Jodie Hollander
2016-05-12 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Jodie Hollander was raised in a family of classical musicians. Currently an artist in residence aboard the SS Vallejo at the Varda Artists Residency Program (http://www.vardaartistsresidency.to/#varprogramabout) she studied poetry in England and has published her work in journals such as The Poetry Review, The Dark Horse, The Rialto, Verse Daily, The Warwick Review, Agenda, Australia’s Best Poems, 2011, and Australia’s Best Poems of 2015. Her debut publication, The Humane Society, was released with Tall-Lighthouse (London) in 2012. She is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship in South Africa, and was awarded a MacDowell Colony fellowship in 2015. She is currently the poetry editor for GARO, the new online journal for the Rocky Mountain Land Library. http://Jodiehollander.com
https://www.facebook.com/VARProgram/

Women's Collective Reading: "Daughter’s Tongue Coalition"
2016-05-12 19:30 - 21:30 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
Pegasus Books presents a reading with “Daughter’s Tongue Coalition” – a local women’s writing collective.
Featuring Readers:
DeShara Suggs-Joe
Ella Schoefer-Wulf
Grace Fondow
Melissa Ramos
Claudette Davis
Anna Avery
Jezebel Delilah
Natalie Catasus
Rachel Kass
And featured poet Donna de la Perriere
Copies of the collective’s new chapbook, Body Collective, will be for sale at the event.

ABOUT THE COLLECTIVE: “The Daughter’s Tongue Collective aims to redefine what it means to be a woman writer. Our goal is to work with and bring together communities of multi-racial, multi-cultural and multi-identifying women. We want to create a safe space for women poets, writers, and lovers of literature to gather together and celebrate women’s art. The immense gentrification infecting the Bay Area is driving out young artists, specifically artists of color. With our Coalition we would like to help foster a community of multicultural women artists and reclaim a space that is rightfully ours. In this space women can gather together to create, perform, and support each other in their artistic endeavors in the Bay Area.”

Martin Seay + Robin Sloan
2016-05-12 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Martin Seay will talk about The Mirror Thief (Melville House), one of the most talked-about debut novels of 2016, with Robin Sloan.
Praise for The Mirror Thief
“A true delight, a big, beautiful cabinet of wonders that is by turns an ominous modern thriller, a supernatural mystery, and an enchanting historical adventure story…A splendid masterpiece, to be loved like a long-lost friend, an epic with near-universal appeal.”—Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed)
“Matched in its ambition only by its accomplishment. This literary, noir thriller–drenched in grit, paranoia, and desperation–pulls the reader inexorably through a Russian doll of mysteries that span centuries and cultures. One hell of a debut novel.” —Chris Phipps, Diesel Books Oakland
“An incredible feat of storytelling . . . A delicious stew of Los Angeles-type noir, Da Vinci Code mystery, Rebel Without a Cause toughness, and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance mechanical spirituality.” —Steve Salardino, Skylight Books

About The Mirror Thief:
A globetrotting, time-bending, wildly entertaining masterpiece in the tradition of “Cloud Atlas.”
“Publishers Weekly” raved that “with near-universal appeal . . .Seay’s debut novel is a true delight, a big, beautiful cabinet of wonders that is by turns an ominous modern thriller, a supernatural mystery, and an enchanting historical adventure story.”Set in three cities in three eras, “The Mirror Thief” calls to mind David Mitchell and Umberto Eco in its mix of entertainment and literary bravado.
The core story is set in Venice in the sixteenth century, when the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world’s most wondrous inventions: the mirror. An object of glittering yet fearful fascination was it reflecting simple reality, or something more spiritually revealing? the Venetian mirrors were state of the art technology, and subject to industrial espionage by desirous sultans and royals world-wide. But for any of the development team to leave the island was a crime punishable by death. One man, however a world-weary war hero with nothing to lose has a scheme he thinks will allow him to outwit the city’s terrifying enforcers of the edict, the ominous Council of Ten . . .
Meanwhile, in two other Venices Venice Beach, California, circa 1958, and the Venice casino in Las Vegas, circa today two other schemers launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret . . .
All three stories will weave together into a spell-binding tour-de-force that is impossible to put down an old-fashioned, stay-up-all-night novel that, in the end, returns the reader to a stunning conclusion in the original Venice . . . and the bedazzled sense of having read a truly original and thrilling work of art.

FRESH AND BEST: Poirier, Ventura + Labrador y Manzano
2016-05-13 19:00 - 21:00 | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
Diesel; A Bookstore welcomes Julien Poirier to the store for the release of Out of Print (City Lights, 2016) as part of the FRESH AND BEST reading series featuring scene-fixtures alongside new and often unpublished poets. Reading with Julien will be Sean Labrador y Manzano and Sierra Ventura. We hope you can join us for an evening of poetry, community, and beverages!
Julien Poirier is the author of several poetry collections, including El Golpe Chileño (Ugly Duckling, 2010), Stained Glass Windows of California (Ugly Duckling, 2012), Way Too West (Bootstrap, 2015) and Out of Print (City Lights). In 2005, he published an experimental newspaper novel, Living! Go and Dream (Ugly Duckling). He is also the editor of an anthology of writing by Jack Micheline, One of a Kind (Ugly Duckling, 2008), and a book of travel journals by Bill Berkson, Invisible Oligarchs (Ugly Duckling, 2015). A founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse Collective, Poirier edited the newspaper New York Nights from 2001 to 2006. He has taught poetry in New York City public schools and at San Quentin State Prison. He lives in Berkeley with his wife and two daughters.
Sierra Ventura was born and raised in the East Bay. She is a poet, an amateur funny person, and an eldritch abomination. She is currently studying creative writing at Mills College in Oakland, CA. Her work has been published in City College of San Francisco’s literary journal, The Forum, The Walrus, and Odd Compulsion. Her poems have been compiled in the following chapbooks: Subhuman Sprawl, STYLE IS A FRAUD, Who’s Fucking Shoe is That?, Winter Vomiting Disease, Take Me to Suplex City, and Daria Reruns.
Sean Labrador y Manzano edited the print journal Conversations at the Wartime Café: a Decade of War 2001-2011; is founder of the series “Mixer 2.0, a San Francisco Bay Area M.F.A/PhD reading series;” curated the symposium “From Trauma to Catharsis: Performing the Asian Avant-Garde;” and with Dillon Westbrook and Robert Woodcock, he performs as José Rizal in the ninety-minute jazz choreo-poem, “Das Kapital, Volume 4: Elimination of the Industrial Phase and the Accumulation of Debt,” which was excerpted at the SF Jazz Poetry Festival, 2014. This year he did a whirlwind tour of conferences (ALA Boston, North American Review bicentennial, and Berkeley Poetry Conference) discussing a range of topics from Mark Twain’s Anti-Imperialist Writings to the Asian Avant Garde. He was selected for the Best American Poetry in 2004. In response to the Best American Poetry 2015 controversy, on behalf of the Circle for Asian American Literary Studies, he will be moderating a roundtable on “Yellowface” at the American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco in 2016

Noah Warren
2016-05-13 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Noah Warren reads from his first collection, The Destroyer in the Glass, winner of the 110th Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize.

Praise for The Destroyer in the Glass:
“The Destroyer in the Glass impresses at once with its wedding of intellect, heart, sly humor, and formal dexterity, all in the service of negotiating those moments when an impulse toward communion with others competes with an instinct for a more isolated self. The poems both examine and embody the nexus of joy and sorrow, of certainty and confusion, without which there’d be none of the restlessness that makes us uniquely human. Warren’s vision is a generous one indeed —and itself a gift.” –Carl Phillips, Judge’s Citation

About The Destroyer in the Glass:
Noah Warren’s brilliant collection of poetry, The Destroyer in the Glass, is the 110th recipient of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, the oldest annual literary award in the United States. Warren explores universal themes of isolation and the desire for human connection in a series of tightly crystallized poems that question the damage we have done—to ourselves and to others—in the pursuit of knowledge and a stable idea of who we are. Balancing a tendency toward form, rhyme, and allusion with a freer, expressive style, this exceptional young poet charts the development of the self through, by, and in language.

Cross Strokes, Poetry Between Los Angeles and San Francisco
2016-05-14 14:00 - 16:00 | Bird & Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery St, San Francisco , CA, 94131, United States
Join us for the San Francisco Launch Party for the anthology Cross Strokes, Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco on Saturday, May 14th from 2 to 4 pm.
Readings by:
Neeli Cherkovski
Tim Donnelly
Sharon Doubiago
Patrick James Dunagan
Bill Mohr
Paul Vangelisti
Maw Shein Win

Plus readings of work by Francisco X. Alarcon, Jack Hirschman, and Lenore Kandel.
Bird & Beckett is located at 653 Chenery Street near the Glen Park Bart station.
See you there!

Northern California Book Awards
2016-05-15 13:00 - 15:00 | San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
35th Annual Northern California Book Awards celebrate writers, readers, and publishers of Northern California. Authors will be honored in Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translation, and Children’s Literature, with brief celebratory readings and remarks by the winning authors. A lively reception with book signing follows, all free and open to the public; Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to Susan Griffin, eco-feminist essayist, novelist, poet, and playwright. NCBR Recogntion Award will be presented to California’s Wild Edge: The Coast in Poetry, Prints, and History, by Tom Killion with Gary Snyder, (Heyday). The NCBAs are presented by Northern California Book Reviewers, an association of book reviewers and book review editors, Poetry Flash, San Francisco Public Library and the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, PEN West, Women’s National Book Association-SF Chapter, and Mechanics’ Institute Library. Visit Poetryflash.org (see NCBA feature on Front Page) for complete list of nominees to be announced in April: http://poetryflash.org/programs/?p=ncba_2016, or email NCBR@poetryflash.org. Winners will be announced at the Awards ceremony!

Amanda Nadelberg + Ben Mirov
2016-05-15 15:00 - 16:00 | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland and Coffee House Press welcome Amanda Nadelberg and Ben Mirov to the store to discuss and sign their new poetry books, Songs from a Mountain and Ghost Machines, on Sunday, May 15th at 3:00pm.
Panoramic narratives made from imaginary forms, daily commutes, circuits of walks—invitations to a new sense of memory and scale. Songs from a Mountain has been praised by Publishers Weekly as “a wild, careening, conceptually wily (yet somehow ruly) book that refuses to keep its feet on the ground.”
Amanda Nadelberg is the author of Bright Brave Phenomena, Isa the Truck Named Isadore, and, most recently, a chapbook called The Bartleby Poems. She lives in Oakland.
Douglas Kearney says of Ghost Machines: “Reading Ghost Machines, I am reminded of Brian Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, J Dilla’s, or DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing. In these sonic works, archives reanimate into loop driven compositions that stave off endings. Refrain riddles these poems, deepening echoes that re-orient and destabilize.”
Ben Mirov is the author of Ghost Machines, Hider Roser, and Ghost Machine. He grew up in Northern California and lives in Oakland.
The books will be available for purchase at the event.

West Marin Review Artists + Writers
2016-05-16 19:00 - 21:00 | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
Join us for an informal evening featuring authors and artists reading from and talking about their work published in West Marin Review, Volume 6. The award-winning literary and arts journal features prose, poetry, art, and original music selected from contributors from across the nation, but the focus this night is on local writers and artists. West Marin Reviewis published by Point Reyes Books in collaboration with a group of professional artists, writers, and editors from West Marin.
Featured Speakers:
Catlyn Fendler, poetry
Denise Parsons, prose
Susan Starbird, prose
Jan Dederick, poetry
Linda Allen, art

Tom Odegard
2016-05-16 19:00 - 21:00 | Himalayan Flavors, 1585 University Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94703, United States
Tom Odegard (aka Tom/Ms.G) arrived in the Bay Area from Portland when he was eight, in 1948. When he was 12 he set about writing a science book but soon discovered that he only knew enough to write the introduction at
which point he switched to poetry. Since then he’s lived in many places in multiple states of mind, and written too many pages of words some of which he’s read at venues around the Bay or put into chapbooks.
He’s published two books: Friends Well Met; a collection of poems – and Past Lives Led; a poetic memoir both from Beatitude Press in Berkeley.
He shuttles back and forth between Friday Harbor Washington and Oakland spending four months in California where he reads and writes and polishes his nest eggs. His poems have been published in a number of collections
including, Spasso’s, Sacred Grounds, and Living in the Land of the Dead a production of Faithful Fools.
In 2005 he discovered he was intersex and came out as a Two Spirit, Tom/Ms.G. He takes great delight in sharing his double gendered points of view with anyone who’ll listen. Mark States favorably compared his poetry to e.e. cummings, to which accolade he remarked, Yikes!

Lambda Literary Awards Finalists Reading
2016-05-17 17:00 - 20:00 | San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Annual Lambda Literary Awards Finalists Reading. Cosponsored by the Lambda Literary Foundation.

RADAR: Black Queer Artists in Conversation
2016-05-17 18:45 - 20:45 | The GLBT Historical Society, 4127 18th Street, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
As part of our QUEERING THE CASTRO program we’re bringing a conversation with three Bay Area artists about the intersections of blackness, queerness and art.
Facilitated by Beatrice Thomas
(Donations accepted!)
Featuring:
Alicia Bell
Alicia Bell is a Southern-Born, Black, Queer, Femme. Her work, mostly in the realm of performance art, incorporates a multiplicity of realities and futures building freedom and liberation. In community, Alicia works mostly with black.seed, Critical Resistance’s Oakland Power Projects, and Abundant Beginnings.
Reek bell
Reek bell is a black militant femme artist & organizer from South Jersey. Her work, mostly in the realm of literary art, reflects intersections of intimacy, friendship, and resistance within blackness. In community, Reek works mostly with black.seed & Oakland SOL (Sustaining Ourselves Locally).
Mustafah Greene
Mustafah Greene is a stunning handsome collection of atoms from Brooklyn, NY. His work, mostly in the realm of visual art, is built upon connecting the classic and the contemporary to synthesize art that speaks truth to the times. In community, Mustafah works mostly with black.seed.

Ken Kalfus w/ Rachel Monroe
2016-05-17 19:30 - 21:30 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith and Headlands Center for the Artspresent Ken Kalfus in-conversation with Rachel Monroe
Ken Kalfus’ Coup de Foudre is a collection of short stories that includes the full text of the title novella that first appeared in Harper’s Magazine. Recalling news events with irony and compassion, Kalfus writes the ultimately tragic story about the president of an international lending institution accused of sexually assaulting a housekeeper in a New York hotel. The fifteen stories that follow vary boldly in theme, setting, and tone but all share the distinctive humor and intellect found throughout Kalfus’ award-winning work.
Ken Kalfus and Rachel Monroe are current Writers in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts.
Ken Kalfus is the author of three novels,Equilateral, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, and The Commissariat of Enlightenment. He has also published the story collections Thirst and Pu-239 and Other Russian Fantasies, the latter a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the basis for the HBO film Pu-239. Kalfus recently received a Pew Fellowships in the Arts award and a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in Philadelphia.
Rachel Monroe has previously written for Oxford American, the New York Times, theLos Angeles Review of Books, and The Awl.

Plein Air Editions: Four Poets from Bootstrap Press
2016-05-17 19:30 - 21:30 | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Rebecca Eland earned her B.A from Naropa University and an M.F.A from Saint Mary’s College of California. She has performed poetry with dancers from the Boulder Ballet, and at venues such as The Royal Botanical Gardens of Glasgow and Edinburgh. The Denver Art Museum and the Watershed Poetry Festival. She has taught at Deer Park Institute, India and currently teaches College Composition and dances ballet. Rebecca lives in the mountains just outside of Boulder, Colorado. Her first collection of poetry,Arrives, Then Steady Pace with the Hour, is published by Plein Air Editions.
Jason Morris was raised in Vermont and now lives in California. His poems and essays have appeared in Vlak, The Can, Greetings, TRY!, Where Eagles Dare, Big Bell, The Tsatsawassans, Amerarcana, and elsewhere. His chapbooks are From the Golden West Notebooks (Allone Co./Publication Studios), Spirits & Anchors (Auguste Press), and most recently Takes (Bootstrap Press).
Ava Koohbor was born in Tehran and now lives in San Francisco. In the past, many of her poems have been translated into English with the assistance of poet Patrick James Dunagan and appear in various publications. Yet she’s now started to translate her own work as well as write directly in English: her recent chapbook published by Bootstrap Press is Triangle Squared, a fictional conversation among John Cage, Marcel Duchamp, and Morton Feldman. She appreciates whatever art offers to her in any and all forms. She believes that each artist is a medium to transfer the world of possibilities to what is.
Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. His latest book of poems titled, someone’s dead already(Bootstrap Press, 2015) has been nominated for a California Book Award. His work in Rikers Island was featured in the New York Times. His latest curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, “We Charge Genocide Again,” has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He recently lived and organized around issues of human rights and self-determination in Jackson, MS.

Mark Binelli
2016-05-17 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Mark Binelli, author of Green Apple staff favorite Detroit City is the Place to Be, reads from his new novel, Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ All-Time Greatest Hits.

Praise for Mark Binelli:
“At once hilarious and sharp, sweeping and intimate, Detroit City Is the Place to Be is an oddly delighted warning from the recent future. Mark Binelli writes with the tender scrutiny of a returning exile, in a style that manages to infuse Rolling Stone vigor with Spy wit, Baffler skepticism, and n+1 intelligence. This is a nonfiction novel about our American experiment—grand and grandiose, unprecedented and absurd—and it’s the most entertaining and persuasive book about this country I’ve read in a very long time.” —Gideon Lewis-Kraus on Detroit City is the Place to Be

“A sweeping narrative encompassing everything from the struggles of Italian-American immigrants to the social dynamics of pie fights. . . [with] joyful nostalgia, pinpoint characterizations and postmodern brio.” –New York Times Book Review on Sacco and Vanzetti Must Die!
About Screamin’ Jay Hawkins’ All-Time Greatest Hits:
Mark Binelli turns his sharp, forceful prose to fiction, in an inventive retelling of the outrageous life of Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, a bluesman with one hit and a string of inflammatory guises.

He came on stage in a coffin, carried by pallbearers, drunk enough to climb into his casket every night. Onstage he wore a cape, clamped a bone to his nose, and carried a staff topped with a human skull. Offstage, he insisted he’d been raised by a tribe of Blackfoot Indians, that he’d joined the army at fourteen, that he’d defeated the middleweight boxing champion of Alaska, that he’d fathered seventy-five illegitimate children.

The R&B wildman Screamin’ Jay Hawkins only had a single hit, the classic “I Put a Spell On You,” and was often written off as a clownish novelty act — or worse, an offense to his race — but his myth-making was legendary. In his second novel, Mark Binelli embraces the man and the legend to create a hilarious, tragic, fantastical portrait of this unlikeliest of protagonists. Hawkins saw his life story as a wild picaresque, and Binelli’s novel follows suit, tackling the subject in a dazzling collage-like style.

At Rolling Stone, Binelli has profiled some of the greatest musicians of our time, and this novel deftly plays with the inordinate focus on “authenticity” in so much music writing about African-Americans. An entire novel built around a musician as deliberately inauthentic as Screamin’ Jay Hawkins thus becomes a sort of subversive act, as well as an extremely funny and surprisingly moving one.

Jim Lynch
2016-05-18 18:00 - 20:00 | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
Joshua Johannssen has spent all of his life surrounded by sailboats. His grandfather designed them, his father built and raced them, his Einstein-obsessed mother knows why and how they work (or not). For Josh and his two siblings, their backyard was the Puget Sound and sailing their DNA. But both his sister and brother fled many years ago: Ruby to Africa and elsewhere to do good works on land, and Bernard to god-knows-where at sea, a fugitive and pirate. Suddenly thirty-one, Josh—who repairs boats of all kinds in a Steinbeckian marina south of Seattle—is pained and confused by whatever the hell went wrong with his volatile family. His parents are barely speaking, his mystified grandfather is drinking harder, and he himself—despite an endless and comic flurry of online dates—hasn’t even come close to finding a girlfriend. Before the Wind is a grand and idiosyncratic family saga.
Jim Lynch lives with his wife in Olympia, Washington. His novels The Highest Tide, Border Songs, and Truth Like the Sunhave been adapted for the stage in Seattle. His prizes include the Indies Choice Honor Book Award, the Washington State Book Award for Fiction, and the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award.

Fenton Johnson
2016-05-18 19:00 - 21:00 | Books Inc. Berkeley, 1491 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94710, United States
Award-winning author Fenton Johnson discusses his unforgettable new novel, The Man Who Loved Birds. Inspired by the real-life state police kidnapping and murder of a legendary storyteller and petty criminal, The Man Who Loved Birds is a seamless, haunting fable exploring the eternal conflicts between free will and destiny, politics and nature, the power of law and the power of love.

An Appreciation of Ralph J. Gleason: Popular Music's Preeminent Commentator
2016-05-18 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Toby Gleason in conversation with Al Young
celebrating the release of
MUSIC IN THE AIR: The Selected Writings of Ralph J. Gleason
CONVERSATIONS IN JAZZ: The Ralph J. Gleason Interviews
both edited by Toby Gleason
published by Yale University Press
MUSIC IN THE AIR: The Selected Writings of Ralph J. Gleason, collects in one volume the best cultural criticism and music writings from Gleason. With a foreword by Jann Wenner and introduction by Paul Scanlon, the book collects the best of his essays, interviews, liner notes, correspondence, and books in sections covering Jazz and Blues; Folk, Rock, and Pop; Comedy; and Politics and Culture.
The co-founder of Rolling Stone magazine, Ralph J. Gleason was among the most respected journalists, interviewers, and critics writing about popular music in the latter half of the twentieth century. As a longtime contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle, Down Beat, and Ramparts, his expertise and insights about music, musicians, and cultural trends were unparalleled, whether his subject was jazz, folk, pop, or rock and roll. He was the only music journalist included on President Richard Nixon’s infamous “Enemies List,” which Gleason himself considered “the highest honor a man’s country can bestow upon him.”
This sterling anthology, edited by Gleason’s son Toby, himself a forty-year veteran of the music business, spans Ralph J. Gleason’s four decades as popular music’s preeminent commentator. Drawing from a rich variety of sources, including Gleason’s books, essays, interviews, and LP record album liner notes, it is essential reading for writers, historians, scholars, and music lovers of every stripe.
Two-time Grammy Award winner Ralph J. Gleason (1917–1975) was the author of numerous articles and three highly regarded books on music as well as an acclaimed TV and documentary film producer. Toby Gleason is a veteran jazz radio producer, programmer, and host, and a former assistant editor at Rolling Stone.
CONVERSATIONS IN JAZZ: The Ralph J. Gleason Interviews brings together for the first time rare and never-before-seen interviews between Ralph Gleason and fourteen of the greatest jazz musicians. These informal sessions, conducted mostly in Gleason’s Berkeley home, have never been transcribed and published in full until now. With a foreword and introductory noted by Ted Gioia, this collection gathers in one place remarkably candid conversations with many of the jazz greats of the twentieth century, from Coltrane to Parker to Mingus and Gillespie.
During his nearly forty years as a music journalist, Ralph J. Gleason recorded many in-depth interviews with some of the greatest jazz musicians of all time. These informal sessions, conducted mostly in Gleason’s Berkeley, California, home, have never been transcribed and published in full until now.
This remarkable volume, a must-read for any jazz fan, serious musician, or musicologist, reveals fascinating, little-known details about these gifted artists, their lives, their personas, and, of course, their music. Bill Evans discusses his battle with severe depression, while John Coltrane talks about McCoy Tyner’s integral role in shaping the sound of the Coltrane quartet, praising the pianist enthusiastically. Included also are interviews with Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins, Quincy Jones, Jon Hendricks, and the immortal Duke Ellington, plus seven more of the most notable names in twentieth-century jazz.
Toby Gleason is the son of Ralph J. Gleason.
Al Young is a poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, educator, and former Poet Laureate of California. Muriel Johnson, Director of the California Arts Council declared: “Like jazz, Al Young is an original American voice.” Mr. Young’s has produced numerous novels, collections of poetry, essays, and memoirs. His work has appeared in literary journals and magazines including Paris Review, Ploughshares, Essence, The New York Times, Chicago Review, Seattle Review, Brilliant Corners: A Journal of Jazz & Literature, Chelsea, Rolling Stone, Gathering of the Tribes, and in anthologies including the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, and the Oxford Anthology of African American Literature.

Lyrics and Dirges
2016-05-18 19:30 - 21:30 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
Pegasus Books presents Lyrics and Dirges: A Monthly Reading Series
Featuring Readers:
Maxine Chernoff
Garrett Murphy
Lark Omura
Elizabeth Rosner
Juan Velasco
Hosted and Curated by Sharon Coleman
Lyrics & Dirges is a monthly reading series featuring a mix of prominent, emerging and beginning writers. Its aim is to highlight various forms of writing in an effort to spotlight the diverse literary community of the Bay Area.
Every third Wednesday of the month at Pegasus Books Downtown.

Townsend Walker
2016-05-19 18:00 - 20:00 | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
In La Ronde a Park Avenue woman puts a price on her brutish husband’s head. Tells her Jersey girlfriend to ask her connected brother for help. The brother talks to his accountant and lover, who talks to her other lover, a movie producer who tells his glam wife back in L.A., who tells her personal trainer while getting a massage. The personal trainer mentions it to his boyfriend who is in money trouble. The boyfriend hypes the price on the husband’s head to get the loan shark off his back, after the guy breaks his leg. The loan shark flies to New York to hire a hit man cheap. Is out-foxed by hit man’s hot sister. Back to the husband with a price on his head.
Townsend Walker draws inspiration from cemeteries, foreign places, violence and strong women. A novella in noir, La Ronde, was published by Truth Serum Press in June 2015. Some seventy short stories have been published in literary journals and included in nine anthologies. He won first place in the SLO NightWriters contest, second place in Our Storiescontest, and two nominations for the PEN/O.Henry Award. Four stories were performed at the New Short Fiction Series in Hollywood. He is currently developing a screenplay based on La Ronde and a series of linked stories based on original collage works of Beverly Mills.

Paul Madonna
2016-05-19 19:00 - 21:00 | The Dryansky Gallery, 2120 Union Street, San Francisco , CA, 94123, United States
Paul Madonna’s First Solo Show in Five Years Comes to The Dryansky Gallery in San Francisco in the Form of an Exhibition & Book Launch
Please join us at The Dryansky Gallery for the opening reception of “Close Enough for the Angels” on Thursday, May 19, 2016, from 7-9 pm! Artist Paul Madonna will be in attendance.
Having recently ended his popular and enduring “All Over Coffee” series after 12 years and a total of 726 strips and two books, Madonna has completed “Close Enough for the Angels”, an illustrated novel that looks toRaymond Chandler and Haruki Murakami as inspirations; the drawings in the book will not “illustrate” the text per-se, but rather—influenced by 19th Century woodcut artist Utagawa Hiroshige—tell their part of the story in graphic terms in the style Madonna is well known for; the exhibit will consist of all new work, including framed originals from the book, text panels on the wall, and a limited edition of fifty hand-bound copies of the book produced by the artist.
Close Enough for the Angels—an exhibition of original drawings and limited edition book launch—opens May 19 from 7-9pm and runs through July 14 at The Dryansky Gallery, 2120 Union Street in San Francisco
For more information visit: http://www.thedryansky.com/close-enough-for-the-angels
About Paul Madonna
Paul Madonna is a San Francisco-based artist and writer. He is the creator of the series “All Over Coffee” (San Francisco Chronicle 2004-2015), and the author of two books, “All Over Coffee” (City Lights Bookstore 2007), and Everything is its own reward (City Lights 2011), which won the 2011 NCBR Recognition Award for Best Book. Paul’s work is about pairing elements: text and images; concept and craft; thought and beauty. Paul’s drawings and stories have appeared in numerous international books and journals as well as galleries and museums, including the San Francisco Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Oakland Museum of California. He is the Comics Editor for The Rumpus.net, has taught drawing at the University of San Francisco, and frequently lectures on creative practice, even when not asked. He holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and was the first (ever!) Art Intern at MAD Magazine (1993-94), for which he proudly received no money. For more information visit: http://www.thedryansky.com/paul-madonna-bio

BI the way
2016-05-19 19:00 - 21:00 | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
“Bisexuals? WTF? Do they really even exist?” The answer is yes, and they’ll be taking E.M. Wolfman books by storm with readings on the topic of loving more than one gender…or at least sorta wantin’ ta…well, you know. Our readers for this evening are Mk Chavez, Ruth Crossman, J de Salvo, Keeley Ann Finn, Kelly Klein, Colleen McKee, and Jan Steckel. The evening will be hosted by the “just plain ol’ gay” and always fabulous Vernon Keeve III. We hope to see you there for a great reading at a great local bookstore.

InsideStoryTime SANCTUARY
2016-05-19 19:00 - 21:00 | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
InsideStorytime SANCTUARY — our first East Bay event! — at Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster Street, Oakland, on Thursday May 19th 2016, 7-9 pm, will feature Ali Eteraz (Native Believer), Paul Corman-Roberts (We Shoot Typewriters), Alexandra Naughton (American Mary), Edmund Zagorin (The Face of Our Town), and Tanya Rey. With MC James Warner (All Her Father’s Guns).

Yaghoub Yadali: Rituals of Restlessness
2016-05-19 19:00 - 21:00 | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland (in partnership with the Center for the Art of Translation) welcomes Yaghoub Yadali to the store to discuss and sign his newly translated work, Rituals of Restlessness, on Thursday, May 19th at 7:00pm.
Engineer Kamran Khosravi wants to die in a car accident. His professional life in the Iranian hinterlands is full of bureaucratic drudgery, protecting dams, for example, from looters. His wife Fariba can no longer stand it, and has left him to rejoin her family in Isfahan. She is anxious for him to choose a life with her, or to let her go and persist with things as they are, but Kamran’s issues run deeper than anybody imagines. He has lost all feeling for his wife, and his plans for a car accident are escapist, not suicidal. He is having an affair with a married country girl, and thoughts of her lead him to foolish distraction. Most recently, he has found a day laborer who matches his approximate build and hair color, and his intentions grow increasingly dark, along with his nihilistic outlook. Rituals of Restlessness won the 2004 Golshiri Foundation Award for the best novel of the year and was named one of the ten best novels of the decade by the Press Critics Award in Iran. However, in 2007 Yaghoub Yadali was sentenced to one year in prison for having depicted an adulterous affair in the novel. Rituals of Restlessness and his short story collection Sketches in the Garden have been banned from publication and reprint in Iran.
Yaghoub Yadali, a fiction writer from Iran, has directed for television and worked for Roshd Magazine as the editor of the film section. In addition to Rituals of Restlessness and Sketches in the Garden, he is the author of the short story collection Probablity of Merriment and Mooning. His short stories, articles, and essays are published in Iran, Turkey, and the US. He has been writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa, Harvard University, and City of Asylum in Pittsburgh, PA.

David Hernandez + Tiffany Midge
2016-05-19 19:30 - 21:30 | Falkirk Cultural Center, 1408 Mission Ave, San Rafael , CA, 94901, United States
David Hernandez’s most recent book of poetry, Hoodwinked (Sarabande Books, 2011), won the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry. Dear, Sincerely—his new collection—is forthcoming Spring 2016 as part of the Pitt Poetry Series. His other books include Always Danger (SIU Press, 2006), winner of the Crab Orchard Series, and A House Waiting for Music (Tupelo Press, 2003). David’s awards include an NEA Literature Fellowship and a Pushcart Prize. His poems have appeared in FIELD, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, The Threepenny Review, and The Best American Poetry 2013. He is also the author of two YA novels, No More Us for You and Suckerpunch, both published by HarperCollins. David teaches creative writing at California State University, Long Beach and at California State University, Fullerton. He lives in Long Beach and is married to writer Lisa Glatt.
Tiffany Midge is the recipient of the Kenyon Review Earthworks Prize for Indigenous Poetry for The Woman Who Married a Bear (University of New Mexico Press), and the Diane Decorah Memorial Poetry Award for Outlaws, Renegades and Saints; Diary of a Mixed-up Halfbreed (Greenfield Review Press). Her work has appeared in North American Review, Florida Review, South Dakota Review, Shenandoah, and the online journals No Tell Motel and Drunken Boat. Tiffany has published creative nonfiction in The Butter, and Sovereign Bodies, and her essays received Pushcart Prize nominations from The Raven Chronicles and Yellow Medicine Review. An enrolled Standing Rock Sioux, she holds an MFA from University of Idaho and is Poet Laureate of Moscow, Idaho. Tiffany is writing the Great American (Indian) Novel about contemporary, urban Native life, Sex, Lies, and Frybread, a Dramedy.

Rachel Richardson, Tess Taylor + Kimberly Grey
2016-05-19 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Kimberly Grey, Rachel Richardson, and Tess Taylor read poems from their new collections.

About Kimberly Grey’s The Opposite of Light:

A revealing scrutiny of contemporary marriage; winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry.
Can the notion of Romantic love withstand our endless postmodern moment? In these extraordinary poems, Kimberly Grey explores our abiding need for neatness, order, and symmetry in matrimony, considering our ideals for love and language in this digital age―its weightless, distracting, and inescapable pressures. She portrays the ways in which love reflects us back to ourselves: familiar but strange, predetermined but new. There is “a drop of blue light,” she writes. “But no high-tech way / to say you’re mine. No way to love / each other but with these ancient bodies.”

“In The Opposite of Light the rapid momentum of invention plays against extremities of feeling, system meeting sensation: “We keep inventing/ newfangled ways to be in the world” gives way to “No way to love each other/ but with these ancient bodies.” These poems are serious in their play, love poems in a world of interlocking technologies and language, tender buttons with a lot to say. — Ken Fields

About Rachel Richardson’s Hundred-Year Wave:

In Rachel Richardson’s second collection of poems, she juxtaposes the grand quests of Ahab and Melville with the quotidian journeys of contemporary life. Hundred-Year Wave launches stories of marriage and motherhood over the currents of a nearly mythological ancestry: women and men who built their possessions out of iron and flour and whalebone and wool. If reaching back into the past is akin to plumbing a depth, then Richardson exhibits the rare abilities of craft to build, from our language, vessels light enough to travel on that element, but sturdy enough to weather the storms we are likely to find there.

“Rachel Richardson’s Hundred-Year Wave is a gorgeous book that borrows its vast subject matter from new parenthood, marriage, the ocean, whales, and Sylvia Plath. The poet knits each poem with such care—stitch by stitch, loop by loop, word after word into an effortless collection of quiet yet haunting music lush with texture and feeling. Her gifts are wide and deep like the ocean, as she shows us that ‘we are not lost/in the vast expanse of lostness.'” –Victoria Chang

About Tess Taylor’s Work and Days:

In 2010, Tess Taylor was awarded the Amy Clampitt Fellowship. Her prize: A rent-free year in a cottage in the Berkshires, where she could finish a first book. But Taylor—outside the city for the first time in nearly a decade, and trying to conceive her first child—found herself alone. To break up her days, she began to intern on a small farm, planting leeks, turning compost, and weeding kale. In this calendric cycle of 28 poems, Taylor describes the work of this year, considering what attending to vegetables on a small field might achieve now. Against a backdrop of drone strikes, “methamphetamine and global economic crisis,” these poems embark on a rich exploration of season, self, food, and place. Threading through the farm poets—Hesiod, Virgil, and John Clare—Taylor revisits the project of small scale farming at the troubled beginning of the 21st century. In poems full of bounty, loss and the mysteries of the body, Taylor offers a rich, severe, memorable meditation about what it means to try to connect our bodies and our time on earth.

“Our moment’s Georgic.” –Stephen Burt

HELLA CLOSE: Stories of Black Queer Intimacy
2016-05-20 18:00 - 20:00 | Strut, 470 Castro Street, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
Featuring
Joshua Merchant
Joshua Merchant is a writer, and native of East Oakland. Combining a masterful eye for detail, startling vulnerability, and unflinching courage, Joshua explores queer issues, black identity, and the complexities of their intersection.
In 2011, he won the title of Youth Speaks champion and represented the Bay Area at Brave New Voices. Later that year, he became the Berkeley Slam’s youngest Individual World Poetry Slam (IWPS) representative. He helped represent the New Shit Show’s first slam team in 2014 at the National Poetry Slam and was third in the nation in 2015 with the Berkeley Slam team. His writing has brought him the honor and privilege to perform alongside artists and activists such as Chuck D, MC Lyte, Angela Davis, Michael Poland, and Saul Williams. He continues to perform and work with youth in his community and across the country.
Jezebel Delilah X
Jezebel Delilah X is a queer, lush-bodied, Black, femme performance artist, writer, actress, filmmaker, educator, facilitator, orator and Faerie Princess Mermaid Gangsta for The Revolution. She loves to flirt, laugh, perform, crack corny jokes, and insert Octavia Butler references into every conversation. She is a co-managing editor for Everyday Feminism; co-host of the queer/feminist Open Mic, Culture Fuck; creative director of queer, Black, multi-disciplinary performance troupe, Congregation of Liberation; and one of the founding members of Deviant Type Press. She has performed in a wide variety of Queer and Queer People Of Color theatre projects and cabarets, and has been a featured reader at literary events all over the Bay Area. She uses a combination of memoir, poetry, theatre, and feminist storytelling to advance her politix of radical love, socioeconomic justice, anti-racism, community accountability, critical reflection, love, healing, and liberation. She loves romantic songs, romantic films, romantic books, romantic conversations, romantic friendships, and writing long, vulnerable, passionate Facebook statuses about romance.
Brontez Purnell
Brontez Purnell has been publishing, performing and curating in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 10 years. He is the author of the cult zine Fag School, frontman for his band The Young Lovers and co-founder and choreographer of the Brontez Purnell Dance Company. Formerly a dancer with Gravy Train!!!, a queer electro indie band that gained national prominence in the mid-2000’s, Purnell recently published his first novella Johnny Would You Love Me (If My Dick Were Bigger) with Rudos and Rubes and will publish a second novel, Since I Laid My Body Down…, with the Sister Spit imprint of City Lights Books. He has currently been awarded the Creative Work Fund to begin work on a documentary about the life of the late Black experimental Bay Area choreographer Ed Mock.
Ramona “Mona” Webb
Scholar practitioner, teaching performance artist, and activist Ramona “Mona” Webb serves as the executive director of the Eden LGBTQ Youth Foundation, the artistic director of Project ABLE and Lyrical Minded415, which is an art-based learning for equity seasonal course implemented in various San Francisco Bay Area school districts, and is the director of The State of Black Bodies by The Pr3ss Play Poets. For nine years, Mona has served as slammaster and host of San Francisco’s The City Poetry Slam. She served on the 2014 and 2015 host city committee that produced the National Poetry Slam Festival in Oakland. Mona is a conservatory-trained artist who writes and performs in “docu-ritual- drama theater” and is currently a graduate student at the California Institute of Integral Studies and Chichester University in London, pursuing dual MFA degrees in Theater Performance Making. How to Catch a Rapist in 12 Parts, her current work in progress, has appeared at Piano Fight Theater and Brava Theater. This performance theater piece chronicles Mona’s journey to seeking justice for her rape that took place 20 years ago.

Julien Poirier + Joanne Kyger
2016-05-22 13:00 - 15:00 | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
Julien Poirier is the author of several poetry collections, including El Golpe Chileño, Stained Glass Windows of California, and Way Too West and most recently, Out of Print. In 2005, he published an experimental newspaper novel, Living! Go and Dream. He is also the editor of an anthology of writing by Jack Micheline, One of a Kind, and a book of travel journals by Bill Berkson, Invisible Oligarchs. A founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse Collective, Poirier edited the newspaperNew York Nights from 2001 to 2006. He has taught poetry in New York City public schools and at San Quentin State Prison. He lives in Berkeley with his wife and two daughters.
One of the major poets of the SF Renaissance, Joanne Kyger was born in 1934 in Vallejo, CA. After studying at UC Santa Barbara, she moved to San Francisco in 1957, where she became a member of the circle of poets around Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan. In 1960, she joined Gary Snyder in Japan. They then traveled to India where, along with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, they met the Dalai Lama. She returned to California in 1964 and published her first book, The Tapestry and the Web, in 1965. In 1969, she settled in Bolinas, where she continues to reside today. She has published over 30 books of poetry and prose, including Strange Big Moon, The Japan and India Journals: 1960-1964, As Ever: Selected Poems, and About Now: Collected Poems, which won the 2008 Josephine Miles Award from PEN Oakland. Her newest title is On Time: Poems 2005-2014. She occasionally teaches at Naropa University.

Chana Bloch, Christina García + Jane Hirshfield
2016-05-22 15:00 - 16:00 | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Chana Bloch, Christina García, and Jane Hirshfield to the store to discuss their contributions to Extraordianry Rendition: American Writers on Palestine on Sunday, May 22nd 3pm.
Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine brings together the work of sixty-five prominent writers to examine America’s culpability in the denial of human rights and dignity to Palestinians in Israel/Palestine and beyond.
The anthology includes pieces by writers such as Chana Bloch, Christina García, Jane Hirshfield, Colum McCann, Roger Reeves, George Saunders and Alice Walker. In writing that is always clear, and often startlingly beautiful, they cover a range of issues including the erasure and reconstruction of histories, the examination of identity, the rights, privileges, and responsibilities of speaking out as artists, the conditions of occupation, and the potential for activism. They also explore the way U.S. foreign policy towards Palestine regularly mirrors the harsh realities faced by many of America’s own minorities. The anthology as a whole counters the dehumanizing narrative about Palestine that has taken hold in the United States, often supported by mainstream news organizations, and makes a significant contribution toward an understanding of the ways people of conscience in general, and writers in particular, can take on one of the most pressing political questions of our time.
Chana Bloch’s Swimming in the Rain: New and Selected Poems, 1980-2015 includes selections from her four earlier collections, The Secrets of the Tribe, The Past Keeps Changing, Mrs. Dumpty, and Blood Honey, as well as new work. Bloch is co-translator of the biblical Song of Songs and of Israeli poets Yehuda Amichai and Dahlia Ravikovitch. She has won two Pushcart Prizes, two NEA fellowships, the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Di Castagnola Award of the Poetry Society of America, and the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Bloch is Professor Emerita of English at Mills College.
Cristina García is the author of six novels, two anthologies, works for young readers, and a collection of poetry. Her latest book, King of Cuba, is a darkly comic portrait of Fidel Castro. García’s work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She has taught at universities nationwide and recently moved to the Bay Area.
Jane Hirshfield’s most recent, eighth poetry collection is The Beauty, published along with Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World. Her honors include The California Book Award, the Poetry Center Book Award, fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations and NEA, and finalist selection for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her work appears in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, TLS, Harper’s, The Paris Review, and eight editions of The Best American Poetry. She is a current chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and this year’s Mohr Visiting Poet at Stanford.

Alicia Jo Rabins: Songs + Poems
2016-05-22 19:00 - 22:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Portland-based writer and musician Alicia Jo Rabins weaves together poetry, violin, a loop pedal, and feminist Bible scholarship to create performances of unique and captivating beauty. This special evening celebrates the launch of OPEN THE GROUND, Alicia’s third album of songs about women in the Bible with her musical project Girls in Trouble, as well as her poetry book DIVINITY SCHOOL, winner of the 2015 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. The New York Times calls Alicia’s voice “gorgeous”; the San Francisco Chronicle calls DIVINITY SCHOOL “an astonishing find: a poetry page-turner, both sexy and humble.”
Suggested $5-10 donation at the door / no one turned away for lack of funds.
