October at Cleave: Bay Area Women Writers
2016-10-14 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
October 14
Sharon Coleman
Christina Springer
MK Chavez
Joanne Furio

Jade Chang w/ Chloe Veltman
2016-10-14 19:00 - 21:00 | Books Inc. Opera Plaza, 601 Van Ness, San Francisco , CA, 94107, United States
Journalist and editor Jade Chang discusses her much-buzzed debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World. Charles Wang is mad at America. A brash, lovable immigrant businessman who built a cosmetics empire and made a fortune, he’s just been ruined by the financial crisis. Now all Charles wants is to get his kids safely stowed away so that he can go to China and attempt to reclaim his family’s ancestral lands and his pride.Charles pulls Andrew, his aspiring comedian son, and Grace, his style-obsessed daughter, out of schools he can no longer afford. Together with their stepmother, Barbra, they embark on a cross-country road trip from their foreclosed Bel-Air home to the upstate New York hideout of the eldest daughter, disgraced art world it-girl Saina. But with his son waylaid by a temptress in New Orleans, his wife ready to defect for a set of 1,000-thread-count sheets, and an epic smash-up in North Carolina, Charles may have to choose between the old world and the new, between keeping his family intact and finally fulfilling his dream of starting anew in China.Outrageously funny and full of charm, The Wangs vs. the World is an entirely fresh look at what it means to belong in America and how going from glorious riches to (still name-brand) rags brings one family together in a way money never could.

North Beach Stories w/ Ray Hanna
2016-10-15 19:00 - 21:00 | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
A COMICAL & MUSICAL JOURNEY
THROUGH SAN FRANCISCO’S GOLDEN AGE
North Beach Stories is Ray Hanna’s searing comical and musical journey through the nightlife of the West Coast. Master storyteller, musician, and shameless name-dropper, Ray Hanna has seen it all, on the streets of North Beach and beyond—all the sleaze, drugs, trailblazing strippers, and punks acting out, Timothy Leary performing at a Broadway nightclub, sheer rock-and-roll madness at the Mabuhay—all in a night’s work in Hanna’s world. He was also in San Francisco to encounter Lenny Bruce’s legacy, and shares the real story behind Lenny’s most outrageous moment, purported to have occurred right above the Beat Museum. It’s all here—all true, all first-person and verified accounts of real showbiz Babylon tales compiled over the past 45 years by musician/comedian/actor Ray Hanna. He remembers, “I was so lucky to be here at a golden age and time. It was a wild, wide-open, rip-roaring kind of town. This city was luring people with ideas, a cosmopolitan place filled with performers and bon vivants from all over the world who had seen a lot. All these comics, musicians, and actors relocating here to develop and do the work, artists re-inventing ourselves in front of your eyes.”
Drawing on his current one-man show 50 Songs; his play The Devil and Lenny Bruce, co-written with Lou Gottlieb; and his book Screams from the Road, Hanna fills the evening with his own oddly detailed perspective on a lifetime in and around San Francisco, including his encounters with the famous and the near-famous. Based in the city, Ray headlined comedy, cabaret, and theatre venues all over the world, logging some 6000 appearances over 24 years. North Beach Stories marks Hanna’s first Bay Area appearance of any kind in over 20 years. During the last two decades, Ray has upped his commitment to the music, and has appeared regularly with a number of working rock bands in Oregon; for the past 11 years leading the Reckless Rockhounds. Ray remembers, “In the comedy clubs, I was known as the ‘piano guy’. Since then, I have worked very hard at the humbling process of removing the quotation marks from piano guy.”
An awe-struck seeker, a father, and a worldly-wise, but not-yet-jaded troubadour with a lifetime of experiences, Ray Hanna delivers the emotional truth behind a remarkable era in San Francisco.

Debra Spark
2016-10-16 13:00 - 15:00 | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
For as long Daniella has been married to Joel, they’ve received phone calls at odd hours, and late at night. Daniella knows the caller as Liesel, Joel’s first wife, a woman whose sudden departure devastated her husband. After years of disruptive, long-distance phone calls, Liesel rings to tell Joel she’s letting Idzia, the seventeen-year-old daughter he has never met, visit for the summer. Daniella and Joel prepare for Idzia’s arrival, but when Joel goes to pick her up from the airport, Idzia isn’t there. Back at home, the phone calls suddenly stop, and Joel and Daniella become haunted by the absence of someone who was never part of their life to begin with.
Debra Spark’s fourth novel, Unknown Caller, tells the story of a brief, failed marriage and its complicated aftermath. Leaping effortlessly across decades and continents, it works to uncover the reasons for Idzia and Liesel’s disappearance and the deeper puzzle of Liesel’s identity.
Spark’s candid, intricate novel highlights the near-impossibility of truly knowing another person, the pain in failing relationships, and the joy in successful ones.
Debra Spark is author of Coconuts for the Saint, The Ghost of Bridgetown, Good for the Jews, The Pretty Girl, and Curious Attractions: Essays on Fiction Writing. She is a professor at Colby College and teaches in the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives with her husband and son in North Yarmouth, Maine.

The Racket Reading Series #1
2016-10-17 18:30 - 21:30 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Hello!
Adobe Books has been kind enough to give me the reins to a monthly reading series.
I’m calling it The Racket – like people making noise, people pulling one over on you – typical reading series stuff.
For our opening salvo into the wide world of reading series, I’m bringing together some fantastic writers (to be announced shortly) and hoping that you, friends and lovers of reading alike, will come and celebrate great writing and maybe buy some books or just stand there awkwardly sipping a Tecate.
Readers will include:
Travis Peterson
Chad Koch
Nancy Davis Kho
All are welcome.
More information to come.

Shilpi Somaya Gowda w/ Shobha Rao
2016-10-17 19:30 - 21:30 | Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park , CA, 94025, United States
You may know Shilpi from her New York Times bestselling debut, Secret Daughter, which has sold more than a million copies worldwide in over 30 countries and languages and is based on her time volunteering in an Indian orphanage. An advisor on the Childrens Defense Fund and a patron of Childhaven International, Shilpi holds an MBA from Stanford University.
Her second novel, The Golden Son, is about Anil Patel, the first of his family to go to college. It is a story of family, responsibility, love, honor, tradition, and identity, in which two childhood friendsa young doctor and a newly married bridemust balance the expectations of their culture and their families with the desires of their own hearts.
Shobha Rao is the author of the debut story collection “An Unrestored Woman.” Shobha moved to the US from India at the age of seven. She is the winner of the 2014 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Fiction, and her story Kavitha and Mustafa was chosen by TC Boyle for inclusion in the Best American Short Stories 2015.
This event is presented in partnership with India Currents.

David Szalay w/ Ethan Nosowsky
2016-10-17 19:30 - 21:30 | Second Act, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Long-listed for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, David Szalay presents All That Man Is. This ambitious, form-busting novel interrogates the state of modern manhood through the stories of nine different characters, each at a different stage of life, away from home, and striving—in the suburbs of Prague, an overdeveloped Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a dingy Cyprus hotel—to understand what it means to be alive, here and now. Szalay uses the ostensibly separate narratives to craft a picture of the shared existence and predicament of the twenty-first-century man. All That Man Is masters a new kind of psychological realism that vibrates with detail, intelligence, relevance, and devastating pathos.
David Szalay is the author of London and the South-East, which won the Betty Trask Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; The Innocent; and Spring. In 2013, he was named one of Granta‘s Best of Young British Novelists. He lives in Budapest.
Ethan Nosowsky is Editorial Director at Graywolf Press. He began his career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux and has also been Editorial Director at McSweeney’s. He has edited books by Jeffery Renard Allen, Hilton Als, Kevin Barry, David Byrne, Vikram Chandra, Geoff Dyer, Dave Eggers, Sarah Manguso, Maggie Nelson, and Jenny Offill among many others. He has taught in the Creative Writing program at Columbia University and has contributed to The Believer, Bookforum, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Threepenny Review. He lives in Oakland, California.

The SHOUT re-launch
2016-10-17 20:00 - 22:00 | Live Oak Theater, 1301 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94709, United States
featuring
Josh Cereghino
Mandy Hu
Yodassa Williams
Kirstin Doyle
…and maybe you!
The SHOUT is a monthly event featuring invited storytellers telling amazing but true 10-minute stories from their lives. Interspersed with these raconteurs, audience members have the opportunity to put their name in the hat in hopes of being picked for one of our 6-minute wild-card slots. It’s like a great party in your living room, only there is a microphone and someone else cleans up!

Martin Cruz Smith
2016-10-18 19:00 - 21:00 | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
The highly anticipated new standalone novel from Martin Cruz Smith, whom The Washington Post has declared “that uncommon phenomenon: a popular and well-regarded crime novelist who is also a writer of real distinction,” The Girl from Venice is a suspenseful World War II love story set against the beauty, mystery, and danger of occupied Venice.
Venice, 1945. The war may be waning, but the city known as La Serenissima is still occupied and the people of Italy fear the power of the Third Reich. One night, under a canopy of stars, a fisherman named Cenzo comes across a young woman’s body floating in the lagoon and soon discovers that she is still alive and in trouble.
Born to a wealthy Jewish family, Giulia is on the run from the Wehrmacht SS. Cenzo chooses to protect Giulia rather than hand her over to the Nazis. This act of kindness leads them into the world of Partisans, random executions, the arts of forgery and high explosives, Mussolini’s broken promises, the black market and gold, and, everywhere, the enigmatic maze of the Venice Lagoon.
Smith’s latest work is a thriller, a mystery, and a retelling of Italian history that will take your breath away. Most of all it is a love story.
Martin Cruz Smith’s novels include Gorky Park, Stallion Gate, Polar Star, Stalin’s Ghost, Rose, December 6, and Tatiana. He is a two-time winner of the Hammett Prize, a recipient of Britain’s Golden Dagger Award, and a winner of the Premio Piemonte Giallo Internazionale. He lives in California.

Kevin Smokler
2016-10-18 19:30 - 21:30 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
The inimitable and always entertaining Kevin Smokler returns to Booksmith for the launch of his new book, Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to 80s Teen Movies and the Places They Happened. The Breakfast Club! The Goonies! Back to the Future! Ferris Bueller’s Day Off! Pretty in Pink! Dead Poets Society! These movies left an indelible mark on America, and, probably, your psyche.
Kevin Smokler attended Goonies Day in Astoria, Oregon, took a Lost Boys tour of Santa Cruz, California, and visited retro arcades, movie theaters, record stores, and the Dirty Dancing resort in Lake Lure, NC. He interviewed actors, writers, and directors. Mostly, he did what he does best, which is to add his keen and witty commentary to the conversation about American Culture and the things that bring us together.
Kevin Smokler is the author of the essay collection Practical Classics: 50 Reasons to Reread 50 Books you Haven’t Touched Since High School (2013) which the Atlantic Wire called “truly enjoyable” and the editor of Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times, A San Francisco Chronicle Notable Book of 2005. His writing on pop culture has appeared in the LA Times, Salon, BuzzFeed, Vulture, the San Francisco Chronicle and on NPR. In 2013, he was BookRiot’s first ever Writer in Residence.
He can be found on twitter at @weegee. He lives in San Francisco with his wife, cat and most of MTV’s first year on vinyl.

Margot Livesey
2016-10-18 19:30 - 21:30 | Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
Donald believes he knows all there is to know about seeing. An optometrist in suburban Boston, he is sure that he and his wife, Viv, who runs the local stables, are both devoted to their two children and to each other. Then Mercury—a gorgeous young thoroughbred with a murky past—arrives at Windy Hill and everything changes.
Mercury’s owner, Hilary, is a newcomer to town who has enrolled her daughter in riding lessons. When she brings Mercury to board at Windy Hill, everyone is struck by his beauty and prowess, particularly Viv. As she rides him, Viv begins to dream of competing again, embracing the ambitions that she had harbored, and relinquished, as a young woman. Her daydreams soon morph into consuming desire, and her infatuation with the thoroughbred escalates to obsession.
Donald may have 20/20 vision but he is slow to notice how profoundly Viv has changed and how these changes threaten their quiet, secure world. By the time he does, it is too late to stop the catastrophic collision of Viv’s ambitions and his own myopia.
Margot Livesey is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels The Flight of Gemma Hardy, The House on Fortune Street, Banishing Verona, Eva Moves the Furniture, The Missing World, Criminals, and Homework. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vogue, and the Atlantic, and she is the recipient of grants from both the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Born in Scotland, Livesey currently lives in the Boston area and is a professor of fiction at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Tonya Foster
2016-10-19 18:30 - 20:30 | Maude Fife Room, UC Berkeley, 2000 Carleston Street, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
Tonya M. Foster was born in Bloomington, Illinois, and raised in New Orleans. She earned a BA from Newcomb College, Tulane University, and an MFA from the University of Houston. Foster is the author of the poetry collection A Swarm of Bees in High Court (Belladonna*, 2015) and coedited the book Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art (2002). Her work has appeared in Callaloo, MiPoesias, Western Humanities Review, the Hat, and elsewhere. In a review, Patricia Spears Jones says, “Foster’ s imaginative work glories in language’s ambiguities, discords, emotions and logic—she allows that imaginative thrall to explore race and gender and political dysfunction.”
Foster has received fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts, the Macdowell Colony, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Graduate Center, CUNY, where she is a PhD candidate. She has taught at Bard College, Queens College CUNY, Baruch College CUNY, and she currently is an assistant professor at California College of the Arts.

Luis Valdez
2016-10-19 19:00 - 20:00 | SJSU Hammer Theatre, 101 Paseo de Antonio, San Jose, CA, 95112, United States
Join us in the newly refurbished Hammer Theatre for a gala evening celebrating the CLA’s 30 years of bringing top authors to San José. Our featured speaker will be none other than acclaimed author, playwright, actor, and director, Luis Valdez. A San José State alumnus, Valdez founded the theatre El Teatro Campesino in 1965 on the Delano Grape Strike picket lines of Cesar Chavez’s United Farmworkers Union to dramatize the plight and cause of farmworkers. El Teatro Campesino was honored with an Obie Award for “demonstrating the politics of survival.” In 1979, Valdez’s play Zoot Suit became the first Chicano work to debut on Broadway. His self-directed movie, La Bamba, was nominated for the 1988 Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture in the Drama category. Valdez has won the Hispanic Heritage award in Literature, as well as the Presidential Medal of the Arts. He has also won three Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Awards and an Emmy Award. Meet Luis at a private VIP reception and CLA fundraiser following the show.

An evening with Lidija Dimkovska
2016-10-19 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from her new novel
A Spare Life
Translated by Christina Kramer
published by Two Lines Press
Hosted by Scott Esposito
It is 1984, and 12-year-old twins Zlata and Srebra live in communist Yugoslavia. In many ways their lives are like that of young girls anywhere, except for one immense difference: Zlata’s and Srebra’s bodies are conjoined at their heads.
A Spare Life tells the story of their emergence from girls to young adults, from their desperately poor, provincial childhoods to their determination to become successful, independent women. After years of discovery and friendship, their lives are thrown into crisis when an incident threatens to destroy their bond as sisters. They fly to London, determined to be surgically separated—but will this dangerous procedure free them, or only more tightly ensnare them?
In A Spare Life master poet and award-winning novelist Lidija Dimkovska lovingly tells the lives of two astonishing girls caught up in Eastern Europe’s transition from communism to democracy. A saga about families, sisterhood, and being outcasts, A Spare Life reveals an existence where even the simplest of actions is unlike any we’ve ever experienced.
Lidija Dimkovska is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2013 European Union Prize for Literature for A Spare Life. She is also the author of the poetry collection pH Neutral History (Copper Canyon Press, 2012), which was a finalist for the 2013 Best Translated Book Award, and Do Not Awaken Them With Hammers(Ugly Duckling Presse, 2006). She lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Christina E. Kramer is a professor of Slavic and Balkan languages and linguistics at the University of Toronto. She is the author of numerous books on the Macedonian language and the Balkans and is the translator of Freud’s Sister, The Time of the Goats, and My Father’s Books. She lives in Toronto.
What has been said about A Spare Life:

“Lidija Dimkovska enriches our contemporary museum of literary wonders with her powerful, grotesque, weird details and episodes told within the merry old novelistic tradition.”
— Dubravka Ugrešić, author of Baba Laid an Egg
“A Spare Life uses the boldest of metaphors – the life of conjoined twins – to embody the disintegration of the former Yugoslavia. This strange and wonderful novel brings to mind Elena Ferrante and Magda Szabó in the acuity of its social observation and the depth of its mordant humor.”— Katie Kitamura, author of The Longshotand A Separation
“Dimkovska has an eye for detail befitting of a poet and the stark, unrelenting prose of a master storyteller.A Spare Life is a weird and wonderful book, capturing the quirk and complexity of both a declining Yugoslavia, and the inseparable lives of two sisters with clarity, wit, and heart.”— Sara Nović, author of Girl at War, finalist for the
Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Geraldine Brooks
2016-10-19 19:00 - 21:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz , CA, 95060, United States
Pulitzer Prize winning author Geraldine Brooks will join us to read and sign copies of her most recent novel, The Secret Chord. Now out in paperback, The Secret Chord traces the arc of King David’s journey from obscurity to fame, from shepherd to soldier, from hero to traitor, from beloved king to murderous despot and into his remorseful and diminished dotage.
“Deeply sympathetic. Brooks offers new perspectives on a character whose story has captured the Western imagination for millennial… she breaks from the biblical version by giving voice to the voiceless women in David’s life: wives and lovers, a daughter, a mother—the beloved and the scorned.” —The Boston Globe
“A compelling read, contemporary in its relevance… powerful storytelling, its landscape and time evoked in lyrical prose.” —The Guardian
“The best historical fiction… Brooks gives the whole king his due… It’s a tall order to breathe life into such a human being, and she manages it admirably.” —NPR
Geraldine Brooks is the author of four novels, the Pulitzer Prize-winning March and the international bestsellers Caleb’s Crossing, People of the Book, and Year of Wonders. She has also written the acclaimed nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Born and raised in Australia, she lives on Martha’s Vineyard with her husband, the author Tony Horwitz.

October Lyrics & Dirges!
2016-10-19 19:30 - 21:00 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
Leticia Hernández-Linares
Angela Hume
Bonnie Wailee Kwong
Aqueila M. Lewis
Anne Raeff
Hosted and curated by Sharon Coleman
Leticia Hernández-Linares is an award-winning writer and community worker. She has performed her poemsongs throughout the country and in El Salvador. Her work has appeared in Street Art San Francisco, U.S. Latino Literature Today, Teatro bajo mi piel, Huizache, and Pilgrimage among other publications. A member of the CantoMundo Organizing Committee, she lives, writes, and works in the Mission District of San Francisco.
Angela Hume lives in Oakland. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Melos (Projective Industries, 2015), The Middle (Omnidawn, 2013) and Second Story of your Body (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs, 2011). Her first full-length book of poetry is Middle Time (Omnidawn, 2016). You can learn more about Angela http://angelamhume.tumblr.com/.
Bonnie Wailee Kwong’s first poetry collection is ravel, a finalist for the Many Voices Project by New Rivers Press, and the White Pine Press Poetry Prize. Her work in poetry and fiction has garnered several Pushcart nominations. She creates in many mediums and languages: English, Cantonese, Mandarin, Japanese, ruby, and javascript. She is currently artist-in-residence at Stanford University. Her website is: www.bonniekwong.info.
Aqueila M. Lewis is an award-winning writer, Bay Area native and resident of Oakland, CA. As a multi-talented artist and poet, she is also well versed in journalism (print and radio) composing, singing, poetry/spoken word, modeling as a plus-model. She also currently holds the titles as Ms. Oakland Plus America 2014 and SF Raw Performing Artist of the Year 2015. Aqueila’s articles have been published in numerous publication and on radio such as 94.1 FM KPFA Radio’s First Voice Media Apprenticeship Program and Full Circle Show, Sideshow Radio, After Hours Radio, All the Rest of US Radio on 89.3 FM KPFB, National Radio Project Making Contact Storytelling Fellowship, Sistah’s With Ink Voices Anthology, Reflections: A Collaboration Between Painting And Literature, In Her Soul Magazine, Til Death Do Us Part Lady Warrior Zine and Walking in the Feminine: Stepping in our Shoes Anthology. Aqueila is currently a CounterPulse Communications Fellow, Liminal Writers-in Residence and creates workshops and circles focused on issues in relation to social justice and community.
Anne Raeff’s stories and essays have appeared in New England Review, ZYZZYVA, and Guernica among other places. Her first novel Clara Mondshien’s Melancholia was published in 2002 (MacAdam/Cage). Her short story collection, The Jungle Around Us won the 2016 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is proud to be a high school teacher and works primarily with recent immigrants. She too is a child of immigrants and much of her writing draws on her family’s history as refugees from war and the Holocaust. She lives in San Francisco with her wife and two cats.

Sarah Griffin
2016-10-19 19:30 - 21:30 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith alum, prolific tweeter, and International Treasure Sarah Maria Griffin joins us for the launch of her debut novel, Spare and Found Parts.
Spare & Found Parts tells the story of Nell, a girl with a ticking mechanical heart, living with her pet stoat and her genius scientist father in a futuristic Ireland ravaged by an epidemic and enduring a fragile recovery. Nell is lonely, ambitious, and anxious about living up to her potential—until she finds a mannequin hand while salvaging at the beach. As she begins to build herself a companion, the city, her father, and her true feelings begin to reveal themselves. A soulful steampunk-dystopian romp with undertones of Station Eleven, Gold, Fame Citrus, and, of course, Frankenstein, Spare and Found Parts will be the highlight of your fall reading list.
Ain’t no party like a Booksmith party, and ESPECIALLY when it’s one of our own. Join us to launch Griffski in style!
Sarah Maria Griffin is from Dublin, Ireland, and received a master’s degree in creative writing from National University of Ireland, Galway. After moving to San Francisco in 2012, she began to contribute essays about emigration to The Irish Times, which developed into Not Lost, a nonfiction collection published for adults. She has since returned to Dublin, and lives in a small red brick house by the sea with her husband and cat. You can find her online at www.sarahgriff.com, on Twitter @griffski, and on Instagram @sarahgriffski.

Rod Smith + Lee Ann Brown
2016-10-20 19:00 - 20:30 | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
Poets Rod Smith and Lee Ann Brown, visiting respectively from Washington, D.C. and New York City, read their work and converse with the audience. This event is FREE.
Getting here.

Rod Smith is the author of Touché (Wave Books, 2015), What’s the Deal? (Song Cave, 2010), Deed (University of Iowa Press, 2007), In Memory of My Theories (O Books, 1996) and several others books and chapbooks. He edits the journal Aerial, publishes Edge Books, and manages Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC. He has taught writing at the Corcoran College of Art & Design, George Mason University, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the Maryland Institute of Contemporary Art. Smith edited The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley (U. Cal., 2014) with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris.

Lee Ann Brown was born in Japan and raised in Charlotte, North Carolina. She is the author of Other Archer (Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2015), In the Laurels, Caught (Fence Books, 2013), Crowns of Charlotte (Carolina Wren Press, 2013), The Sleep That Changed Everything (Wesleyan, 2003), and Polyverse (Sun & Moon Press, 1999), which won the 1996 New American Poetry Competition. In 1989, Brown founded Tender Buttons Press, which is dedicated to publishing experimental women’s poetry. She now lives in New York City, where she teaches at St. John’s University and curates poetry events through Torn Page.

Vinod Narayan + Open Mic
2016-10-20 19:00 - 21:00 | Willow Glen Library, 1157 Minnesota Ave, San Jose , CA, 95125, United States
Vinod Narayan is a Poet from India and made the SF Bay Area his home since 2002. He started writing poetry in 2004 and have been continuing it since then both writing and performing them at events in the Bay Area. Vinod is also a Blogger, Video Podcaster and a Content Management Professional regularly blogging on poetry, movie reviews, articles and opinions on life and things that matter to life. Vinod’s poetry range from personal poems to poems that address the theme of humanity, love, peace and surrealism. He also actively pens Haikus and Flash Fiction and converts poems to video poems on Youtube. For last two years he has taken up a 30 day challenge on the poetry month of April where he pens a new poem every day. This year he took up two projects, Penning a new poem every day as well as translating a poem by an international poet to his native language Malayalam. This has sparked his interest in translations. He has two collections of Poetry “Remembering Dad” and “Precious Wombs to Priceless Tombs”. He is currently working on his third collection of poetry “Capturing Reflections”. He lives in Niles, Fremont with his wife and two kids and runs his Content Company ‘PenPositive’ creating and managing content for companies He believes in the power of the Pen and quotes “The power of the pen is not in the color of the ink it spills; but the power of the word it spells.”

October Cante Jondo Poetry Series
2016-10-20 19:00 - 21:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Please join us as we continue to celebrate the deep songs inside of us! We also will be celebrating the birthday of Amalia Alvarez!
Featuring:
Amalia Alvarez
Alicia Franco
Thea Matthews
Naomi Quiñonez
with flamenco guitar by Gopal Slavonic

Pedestrian Prose #1 w/ Purnell + Zink
2016-10-20 19:30 - 21:00 | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Pedestrian Press is proud to present: alliteration! Just kidding. It’s our new reading series. Looking around the East Bay literary scene, we’ve noticed a vacuum for short stories and creative non-fiction. Pedestrian Prose is our attempt to fill it, with two featured authors reading one complete short story, novel chapter or excerpt, or essay. For our inaugural reading, we’re proud to feature Laura Zink and Brontez Purnell, two great East Bay fiction writers, and to give you a chance to hear a complete story or chapter from each. Please join us!

Poetry Flash: Randall Mann + Adrienne Su
2016-10-20 19:30 - 21:30 | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Randall Mann’s most recent book of poems is Straight Razor. Richard Rayner of the Los Angeles Times calls it “Bawdy yet elegant poems depicting the debaucheries and traumas of growing up amid San Francisco’s gay scene…Craft and bravura mix well…Mann shows himself [Thom Gunn’s] apt pupil.” His two previous collections are Breakfast with Thom Gunn and Complaint in the Garden. His new collection, Proprietary, will be published in summer 2017.
Adrienne Su’s most recent book of poems is Living Quarters. Cate Marvin says, “Su’s approach is risky in its sheer honesty and fierce by way of simplicity.” Her previous collections are The Middle Kingdom, Sanctuary, and Having None of It. Her work has been anthologized in The New American Poets, The Pushcart Prize XXIV, and Asian-American Poetry: The Next Generation, and her honors, along with her Pushcart Prize, include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and residencies at the Fine Arts Works Center and The Frost Place. She teaches at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

DNA Hymn East Bay Book Launch
2016-10-20 19:30 - 22:00 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
*DNA Hymn’s East Bay Book Launch w/ Maya Chinchilla, Tha Hood AlKemist, Crystal Azul Barr & Vanessa Rochelle Lewis! Performer bios coming soon! *Annah Anti-Palindrome’s debute book, DNA Hymn, is a collection of poems about rural, working-class, queer/femme, JewWitch, survivor identity. Pieces of this book will be performed through live, musical soundscapes made w/ a loop pedal, kitchen utensils, gas-masks, raw eggs, blood pressure cuffs, found objects, her body (mostly her throat), and more!

San Francisco Writers Grotto Fellow Reading
2016-10-21 17:00 - 19:00 | The Grotto, 490 2nd Street, San Francisco, CA, 94107, United States
Join us for an amazing night of readings from the 2016 Grotto Fellows
Chad Koch is a founding editor of Foglifter, San Francisco’s only queer literary journal. He recently received his MFA from San Francisco State University, where he was editor-in-chief of Fourteen Hills. His most recent stories were published in The North American Review and Sparkle & Blink. His story, “Lost Boys” was a semi-finalist for the 2016 Raymond Carver Short Story Award.
Caleb Leisure received his MFA in Fiction from New York University. In 2011 he was named a NYC Emerging Writer Fellow at the Center for Fiction, and in 2014 he won the Crazyhorse Fiction Prize. He works for a small winery in Sonoma County and is at work on his first novel. He lives in Oakland.
Marissa Ortega-Welch is a freelance radio producer in Oakland, California. Her stories have aired on NPR’s Latino USA, KQED, and KPFA. She is currently the health reporter for KALW Public Radio. She’s also worked for years as a teacher and naturalist and is drawn to stories about the environment, youth, and informal economies.
Lisa Marie Rollins is playwright, poet and freelance director. Most recently she directed a reading of Tearrance Chisholm’s Br’er Cotton (Playwrights Foundation) and is co-Director of Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment (Crowded Fire). She is the director of All Atheists are Muslim by Zahra Noorbakhsh and was co-producer of W. Kamau Bell’s “Ending Racism in About and Hour”. She was Poet in Residence at June Jordan’s Poetry for the People at U.C. Berkeley, a CALLALOO Journal London Writing Workshop Fellow and an alumni in Poetry of VONA Writing Workshop. Her writing is published in Other Tongues: Mixed-Race Women Speak Out, River, Blood, Corn Literary Journal, Line/Break, As/Us Literary Journal, The Pacific Review and others. Currently, she is finishing her new manuscript of poems, Compass for which she received the 2016 Mary Tanenbaum Literary Award from SF Foundation. She is an Adjunct Professor at SFSU in Race and Resistance Studies. Lisa Marie is a 2015-16 member of Just Theater Play Lab and Artist-in-Residence at BRAVA Theater for Women in San Francisco. @thirdrootprod
Kaitlin Solimine’s debut novel, Empire of Glass, is forthcoming in Summer 2017 (Ig Publishing). Raised in New England, she has considered China a second home for two decades. She has received the Yenching scholarship, Fulbright Fellowship, and Bread Loaf’s Donald E. Axinn Scholarship. A graduate of Harvard University and the MFA program at UC-San Diego, she has published fiction and non-fiction in National Geographic News, The Wall Street Journal, Guernica Magazine, Kartika Review, China Daily, and numerous anthologies. She recently returned from living in Singapore and now resides in San Francisco where she is co-founder of HIPPO Reads, a network connecting academic insights to the wider public.

Ari Banias + Margaret Ross
2016-10-21 19:00 - 20:00 | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
Come see why CAConrad says, “Ari Banias is one of the best living poets, and this book in your hands is our proof. Anybody is the courage of a poet who trusts the strength of poetry to make room in our world for everybody.” Or why Maggie Nelson gushes, ““I’m so impressed by the range and grace of Ari Banias’ Anybody. It’s discursive, straight-talking, and thinky, then ghostlike, elliptical, and mischievous. It takes its time, then rushes; it’s quiet, then bold; it’s steeped in sociality, then ringing with solitude. I happily recognize its arrival, even if I know (as does Banias, quoting Berlant) that recognition may be but the misrecognition we can bear.”
Margaret Ross’ A Timeshare unearths the corporeal in the most desolate reaches of corporate speech: Futures exchange; Human resources; Personal life. Lush and visceral, A Timeshare knows that questions and crises of individual existence are inextricably bound to shared experience and its deft music carries from the closest closet to outer space, touching the concrete through the metaphysical.
This will be a very special evening of poetry!
Ari Banias has held fellowships at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford. His poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Offing, Poetry, A Public Space, as part of the exhibition Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects, and in a chapbook, What’s Personal is Being Here With All Of You (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs). Ari lives and works in Berkeley. Anybody is his first book.
Margaret Ross‘s first book, A Timeshare, came out last fall. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, The New Republic and The New Yorker and have been recognized by fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford, where she is currently a Stegner Fellow.

Book Party for HOUSE A
2016-10-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Happy / over the moon / grateful to invite you to celebrate the publication of my first book, HOUSE A (Omnidawn Publishing), selected by Claudia Rankine as winner of the Omnidawn Poetry Book Prize.
There will be a reading, a projector with images, some form of favorite childhood snacks, adult drinks, and of course books for sale! Tell your friends!
HOUSE A investigates the tones and textures of immigrant home-building by asking: How is the body inscribed with a cosmology of home and vice versa? Through an assemblage of oblique letters to Mao, incantations of “dream-geometry,” and image-text experiments, the book seeks to render the immersive/obscured feeling of a childhood household where the haunting of history blurs with a constellation of sheltering figures, patterns, and shadows. With evocative and intellectual precision, HOUSE A maps a new poetics of American Home, steeped in longing and rooted by displacement.
book // www.jenniferscheng.com/house-a
poems // http://conjunctions.com/webcon/cheng13.htm
interview // http://theconversant.org/?p=10571

Jack Spicer chapbook release
2016-10-22 15:00 - 17:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
SPECT books will be releasing a chapbook of an unncollected piece of Jack Spicer prose titled “The Wasp. Featured reading by Daniel Benjamin who wrote an afterward for the text.
AND
Omnidawn publishing will be releasing a new book of poetry entitled “The Field” by Robert Andrew Perez. He will be reading from the book!

Gerald Fleming
2016-10-22 19:00 - 21:00 | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
Gerald Fleming’s new book of prose poems (Hanging Loose Press, Brooklyn)—titled, simply, One, pushes the tensile strength of the English language. Frederick Barthelme has called the work in this new volume “dizzying and wonderful, pretzelesque,” and for Fleming the book is the culmination of two years’ work using a language “constrained, but somehow liberated in that constraint.” Of his last book, The Choreographer (Sixteen Rivers Press), the poet Terence Winch said, “Fleming’s world is a universe of his own making, defined by a poet’s sense of language and a novelist’s take on story. Readers will have a blast traveling through this wondrous place.”
Gerald Fleming’s most recent books are Night of Pure Breathing, prose poems (Hanging Loose Press), and Swimmer Climbing onto Shore, poetry (Sixteen Rivers Press). Fleming taught in San Francisco’s public schools for thirty-seven years and has written three books for teachers, including Rain, Steam, and Speed (Jossey-Bass/Wiley). From 1995 to 2000, he edited and published the literary magazine Barnabe Mountain Review. In 2013, with his brother and sister—glass artists Bernie Fleming and Michaela Fleming—he launched the limited-edition magazine One (More) Glass.

Roastmeal: The Rage Issue Release
2016-10-22 19:00 - 22:00 | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Friends! Join us in opening the hellmouth and getting super aggro this October with the epic release of ROASTMEAL: The Rage Issue! This blistering 11th issue of Oatmeal Magazine is so hot and messy with rage it’ll burn through your eyeballs into your heart and deep down in your gut, and we’ll all be better for it. It’s beautiful and fierce and ugly and important and full of love and strength and vulnerable writing, and we can’t wait to share it with you all.
*Also* this might be our last issue ever, so we extra-hope you’ll come hang out and get mad AF with a bunch of wonderful people who appreciate all your rage and feelings! There will be amazing readings AND we are so lucky and excited that SPELLLING and collander are gonna be playing all their dreamy, dreamy sounds. Come dance!! It’ll be the best night.
doors at 7 // readings at 7:30 // music at ~8:45
more details below!
* * * READINGS * * *
ANGEL DOMINGUEZ is a Latinx, Los Angeles born writer and performance artist forming Dzonots with notebooks along the California coast. He is the author of Black Lavender Milk (Timeless Infinite Light, 2015), an experimental lyric-novel that functions as an extended meditation on writing in relation to the body; time, loss, ancestry, ritual and dreaming. His work can be found in FENCE, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Macaroni Necklace #5, Elderly 18, Open House Poetry, spiralorb.com and more. He was the co-founding editor of Tract/Trace: an investigative journal, senior editor of The Bombay Gin, and presently curates “Mi Vida Locx” with Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta and Elana Chavez. Along with Hannah Kezema, he co-founded the performance art collaborative: Dream Tigers. Find him on twitter: @dandelionglitch
JOSÉ VADI is an award-winning writer and film producer based in Oakland, California. The recipient of the Shenson Performing Arts Award, his work has been featured by the PBS NewsHour, The Daily Beast, Colorlines, The Huffington Post, Jupiter 88, and Catapult.
TARA MARSDEN lives and writes in Oakland. She moonlights as a bookseller (don’t ask her about her day job). Her Slaughterhouse Five-themed smut can be found in the anthology Loose Lips: Fanfiction Parodies of Great (and Terrible) Literature from the Smutty Stage of Shipwreck, recently published by Grand Central. You can read her non-smut writing in Eleven Eleven, Boing Boing, and The Establishment.
ELIZABETH FREEMAN lives in Oakland, sells books for a living in Berkeley, watches Murder She Wrote and hangs out with her elderly cat a lot. She is @eafreem on twitter with lots of feelings & words & minute by minute narration of terrible tv shows.
With a world as fleeting as it is, AKANDE X is merely attempting to write everything down before it is gone. He loves Toni Morrison, Nietzsche, and Richard Wright.
MELINDA NOACK is woman writer, writer of womanly things based in Oakland. She helped create Lacuna, the “world’s most public library,” for the Bay Area Book Festival, co-coordinates local writing group, If I Told Napoleon, and has been a featured reader at Nomadic Press, Liminal, and The Hundy. Friends and mild acquaintances are reminded of her when they see nachos, kettle corn, and dreadful book titles. She likes three-part lists.
CLAIRE STRINGER is an illustrator and bookseller living in Oakland. She has eaten oatmeal most mornings since co-founding Oatmeal Magazine in 2011, and recently started illustrating for The Rumpus’ Funny Women column. Sometimes she posts her art on her tumblr, www.clairestrings.com
+ even more!
—- — — — —
* * * MUSIC! * * *
~*~*~ collander ~*~*~
queer sick experimental pop
soundcloud.com/collander
~*~*~ SPELLLING ~*~*~
conjurings
soundcloud.com/spellling
—- —- — — —
+ snacks and drinks! maybe this time we will actually have a vat of oatmeal?? who knows.
—– — – — – –
access info:
pls come scent free! chemical products make some people very sick, so no perfumes, essential oils, fragranced products, detergents, etc. we also ask folks to please avoid smoking at this event and avoid wearing clothes with cigarette smoke. (we will try our best to remove immediate scents in the bookstore, but we are not able to guarantee the event as fully scent-free because it’s located next to a beauty salon, and sometimes the smell of aerosol or perm solution comes through the vents; we also won’t be able to check folks at the door.) here’s a helpful scent-free guide! http://www.anapsid.org/cnd/files/how2bscentfree.pdf
the bookstore is wheelchair accessible, however its bathroom is not (it’s upstairs). there are accessible bathrooms at golden lotus a few doors down and also at the tribune tavern across the street, and we’ll make sure that folks can use them the night of the event. please feel free to reach out to claire or any of the event people to let us know if there’s any additional information/accommodations you need!
We can’t wait to see you all so soon!
Love and rage,
The Oatmeal Family

André Alexis
2016-10-22 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Praise for André Alexis:
“A novel about a pack of talking dogs, you say? The very idea will most likely breed thoughts of insufferable whimsy, like those paintings of mutts playing poker, or of more or less effective satire, in the vein of Animal Farm. It’s a grand thing, then, that this spry novel by Canadian André Alexis spends its 160 pages repeatedly defying expectations … I’m far from being a dog person, but as a book person I loved this smart, exuberant fantasy from start to finish.” – — Jonathan Gibbs, The Guardian, on Fifteen Dogs

“Over the course of this novel, slim yet epic in scope, Alexis chronicles the fates of these strangely afflicted beasts, shifting from thought experiment to comic parable to something more delicate, laden with detail, discovery and emotional nuance.” — The Globe & Mail on Fifteen Dogs

“A remarkable book. Insightful, wildly original and beautiful. Buy it.” — Mark Medley, Books Editor at The Globe & Mail, on Fifteen Dogs
About The Hidden Keys:
Parkdale’s Green Dolphin is a bar of ill repute, and it is there that Tancred Palmieri, a thief with elegant and erudite tastes, meets Willow Azarian, an aging heroin addict. She reveals to Tancred that her very wealthy father has recently passed away, leaving each of his five children a mysterious object that provides one clue to the whereabouts of a large inheritance. Willow enlists Tancred to steal these objects from her siblings and help her solve the puzzle.

A Japanese screen, a painting that plays music, a bottle of aquavit, a framed poem and a model of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater: Tancred is lured in to this beguiling quest, and even though Willow dies before the puzzle is solved, he presses on.

As he tracks down the treasure, he must enlist the help of Alexander von Wurfel, conceptual artist and taxidermist to the wealthy, and fend off Willow’s heroin dealers, a young albino named ‘Nigger’ Colby and his sidekick, Sigismund ‘Freud’ Luxemburg, a clubfooted psychopath, both of whom are eager to get their hands on this supposed pot of gold. And he must mislead Detective Daniel Mandelshtam, his most adored friend.

Inspired by a reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, The Hidden Keys questions what it means to be honorable, what it means to be faithful and what it means to sin.
