigoni Stern’s Giacomo’s Seasons, Giulio Mozzi’s This Is the Garden, and Antonio Tabucchi’s Tristano Dies, For Isabel: A Mandala, and Stories with Pictures. Her prizes include a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, an NEA Translation Fellowship, The Italian Prose in Translation Award, and the National Translation Award for Prose.

Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, reading and in conversation
2021-04-01 19:00 - 20:00 | online
Remote access event, free and open to the public
Registration link pending
With emcee, Brent Awa Jensen
Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts
Details tba here

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center

Aiden Thomas
2021-04-02 17:00 - 18:00 | online
Friday, April 2, 2021 | 5:00 pm PDT | Zoom (RSVP to receive the event link)
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, Oregon. Aiden’s special talents include: quoting The Office, finishing sentences with “is my FAVORITE,” and killing spiders. Aiden is notorious for not being able to guess the endings of books and movies, and organizes their bookshelves by color. In Aiden’s debut novel, Cemetery Boys, a trans boy determined to prove his gender to his traditional Latinx family summons a ghost who refuses to leave.

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #53
2021-04-02 18:00 - 19:30 | online

Jillian C York in conversation with Ben Tarnoff
2021-04-03 12:00 - 14:00 | CA
discussing Jillian York’s new book
Silicon Values: The Future of Free Speech under Surveillance Capitalism
published by Verso Books

This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required
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(CLICK HERE) to register. Link to be posted.
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(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. Link to be posted.

How Google, Facebook and Amazon threaten our Democracy

What is the impact of surveillance capitalism on our right to free speech? The internet once promised to be a place of extraordinary freedom beyond the control of money or politics, but today corporations and platforms exercise more control over our ability to access information and share knowledge to a greater extent than any state. From the online calls to arms in the thick of the Arab Spring to the contemporary front line of misinformation, Jillian C. York charts the war over our digital rights. She looks at both how the big corporations have become unaccountable censors, and the devastating impact it has had on those who have been censored.
In Silicon Values, leading campaigner Jillian C. York looks at how our rights have become increasingly undermined by the major corporations’ desire to harvest our personal data and turn it into profit. She also looks at how governments have used the same technology to monitor citizens and threatened our ability to communicate. As a result our daily lives, and private thoughts, are being policed in an unprecedented manner. Who decides the difference between political debate and hate speech? How does this impact on our identity, our ability to create communities and to protest? Who regulates the censors? In response to this threat to our democracy, York proposes a user-powered movement against the platforms that demands change and a new form of ownership over our own data.

Jillian C. York is International Activism Director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, EFF. She is also a founding member of the feminist collective, Deep Lab. She has been covering questions of surveillance and freedom since the 2000s. She was named by Foreign Policy as one of the top 100 intellectuals on social media. She has written for the Guardian, Al Jazeera and Foreign Policy. She is based in Berlin.

Ben Tarnoff is the author of the books A Counterfeiter’s Paradise and The Bohemians and is a cofounder of Logic magazine. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, The New Republic, Jacobin, and Lapham’s Quarterly, among other publications. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

LOGIC is a critical journal devoted to technology and society. Past issues have explored the effects of technology on culture. Each issues focusses on a specific theme. Past themes have included: civic life in relation to technology, explorations of the problems and possibilities big tech and big data create, democracy in the face of ever accelerating technological advances, gender and equality, sex in relation to technology, how bodies and technologies cross one another, and much more. visit: https://logicmag.io

Conversations with Authors - Sue Monk Kidd (Online Event)
2021-04-03 16:00 - 18:00 | CA
An extraordinary story set in the first century about a woman who finds her voice and her destiny, from the celebrated number one New York Times bestselling author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Invention of Wings.
In her mesmerizing fourth work of fiction, Sue Monk Kidd takes an audacious approach to history and brings her acclaimed narrative gifts to imagine the story of a young woman named Ana. Raised in a wealthy family with ties to the ruler of Galilee, she is rebellious and ambitious, with a brilliant mind and a daring spirit. She engages in furtive scholarly pursuits and writes narratives about neglected and silenced women. Ana is expected to marry an older widower, a prospect that horrifies her. An encounter with eighteen-year-old Jesus changes everything.
Their marriage evolves with love and conflict, humor and pathos in Nazareth, where Ana makes a home with Jesus, his brothers, and their mother, Mary. Ana’s pent-up longings intensify amid the turbulent resistance to Rome’s occupation of Israel, partially led by her brother, Judas. She is sustained by her fearless aunt Yaltha, who harbors a compelling secret. When Ana commits a brazen act that puts her in peril, she flees to Alexandria, where startling revelations and greater dangers unfold, and she finds refuge in unexpected surroundings. Ana determines her fate during a stunning convergence of events considered among the most impactful in human history.
Grounded in meticulous research and written with a reverential approach to Jesus’s life that focuses on his humanity, The Book of Longings is an inspiring, unforgettable account of one woman’s bold struggle to realize the passion and potential inside her, while living in a time, place and culture devised to silence her. It is a triumph of storytelling both timely and timeless, from a masterful writer at the height of her powers.
Sue Monk Kidd‘s debut, The Secret Life of Bees, spent more than 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, has sold more than 6 million copies in the United States, was turned into an award-winning major motion picture and a musical, and has been translated into thirty-six languages. Her second novel, The Mermaid Chair, was a #1 New York Times bestseller and was adapted into a television movie. Her third novel, The Invention of Wings, an Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 pick, was also a #1 New York Times bestseller. She is the author of the acclaimed memoirs The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, a groundbreaking work on religion and feminism, and the New York Times bestseller Traveling with Pomegranates, written with her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor.

Better Ancestors: Kai Sugioka-Stone, Amanda Muñiz, Isabelle Khoo-Miller, Arlene Biala and Melissa Merin
2021-04-05 18:00 - 19:30 | online
Quiet Lightning presents the second Better Ancestors, featuring readings and performance by Kai Sugioka-Stone, Amanda Muñiz, Isabelle Khoo-Miller, Arlene Biala and Melissa Merin! This show curated by the artists who performed at the first Better Ancestors (pictured top left, clockwise L-R): Josiah Luis Alderete, Aja Couchois Duncan, Greer Nakadegawa-Lee, Nia McAllister and Brontez Purnell—find out more about them and watch their performances here, then join us on April 5!
ABOUT THE AUTHORS (pictured above, clockwise from top right)
Kai Sugioka-Stone is a Japanese-American poet, mindfulness-based meditator, musician, actor, photographer, and upcoming filmmaker. His writing focuses on liminal identity, and growing up in the era of California Wildfires, the Trump presidency, and COVID. He featured at San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck’s event Sudden Return of The Fire Thieves. His work was featured in the San Francisco Public Library’s Poem of the Day Project. He was published in The Berkeley Times’ Poetry Edition Vol. 10, No. 16, as well as Quiet Lightning’s zine sPARKLE & bLINK #104. He read at Tea Root’s Recovery A.C.T. and gave an online writing workshop reflecting on Japense-American identity with Nikkei Rising. He is part of Lauren Ito’s upcoming exhibit, Political Inheritcance. Photo by Kristen Murakoshi.
Amanda Muñiz is a Mexican writer born in Puebla and raised in Oakland, California. She majored in English Literature from San Francisco State University. Her work has been published by Pochino press and more recently in the Translating Migration poetry anthology project. Amanda has been a featured reader in various shows in the Bay Area including the electrifying ¿Donde Esta Mi Gente? the hilarious ¿Donde Esta mi Comedy?, BEASTCrawl, Literary Speakeasy, LitQuake’s legendary LitCrawl, as well as the Carnival of Poetry organized by Writers of Singapore. The immigrant experience has inspired most of her writing, which she considers a reflection and a testament of her family’s resilience as well as a never-ending letter of love and gratitude to her parents. Photo courtesy of the author.
Isabelle Khoo-Miller is a child of earth, like all of us. They are alive and in abundant love. They create in many mediums, including imagination. They are from the ocean and have roots and familia in Coastal Miwok and Ohlone land, the Bay Area. Photo courtesy of the author.
Arlene Biala (she/her) is a Pinay poet born in San Francisco and raised in the South Bay. She has been participating in poetry performances and workshops for over 30 years and was the 2016-2017 Santa Clara County Poet Laureate. She is the author of several collections of poetry: bone, continental drift and her beckoning hands, which won the 2015 American Book Award. Her latest book, one inch punch, was published in January 2019. Photo courtesy of the author.
Melissa Merin has been writing since she could hold a crayon. She is established as a parent, a lover & partner, a queer, an anti-authoritarian and, a consistently retiring punker. Melissa believes in utilizing a diversity of tactics to build the world we need; one of her favorite tactics is writing. Melissa is also a long-time educator and agitator and has never been able to get it together to “publish” though, many zines and blogs tell the story of trying. Melissa has the distinction of being one of a few Black cis-women of her generation to not love Beyonce or Oprah.
ABOUT THE SERIES
One of Quiet Lightning’s efforts to diversify and move toward racial equity, Better Ancestors is a new quarterly showcase of writers of color. Developed in partnership with Michael Warr, the series features 5 authors reading or performing whatever they choose. Each author selects one performer for the following show, so the series – and community – is self-generating. All authors are paid and published in an end of the year anthology.
Why Better Ancestors? As one of our initiatives to diversify from a board that has historically been mostly white, this showcase aims to provide a long-term, forward-thinking goal. As a society, we are suffering the consequences of pervasive systemic injustice against people of color, queer and trans people, the poor, disabled, and otherwise disadvantaged. But we are all ancestors of the future. If the planet is to remain inhabitable; if the function of humanity is not to sort and oppress our descendants based on their skin color, accent, or material property, we must be better ancestors. This begins by listening to one another, and by giving each other space to be heard.

ABOUT MICHAEL WARR (pictured above, right)
Michael Warr’s books include Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmet Till to Trayvon Martin, edited by Michael Warr (W.W. Norton), and from Tia Chucha Press The Armageddon of Funk, We Are All The Black Boy, and Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry From Chicago’s Guild Complex. In 2017 he was named a San Francisco Library Laureate. Other poetry honors include a Creative Work Fund award for his multimedia project Tracing Poetic Memory in Bayview Hunters Point, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. Michael is the former Deputy Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora and has extensive experience in community-based arts. He became a board member of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library in 2018. In 2020, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Follow his creative work at https://michaelwarr-creativework.tumblr.com/.

ABOUT QUIET LIGHTNING
Now in its 11th year, Quiet Lightning is a literary movement to create and foster community around the written and spoken word. QL aims to democratize public space by offering performances, curation opportunities, and programming with no barriers to entry, providing a launchpad for new and emerging artists, a reliable platform for professional writers, and an inclusive, accessible gathering place for the public. QL is committed to care-taking and progressing the rich threads of literary culture that exist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Recognized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as one of the 100 “people, organizations, and movements who are shaping the future of culture”, Quiet Lightning’s flagship is the literary mixtape, a submission-based series with a blind selection process and different curators for each show. The shows, which are free to attend, are published as books, handed out free to the first 100 people, and all participating artists are paid. QL has now produced 137 shows featuring 1,673 readings by 879 local authors in 91 venues, ranging from dive bars and art galleries to state parks and national landmarks, and has published 115 books and produced two films, all selected by 74 different curators. In 2019, Quiet Lightning pioneered an application process for limited-term board-membership, called Disruptors, to regularly bring new ideas and energy into the organization. QL maintains Litseen.com, a daily calendar of literary events.
MAKE A ONE-TIME DONATION OR SUPPORT US ON PATREON
Every tax deductible donation helps Quiet Lightning invest in a sustainable, ethical arts ecosystem, with the goal of building that culture into the fabric of our lives. You can donate by Venmo or PayPal or pledge a recurring donation by becoming one of our supporters on Patreon, which comes with a few additional perks and helps us expand on the work that we do.

Julie Lythcott-Haims with Adam Smiley Poswolsky
2021-04-06 18:00 - 19:00 | CA
This event is online. Guests who pre-order a book at the time of registration will also receive temporary access to a post-event recording after the webinar concludes.
Do you remember the first real challenge you faced as an adult? When you looked around and realized, “This problem is completely on me to solve, and there’s no one around who will point the way. What will I do to handle it?”
In a memoir and guidebook for young adults who are starting out and working their way up, bestselling author Julie Lythcott-Haims of How to Raise An Adult offers a roadmap to early adulthood called Your Turn: How to Be An Adult. This book is for the emerging early adult ages 18-35. From your earliest “Oh wow, how am I going to handle this?” adulting moment and onward, this smart, funny and frank author offers solidarity to her younger self and to any person just beginning to build a future. Turns out, crafting a confident adulthood is not an easy, one-time task, and it takes a long time to stick the landing.

Julie offers guideposts for the new adulthood. No longer are a marriage and a lifelong job the “be all end all” of your adult years. Crafting a life for yourself today looks a lot more complex. Real estate prices and a pandemic may have you living with parents—but within that scope, you can still craft a mature independence. Your career path may include several jobs, instead of a single five-decade career with pension—and yet there is still a way to build continuity in your work. With respect for how the world has changed, Lythcott-Haims offers something that any modern early adult will appreciate: good guidance, respect, and advice that doesn’t assume a one-size-fits-all approach to adulthood. This is the nitty gritty support we all wish we had.

The former Stanford dean shares all this and more in a webinar interview and hour-long conversation with Adam Smiley Poswolsky, millennial workplace expert and author of The Quarter Life Breakthrough and the forthcoming Friendship in the Age of Loneliness. Join two experts—one who has been there, and one still in the thick of crafting modern adulthood—as they discuss what it takes to build a powerful life for yourself in 2021.
** Please consider joining with a book purchase or donation to support Kepler’s Literary Foundation programs. **

Hoa Nguyen with Garrett Caples
2021-04-06 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Hoa Nguyen reads from her new poetry collection
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure
published by Wave Books
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register. (link to be posted soon)
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(Click Here) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon)
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A poetic meditation on historical, personal, and cultural pressures pre- and post-“Fall-of-Saigon” with verse biography on the poet’s mother, Diệp Anh Nguyễn, a stunt motorcyclist in an all-women Vietnamese circus troupe. Multilayered, plaintive, and provocative, the poems in A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure are alive with archive and inhabit histories. By turns lyrical and unsettling, Hoa Nguyen’s poetry sings of language and loss; dialogues with time, myth and place; and communes with past and future ghosts.
Hoa Nguyen is the author of several books of poetry, including A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure (Wave, forthcoming 2021), As Long As Trees Last, Red Juice, and Violet Energy Ingots, which received a 2017 Griffin Prize nomination. As a public proponent and advocate of contemporary poetry, she has served as guest editor for The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2018 and judge for the 2020 Griffin Prize for Poetry, and she has performed and lectured at numerous institutions, including Princeton University, Bard College, Poet’s House, and the Banff Centre’s Writers Studio. Recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize and a 2020 Neustadt International Prize for Literature nomination, she has received grants and fellowships from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, the MacDowell Colony, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. Her writing has garnered attention from such outlets as The PBS News Hour, Granta, The Walrus, New York Times, and Poetry, among others. Born in the Mekong Delta and raised and educated in the United States, Nguyen has lived in Canada since 2011.
Garrett Caples is the author of The Garrett Caples Reader (1999), Complications (2007), Quintessence of the Minor: Symbolist Poetry in English (2010), Retrievals (2014), and Power Ballads (2016). He is an editor at City Lights Books, where he curates the Spotlight poetry series. Caples was also a contributing writer to theSan Francisco Bay Guardian and has coedited the Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia (2013), Particulars of Place (2015) by Richard O. Moore, and Incidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems (2016) by Frank Lima. He makes his home in San Francisco.

Bettye Kearse - The Other Madisons (Book Discussion & Film Screening)
2021-04-06 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
In The Other Madisons, Bettye Kearse—a descendant of an enslaved cook and, according to oral tradition, President James Madison—shares her family story and explores the issues of legacy, race, and the powerful consequences of telling the whole truth.

For thousands of years, West African griots (men) and griottes (women) have recited the stories of their people. Without this tradition Bettye Kearse would not have known that she is a descendant of President James Madison and his slave, and half-sister, Coreen. In 1990, Bettye became the eighth-generation griotte for her family. Their credo—“Always remember—you’re a Madison. You come from African slaves and a president”—was intended to be a source of pride, but for her, it echoed with abuses of slavery, including rape and incest.
Confronting those abuses, Bettye embarked on a journey of discovery—of her ancestors, the nation, and herself. She learned that wherever African slaves walked, recorded history silenced their voices and buried their footsteps: beside a slave-holding fortress in Ghana; below a federal building in New York City; and under a brick walkway at James Madison’s Virginia plantation. When Bettye tried to confirm the information her ancestors had passed down, she encountered obstacles at every turn.
Part personal quest, part testimony, part historical correction, The Other Madisons is the saga of an extraordinary American family told by a griotte in search of the whole story.
About the Author
Bettye Kearse is a writer and retired pediatrician. Her writing has appeared in the Boston Herald, TIME Magazine, River Teeth, Zora, and the anthology Black Lives Have Always Mattered, among other places. The Other Madisons received the International Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Book Award for Nonfiction, Autobiography. Her research for The Other Madisons was covered in the Washington Post. She lives in New Mexico.
Eduardo Montes-Bradley creates films with a transcendent documentary style. He has been awarded multiple distinctions for his photography of the descendants of the enslaved community. His biographical portrayal of Civil Rights activist Julian Bond was presented at the Royal Academy in London.

Bettye Kearse photo by Eduardo Montes-Bradley

Launch for Natalie Baszile / We Are Each Other's Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy, with Konda Mason
2021-04-06 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Booksmith and The Bindery are very pleased to host the virtual launch for Natalie Baszile for her book We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy. She’ll be in conversation with Konda Mason.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order We Are Each Other’s Harvest here – we’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
About the book
In this impressive anthology, Natalie Baszile brings together essays, poems, photographs, quotes, conversations, and first-person stories to examine black people’s connection to the American land from Emancipation to today. In the 1920s, there were over one million black farmers; today there are just 45,000. Baszile explores this crisis, through the farmers’ personal experiences. In their own words, middle aged and elderly black farmers explain why they continue to farm despite systemic discrimination and land loss. The “Returning Generation”—young farmers, who are building upon the legacy of their ancestors, talk about the challenges they face as they seek to redress issues of food justice, food sovereignty, and reparations.
These farmers are joined by other influential voices, including noted historians Analena Hope Hassberg and Pete Daniel, and award-winning author Clyde W. Ford, who considers the arrival of Africans to American shores; and James Beard Award-winning writers and Michael Twitty, reflects on black culinary tradition and its African roots. Poetry and inspirational quotes are woven into these diverse narratives, adding richness and texture, as well as stunning four-color photographs from photographers Alison Gootee and Malcom Williams, and Baszile’s personal collection.
As Baszile reveals, black farming informs crucial aspects of American culture—the family, the way our national identity is bound up with the land, the pull of memory, the healing power of food, and race relations. She reminds us that the land, well-earned and fiercely protected, transcends history and signifies a home that can be tended, tilled, and passed to succeeding generations with pride. We Are Each Other’s Harvest elevates the voices and stories of black farmers and people of color, celebrating their perseverance and resilience, while spotlighting the challenges they continue to face. Luminous and eye-opening, this eclectic collection helps people and communities of color today reimagine what it means to be dedicated to the soil.
About the authors
Natalie Baszile is the author of the novel Queen Sugar, which was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2014, longlisted for the Crooks Corner Southern Book Prize, nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and adapted for television by writer/director Ava DuVernay and co-produced by Oprah Winfrey for OWN. Baszile holds a M.A. in Afro-American Studies from UCLA and is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. She lives in San Francisco.
Konda Mason is a social entrepreneur, finance activist, earth and social justice activist and mindfulness teacher. She is the Co-founder and President of Jubilee Justice, Inc, a nonprofit working to bring climate resilient farming and economic equity to Black farmers in the rural South in order to restore and accelerate Black land ownership and stewardship and create thriving Black farming communities. Jubilee Justice also convenes transformational learning journeys across race and class exploring conversations at the intersection of Land, Race, Money & Spirit. She is also the Co-founder and VP of Potlikker Capital, a next economy loan fund specially designed to deploy integrated capital to Black American farmers.
Konda is Co-Founder and founding CEO of Impact Hub Oakland (newly renamed Emerge Oakland), an award winning co-working space that supports socially engaged entrepreneurs and changemakers. She is the Strategic Director of RUNWAY, a micro-lending fund for African American entrepreneurs, and the co-founder of the annual COCAP (Community Capital) conference in Oakland, with a focus on closing the racial wealth gap, restorative economics and the next economy just transition.
Along with her partner, actor Woody Harrleson, Konda opened the first home delivery service of organic food in the Los Angeles area and was responsible for negotiating the first organic food section in a major supermarket in the area. Ms. Mason holds a Permaculture Design Certificate from Commonweal Institute and has an honorary MBA from Presidio Graduate School of Business. She teaches mindfulness at retreat centers throughout the U.S.A.
Konda sits on the Board of Directors of The Historic Clayborn Temple in Memphis, TN, On Being with Krista Tippett, One Generation with Paul Hawken, Lion’s Roar Magazine, and is a Trustee at Mills College in Oakland, CA.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Virtual Event: Sanjena Sathian
2021-04-06 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
JOIN US ON TUESDAY, APRIL 6 AT 6PM PT WHEN SANJENA SATHIAN JOINS US FOR THE LAUNCH OF HER NOVEL, GOLD DIGGERS, ON ZOOM!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83436765824
Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,83436765824# or +12532158782,,83436765824#
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kch8N18RIF
Praise for Gold Diggers
“In a perfect alchemical blend of familiar and un-, Gold Diggers takes a wincingly hilarious coming-of-age story, laces it with magical realism and a trace of satire, and creates a world that’s both achingly familiar and marvelously inventive. Written with such assurance it’s hard to believe it’s Sanjena Sathian’s debut, this is a dizzyingly original, fiercely funny, deeply wise novel about the seductive powers—and dangers—of borrowed ambition.” —Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere
“A refreshing tweak of the assimilation novel…Sathian artfully and convincingly conjures [this] world…Sathian has a knack for page-turner prose, but the story has plenty of heft. A winningly revamped King Midas tale.” —Kirkus
“Dazzling…the sharp characterizations bring humor and contemplation in equal measure, touching on the pressures Neil and Anita face to produce a legacy that honors their parents’ sacrifices. Sathian’s bildungsroman isn’t one to miss.” —Publishers Weekly
About Gold Diggers
A brilliant Indian-American magical realist coming of age story and the debut of a major talent.
Spanning two continents, two coasts, and four epochs, Gold Diggers expertly balances social satire and magical realism in a classic striver story that skewers the model minority narrative, asking what a community must do to achieve the American dream. In razor sharp and deeply funny prose, Sathian perfectly captures what it is to grow up as a member of a family, of a diaspora, and of the American meritocracy. This blockbuster novel both entertains and levels a critique of what Americans of color must do to make their way.
A floundering second-generation teenager growing up in the Bush-era Atlanta suburbs, Neil Narayan is authentic, funny, and smart. He just doesn’t share the same drive as everyone around him. His perfect older sister is headed to Duke. His parents’ expectations for him are just as high. He tries to want this version of success, but mostly, Neil just wants his neighbor across the cul-de-sac, Anita Dayal.
But Anita has a secret: she and her mother Anjali have been brewing an ancient alchemical potion from stolen gold that harnesses the ambition of the jewelry’s original owner. Anjali’s own mother in Bombay didn’t waste the precious potion on her daughter, favoring her sons instead. Anita, on the other hand, just needs a little boost to get into Harvard. But when Neil—who needs a whole lot more—joins in the plot, events spiral into a tragedy that rips their community apart.
Ten years later, Neil is an oft-stoned Berkeley history grad student studying the California gold rush. His high school cohort has migrated to Silicon Valley, where he reunites with Anita and resurrects their old habit of gold theft—only now, the stakes are higher. Anita’s mother is in trouble, and only gold can save her. Anita and Neil must pull off one last heist.
Gold Diggers is a fine-grained, profoundly intelligent, and bitingly funny investigation in to questions of identity and coming of age—that tears down American shibboleths.

VIRTUAL: Launch for Natalie Baszile / We Are Each Other's Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers, Land, and Legacy, with Konda Mason
2021-04-06 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
