Litseen

Rosalind Brackenbury: The Third Swimmer
2016-05-25 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
This is the story of a marriage between two Britons, Olivia and Thomas. The first part of the novel takes place in London, on the brink of war, bracing for invasion. It ends with a bomb that would have killed Olivia, had Olivia not been spending the night with her married lover, Felix. Prior to spending her final night with Felix, Olivia has accepted a proposal of marriage from Thomas, a more suitable life partner. Part Two opens in 1952, after the war, but with the effects of the war still haunting the survivors as well as the landscape. Thomas and Olivia, now married with children, have traveled to the south coast of France, to have what might be their delayed honeymoon. But their marriage has cooled down almost to the point of dying out. The central event of the novel is an attempt by Thomas to rescue a stranger seen drowning out at sea. The couple’s future will depend on the outcome of this impetuous act of bravery.
Rosalind Brackenbury is the author of many novels and collections of poetry. In 2015 she was named Poet Laueate of Key West, Florida. She has worked as a teacher, a book reviewer, a deck hand, a mother, and a college professor. She lives in Key West and spends part of each year in France.

Jennifer Dwight
2016-05-26 18:00 - 20:00 | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
Recently widowed and adapting to the challenges of single motherhood, Mercedes Bell is a paralegal at Crenshaw, Slayne & McDonough when she meets Jack Soutane, a dashing San Francisco lawyer who has recently begun leasing office space from the firm. It’s the 1980s. The crack epidemic, homelessness, and AIDS explode on the scene, Jack’s law practice booms―and the Crenshaw firm eagerly shares his bounty. Meanwhile, despite all the warning signs, Mercedes falls under Jack’s spell.
When calamity strikes and Jack succumbs to his own dark surprise, Mercedes finds herself in a race to survive and to protect her daughter. In order to do so, she must make sense of wildly inconsistent information―and face the truths that emerge. Compelling and full of suspense, The Tolling of Mercedes Bell is a story about honesty in the face of deception, courage in the pursuit of happiness, and the unexpected places that quest can lead.
Jennifer Dwight has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area’s legal community, the setting for her upcoming suspense novel, for more than 30 years. She has written and published several law practice-related nonfiction books, many articles, a sixty-segment fiction serial, and numerous short stories. She received a B.A. in Religion from The Colorado College and has studied creative writing at U.C. Extension in Berkeley, CA.

Jose Gutierrez + Tracey Knapp
2016-05-26 19:00 - 21:00 | Bird & Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery St, San Francisco , CA, 94131, United States
Jose Gutierrez was born in Miami and raised in Panama. He’s been a poet of repute in San Francisco for a decade. We’re pleased to host a release reading of his new collection, “A World Less Away.” Tracey Knapp, whose book “Mouth” was published in 2015, will open the reading.

Jo Baker
2016-05-26 19:00 - 21:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz , CA, 95060, United States
From the best-selling author of Longbourn, a stunning new novel that follows an unnamed writer–Samuel Beckett–whose life and extraordinary literary gift are permanently shaped in the forge of war.
When war breaks out in Europe in 1939, a young, unknown writer journeys from his home in neutral Ireland to conflict-ridden Paris and is drawn into the maelstrom. With him we experience the hardships yet stubborn vibrancy at the heart of Europe during the Nazis’ rise to power; his friendships with James Joyce and other luminaries; his quietly passionate devotion to the Frenchwoman who will become his lifelong companion; his secret work for the French Resistance and narrow escapes from the Gestapo; his flight from occupied Paris to the countryside; and the rubble of his life after liberation. And through it all we are witness to workings of a uniquely brilliant mind struggling to create a language that will express his experience of this shattered world. Here is a remarkable story of survival and determination, and a portrait of the extremes of human experience alchemized into timeless art.

Carol Snow + Brian Teare
2016-05-26 19:30 - 21:30 | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Carol Snow’s new book is Position Paper: New and Selected Poems. Robert Hass has called her work “brilliant, funny, subtle,” Cole Swenson “delicate and masterful,” and Fanny Howe has deemed it “a new and mesmerizing way of looking at things.” Her previous books are Artist and Model, selected by Robert Hass for the National Poetry Series and winner of the Poetry Center Book Award; For; The Seventy Prepositions; and Placed: Karesansui Poems. Among her honors are the Joseph Henry Jackson Award, a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Poetry Fund grant.
Brian Teare’s new book of poems is The Empty Form Goes All the Way to Heaven. Cole Swensen says, “A kind of stillness gradually builds through these carefully-shaped pieces, a distilled poise in which one comes to hear Agnes Martin as one simultaneously sees the Zen koan that the collection itself slowly, precisely forms.” He’s published four previous books of poems, The Room Where I Was Born, winner of the Brittingham Prize; Sight Map; Pleasure, which won the Lambda Award; and Companion Grasses, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. A 2015 Pew Fellow in the Arts, he’s received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Fund for Poetry, among others. An Assistant Professor at Temple University, he lives in South Philadelphia, where he makes books by hand for his micropress, Albion Books.

Nomadic Press Author Readings
2016-05-26 19:30 - 21:30 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
Pegasus Books presents an evening with authors from Oakland’s Nomadic Press
Featuring Readers:
Tongo Eisen-Martin
Cassandra Dallett
Soma Mei Sheng Frazier
Allie Marini
Nick Johnson
and MK Chavez
About Nomadic Press (from their website):
“We are proud to print all of our books locally in Oakland, CA. We strongly believe in supporting local authors, publishers, and printers and growing together. We distribute our books with a local distributor and every week—multiple times a week—feature local writers, musicians, and artists in our diverse events across the Bay Area and Brooklyn, NY. Thank you for visiting and supporting your small, community-focused non-profit publishing organization.”

Dana Gioia: 99 Poems
2016-05-26 19:30 - 21:30 | Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park , CA, 94025, United States
We are so honored to bring the newly appointed Poet Laureate of California, Dana Gioia, to celebrate the publication of his new collection. We hope youll join us in welcoming this profound and meaningful artist to Keplers Books in Menlo Park.
Dana Gioia is widely known in the literary community for his rigorous craft and his imaginative use of traditional forms, rhyme and meter. He tackles the everyday drama and emotional moments in our lives and explores universal themes like grief, love, time, family and his own mortality. This is the first collection of Gioias to gather work from across his storied career, including a dozen remarkable new poems.
The Washington Post raves, 99 Poems is one of the most anticipated collections of 2016, and it does not disappoint. No matter what the topicmystery, place remembrance, imagination, stories, songs, loveor the form, these polished pieces are vibrant and inviting.
Dana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia is a native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent. He earned an M.B.A at Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. In December of 2015, Gioia was named Poet Laureate of California by Governor Jerry Brown and will advocate for the education and practice of poetry during his two-year term. He has published four full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California.

Anne Waldman + Friends
2016-05-27 19:30 - 21:00 | Hyatt Regency San Francisco, 5 Embarcadero Center, San Francisco , CA, 94111, United States
POETRY READING: ANNE WALDMAN +
short opening readings by Dean Kritikos, Laura Hinton, Lee Ann Brown
Celebrating the wild hybrid nature of Anne Waldman’s poetry
FREE and OPEN to the PUBLIC
In conjunction with the American Literature Conference
Hyatt Regency, 5 Embarcadero, Room TBA
There are few living American poets today who bring to our literary table the artistic achievement, influence, and multi-faceted artistic production of Anne Waldman.
Poet, multi-media performer, scholar, editor, teacher, playwright, feminist, anti-war activist, and innovator-builder of two major U.S. poetry institutions—Waldman has long been and continues to be into her 70s one of our most important and cherished contemporary avant-garde poetry figures. She is a verbal-performance powerhouse who has worked on countless stages and within multiple forms of poetry-hybrid collaborations as she struggles to reinvent genres and poetry itself through various new-media forms.
Author of over forty volumes of poetry, as well as well as books and essays on poetry and art criticism, Waldman is a legendary experimenter of the hybrid, multi-dimensional possibilities of poetry in performance, a poetics that works both on and off the page. She recently stated in an interview,”I love the book as a vibrational object. I also like to get up and activate the text energetically with my voice.”

Conditional Love: Lonely Christopher, Maxe Crandall & Kevin Lo
2016-05-28 14:00 - 16:00 | Small Press Distribution, 1341 7th Street, Berkeley , CA, 94710, United States
SPD PRESENTS is a monthly reading series with the aim of fostering relationships between emerging writers and readers in our national small press community.
~*~
LONELY CHRISTOPHER is a poet and filmmaker. He is the author of the poetry collection Death & Disaster Series (Monk Books, 2014) and the short story collection The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse, which was a 2011 selection of Dennis Cooper’s Little House on the Bowery imprint of Akashic Books. His first novel, THERE, is forthcoming in 2017. His plays have been produced in New York City and China. His film credits include the feature MOM (which he wrote and directed), the shorts We Are Not Here and Petit Lait (which were adapted from his stories), and Crazy House (for which he wrote the screenplay). He lives in Brooklyn.
Maxe Crandall is a poet and playwright who lives in Brooklyn, NY and Berkeley, CA. Maxe is the author of the chapbooks Together Men Make Paradigms and Emoji for Cher Heart. The play Together Men Make Paradigms premiered at Dixon Place and was short-listed for the Leslie Scalapino Award. Their art and writing about art has appeared in the show Bring Your Own Body: Transgender Between Art and Archives and Transgender History in 99 Objects. A recipient of the Poetry Project’s Emerge-Surface-Be Fellowship and the Poets House Emerging Poets Fellowship, Maxe teaches in the Program in Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford University.
KEVIN LO is a composer, choreographer, and writer recently moved to Oakland from Melbourne, Australia, whose sonic improvising work generally unfolds from preparing and re-preparing instruments as morphological substrate, using violins/the insides/outsides of a piano (depending on availability) with metallic and magnetic objects; sometimes utilizing electronics; often employing extremely close recording techniques.
~*~
Founded in 1969, SPD is currently the only distributor in the country dedicated exclusively to independently published literature. For more information, visit http://spdbooks.org/

Saturday Night Special: A "Sullied" Open Mic
2016-05-28 19:00 - 21:30 | Nick’s Lounge, 3218 Adeline St., Berkeley, CA, 94703, United States
This month at SNS, we’re celebrating the sullied. The damaged, the impure, the tainted, tarnished, spoiled, polluted and defiled. Bring us your filthy poems, your ruined stories, your glorious poisonous words. We want to eat them up.
As always, we’d love to hear your (three-minute) poems, stories, comedic sketches, songs, or dances on our optional theme (or any topic).
Features: Tim Donnelly & Barbara R. Saunders
—
First come first served. Sign-up starts at 7pm and closes when it fills up or when the reading starts, so get there early if you want to read! (Note: Sometimes the list is full by 7:03pm)
Each reader will have 3 minutes maximum. For prose writers this is about one and a half double-spaced pages.
PLEASE NOTE: We are strict about the 3 minute max. When you reach your time limit at SNS, we turn on the disco lights! So, please plan ahead. Practice your piece out loud. Time yourself. Dance!
Saturday, May 28th, 2016
7 – 9:30 pm
Nick’s Lounge (21+)
3218 Adeline Street, Berkeley, CA
1 block south of Ashby BART
Between Fairview St & Martin Luther King Jr Way
FREE!
But bring CASH if you want to buy drinks (which you sort of have to, because there’s a 1-drink minimum!)
Hosted by Hollie Hardy & Tomas Moniz
Please help us out by liking our FB page, where you can also find more details and photos from past events:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Saturday-Night-Special-an-East-Bay-open-mic/112174188880786?sk=info
BIOS
Barbara R. Saunders is a writer from New York, living in Berkeley. She has been a featured storyteller at The Monkey House and has performed original solo work at the Marsh, where she studies with director David Ford. Barbara works as a freelance writer and editor and has won national awards for scholastic nonfiction and communications. In poetry, she is drawn to musical sounds and biographical themes.
TIM DONNELLY has lived in downtown Berkeley since 1991. Before that he was an LA poet. He is a Special Education paraprofessional in the Berkeley Unified School District and a seasoned Union negotiator.
Recent poetry publications include Eleven Eleven, The Dead Animal Handbook, Saturday Night Special, The Oakland Review, Sparkle & Blink, Poems on the Emery-Go-Round, & Cross Strokes: Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Bay Area Poets Coalition: Special Biennial Event
2016-05-29 13:00 - 16:30 | San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
BAPC presents a special biennial poetry event
at the SAN FRANCISCO MAIN LIBRARY
in the H/L Room, Grove Street at Market.
Please enter the building on Grove Street.
A poster just beyond the lobby will direct you to the meeting hall.
Persons from the East Bay taking BART will get off at CIVIC CENTER station,
1/4 block from the Grove Street entrance to the library.

Nomadic Press All Stars
2016-05-29 17:30 - 20:30 | SAFEhouse Arts, 1 Grove St., San Francisco , CA, 94103, United States
FREE. Please RSVP via ticket link to help us track numbers:http://ticketf.ly/1q8bkLn
Central Market NOW and The SF Creative Writing Institute will present local writers reading their work in a free presentation of Nomadic Press All Stars.
Readings by Cassandra Dallett, Mk Chavez, Nick Johnson, Paul Corman-Roberts, Cyrus Armajani, Nick Johnson, and Soma Mei Sheng Frazier. Music by Azuah! Curated by Nomadic Press Executive Director and Founder, J. K. Fowler. www.nomadicpress.org
This event is FREE and OPEN to the public. There will also be light refreshments and the opportunity to meet and talk with the performers.
Central Market NOW celebrates another year of supporting neighborhood art in partnership with the SF Mayor’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development, the California Arts Council and the Kenneth Rainin Foundation. This year CMN has also partnered with The SF Creative Writing Institute to bring the best of the Bay Area’s writers and poets to our neighborhood.

Kwame Alexander
2016-05-31 18:00 - 19:00 | Central Library, Berkeley Public Library, 2090 Kittredge St, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Pegasus Books will sell books at this special event with Middle Grade author Kwame Alexander – Presented by the Berkeley Public Library

Author, poet and educator Kwame Alexander, winner of the 2015 Newbery Medal and a 2015 Coretta Scott King author medal for The Crossover, will visit the Berkeley Public Library for a very special program for kids ages 9 and up and their parents. The Crossover was a New York Times Bestseller and was called a fast and furious middle grade novel of family and brotherhood (and basketball).
Mr. Alexander will talk about and read from his amazing breakthrough book and upcoming books (both about sports and not). He will also be available shortly afterward to sign books.
Kwame Alexander is a poet, educator, New York Times Bestselling author of 21 books, and recipient of the 2015 Newbery Medal for his novel, The Crossover. The founder of two organizations, Book-in-a-Day and LEAP for Ghana, he regularly travels the world as a literacy advocate and expert. Kwame has owned several publishing companies, written for stage and TV (TLC’s “Hip Hop Harry”), recorded a CD, produced jazz and book festivals, hosted a radio show, and taught high school English. In 2015, Kwame served as Bank Street College of Education’s first writer-in-residence. Visit him at KwameAlexander.com.

Happy Hour Stories Goes Classic!
2016-05-31 19:30 - 21:30 | Pegasus Books on Solano, 1855 Solano Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94707, United States
Happy Hour Stories is Solano’s monthly story time – for adults!
This month, join us for an hour of our favorite classics – Greek, Roman, epics, etc. …As always, stories served up with a delicious cocktail.
Featuring a special guest – TBA!
About Happy Hour Stories:
Created in 2014 by Pegasus on Solano’s Elizabeth Freeman and Manuela Aronofsky, Happy Hour Stories is a special story time – for adults!

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

San Francisco Writers Grotto: 3 Minute Reads
2016-06-03 18:00 - 20:00 | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
Join us for a fast-paced and irreverent evening as we showcase new work from the students of the famed San Francisco Grotto Writing Program. On consecutive Friday evenings fiction and nonfiction writers from Grotto classes will read their work—but only for 3 minutes each. Their instructors (Writers Grotto authors) will be enforcing the time limit! Join us for some wine, fun, and a lot of fresh new writing.

Nomadic Press at Oakland First Fridays with Fantastic Negrito
2016-06-03 19:00 - 20:00 | Chapter 510 & the Dept. of Make Believe, 2301 Telegraph Ave, Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
Join us at this amazing Oakland First Fridays event as Nomadic Press presents a host of amazing Bay Area writers prior to a performance by the phenomenal Fantastic Negrito as they launch their newest album, Last Days of Oakland.
The lineup: Arisa White, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Kwan Booth, Cassandra Dallett, Freddy Gutierrez, Mk Chavez, Paul S. Flores, and two of the Oakland Youth Poet Laureates, Tova Ricardo, this year’s Youth Poet Laureate, and Emma Talamantes, one of the 2016 finalists. Music by the wonderful Hip Hop for Change!
Event details:
Main FB event listing: https://www.facebook.com/events/1015349905221447/
We are thrilled and honored to announce that Fantastic Negrito will be performing to celebrate the launch of their upcoming album, The Last Days of Oakland, at our June First Friday street festival.
Fantastic Negrito will be playing a full set at the dusk of dawn (around 8:15).
Prior to the performance, the evening will feature Zakiya Harris and interactive art by 1AM SF and spoken word by Nomadic Press (featuring Oakland Youth Poet Laureattes), and more!
Much of the art and performances will be themed around the title of Fantasic Negrito’s album: THE LAST DAYS OF OAKLAND
It means something to be from Oakland. The tiny city that birthed the Hells Angels, the first sports team in black, and America’s oldest street dance has always been ground zero for counter culture. It is a place where violent crime, art, and swagger converge. It has always been diverse. It has always understood that danger and edge are critical ingredients for art and culture.
But Oakland is changing. As its neighbors, San Francisco and Silicon Valley, spill over with money, the economy in Oakland is soaring. Young entrepreneurs and aspiring artists are attracted by the city’s perceived “renaissance.” Oakland is becoming whiter and safer. Now Oakland is ground zero for the national discussion on gentrification.
Fantastic Negrito is an artist who bridges Oakland’s future with its legendary past. He is a wounded veteran of the city once claimed by Black Panthers and hustlers. He is a vital voice in what the New York Times called “the hottest city in America.” His album, The Last Days of Oakland, is about the fallout and rebirth that comes in the wake of a seismic shift. It is intensely relevant — the way his city has always been.
Come out to join the conversation about the changing landscape of our beautiful city. It’s going to take all of us to perserve our city’s diverse personality, culture, and richness. Let’s do this. Together.
ABOUT FANTASTIC NEGRITO
Xavier Dphrepaulezz hailed from an orthodox Muslim household as a child. After relocating from rural Massachusetts to Oakland as a teenager in the 1980s, he quickly moved from strict religion to the music of Funkadelic; by the age of 20 he taught himself to play just about every instrument he came across, and in the `90s, he signed a multi-million dollar deal with Interscope Records performing under his first name Xavier. Dphrepaulezz’s life changed drastically when he was involved in a near death car accident resulting in a three-week coma, followed by intensive physical rehabilitation with his guitar playing hand permanently incapacitated. After a five-year hiatus, Dphrepaulezz created Fantastic Negrito. Inspired by all American music, most especially Delta bluesmen such as R.L Burnside and Skip James, he sought to modernize his compositions by sampling and looping his own live recordings. He told NPR that the name is “a celebration of blackness. The ‘Fantastic’ is self-explanatory; the ‘Negrito’ is a way to open blackness up to everyone, making it playful and international.”
Upon winning NPR’s inaugural Tiny Desk Concert Contest, Fantastic Negrito quickly won over critics with 2015’s self-titled EP. Consequence of Sound wrote of the record “Dphrepaulezz sings like a man compelled by a spiritual force…[his] voice is impassioned, somewhere between a croon and a scream,” and the Washington Post praised the EP’s “raw vocals and self-assessing lyrics.” The San Francisco Chronicle noted that “almost overnight, the singer-songwriter became an international sensation.”
Find our more about the band at http://www.fantasticnegrito.com/

First Friday: Naked Truth
2016-06-03 19:00 - 21:00 | Main Reading Room, Mill Valley Public Library, 375 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley , CA, 94941, United States
Main Reading Room – 7pm
Wine reception at 6:30pm for pre-registered guests.
For adults and high school students only. No one younger will be admitted. This event is free and open to the public.
Registration highly recommended. Click here to register.

First Friday: Naked Truth
Sit back, enjoy a glass of wine and watch as the Library is transformed into a venue for real people telling real-life stories, raw and without notes. Our amazing line-up of talented storytellers will have carte blanche to choose their favorite, go-to, killer stories—no constraints of a theme! Some of your favorite storytellers will be back to share some of their favorite stories, including Matteson Perry, Doug Cordell, & Josh Healey.

What is First Friday?
Debuting in January 2011 in celebration of the Library’s centennial year, the ongoing “First Fridays” and “After Hours” series presents different narratives, ideas and presentations that an audience might otherwise not consider or experience. After Hours is for adults and high school students.
The Venue:
The Library’s Main Reading Room is transformed into a beautiful venue for After Hours events. Built in 1966, the Library is nestled among the redwoods in an award-winning building and reflects the diverse intellectual interests of the community.
The Experience:
Programs typically last 90 minutes (includes Q&A). After Hours features a wine reception before and after our program. Patrons enjoy the intimate atmosphere and ability to meet our presenters. Attendance ranges between 115 and 260 people per event.

Hamel, Lau, + Caples
2016-06-03 19:30 - 21:30 | Studio One Arts Center, 365 45th Street, Oakland, CA, 94609, United States
Please join us on Friday, June 3rd @ 7:30 pm for a reading w.
Gillian Olivia Blythe Hamel, David Lau and Garrett Caples!
Event is FREE.
Wine, Lagunitas beer and snacks will be served.
Gillian Olivia Blythe Hamel’s work has appeared in VOLT,jubilat, The Volta, and The Offending Adam, and was recently featured in the Aesthetic Blitz exhibition from the Asian American Women Artists Association. Her first book,occident, is forthcoming from Called Back Books in 2017. She is managing editor at Omnidawn Publishing and editor of OmniVerse. Gillian also co-publishes speCt!, a chapbook series and book arts imprint, with Peter Burghardt and Robert Andrew Perez. She lives in Oakland, California.
David Lau‘s poetry and essays have appeared widely (in Boston Review, The American Reader, Armed Cell, New Orleans Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and New Left Review). His first book of poetry, Virgil and the Mountain Cat, was described by the Believer as “simultaneously creative and destructive … grounded in—or rather, trapped by—the present.” Commune Editions will publish his second book this August; Still Dirty finds its bearings in the political struggles after the economic crisis. In 2009, he was chosen as a Poetry Society of America New American Poet. Lau is also the author of the chapbookBad Opposites (2012). With Cal Bedient, he edits the journal Lana Turner. A graduate of UCLA and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he is a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz, where he first began teaching in 2005. He has also taught poetry at UC Berkeley and in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College.
Garrett Caples is the author of the forthcoming Power Ballads(Wave, 2016), as well as earlier poetry collections The Garrett Caples Reader (Angle, 1999) and Complications (Meritage, 2007). He wrote the essay book Retrievals (Wave, 2014), and co-editedIncidents of Travel in Poetry: New and Selected Poems by Frank Lima (City Lights, 2016) and Collected Poems of Philip Lamantia(California, 2013). He curates the Spotlight Poetry Series for City Lights.

Bay Area Poets Coalition First Saturday
2016-06-04 15:00 - 17:00 | Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison Street, Berkeley, CA, 94702, United States
Addison is one block south of and parallel to University Ave.
between Acton & Bonar St.
Parking on the street (NOT in the S.C.L. parking lot)
Check in at the front desk and you will be directed to the meeting location
(usually Movie Room, or backyard garden)
All Ages Welcome
Come and enjoy a friendly and informal read-around —
3-5 minutes per poet/reader, or “just listening” is fine too 🙂

Cathy Arellano Book Release Party
2016-06-04 16:00 - 18:00 | Galería de la Raza, 2857 24th Street, San Francisco , CA, 94110, United States
Join Cathy Arellano, Korima Press and Galería de la Raza for a book release party and reading for Cathy’s new book published by Korima Press “Salvation on Mission Street.”
Book description:
The poetry and prose in the collection explore the deep love instilled in a people for themselves and their homeland even as they battle loss in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Author Bio:
Just another Mexican lesbian writer from San Francisco’s Mission District, Cathy Arellano grew up here in the late 1960s to early 80s surrounded by cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents on her mother’s side. In 1983, new owners evicted her mother from the flat they were renting, and she passed away less than a year later. Arellano returned and taught youth in the neighborhood. “Salvation’s” poems and stories are her creative offering to a people and place she loves.
Reader Bios:
Estela de la Cruz is a poet who lives in San Francisco. She has a BA in English from UC Berkeley. She has read at Galeria de la Raza’s Lunada, Voz Sin Tinta, Pan Dulce Poets, Flor y Canto (2015), and other Bay Area venues. She was published in Konch Magazine, and she self-published a small chapbook called For the Hell of it. Her primary objective is to create art. That’s it.
Ingrid Aleja García is a Guatemalan jack of all trades and participant of many sf carnavals, a Loco Bloco alumni and lover of all arts. Ingrid grew up in SF´s mission district (when taxis wouldn´t dare to enter the neighborhood). She immigrated back to the homeland and worked as a social justice activist & artist. Now she is a proud Visual Designer graduate of CCSF and has taught youth to express themselves through the arts in Guatemala and in San Francisco.
Leticia Hernández-Linares is a poet, interdisciplinary artist, educator, and author of Mucha Muchacha, Too Much Girl (Tía Chucha Press, 2015). A three-time San Francisco Arts Commission grantee, she lives, works, and writes in the Mission District. There was a time when she did not know Norman Zelaya.
Andrea Rodriguez: Born and raised in SF, received her B.A. from UCLA and M.F.A. from USC. Intersecting her worlds of dance, fitness, design, production and technology, she is a Game Producer for the Zumba Fitness Video Game Franchise, Music Video Director for the Loco Bloco “From the Bay to Bahia,” video, and Theatrical Director for the LA Cumbia Festival. Andrea’s mission is to inspire you to move using dance, art, music, technology and cultura!
Lito Sandoval is President of the Latino Democratic Club. He was a member of the queer Latino comedy troupe Latin Hustle and appeared in the production Full Frontal Rudity. His work has also been seen in the anthology Virgins, Guerrillas y Locas: Gay Latinos Writing About Love.

Summer Reading: Eteraz, Shreve, Khong, Bernard + Mouton
2016-06-04 18:00 - 20:00 | The Armory Club, 1799 Mission St, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
featuring
Ali Eteraz
critically acclaimed memoirist
(Children of Dust),
and author of the novel Native Believer
“Merciless, intellectually lacerating, and brutally funny, Native Believer is not merely a Gonzo panorama of Muslim America–it’s one of the most incisive novels I’ve ever read on America itself. Here, sex, money, and violence all stake their claims on treacherously shifting identities–and neither love nor god is an escape.”
–Molly Crabapple, author of Drawing Blood
Porter Shreve
New York Times notable
author, teacher, and essayist
(The End of the Book, When The White House Was Ours)
“Porter Shreve’s The End of the Book is audacious, affecting and elegiac, a terrific novel about a century of American letters that hums with the artist’s deep desire to last.” — Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins
Rachel Khong
(California Sunday, The Believer)
Executive Editor of Lucky Peach
and author of the forthcoming novel
Goodbye, Vitamin
“Rachel Khong’s first novel sneaks up on you — just like life, illness and heartbreak. And love. A million small, human and often deeply funny details gather force to tell a tale that is ultimately incredibly poignant.”
—Miranda July, author of The First Bad Man
Sean Bernard
author of Studies in the Hereafter
and
Desert Sonorous,
winner of the 2014 Juniper Prize
“This collection works by stealth, like alien lights sweeping over a desert plain. All the wreckage of American life, Tucson style, is here on display: the margaritas and air-conditioning, the lost believers caught in a life most theirs the moment before it slips from their palms. What Sean Bernard does so well, with his versatile rhythmic style, is to get you to care about such overheated characters, all of them aliens.”―Edie Meidav, Juniper Prize for Fiction judge and author of Lola, California
Tommy Mouton
poet, fiction writer
& Steinbeck Fellow
author of What We Do Cherish
Free Admission
Cash Bar Exotica
Doors at 5.30,
Reading at 6.00

Jeramy DeCristo
2016-06-06 19:00 - 21:00 | Himalayan Flavors, 1585 University Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94703, United States
Jeramy DeCristo is a black Bay Area-based artist and writer working in sound, text, image, structure and movement. The conceptual dimensions of his work, whether art installation or poetry, emerge largely from thinking and rethinking blackness as a profoundly radical aesthetic form and material; specifically he thinks through the formal, material and epistemological worlds made possible in and through black music. He also makes music under his own name and the pseudonym OKeh. DeCristo is currently a University of California President’s Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Literature Department at UC San Diego where he is working on a book about black experimental music, entitled Blackness and the Writing of Sound in Modernity. He obtained his PhD from the History of Consciousness Program at UC Santa Cruz in 2015.

León, Peters, Gelman, + White
2016-06-06 19:00 - 21:00 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Raina J. León, PhD is a CantoMundo fellow, a Cave Canem graduate fellow, and a member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective. She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and sombra: (dis)locate (2016). She has received numerous fellowships and residencies including the Macdowell Colony, the Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale. She is a founding editor of The Acentos Review and an associate professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California.
http://www.rainaleon.com/poems.html
Annelyse Gelman is a California Arts Scholar, the inaugural poet-in-residence at UCSD’s Brain Observatory, and recipient of the 2013 Mary Barnard Academy of American Poets Prize. Her work has appeared in Indiana Review, the PEN Poetry Series, and elsewhere, and she is the author of the poetry collection Everyone I Love is a Stranger to Someone (2014), shortlisted for the Believer Poetry Award.
www.annelysegelman.com.
Arisa White received her MFA from UMass, Amherst. She’s a Cave Canem fellow and the author of Black Pearl, Post Pardon, Hurrah’s Nest, and A Penny Saved. A 2013-14 recipient of an Investing in Artist Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation and the northwest regional representative for Nepantla: A Journal Dedicated to Queer Poets of Color, Arisa is a BFA faculty advisor at Goddard College. Forthcoming from Augury Books in October 2016 is her third full-length collection, You’re the Most Beautiful Thing that Happened.
arisawhite.com

Jensen Beach + Colin Winnette
2016-06-06 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Colin Winnette talks with Jensen Beach about his short story collection, Swallowed by the Cold (Graywolf Press).

Praise for Jensen Beach:

“The shocking accident in the first story of Swallowed by the Cold centers this collection like a knife. Jensen Beach understands the deep uneasiness of men and women, and in his stories lie surprises—mortal surprises, among others—that are revealed in vivid episodes of quiet harm. This book held me fast.”—Ron Carlson

“Jensen Beach is a master of linguistic restraint, a writer whose precision, empathy, and relentless honesty form the spine of this extraordinary work of fiction. Taken individually, these stories are works of art. It’s when the collection is viewed as a whole, however, that an intricate fictional latticework emerges. Each story here is the progenitor of the next, each life therein a quiet catastrophe, each character both victim and witness, bound to every other character in those unknowable ways that bind us all together. This is not just a book, but a world.”—Jack Livings, author of The Dog

“Swallowed by the Cold moved me enormously. Jensen Beach renders his characters in a way that is both unsettling and deeply complex, and he imbues the Swedish landscape that surrounds them with a layered personality. This is a wonderful book—graceful and assured, spare and compassionate—and Jensen Beach is a fiercely talented writer.”—Molly Antopol

About Swallowed by the Cold:

The intricate, interlocking stories of Jensen Beach’s extraordinarily poised story collection are set in a Swedish village on the Baltic Sea as well as in Stockholm over the course of two eventful years.
In “Swallowed by the Cold,” people are besieged and haunted by disasters both personal and national: a fatal cycling accident, a drowned mother, a fire on a ferry, a mysterious arson, the assassination of the Swedish foreign minister, and, decades earlier, the Soviet bombing of Stockholm. In these stories, a drunken, lonely woman is convinced that her new neighbor is the daughter of her dead lover; a one-armed tennis player and a motherless girl reckon with death amid a rainstorm; and happening upon a car crash, a young woman is unaccountably drawn to the victim, even as he slides into a coma and her marriage falls into jeopardy.
Again and again, Beach’s protagonists find themselves unable to express their innermost feelings to those they are closest to, but at the same time they are drawn to confide in strangers. In its confidence and subtle precision, Beach’s prose evokes their reticence but is supple enough to reveal deeper passions and intense longing. Shot through with loss and the regret of missed opportunities, “Swallowed by the Cold” is a searching and crystalline book by a startlingly talented young writer.

Sugartown Voices
2016-06-07 18:45 - 21:00 | Spice Monkey, 1628 Webster St, Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
Featured readers: Bonnie Thomas: Sun on the Rind • Chantal Guillemin: Truchas: Closer to Heaven • Gail Peterson: Swimming the Sky • Kimberly Saterfield:Voices from the Field. On guitar: Barry Ebner. Curated by Leila Rae. An open mic follows the featured readers. Free Drawing: Book, Broadside, and Spice Monkey Gift Card. Book Table.

Russ Franklin w/ Adam Johnson
2016-06-07 19:30 - 21:30 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Cosmic Hotel is Russ Franklin’s quirky yet touching novel that follows Sandeep Sanghavi, the son of an Indian businesswoman and a famous eccentric astronomer named Van Ray. Sandeep lives a nomadic life staying at different hotels across America with his mother and her hotel consulting firm. After not seeing them for many years, Van Ray shows up broke with his pregnant astronaut ex-wife in tow, claiming to have discovered a big secret that will change their lives. Sandeep must juggle his father’s scientific search, his mother’s failing business, and the tension of having family all together for the first time in decades.
Russ Franklin has degrees in math, physics, and literature, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University, as well as a Kingsbury Fellow at Florida State University. His work has appeared in Oxford American, Alaska Quarterly Review,Greensboro Review and other publications. He currently teaches writing at Florida State University in Tallahassee.
Adam Johnson is the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Orphan Master’s Son and the National Book Award winning short story collection Fortune Smiles . He teaches creative writing at Stanford University. His fiction has appeared in Esquire, The Paris Review, Harper’s, Tin House, Granta, and Playboy, as well as The Best American Short Stories. His other works include Emporium, a short-story collection, and the novel Parasites Like Us. He lives in San Francisco.

Yaa Gyasi Book Launch
2016-06-07 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Yaa Gyasi reads from her highly touted debut novel, Homegoing, at this book launch party.

Praise for Homegoing:

“A marvelous novel.” — Publishers Weekly *starred review*

“Gyasi’s characters are so fully realized, so elegantly carved—very often I found myself longing to hear more. Craft is essential given the task Gyasi sets for herself—drawing not just a lineage of two sisters, but two related peoples. Gyasi is deeply concerned with the sin of selling humans on Africans, not Europeans. But she does not scold. She does not excuse. And she does not romanticize. The black Americans she follows are not overly virtuous victims. Sin comes in all forms, from selling people to abandoning children. I think I needed to read a book like this to remember what is possible. I think I needed to remember what happens when you pair a gifted literary mind to an epic task. Homegoing is an inspiration.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates, National Book Award winning author of Between the World and Me

“Homegoing is a remarkable feat—a novel at once epic and intimate, capturing the moral weight of history as it bears down on individual struggles, hopes, and fears. A tremendous debut.” —Phil Klay, National Book Award winning author of Redeployment

About Homegoing:

A riveting, kaleidoscopic debut novel and the beginning of a major career: a novel about race, history, ancestry, love, and time that traces the descendants of two sisters torn apart in eighteenth-century Africa across three hundred years in Ghana and America.

Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and will live in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising children who will be sent abroad to be educated before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the empire. Esi, imprisoned beneath Effia in the Castle’s women’s dungeon and then shipped off on a boat bound for America, will be sold into slavery. Stretching from the wars of Ghana to slavery and the Civil War in America, from the coal mines in the American South to the Great Migration to twentieth-century Harlem, Yaa Gyasi’s novel moves through histories and geographies and captures–with outstanding economy and force– the troubled spirit of our own nation. She has written a modern masterpiece.

Passages on the Lake 27
2016-06-08 19:00 - 21:00 | The Terrace Room, 1800 Madison St, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Oakland’s premiere literary showcase kicks off summer early with some seriously hot performance writers including Maw Shein Win, Kira Lynne Allen, Jenee Darden, Riss Rosado and a tribute to musical poetry duo Beach Head.

Ruth Thompson + Jayne Benjulian
2016-06-08 19:30 - 21:30 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
About Ruth Thompson’s Crazing: Beginning where “The White Queen” (Woman With Crows) ends, in the loss of “memory, cleverness, concentration” and the hope of “light through the cracks,” this new book by poet Ruth Thompson explores aging, loss, and the “delamination” of the earth whose body she shares. “We are blown here out of sight of ourselves,” she writes, “staggering and dismayed.” Yet dissolution resolves in expansion, laughter, joy – “seeing, in this dire wind, what there is to worship.”

About Jayne Benjulian’s Five Sextillion Atoms: In poems of formal compression, tautness, acuity of imagery and epigrammatic exactitude, we encounter loving mother, father who betrays, cruel stepmother, followed by motherhood peeled of its idyllic fantasies. Nuanced and gripping, Five Sextillion Atoms is the debut of a skilled portraitist and satirist.
Notable for the way in which it combines stories of family history with larger matters of public history, Five Sextillion Atoms encapsulates the inner world of the child and the adult who carries an icy wound.
Ruth Thompson grew up in California and received a BA from Stanford and a PhD from Indiana University. She has been an English professor, librarian, college dean, and yoga teacher in Los Angeles. She now lives in Hilo, Hawai’i, where she teaches writing, meditation, and yoga. Her poems have won the New Millennium Writings Poetry Award and the Harpur Palate Milton Kessler Memorial Prize, among others. Woman with Crows is her second book of poetry, and was a finalist for the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s To The Lighthouse Prize in 2010. Her chapbook, Here Along Cazenovia Creek, was the basis for a collaborative performance of poetry and dance with Japanese dancer Shizuno Nasu. Her most recent book is Crazing.
Jayne Benjulian’s work appears in Agni, Barrow Street, Women’s Review of Books, Poet Lore, Nimrod International, Ms., Poetry Daily and elsewhere. She has been an Ossabaw Island Project Fellow; a teaching fellow at Emory University, where she earned an MA; a lecturer in the Graduate Program in Theater at San Francisco State University; and a Fulbright Teaching Fellow in Lyon, France. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers. Jayne grew up near Jones Beach and in Westchester, NY. As a child, she left letters to herself under her mattress, intending to read them years later and see who she had been. She served as chief speechwriter at Apple, investigator for the public defender in King County, Washington, and director of new play development at Magic Theater. She now lives in the Berkshires. Five Sextillion Atoms is her first collection.

Poetry Flash: Cohen + Hodges
2016-06-12 15:00 - 16:00 | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland hosts another installment of Poetry Flash on Sunday, June 12th at 3pm. The featured guest poets will be Susan Cohen and Catherine Abbey Hodges.
Poetry Flash readings are wheelchair accessible; ASL interpreters may be requested one week in advance from editor@poetryflash.org. Visit Poetryflash.org for more events and reviews! Poetry Flash has begun a Kickstarter campaign. Click here to learn more about helping them so they can better serve and support the literary communities of the West Coast and beyond.
Join us for the official book launch of Susan Cohen’s second full-length collection, A Different Wakeful Animal, winner of the 2015 Meadowhawk Prize from Red Dragonfly Press. Stephen Dunn says, “Her descriptions constitute what I want to call intelligence—someone in the act of getting the world right, making it ours as well as hers.” A former contributing writer for the Washington Post Magazine, she was also a professor of Journalism at UC Berkeley. Her poems have been widely published in literary journals and anthologized in the Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry.
Catherine Abbey Hodges’s debut book of poems is Instead of Sadness, winner of the 2015 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize from Gunpowder Press. Paulann Petersen says, “Catherine Abbey Hodges offers us—inside each musical line, within each vibrant trope—a luminous wisdom. Each poem gives us a world ‘replenished like a well // in blues and greens and wings.’” She is also author of the chapbook All the While, and she is professor of English at Porterville College in central California.
Copies of each book will be available for purchase at the event.
