Litseen

Voz Sin Tinta Zoom Reading
2020-05-14 18:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
Folks! Join us Thursday evening for a Zoom open mic! Find the link below!
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZclcOivqDsuGN3874bFQ-7kFD56Uvs4cPG4?fbclid=IwAR0ccdL5H4kZSVW4zZZOpl8-4Qah1LVvcxqQ_NSQkiZ6jp68i4ITR16nEsQ

Courts, COVID-19 & Voter Suppression
2020-05-14 19:00 - 20:00
Moderated by Lala Wu
Program will air Thursday May 14th, 7:00 PM PST

Register (for free) to watch this program’s debut

We’ve all seen the images from the recent in-person election in Wisconsin: people lined up wearing masks, some holding signs saying “THIS IS RIDICULOUS,” as they risked deadly COVID-19 illness and violated a shelter-in-place order simply to exercise the right to vote. Perhaps the most disturbing part of this scenario was the fact that it wouldn’t have happened without a last-minute ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that rolled back an absentee ballot extension period that had been put in place expressly to mitigate contagion potential from in-person voting. With less than six months to go until the 2020 Presidential election, and with the COVID-19 pandemic expected to remain in full force, can we expect a repeat of the debacle in Wisconsin—this time, on a national scale? In the aftermath of 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder verdict that shattered the Voting Rights Act, how much can we rely on our courts as the last line of defense in our right to vote?
Three nationally recognized experts will lead us through the role of the courts in ensuring voters’ access to vital options like absentee ballots and early voting, and show us how everyday citizens can act now to shape the judiciary in the short and long term. Featuring legal scholar Richard Hasen, whose Election Meltdown was deemed “required reading for legislators and voters” by Kirkus in a starred review; Constitutional scholar Alan Hirsch, whose A Short History of Presidential Election Crises was praised as “lucid, balanced, and deeply informed” by Elizabeth Kolbert; and renowned civil rights leader Abdi Soltani, executive director of the ACLU of Northern California. Moderated by Lala Wu, whose Sister District Project enlists 40,000 women nationwide in the fight to win crucial state legislative elections.
Our series on Voting Rights has been generously supported by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, the Stephen M. Silberstein Foundation, Mal Warwick Donor Digital, and Guy and Jeanine Saperstein.

Recommended Reading

Richard Hasen, Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy
Alan Hirsch, A Short History of Presidential Election Crises: (And How to Prevent the Next One)
Order your copies from one of our independent bookstore partners

Mary Ruefle
2020-05-14 19:00 - 20:30 | Mill Valley Public Library, 375 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley , CA, 94941, United States
Mary Ruefle is the author of many books, including Dunce (Wave Books, 2019), My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016), Trances of the Blast (Wave Books, 2013), Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures (Wave Books, 2012), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism, and Selected Poems (Wave Books, 2010), winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She has also published a comic book, Go Home and Go to Bed! (Pilot Books/Orange Table Comics, 2007), and is an erasure artist, whose treatments of nineteenth century texts have been exhibited in museums and galleries and published in A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006). Ruefle is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Robert Creeley Award, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Bennington, Vermont.

Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves
2020-05-14 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
iller Apps: War, Media, Machine
published by Duke University Press
In Killer Apps Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves provide a detailed account of the rise of automation in warfare, showing how media systems are central to building weapons systems with artificial intelligence in order to more efficiently select and eliminate military targets. Drawing on the insights of a wide range of political and media theorists, Packer and Reeves develop a new theory for understanding how the intersection of media and military strategy drives today’s AI arms race. They address the use of media to search for enemies in their analyses of the history of automated radar systems, the search for extraterrestrial life, and the development of military climate science, which treats the changing earth as an enemy. As the authors demonstrate, contemporary military strategy demands perfect communication in an evolving battlespace that is increasingly inhospitable to human frailties, necessitating humans’ replacement by advanced robotics, machine intelligence, and media systems.
Jeremy Packer is Associate Professor in the Institute for Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto.
Joshua Reeves is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Media at Oregon State University.
Praise for Killer Apps

“In this crucial new book, Jeremy Packer and Joshua Reeves offer a provocative, media-centric analysis of automated killing machines. Engaging with an armada of flying sensors, robotic submarines, and AI weapons already in use, they show that big data, computer vision, and super intelligence emerge not just to order and organize the battlefield, but to produce new enemies. Clever and incisive, the book provides a haunting look at warfare of the near future.” — Lisa Parks, coeditor of Life in the Age of Drone Warfare
“This is an excellent book: well designed, thoroughly engaging, informative and, unfortunately, extremely topical and timely. The authors have gone to great lengths to make Killer Apps relentlessly up to date, providing readers with the latest in weapons developments, including AI drones and ‘swarmanoid’ robotics. With its impressive grounding in theory and hardware, it will become the go-to book for critical understandings of the intersection of warfare, media, and enmity.” — Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, author of Kittler and the Media

Joan Frank: Where You're All Going
2020-05-14 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Joan Frank discusses her new collection of novellas, Where You’re All Going, with Peg Alford Pursell.
Praise for Where You’re All Going
“Joan Frank’s wonderful novellas are funny, edgy, poignant and true. Attuned to the predicaments of the slight-outsider, and of good people struggling to get by, Frank gives us characters dealing with love lost and love sustained, and the small essential intimacies that make up both. Her prose is vivid, her observations sharp, and everywhere music and song animate the conversation. You’ll feel more alive when you read these stories, and hold closer to you the people you cherish.” —Sylvia Brownrigg
“Joan Frank has an uncanny ability to go deeply into character and with the lightest touch show us how divided we humans are in the most complicated matters of the heart. Where You’re All Going  is a marvel.” —Ann Packer, NYT best-selling author of The Children’s Crusade
“Every novella in this book is, in part, about music, from jazz to classical to Marvin Gaye. One could practically mark the first novella, ‘staccato’; every paragraph begs to be read aloud, to be heard. The stories are, line after line, brimming with a brisk freshness.” —Aimee Bender
About Where You’re All Going
In her quartet of novellas, Joan Frank invites readers into the inner lives of characters bewildered by love, grief, and inexplicable affinities. A young couple navigates a strange friendship and unexpected pregnancy; a woman recalls the bizarre fallout of her former lover’s fame; a lonely widow is drawn to an arrogant young man; a wealthy spiritual seeker grapples with what wealth cannot affect. Witty and humane, Frank taps the riches of the novella form as she writes of loneliness, friendship, loss, and the filaments of intimacy that connect us through time.

Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano: Fire in Paradise
2020-05-15 17:00 | Pt. Reyes Books, 11315 CA-1, Pt. Reyes Station, CA, 94956, United States
Journalist Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano discuss Fire in Paradise, their account about the 2018 Camp Fire, one of the worst wildfires in U.S. history.
About Fire in Paradise
The harrowing story of the most destructive American wildfire in a century.
There is no precedent in postwar American history for the destruction of the town of Paradise, California. On November 8, 2018, the community of 27,000 people was swallowed by the ferocious Camp Fire, which razed virtually every home and killed at least 85 people. The catastrophe seared the American imagination, taking the front page of every major national newspaper and top billing on the news networks. It displaced tens of thousands of people, yielding a refugee crisis that continues to unfold.
Fire in Paradise is a dramatic and moving narrative of the disaster based on hundreds of in-depth interviews with residents, firefighters and police, and scientific experts. Alastair Gee and Dani Anguiano are California-based journalists who have reported on Paradise since the day the fire began. Together they reveal the heroics of the first responders, the miraculous escapes of those who got out of Paradise, and the horrors experienced by those who were trapped. Their accounts are intimate and unforgettable, including the local who left her home on foot as fire approached while her 82-year-old father stayed to battle it; the firefighter who drove into the heart of the inferno in his bulldozer; the police officer who switched on his body camera to record what he thought would be his final moments as the flames closed in; and the mother who, less than 12 hours after giving birth in the local hospital, thought she would die in the chaotic evacuation with her baby in her lap. Gee and Anguiano also explain the science of wildfires, write powerfully about the role of the power company PG&E in the blaze, and describe the poignant efforts to raise Paradise from the ruins.
This is the story of a town at the forefront of a devastating global shift—of a remarkable landscape sucked ever drier of moisture and becoming inhospitable even to trees, now dying in their tens of millions and turning to kindling. It is also the story of a lost community, one that epitomized a provincial, affordable kind of Californian existence that is increasingly unattainable. It is, finally, a story of a new kind of fire behavior that firefighters have never witnessed before and barely know how to handle.?What happened in Paradise was unprecedented in America. Yet according to climate scientists and fire experts, it will surely happen again.
About the authors
Alastair Gee is an award-winning editor and reporter at the Guardian who has also written for The New Yorker online, the New York Times, and the Economist. Gee lives in New York City.
Dani Anguiano writes for the Guardian and was a reporter for the Chico Enterprise-Record. Anguiano lives in the San Francisco Bay area.

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #9
2020-05-15 18:00
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!
Showing up is one amazing form of support that we really appreciate. Another is financial. Money = energy to us, and donating sends one signal (of many) that you would like our work to continue. If 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/e/nomadic-press-virtual-open-mic-2-tickets-100581457848;
OR 3) donating through the website at www.nomadicpress.org/donate
We have a short goal of $150.
90 minutes
30 readers
3 minutes each
On Zoom!
It feels really important to gather in these times, and we need to prioritize the health of most vulnerable community members (our elders, those who work with elders, and those with suppressed immune systems). So we are hosting another virtual open mic! Feel free to join just to listen, too! We can hold up to 100 people.
Hosted by Nazelah Jamison (with J. K. on tech). It’s a continuing experiment, and we hope you can join us!
Sign Up Here:
https://forms.gle/1ZNKSnnzRZpXxvUE7
Our safe space process still applies to our collective virtual space, so please read this by visiting https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess.
Zoom Joining Info
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Virtual Open Mic #9
Time: May 15, 2020 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81341873943
Meeting ID: 813 4187 3943
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Aya De León: Side Chick Nation
2020-05-15 19:00 - 21:00 | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, 94704
Location:
In the basement of the store.
2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley
Website
Aya De León is a writer, activist, educator, spoken word poet and author of the award-winning Justice Hustlers series. The Director of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, she teaches poetry and spoken word at UC Berkeley and is an alumna of Cave Canem, VONA and Harvard University. She is a winner of the International Latino Book Award and a two time winner of the Independent Publisher Book Awards, and her extensive writing credits include Guernica, Essence, Ebony, The Huffington Post, VICE, Ploughshares, Woman’s Day and Bitch magazine, among many other websites and publications. De León first came to national attention as a spoken word artist in the underground poetry scene in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a hip-hop theater artist. Visit her online at ayadeleon.com, on Twitter @AyadeLeon, or on Facebook.

Marta Lindsey: Golden Gate Park, An A-Z Adventure
2020-05-15 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Join us to celebrate Marta Lindsey’s new book Golden Gate Park, An A-Z Adventure
About Golden Gate Park, An A-Z Adventure
Explore California’s most visited city park in this A-to-Z adventure
From A for Artist Ruth Asawa’s hanging wire creations in the de Young Museum to Z for the Zebra on the carousel in the Koret Children’s Quarter, this book leads you around San Francisco’s famous Golden Gate Park to reveal a range of fun and surprising facts for tourists and locals alike. Step into art, science, nature, and culture by visiting the park’s major attractions, like the serene Japanese Tea Garden; discovering secret destinations, like the magical fairy doors hidden in trees; or just relaxing on the green meadows where the bison roam. Included also at the back of the book is a colorfully illustrated map with extra trivia and details on the park’s favorite sights.

Shelter in Sunset Reading Series
2020-05-16 17:00 - 18:30
In but a moment’s time, our lives have become hyperlocalized. Sheltering in place, we become intensely aware of where we are, and with whom. Bringing together poets in the neighborhood is one way to reimagine place, belonging, and how we make these. The map of poetry often allows us to lose restrictions of time and space. In another way, place seeps through all that we do—all that we are.
Here, then. Presenting the Shelter in Sunset Reading Series, edition one, all the way from the Sunset District in Yelamu (San Francisco).
FEATURING:
Art Beck
Monica Mody
Pireeni Sundaralingam
Russell Reza-Khaliq Gonzaga
Sarah Heady
Organizer & host Monica Mody
Please RSVP using the form below. You will be sent the details of the video conference 90 minutes before the reading.
RSVP form: https://forms.gle/n7w5A5TF5NTEW4qE8
(This event will not be recorded.)
_____________________________
Bios coming soon.

Virtual Event!- Writing the Complexity of the Asian American Experience
2020-05-17 11:00 - 13:00
In Discussion: Immigrants, Refugees, and Second Gen: Writing the Complexity of the Asian American Experience (Livestream) with Traci Chee, Lori Lee, Deeba Zargarpur, I.W. Gregorio
May 17, 2020 at 2PM ET / 11AM PT on Facebook Live! Follow Books Inc. on Facebook to gurantee you get a notification when we go live!
Join authors as they talk about the complexity of writing the Asian American experience from immigrants to refugees to Second Gen and beyond!
Aagain, you can watch the panel live on Books Inc.’s Facebook Page or on the Asian Author Alliance website.
Find more information about this panel and other upcoming virtual events celebrating Asian & Pacific Islander American Book Month here: https://asianauthoralliance.com/asian-pacific-islander-american-book-month/

Extinct Animals of the Ice Age!
2020-05-17 14:00 - 16:00
The Tar Pits Cantos Author Greg Harmon reads for the kids & their parents

Join us online at
Bird & Beckett this
Sunday afternoon,
for a reading by
the proprietor’s eldest son’s
childhood baseball coach
Greg Harmon
now a distinguished and acclaimed writer for youngsters
and author of

The Tar Pits Cantos
a poetic reimagining
of a long gone world swallowed up
in the glorious Los Angeles muck
plus the thirteen poems of
Henry’s Bestiary

all inspired by the author’s outings
with his grandson Henry
and Frank Sinatra
to the fabled La Brea tar pits
click here to view/listen to the live stream on Sunday, 5/17 at 2pm

Global Green New Deal: “Into the Portal, Leave No One Behind”
2020-05-19 08:00 - 09:30
We need to move from crisis to justice with a global green new deal for people and the planet.
On May 19, join Arundhati Roy and Naomi Klein at 4:00 PM GMT+1/ 11:00 AM EDT/ 8:30 PM IST, moderated by Asad Rehman, to hear how we can begin this global transformation.

VIRTUAL: ZYZZYVA & The Booksmith Present: Lockdown Lit @ Lunch with Clare Beams & Rachel Vorona Cote
2020-05-19 11:00 - 13:00
Booksmith and The Bindery, in partnership with Zyzzyva, present Lockdown Lit @ Lunch, a weekly salon, Tuesdays at 11am PST. Lockdown Literature is a group of authors with books published during the coronavirus pandemic who have banded together to support one another. The first event features Clare Beams (The Illness Lesson) & Rachel Vorona Cote (Too Much).
You can find a full list of Lockown Lit authors here. Please save the date and join us!
This event will be streaming live on our Facebook page.

Friends, neighbors: We are pleased to be able to bring you some of our events virtually while our doors are otherwise closed in the interest of public health. If you’d like to support the store, you can still do that in the usual ways:
> Buy The Illness Lesson and/or Too Much and we’ll deliver them directly to your door.
> Buy one of our gift certificates, which we keep on file and never expire.
> Make a donation.
Thank you very much for your support – we’re proud to be a legacy business and a mainstay of the Haight-Ashbury since 1976!

The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams
“Brilliant, suspenseful… A masterpiece.” – Elizabeth Gilbert, author of City of Girls
At their newly founded school, Samuel Hood and his daughter Caroline promise a groundbreaking education for young women. But Caroline has grave misgivings. After all, her own unconventional education has left her unmarriageable and isolated, unsuited to the narrow roles afforded women in 19th century New England.
When a mysterious flock of red birds descends on the town, Caroline alone seems to find them unsettling. But it’s not long before the assembled students begin to manifest bizarre symptoms: Rashes, seizures, headaches, verbal tics, night wanderings. One by one, they sicken. Fearing ruin for the school, Samuel overrules Caroline’s pleas to inform the girls’ parents and turns instead to a noted physician, a man whose sinister ministrations — based on a shocking historic treatment — horrify Caroline. As the men around her continue to dictate, disastrously, all terms of the girls’ experience, Caroline’s body too begins to betray her. To save herself and her young charges, she will have to defy every rule that has governed her life, her mind, her body, and her world.
Clare Beams’s extraordinary debut story collection We Show What We Have Learned earned comparisons to Shirley Jackson, Karen Russell and Aimee Bender, and established Beams as a writer who “creates magical-realist pieces that often calculate the high cost of being a woman” (The Rumpus). Precisely observed, hauntingly atmospheric, as fiercely defiant as it is triumphant, The Illness Lesson is a spellbinding piece of storytelling.

Lunch Visit and Discussion with Molly Wizenberg, author of THE FIXED STARS
2020-05-19 12:00 | The Ruby, 23rd and bryant street, san francisco, 94110
Join us for a discussion and Q&A with Molly Wizenberg, author of The Fixed Stars. Molly will be in conversation with Ruby member Sana Javeri Kadri. Thanks to the publisher, we have 3 copies of the book available to the first three people who sign up! Books will also be on sale the day of!
This is a potluck lunch so stay tuned on what to bring!
About The Fixed Stars
At age 36, while serving on a jury, Molly Wizenberg found herself drawn to a female attorney she hardly knew. Married to a man for nearly a decade and mother to a toddler, Wizenberg tried to return to her life as she knew it, but something inside her had changed irredeemably. Instead, she would discover that the trajectory of our lives is rarely as smooth or as logical as we’d like to believe.
Like many of us, Wizenberg had long understood sexual orientation as a stable part of ourselves: we’re “born this way.” Suddenly she realized that her story was more complicated. Who was she, she wondered, if something at her very core could change so radically?
THE FIXED STARS (Abrams Press; May 12, 2020; U.S. $25.00; Hardcover) by New York Times bestselling and James Beard Award–winning author Molly Wizenberg is a taut, electrifying memoir exploring timely and timeless questions about desire, identity, and the limits and possibilities of family. In honest and searing prose, Wizenberg forges a new path: through the murk of separation and divorce, coming out to family and friends, learning to co-parent a young child, and realizing a new vision of love.
THE FIXED STARS is a frank and moving story about letting go of rigid definitions and ideals that no longer fit, and learning instead who we really are.
About the Author
Molly Wizenberg is the author of two bestselling books, A Homemade Life and Delancey, and the James Beard Award–winning blog Orangette. She has written for the Washington Post, the Guardian, Saveur, and Bon Appétit, and she also cohosts the podcast Spilled Milk. With chef Brandon Pettit, Wizenberg cofounded the award-winning Seattle restaurants Delancey and Essex.

Source:: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lunch-visit-and-discussion-with-molly-wizenberg-author-of-the-fixed-stars-tickets-93595559839

A virtual conversation with Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky & Stan Cox!
2020-05-19 12:00 - 14:00
Presented by City Lights & Democracy Now!
This event is free & will be broadcast on Crowdcast. Sign up here to attend!
Amy Goodman in discussion with Noam Chomsky and Stan Cox about the prospects for the Green New Deal, how the pandemic does–and does not—affect the struggle for climatic and economic justice, among other relevant topics.
Amy Goodman is a broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and the host Democracy Now! She joins us from New York City. Stan Cox is the author of the new book The Green New Deal and Beyond just published by City Lights, and joins us from Salina, Kansas. Noam Chomsky, author of the foreword to The Green New Deal and Beyond, is a scholar, academic, and author of numerous books including Because We Say So with City Lights. He joins us from Tucson, Arizona.
WE THANK OUR CO-SPONSORS: Alternative Radio,The Climate Mobilization, CODEPINK, Counterpunch, The Gund Institute, Haymarket Books, The Institute for Social Ecology, Post-Carbon Institute, Post Growth Institute, Project Censored, Research and Degrowth, Truthout

See Black Women
2020-05-19 16:00 - 17:15
‘See Black Women’ is presented as part of the Art+Action Coalition’s COME TO YOUR CENSUS campaign, which aims to inspire and galvanize Census participation by all communities. This two-part conversation held in collaboration with Art+Action Coalition Partners YBCA and Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD), will take place LIVE on Tuesday, May 19 and Tuesday, May 26 from 4-5:15pm (PST) on YBCA and MoAD’s Facebook pages.
To insist upon being seen and heard is an act of resistance. Telling one’s story, recording a community’s legacy, and creating visual representations of one’s ancestry are methods of resisting erasure. During these two conversations, the participants seek to answer questions including: How do we cite and honor our existence? How do we ensure our labor is acknowledged and our stories are heard for us to receive our fair share—both in civic and artistic arenas?
The first talk includes Erica Deeman / @erica_deeman, Lava Thomas/ @lavathomas , Angela Hennessy /@thehouseofhennessy and Sage Stargate.
The second on 5/26 with Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo /@bluekaza, Tahirah Rasheed, Asya Abdrahman/ @asyaabdrahman, & Sam Vernon / @samevernon
Both panels are curated and moderated by Ashara Ekundayo @blublakwomyn under her #ArtistAsFirstResponder platform
For more information about the See Black Women panel conversation visit: https://ybca.org/event/2020-see-black-women/

Alissa Carpenter with Jen Oleniczak Brown - How to Listen and Be Heard (Zoom Livestream)
2020-05-19 17:00 - 19:00
Tuesday, May 19, 5:00pm • Free Zoom Livestream Event • Presented with Shack 15
Moderated by Jen Oleniczak Brown
Too often, people avoid difficult conversations; but these discussions often need to happen to bring people together so we can all succeed.
There’s no denying that our workplaces are more diverse than ever. Age, race, gender—there are so many different perspectives and experiences being brought to the table. And the best employees and leaders know that harnessing the power of these differences will build stronger teams, ideas, and organizations. But how do we do this? If we all think, feel, and act so differently, how do we get anything done?
The first step is recognizing that these differences exist. And that they’re here to stay. We need to respect and embrace our varied viewpoints, and then we can start to communicate across (not against) them.
How to Listen and How to Be Heard shows you how to bridge the conversation gap and use your unique voice to start powerful conversations. This book is about learning how to communicate with, through, and alongside what makes us different. It’s about open dialogue and practical tools that get everyone on the same page—or at least in the same room. It’s not about quick fixes or the absence of conflict; it’s about working toward authentic communication in the workplace—for managers, employees, and colleagues from all fields. It’s about remembering that we’re all here to work together.
Alissa Carpenter is a multigenerational workplace expert and owner of Everything’s Not Ok and That’s OK, where she provides training, consulting, and speaking services to organizations all over the world. Carpenter has delivered a TEDx talk on authentic workplace communication, and has been featured in media outlets including Forbes, ABC, FOX, and CNN Money.
Jen Oleniczak Brown is the Founder of The Engaging Educator (EE), a women-owned and operated company dedicated to helping people find their unapologetic, authentic, and best voice/communication style through improv-based education. Her work has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, Bustle, and Moneyish. She is also the author of Improv(E): Using Improv to Find Your Voice, Style, and Self.

Cara Black with Jacqueline Winspear
2020-05-19 18:00 - 20:00
Hosted by Peter Maravelis
Two masters of crime fiction discussing the writing of fiction that takes place in World War Two Europe. They explore topics that closely parallel many of the issues of the day as well as discussing the challenge and complexities of placing one’s writing in a dynamic historic period.
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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(Click Here) to make reservations
Event is free, but reservations are required
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Books for this event may be purchased at BOOKSHOP.ORG at the following links :
>To purchase Three Hours in Paris click here<
>To purchase The American Agent: A Masie Dobbs Novel click here<
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Cara Black’s most recent book is
Three Hours in Paris
Published by Soho Press
Cara Black, doyenne of the Parisian crime novel, is at her best as she brings Occupation-era France to vivid life in this gripping story about one young woman with the temerity—and drive—to take on Hitler himself. Cara Black is also the author of the bestselling Aimee Leduc Series. The most recent release being Murder in Bel-Air published by Soho Books.
Visit: www.carablack.com
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Jacqueline Winspear’s essay “Writing about War” will be published in the new anthology
Private Investigations: Mystery Writers On The Secrets, Riddles and Wonders In Their Lives
published by Seal Press
Jacqueline Winspear is the author of the Masie Dobb’s Series, following the exploits of the renowned psychologist and investigator Masie Dobbs through her exploits in WW2 London. The most recent novel in the series is The American Agent (number 15) published by Harper Collins. Additional books in the series include: To Die But Once; In This Grave Hour; Journey to Munich and many others.
Visit: www.jacquelinewinspear.com

Sex, Art and Power: Writer to Writer with Garth Greenwell and Lidia Yuknavitch
2020-05-19 19:00 - 20:00
Moderated by Keiko Lane
Program will air Tuesday May 19th, 7:00 PM PST

Register (for free) to watch this program’s debut

In our Writer to Writer series, two writers who are fans of each other’s work come together for a conversation. Garth Greenwell’s most recent book, Cleanness, was described in Harpers as “an electrifying portrait of sex’s power to lacerate and liberate, to make and unmake our deepest selves…The book’s sex scenes unfold like revelations, effortlessly braiding inner drama with precisely choreographed intimacy.” And Greenwell, writing in The New Yorker, has called Lidia Yuknavitch’s sex scenes “remarkable among current American novelists, not just for their explicitness but for the way she uses them to pursue questions of agency, selfhood, and the ethical implications of making art.” Come listen in as two of contemporary literature’s most incendiary writers talk about the relationships between queer bodies and sex, language and literary citizenship, and the moral and artistic complexities of desire and power. Moderated by Keiko Lane, writer, poet, and former faculty member at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

Recommended Reading

Garth Greenwell, Cleanness
Lidia Yuknavitch, Verge
Order your copies from one of our independent bookstore partners

Jennifer Ackerman, The Bird Way at Bookshop Santa Cruz
2020-05-19 19:00 - 21:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz , CA, 95060, United States
This is an advanced event listing. Please check back for updated information, or sign up for our events emails.
This free event will take place at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Chairs for open seating are usually set up about an hour before the event begins. If you have any ADA accommodation requests, please email info@bookshopsantacruz.com by May 17th.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Genius of Birds, a radical investigation into the bird way of being, and the recent scientific research that is dramatically shifting our understanding of birds — how they live and how they think.
“There is the mammal way and there is the bird way.” This is one scientist’s pithy distinction between mammal brains and bird brains: two ways to make a highly intelligent mind. But the bird way is much more than a unique pattern of brain wiring, and lately, scientists have taken a new look at bird behaviors they have, for years, dismissed as anomalies or mysteries. What they are finding is upending the traditional view of how birds conduct their lives, how they communicate, forage, court, breed, survive. They’re also revealing the remarkable intelligence underlying these activities, abilities we once considered uniquely our own–deception, manipulation, cheating, kidnapping, infanticide, but also, ingenious communication between species, cooperation, collaboration, altruism, culture, and play.
Some of these extraordinary behaviors are biological conundrums that seem to push the edges of–well–birdness: A mother bird that kills her own infant sons, and another that selflessly tends to the young of other birds as if they were her own. Young birds that devote themselves to feeding their siblings and others so competitive they’ll stab their nestmates to death. Birds that give gifts and birds that steal, birds that dance or drum, that paint their creations or paint themselves, birds that build walls of sound to keep out intruders and birds that summon playmates with a special call–and may hold the secret to our own penchant for playfulness and the evolution of laughter.
Drawing on personal observations, the latest science, and her bird-related travel around the world, from the tropical rainforests of eastern Australia and the remote woodlands of northern Japan, to the rolling hills of lower Austria and the islands of Alaska’s Kachemak Bay, Ackerman shows there is clearly no single bird way of being. In every respect, in plumage, form, song, flight, lifestyle, niche, and behavior, birds vary. It’s what we love about them. As E.O Wilson once said, when you have seen one bird, you have not seen them all.
Jennifer Ackerman has been writing about science and nature for three decades. She is the author of eight books, including The Genius of Birds, which has been translated into twenty languages and the forthcoming The Bird Way: A New Look at How Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think. Her articles and essays have appeared in Scientific American, National Geographic, The New York Times, and many other publications, Ackerman is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship in Nonfiction, a Bunting Fellowship, and a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The Editor by Steven Rowley | A GGP Virtual Book Chat on Zoom
2020-05-19 19:00 - 21:00
Join us on Zoom on Tuesday, May 19 at 7 PM Pacific for a virtual book chat about one of Kathleen’s favorite books, THE EDITOR by Steven Rowley. We expect Steven Rowley to join us!

Zoom meeting link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82390231644
We’ll be playing excerpts of the audiobook from our audiobook partner, Libro.fm. You can get your audiobook here: bit.ly/LibroEditor
If you’d prefer paper, here’s a link to our website where you can order a copy for shipment from our warehouse: bit.ly/GGPEditor
“What happens when you write that novel and it finally finds a home at a publishing house? If it’s 1992 and your editor is Jackie O, you are forced to look deeper and answer the questions you been avoiding your whole life — this is a must-read for any aspiring writer!”— Kathleen
April 2019 Indie Next List
“Steven Rowley’s new novel is exactly the balm I needed in today’s climate. Focusing on a young writer who discovers that his editor is none other than Jackie Kennedy Onassis, the book explores both romantic and familial relationships in a humorous and touching manner. Although the writing is wickedly barbed and the zingers fly at the speed of a 1940s rom-com, The Editor is so much more. There is real heart in the writing as well as real love between the characters. It’s a true delight and the kind of book people who loved Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine or Less will truly enjoy. Just be prepared with a box of tissues and your favorite cocktail (Jackie would suggest daiquiris).”
— William Carl, Wellesley Books, Wellesley, MA
Description
From the bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus comes a novel about a struggling writer who gets his big break, with a little help from the most famous woman in America.
After years of trying to make it as a writer in 1990s New York City, James Smale finally sells his novel to an editor at a major publishing house: none other than Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Jackie–or Mrs. Onassis, as she’s known in the office–has fallen in love with James’s candidly autobiographical novel, one that exposes his own dysfunctional family. But when the book’s forthcoming publication threatens to unravel already fragile relationships, both within his family and with his partner, James finds that he can’t bring himself to finish the manuscript.
Jackie and James develop an unexpected friendship, and she pushes him to write an authentic ending, encouraging him to head home to confront the truth about his relationship with his mother. Then a long-held family secret is revealed, and he realizes his editor may have had a larger plan that goes beyond the page…
From the bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus comes a funny, poignant, and highly original novel about an author whose relationship with his very famous book editor will change him forever–both as a writer and a son.
About the Author
Steven Rowley is the bestselling author of Lily and the Octopus, which has been translated into nineteen languages. He has worked as a freelance writer, newspaper columnist, and screenwriter. Originally from Portland, Maine, Rowley is a graduate of Emerson College. He currently resides in Los Angeles.
Praise For…
One of:
NPR’s Favorite Books of 2019
Esquire’s “Best Books of 2019 (So Far)”
Southern Living’s “25 Beach Reads Perfect for Summer”
PopSugar’s “Buzzy Books to Read This Spring”
Town & Country’s “Must-Read Books of Spring 2019”
Cosmopolitan’s “13 Best Books Coming Out in April”

Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody on Paul Valéry
2020-05-19 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody discusses his translation of The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry.
About The Idea of Perfection
A fresh look into the monumental work of Paul Valéry, one of the major French literary figures of the twentieth century.
Heir to Mallarmé and the symbolists, godfather to the modernists, Paul Valéry was a poet with thousands of readers and few followers, great resonance and little echo. Along with Rilke and Eliot, he stands as a bridge between the tradition of the nineteenth century and the novelty of the twentieth. His reputation as a poet rests on three slim volumes published in a span of only ten years. Yet these poems, it turns out, are inseparable from another, much vaster intellectual and artistic enterprise: the Notebooks.
Behind the published works, behind the uneventful life of the almost forgotten and then exceedingly famous poet, there hides another story, a private life of the mind, that has its record in 28,000 pages of notes revealed in their entirety only after his death. Their existence had been hinted at, evoked in rumors and literary asides; but once made public it took years for their significance to be fully appreciated. It turned out that the prose fragments published in Valéry’s lifetime were not the after-the-fact musings of an accomplished poet, nor his occasional sketchbook, nor excerpts from his private journal. They were a disfigured glimpse of a vast and fragmentary “exercise of thought,” a restless intellectual quest as unguided and yet as persistent, as rigorous, and as uncontainable as the sea that is so often their subject.
The Idea of Perfection shows both sides of Valéry: the craftsman of sublimely refined verse, and the fervent investigator of the limits of human intellect and expression. It intersperses his three essential poetic works—Album of Early Verse, The Young Fate, and Charms—with incisive selections from the Notebooks and finishes with the prose poem “The Angel.” Masterfully translated by Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody, with careful attention to form and a natural yet metrical contemporary poetic voice, The Idea of Perfection breathes new life into poems that are among the most beautiful in the French language and the most influential of the twentieth century.
About the Author
Paul Valéry is one of the major figures of twentieth-century French literature. After a promising debut as a young symbolist in Mallarmé’s circle, Valéry withdrew from public view for almost twenty years, and was almost forgotten by 1917 when the publication of the long poem La Jeune Parque made him an instant celebrity. He was best known in his day for his small output of highly polished lyric poetry, and posthumously for the 28,000 pages of his Notebooks. He died in 1945.
Nathaniel Rudavsky-Brody was born in Columbus, Ohio. He has translated the work of French and Belgian poets, including Benjamin Fondane, for which he was awarded the Susan Sontag Prize for Translation. He is the author of two volumes of poetry in French and one in English, and has worked as a typesetter, a programmer, and a private tutor in Greece.

Oakland Virtual Slam ft. Joyce Lee!
2020-05-19 20:00 - 22:00
GANG GANG. We might be stuck inside but that doesn’t mean we can’t come together and have a poetry slam! We’ll be hosting the slam on zoom and Bay Poets Unite will be live streaming our virtual slam on facebook, youtube, and twitter! We got a $50 prize for 1st place!
📝Workshop starts at 7:15 PM on Zoom (Meeting ID: 868-4725-4912)
🎙Virtual Slam starts at 8:15 PM on our facebook page!
Sign Up List for the Virtual Slam. Deadline is Mon 11:59pm (https://forms.gle/nmF9ZtqFWR23XnLY7)
Our feature is the amazing Joyce Lee:
Joyce Lee is an International storyteller and performance poet. Her performances of her own creative non-fiction writing constantly receive standing ovations and encores from her fans and personal heroes.
Joyce Lee is an explorer of emotional and physical life. She travels the world and writes but is not a travel writer, instead, each place she wanders, each country, is allotted by her to introduce its own spirit. Joyce listens to that spirit and takes notes. Sometimes the note is a memory, sometimes a story, but every time a poetic gift to her audience. She currently resides in Bogota, Colombia with plans to move to elsewhere in 2020 to complete her first novel.

Alta Asks Live: Peter Orner
2020-05-20 12:30 - 13:00
Where do Peter Orner’s characters come from? Will the global pandemic appear somehow in his future work? And what comes next for the award-winning author and Dartmouth College professor? Orner will join Alta Asks Live and host Heather Scott Partington on Wednesday, May 20 at 12:30 p.m. PST to discuss his short story collection, Maggie Brown & Others, and much, much more. REGISTER: https://www.crowdcast.io/e/alta-asks-live-peter

Todd Miller: Empire of Borders
2020-05-20 16:00 - 18:00
Todd Miller discusses his recent book Empire of Borders: The Expansion of the US Border around the World
This author presentation, discussion and Q and A will stream here https://www.facebook.com/revbooksnyc/
The United States is outsourcing its border patrol abroad—and essentially expanding its borders in the process.
Buy the book at a special price here https://www.revolutionbooks.org/book/9781784785116
Register today: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/todd-miller-empire-of-borders-expansion-of-us-borders-around-the-world-tickets-105612824802
Journalist Todd Miller reveals in Empire of Borders, the nature of US borders has changed. These boundaries have effectively expanded thousands of miles outside of US territory to encircle not simply American land but Washington’s interests. Resources, training, and agents from the United States infiltrate the Caribbean and Central America; they reach across the Canadian border; and they go even farther afield, enforcing the division between Global South and North.
*Empire of Borders* traces the rise of this border regime. It delves into the practices of “extreme vetting,” which raise the possibility of “ideological” tests and cyber-policing for migrants and visitors, a level of scrutiny that threatens fundamental freedoms and allows, once again, for America’s security concerns to infringe upon the sovereign rights of other nations.
In Syria, Guatemala, Kenya, Palestine, Mexico, the Philippines, and elsewhere, Miller finds that borders aren’t making the world safe—they are the frontline in a global war against the poor.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Stephanie Danler and Anna Wiener
2020-05-20 17:00 - 19:00
Join us on Wednesday May 20th at 5:00pm PDT on Instagram Live for a conversation between Stephanie Danler and Anna Wiener on her new memoir Stray.
About Stray
From the bestselling author of Sweetbitter, a memoir of growing up in a family shattered by lies and addiction, and of one woman’s attempts to find a life beyond the limits of her past. Stray is a moving, sometimes devastating, brilliantly written and ultimately inspiring exploration of the landscapes of damage and survival.
After selling her first novel–a dream she’d worked long and hard for–Stephanie Danler knew she should be happy. Instead, she found herself driven to face the difficult past she’d left behind a decade ago: a mother disabled by years of alcoholism, further handicapped by a tragic brain aneurysm; a father who abandoned the family when she was three, now a meth addict in and out of recovery. After years in New York City she’s pulled home to Southern California by forces she doesn’t totally understand, haunted by questions of legacy and trauma. Here, she works toward answers, uncovering hard truths about her parents and herself as she explores whether it’s possible to change the course of her history.
Lucid and honest, heart-breaking and full of hope, Stray is an examination of what we inherit and what we don’t have to, of what we have to face in ourselves to move forward, and what it’s like to let go of one’s parents in order to find a peace–and family–of one’s own.

Litquake on Lockdown: Ishmael Beah and Little Family
2020-05-20 18:00
From the #1 New York Times-bestselling author of the Sierra Leone child-soldier memoir, A LONG WAY HOME, comes this powerful new novel about young people living at the margins of society. LITTLE FAMILY portrays the lives of five youth who have improvised a household in an abandoned airplane, struggling to replace the homes they have lost with the one they have created together. Join us to celebrate release of this remarkable debut work of fiction from Ishmael Beah, whom Vanity Fair has called “arguably the most-read African writer in contemporary literature.” FREE, $5 suggested donation
Streamed live on Crowdcast and Facebook Live!
Books are available from your favorite indie bookstores, or order from bookshop.org!

Speakers

Ishmael Beah
Ishmael Beah, born in Sierra Leone, West Africa, is the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, and the novel Radiance of Tomorrow. His newest novel, Little Family, is a profound and tender portrayal of the connections we forge to survive the… Read More →

Alia Volz, in conversation with Joe Loya, discusses Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco
2020-05-20 18:00 - 19:00
During the ’70s in San Francisco, Alia’s mother ran the underground Sticky Fingers Brownies, delivering upwards of 10,000 illegal marijuana edibles per month throughout the circus-like atmosphere of a city in the throes of major change. She exchanged psychic readings with Alia’s future father, and thereafter had a partner in business and life. Decades before cannabusiness went mainstream, when marijuana was as illicit as heroin, they ingeniously hid themselves in plain sight, parading through town–and through the scenes and upheavals of the day, from Gay Liberation to the tragedy of the Peoples Temple–in bright and elaborate outfits, the goods wrapped in hand-designed packaging and tucked into Alia’s stroller. But the stars were not aligned forever and, after leaving the city and a shoulda-seen-it-coming divorce, Alia and her mom returned to San Francisco in the mid-80s, this time using Sticky Fingers’ distribution channels to provide medical marijuana to friends and former customers now suffering the depredations of AIDS.
Exhilarating, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreaking, Home Baked celebrates an eccentric and remarkable extended family, taking us through love, loss, and finding home. (Houghton Mifflin)
This will be a live stream event on Crowdcast. The event is FREE and you can register here.

Red Light Lit
2020-05-20 19:00 - 20:30
Red Light Lit is having its first virtual reading series hosted by comedian, Luna Malbroux. Featured readers include Peter Thomas Bullen, Lara Coley, Jenee Darden, Ingrid C Keir, Kar Johnson, Thea Matthews, Loria Mendoza, Mackenzie Studebaker, Kristina Sergeevna Ten and more. The show is curated by Jennifer Lewis and will have some special guests! If you are not in the Bay Area, this is your chance to join us as we explore love relationships and sexuality in the time of quarantine.
Make sure to log-on early, the show will only hold 100-people.
THE SHOW IS FREE AND EVERYONE IS WELCOME!!!!
However, if you want to support Red Light Lit to ensure we can continue publishing emerging writers, you can donate via Eventbrite up to 24-hours after the show.
ZOOM INFORMATION:
Meeting ID: 948 0831 7020
Password: [REDACTED]
Join from a PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android device:
Web Link: https://tinyurl.com/y87b3hwz
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