Plein Air Editions: Four Poets from Bootstrap Press
2016-05-17 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | 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.

Chris McCormick: The Desert Boys
2016-05-23 18:00 - 20:00 | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
Desert Boys follows the life of Daley Kushner, growing up, coming out, and grappling with the remnants of his childhood in California’s Mojave Desert. This series of powerful, linked stories illuminates Daley’s world—the family, friends, and community that have both formed and constrained him, and his new life in San Francisco. Back home, the desert preys on those who cannot conform: an alfalfa farmer on the outskirts of town; two young girls whose curiosity leads to danger; a black politician who once served as his school’s Confederate mascot; Daley’s mother, an immigrant from Armenia; and Daley himself, introspective and queer. Meanwhile, in another desert on the other side of the world, war threatens to fracture Daley’s most meaningful—and most fraught—connection to home, his friendship with Robert Karinger.
Chris McCormick was raised in the Antelope Valley. He earned his B.A. at the University of California, Berkeley, and his M.F.A. at the University of Michigan, where he was the recipient of two Hopwood Awards. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan

Nick Bantock: The Pharos Gate
2016-05-24 18:00 - 20:00 | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
A love story for the ages, the tale of Griffin and Sabine is an international sensation that spent over 100 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and continues to beguile readers 25 years after its original publication. Here to celebrate that anniversary is the final volume in Griffin and Sabine’s story—a book that can be enjoyed as a singular reading experience or in conjunction with the series as a whole. The Pharos Gate rejoices in the book as physical object, weaving together word and image in beautifully illustrated postcards and removable letters that reveal a sensual and metaphysical romance, one full of mystery and intrigue.
Nick Bantock, born and raised in England, now lives in Victoria, British Columbia. An acclaimed writer and artist, he is the author of books ranging from fiction to creative inspiration. His art is publicly and privately collected throughout the world.

David Schneider: Crowded by Beauty
2016-05-25 19:00 - 20:00 | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes David Schneider to the store to discuss and sign, Crowded by Beauty: The Life and Zen of Poet Philip Whalen, on Wednesday, May 25th at 7:00pm.
Philip Whalen was an American poet, Zen Buddhist, and key figure in the literary and artistic scene that unfolded in San Francisco in the 1950s and 60s. When the Beat writers came West, Whalen became a revered, much-loved member of the group. Erudite, shy, and profoundly spiritual, his presence not only moved his immediate circle of Beat cohorts, but his powerful, startling, innovative work would come to impact American poetry to the present day.
Drawing on Whalen’s journals and personal correspondence, particularly with Ginsberg, Kerouac, Snyder, Kyger, Welch, and McClure, David Schneider shows how deeply bonded these intimates were, supporting one another in their art and their spiritual paths. Schneider, himself an ordained priest, provides an insider’s view of Whalen’s struggles and breakthroughs in his thirty years as a Zen monk. When Whalen died in 2002 as the retired Abbot of the Hartford Street Zen Center, his own teacher referred to him as a patriarch of the Western lineage of Buddhism. Crowded by Beauty chronicles the course of Whalen’s life, focusing on his unique, eccentric, humorous, and literary-religious practice.
David Schneider is the author of Street Zen: The Life and Work of Issan Dorsey. He was ordained as a Zen priest in 1977 and made an Acharya of Shambhala in 1995, a role in which he continues.

Rosalind Brackenbury: The Third Swimmer
2016-05-25 19:30 - 21:30 | 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.
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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.
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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
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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.
