Jarett Kobek
2019-10-29 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
celebrating the release of his new novel
Only Americans Burn in Hell
published by We’ve Heard You Like Books

‘Brilliantly funny … the best satire of our contemporary nightmare that you will ever see, and very possibly the last’ Alan Moore
It’s 2019 and America is ruled over by a billionaire reality TV star. Its media is owned by a transnational class of the shameless and the depraved. And its people have been silently robbed of their wealth, their dignity and their democracy.
In this brave new world, going to see a superhero movie counts as activism, and arguing with the other serfs on social media is political engagement. BUT EVERYTHING’S FINE – as long as you never, ever ask yourself who makes money from the ticket sales and the ratings, or who owns Twitter.
It’s 2019 and Jarett Kobek has done the only thing a dissident American novelist can do in those circumstances: he’s joined the party and written fantasy novel about an immortal fairy queen and a shadowy billionaire philanthropist sheikh called Dennis.
Hilarious, provocative and unmissable, Only Americans Burn in Hell is the only novel for our certifiably insane times.
Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. His novel I HATE THE INTERNET was an international bestseller, translated into nine languages, and published in twelve countries.

Gary Janetti: Do You Mind If I Cancel?
2019-10-29 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Gary Janetti discusses his new book, Do You Mind If I Cancel? (Things That Still Annoy Me).
Praise for Do You Mind If I Cancel?
“Gary Janetti’s book is so rolling-on-the-floor funny, so brilliantly observant, and so full of heart, I’m sure a jealous Prince George will decree that Gary be locked up in the Tower of London.”— Kevin Kwan, New York Times bestselling author of the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy
“The writing of Gary Janetti, whether televised or tweeted, is famously incisive and sharp-tongued. What a revelation it was, therefore, to discover in these revealing personal essays an artist of great tenderness and vulnerability. And he’s still funny as hell.”— Armistead Maupin, New York Times bestselling author of The Tales of the City
“Almost as soon as I began to read Gary Janetti’s Do You Mind If I Cancel?, I found myself feeling the way I felt when I first encountered Fran Lebowitz and David Rakoff: laughing and wanting to shout out the best bits to whoever else was in the room, even if no one else was there. This crazy quilt of memoir, cultural history, one-liners aplenty, and periodic arias of hopefulness, frustration, and brashly rude rage, is a work of intertwined great humor and great feeling. I’ve already lost my copy, snatched up by its next eager reader.”— Benjamin Dreyer, New York Times bestselling author of Dreyer’s English
About Do You Mind If I Cancel?
Gary Janetti, the writer and producer for some of the most popular television comedies of all time, and creator of one of the most wickedly funny Instagram accounts there is, now turns his skills to the page in a hilarious, and poignant book chronicling the pains and indignities of everyday life.
Gary spends his twenties in New York, dreaming of starring on soap operas while in reality working at a hotel where he lusts after an unattainable colleague and battles a bellman who despises it when people actually use a bell to call him. He chronicles the torture of finding a job before the internet when you had to talk on the phone all the time, and fantasizes, as we all do, about who to tell off when he finally wins an Oscar. As Gary himself says, “These are essays from my childhood and young adulthood about things that still annoy me.”
Original, brazen, and laugh out loud funny, Do You Mind if I Cancel? is something not to be missed.

Folkland Book Club featuring books from Small Press Distribution
2019-10-30 18:00 - 19:30 | Oakland Main Library, 125 14th St, Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
Join us for a monthly book club featuring titles from Small Press Distribution. Pick up a free copy of our October book at the September Book Club meeting on 9/25, or at the Main Library Reference desk starting on 9/26 while supplies last.
OUR OCTOBER BOOK CLUB PICK:
ROOM IN ROME
Poetry by Jorge Eduardo Eielson
“As a person, Eielson always kept something secret, an intimacy he preserved even beyond the reach of his closest friends. This mysterious depth intrigued and fascinated those who knew him and is a salient feature of his writing, sculpture, and paintings. Perhaps this depth will help ensure that his visual and poetic works endure. Though inseparable from the period in which it was created, Eielson’s work deserves to live on and bear witness for future generations to the myths, dreams, miseries, and achievements pertaining to the world in which Eielson both suffered and enjoyed his life.”
—Mario Vargas Llosa
“David Shook’s translation of Jorge Eduardo Eielson’s ROOM IN ROME rescues an essential voice of contemporary Peruvian poetry. A poet of the world who rebels against national as well as aesthetic borders, Eielson rejects simplistic discords between social and artistic commitment. His poetry heralds the power of words: gathering them, sculpting them, changing them to gunshots.”
—Katherine Hedeen
“Alongside his other Roman collection, Noche oscura del cuerpo, critics consider ROOM IN ROME to be Eielson’s masterpiece. The collection displays its author’s rare ability to ‘knot’ together past and present, tradition and novelty, the anguish of modern life and the resplendence of another, serene existence within reach.”
—Martha Canfield
“There was a time when poetry belonged to the world, both the known world and the one beyond knowing. Eielson taught me everything.”—Mario Bellatín

Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrow
2019-10-30 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Hannu Rajaniemi, Meg Elison, Annalee Newitz discuss their contributions to Future Tense Fiction: Stories of Tomorrowwith editor Torie Bosch.
About Future Tense Fiction
Future Tense Fiction is a collection of electrifying original stories from a veritable who’s-who of the most interesting authors working on the margins of speculative literature and science fiction.
Featuring Carmen Maria Machado, Emily St. John Mandel, Charlie Jane Anders, Paolo Bacigalupi, Madeline Ashby, Mark Oshiro, Meg Elison, Maureen McHugh, Deji Bryce Olukotun, Hannu Rajaniemi, Annalee Newitz, Lee Konstantinou, and Mark Stasenko–Future Tense Fiction points the way forward to the fiction of tomorrow.
A disease surveillance robot whose social programming gets put to the test. A future in which everyone receives universal basic income–but it’s still not enough. A futuristic sport, in which all the athletes have been chemically and physically enhanced. An A.I. company that manufactures a neural bridge allowing ordinary people to share their memories. Brimming with excitement and exploring new ideas, the stories collected by the editors of Slate’s Future Tense are philosophically ambitious and haunting in their creativity. At times terrifying and heartwrenching, hilarious and optimistic, this is a collection that ushers in a new age for our world and for the short story.
Annalee Newitz writes science fiction and nonfiction. She is the author of the novel Autonomous, nominated for the Nebula and Locus Awards, and winner of the Lambda Literary Award. As a science journalist, she’s written for the Washington Post, Slate, Ars Technica, the New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among others. Her book Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinctionwas a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize in science. She was the founder of io9, and served as the editor-in-chief of Gizmodo and the tech culture editor at Ars Technica. She has published short stories in Lightspeed, Shimmer, Apex, and Technology Review’s Twelve Tomorrows. She was the recipient of a Knight Science Journalism Fellowship at MIT, worked as a policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and has a Ph.D. in English and American Studies from UC Berkeley. Her new novel, The Future of Another Timeline, comes out September 2019.
Meg Elison is a science fiction author and feminist essayist. Herdebut novel, The Book of the Unnamed Midwife, won the 2014 Philip K.Dick award. Her second novel was a finalist for the Philip K. Dick,and both were longlisted for the James A. Tiptree award. She has been published in McSweeney’s, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Catapult, and many other places. Elison is a high school dropout and a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley. Find her online, where she writes like she’s running out of time.
Hannu Rajaniemi is the author of four novels including The Quantum Thief(winner of 2012 Tähtivaeltaja Award for the best science fiction novel published in Finland and translated into more than 20 languages), and Invisible Planets, a short story collection. His most recent book is Summerland, an alternate history spy thriller in a world where the afterlife is real. His short fiction has been featured in Slate, MIT Technology Review and the New York Times. Hannu lives in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is a co-founder and CEO of HelixNano, a venture- and Y Combinator–backed biotech startup.
Torie Bosch is the editor of Future Tense, a partnership of Slate, New America, and Arizona State University. She was also the co-editor of the 2017 edition of What Future: The Year’s Best Ideas to Reclaim, Reanimate & Reinvent the Future (The Unnamed Press).

Susan Steinberg presents Machine
2019-10-30 19:30 - 21:30 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
Susan Steinberg presents Machine

Wednesday, October 30, 7:30pm
Pegasus Books Downtown
Susan Steinberg discusses Machine: a haunting story of guilt and blame in the wake of a drowning, the first novel by the author of Spectacle.
In conversation with Lucy Corin, author of One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses.

Susan Steinberg’s first novel, Machine, is a dazzling and innovative leap forward for a writer whose most recent book, Spectacle, gained her a rapturous following. Machine revolves around a group of teenagers—both locals and wealthy out-of-towners—during a single summer at the shore. Steinberg captures the pressures and demands of this world in a voice that effortlessly slides from collective to singular, as one girl recounts a night on which another girl drowned. Hoping to assuage her guilt and evade a similar fate, she pieces together the details of this tragedy, as well as the breakdown of her own family, and learns that no one, not even she, is blameless.
A daring stylist, Steinberg contrasts semicolon-studded sentences with short lines that race down the page. This restless approach gains focus and power through a sharply drawn narrative that ferociously interrogates gender, class, privilege, and the disintegration of identity in the shadow of trauma. Machine is the kind of novel—relentless and bold—that only Susan Steinberg could have written.
PRAISE

“The narrative shifts, experimental structure and poetic language in Steinberg’s hypnotic first novel capture the teen years with their shifting emotional tides and heightened awareness of class, gender, self and others.”—BBC Culture
After making waves with her book ‘Spectacle,’ bold stylist Susan Steinberg resurfaces with her first novel, a tale of gender, class, privilege and trauma set during a summer at the shore. . . . The narrative grapples with guilt and blame while eschewing formal conventions.”—Chicago Tribune
“With simple, lyrical language, Steinberg presents a mystery of privilege and youth that deftly captures the unadulterated gear quaking deep behind a teenagers invincible front.”—Booklist
“What makes [Machine] so thrilling is Steinberg’s artistry with form; she fractures narrative into its fundamental parts. Steinberg writes prose with a poet’s sense of meter and line, and a velocity recalling the novels of Joan Didion. The result is a dizzying work that perfectly evokes the feeling of spinning out of control.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
“Steinberg writes in small, interconnected, and poetic fragments. . . . Heartbreaking, eerie, and acutely observant.”—Kirkus, starred review

AUTHOR BIO
Susan Steinberg is the author of Machine, Spectacle, Hydroplane, and The End of Free Love. She is the recipient of a United States Artists Fellowship, a National Magazine Award, and a Pushcart Prize. She teaches at the University of San Francisco.
Lucy Corin is the author of two short story collections, One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses (McSweeney’s Books) and The Entire Predicament (Tin House Books) as well as a novel, Everyday Psychokillers: A History for Girls (FC2). She won an American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at the University of California at Davis, and is at work on a novel, The Swank Hotel.

Event date:

Wednesday, October 30, 2019 – 7:30pm

Event address:

Pegasus Books Downtown
2349 Shattuck Ave

Berkeley, CA 94704

SoMa Lurk Book Launch & Reading
2019-11-01 18:30 - 20:00 | Project Kalahati, 150 Frank H Ogawa Plaza, Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
Join on First Friday.
Book description:
SoMa Lurk is a collection of poems and photographs by José Vadi that documents, channels, and writes from the many physical, cultural and economic changes the Bay Area has undergone since 2015.
About the author:
José Vadi is an award-winning poet, essayist, and producer based in Oakland, California. His previous poetry chapbooks include Marrow (Discantbelife Press). His work has been featured by the PBS NewsHour, the San Francisco Chronicle, McSweeney’s, New Life Quarterly, and Catapult. (josevadi.com | @vadiparty)

Nighttime on the Other Side of Everything - Book Launch
2019-11-01 19:00 - 23:00 | Jered’s Pottery, 5743A Horton St., Emeryville, CA, 94608, United States
Join Sarah Kobrinsky for the celebration of the launch of her new book, Nighttime on the Other Side of Everything (New Rivers Press). Expect a small reading and a big party.
“Whether writing about dry-cleaned gorilla suits or stillborn infants, cigarettes or hammers, moonshine or ashrams, Sarah Kobrinsky balances with grace on a tightrope strung between the human platforms of the ridiculous and the sublime. Honest, lyrical, irreverent, and profound, these are poems honed by the blade of awareness and engraved with empathy. ”
-Elizabeth Rosner, author of Survivor Cafe, and the Speed of Light

Mikhal Dekel: Tehran Children
2019-11-01 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Mikhal Dekel discusses her new book, Tehran Children: A Holocaust Refugee Odyssey.
Praise for Tehran Children
“A revelatory history, a saga of flight and welcome, of death and head-down survival, a powerful narrative built for this moment. Dekel’s sweeping storytelling is marked by heartbreaking restraint and historical sensitivity.”—Charles King, Georgetown University, author of Odessa and Midnight at the Pera Palace
“Though their story is seldom told, most Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust did so by taking the road east, into the Soviet Union. In tracing the harrowing journey of her father’s escape, Mikhal Dekel provides a multi-layered and nuanced account. . . . Her exploration of the peculiar refugee world in 1940s Tehran — especially the tense relations between Jewish and Catholic Polish refugees in that city – makes the book an important and timely addition to the literature of the Holocaust and modern refugee history.” — Tom Reiss, author of The Orientalist and The Black Count
“In this brilliantly conceived narrative, Mikhal Dekel reconstructs her father’s and grandmother’s circuitous journeys by land and sea through Iran on the way from Poland to Palestine in the years of the Holocaust. Retracing their lives as she lives her own, in turn she illuminates a series of unexpected places absent from many maps of the refugee experience of the era. A striking book.”—Samuel Moyn, Yale University, author of Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World
About Tehran Children
Author Mikhal Dekel’s father, Hannan Teitel, and her aunt Regina were two of these refugees. After they fled the town in eastern Poland where their family had been successful brewers for centuries, they endured extreme suffering in the Soviet forced labor camps known as “special settlements.” Then came a journey during which tens of thousands died of starvation and disease en route to the Soviet Central Asian Republics of Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. While American organizations negotiated to deliver aid to the hundreds of thousands of Polish Jews who remained there, Dekel’s father and aunt were two of nearly one thousand refugee children who were evacuated via Polish military transport to Iran, where they were embraced by an ancient Persian-Jewish community celebrating familiar rituals in unfamiliar ways. Months later, their Zionist caregivers escorted them via India to Mandatory Palestine, where, at the endpoint of their 13,000 mile journey, they joined hundreds of thousands of refugees (including over one hundred thousand Polish Catholics). The arrival of the “Tehran Children” was far from straightforward, as religious and secular parties vied over their futures in what would soon be Israel.
Beginning with the death of the inscrutable Tehran Child who was her father, Dekel fuses memoir with extensive archival research to recover this astonishing story, with the help of travel companions and interlocutors including an Iranian colleague, a Polish PiS politician, a Russian oligarch, and an Uzbek descendent of Korean deportees. The history she uncovers is one of the worst and the best of humanity, of fate and destiny, of hospitality and of cruelty, of love and hate. The experiences her father and aunt endured, along with so many others, ultimately reshaped and redefined their lives and identities and those of other refugees and rescuers, profoundly and permanently, during and after the war.
With literary grace, Tehran Children presents a unique narrative of the Holocaust, whose governing symbol is not the concentration camp, but the refugee, and whose center is not Europe, but Central Asia and the Middle East.

BAPC OPEN POETRY READING
2019-11-02 15:00 - 17:00 | Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison Street, Berkeley, CA, 94702, United States
BAPC OPEN POETRY READING

Upcoming First Saturday Readings in 201 November 2, December 7

3:00 – 5:00 PM

STRAWBERRY CREEK LODGE
1320 Addison St., Berkeley, CA

Addison is one block south of and parallel to University Ave.
between Acton & Bonar St.
Parking on the street (NOT in the S.C.L. parking lot)

Check in at the front desk and you will be directed to the meeting location
(usually Movie Room, or backyard garden)

All Ages Welcome

Come and enjoy a friendly and informal read-around —
3-5 minutes per poet/reader, or “just listening” is fine too 🙂

Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne: Holding on to Nothing
2019-11-02 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne discusses her new novel, Holding on to Nothing.
Praise for Holding on to Nothing
“Holding On To Nothing is a resonant song of the South, all whiskey, bluegrass, Dolly Parton, tobacco fields, and women who know better but still fall for the lowdown men whom they know will disappoint them. Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne writes with extraordinary love and compassion of the lives of her flawed characters; she shines a clear, calm light on their tragedies, their joys, and their hard-won redemptions.”—Lauren Groff, Florida and Fates and Furies
“Forget Hillbilly Elegy and read this gorgeous novel instead. Every detail is exactly right. Contemporary themes of work and no work, drinking, sex, guns, music, community, and no future—along with in-depth character development and a hard-driving plot—make this a book you literally cannot put down.”—Lee Smith, Dimestore and The Last Girls
“With her immense empathy for her characters, Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne refuses to give the reader a simple, and stereotypical, tale of Appalachian dysfunction. Instead, we get a story of a seemingly star-crossed couple striving to create a better life in the most trying of circumstances. Holding On To Nothing is a gem.”—Ron Rash, Serena
About Holding on to Nothing
Lucy Kilgore has her bags packed for her escape from her rural Tennessee upbringing, but a drunken mistake forever tethers her to the town and one of its least-admired residents, Jeptha Taylor, who becomes the father of her child. Together, these two young people work to form a family, though neither has any idea how to accomplish that, and the odds are against them in a place with little to offer other than bluegrass music, tobacco fields, and a Walmart full of beer and firearms for the hunting season. Their path is harrowing, but Lucy and Jeptha are characters to love, and readers will root for their success in a novel so riveting that no one will want to turn out the light until they know whether this family will survive.
In luminous prose, debut novelist Elizabeth Chiles Shelburne brings us a present-day Appalachian story in the tradition of Lee Smith, Silas House, and Ron Rash, cast without sentiment or clich , but with a genuine and profound understanding of the place and its people.

50 Hikes with Kids Reading and Nature Scavenger Hunt
2019-11-03 14:00 - 15:00 | Pegasus Books on Solano, 1855 Solano Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94707, United States
50 Hikes with Kids Reading and Nature Scavenger Hunt

Pegasus Books Solano
Sunday, November 3, 2pm – 3pm
Pegasus families, come join author Wendy Gorton for an afternoon of adventure with your littles!
We will:
-Read an adventure storybook
-Read a local map
-Plan our adventure!
-Take photos and identify scavenger hunt plants out front and try a fun identification app on a phone
-Trace plants and sketch in a provided nature journal
-Read “”50 Hikes with Kids” to plan your next adventure!
-Sign books
A Love of Nature Starts Here!
California kids live in a magnificent natural playground, and 50 Hikes with Kids California helps them explore its beaches, deserts, mountains, and forests. Scavenger hunts for every hike make it fun for families to learn about the region’s geology, flora, and fauna. For successful adventures with even the youngest trekkers, award-winning author Wendy Gorton includes a detailed map, trustworthy and intuitive directions, a difficulty rating, restroom info, and places to grab a snack nearby for every trip.
Wendy Gorton holds a master’s degree in learning technologies and is a former classroom teacher. She has worked as a National Geographic Fellow in Australia researching Tasmanian devils, a PolarTREC teacher researcher in archaeology in Alaska, an Earthwatch teacher fellow in the Bahamas and New Orleans, and a GoNorth! teacher explorer studying climate change via dogsled in Finland, Norway, and Sweden. Today, she is a global education consultant who has traveled to more than fifty countries to design programs, build communities, and train other educators to do the same.

Event date:

Sunday, November 3, 2019 – 2:00pm to 3:00pm

Event address:

Pegasus Books Solano
1855 Solano Ave

Berkeley, CA

Ramesh Srinivasan
2019-11-03 17:00 - 19:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
discussing his new book
Beyond the Valley: How Innovators around the World are Overcoming Inequality and Creating the Technologies of Tomorrow
Published by The MIT Press

How to repair the disconnect between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us: toward a more democratic internet.
In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the convenience of buying from Amazon, and the elegance and power of our Apple devices, but it’s a one-way, top-down process. We’re not asked for our input, or our opinions—only for our data. The internet is brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China. It’s time, Srinivasan argues, that we think in terms beyond the Valley.
Srinivasan focuses on the disconnection he sees between designers and users, producers and consumers, and tech elites and the rest of us. The recent Cambridge Analytica and Russian misinformation scandals exemplify the imbalance of a digital world that puts profits before inclusivity and democracy. In search of a more democratic internet, Srinivasan takes us to the mountains of Oaxaca, East and West Africa, China, Scandinavia, North America, and elsewhere, visiting the “design labs” of rural, low-income, and indigenous people around the world. He talks to a range of high-profile public figures—including Elizabeth Warren, David Axelrod, Eric Holder, Noam Chomsky, Lawrence Lessig, and the founders of Reddit, as well as community organizers, labor leaders, and human rights activists.. To make a better internet, Srinivasan says, we need a new ethic of diversity, openness, and inclusivity, empowering those now excluded from decisions about how technologies are designed, who profits from them, and who are surveilled and exploited by them.
Ramesh Srinivasan is Professor of Information Studies and Design Media Arts at UCLA. He makes regular appearances on NPR, The Young Turks, MSNBC, and Public Radio International, and his writings have been published in the Washington Post, Quartz, Huffington Post, CNN, and elsewhere.
visit: http://rameshsrinivasan.org/

Release Party for New great weather for MEDIA Anthology
2019-11-05 19:00 - 21:00 | Bird & Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery St, San Francisco , CA, 94131, United States
Bird & Beckett and great weather for MEDIA present an inspiring evening of cutting edge poets and prose writers from across the Bay Area and the U.S. They come together to celebrate the release of great weather’s new anthology, Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea, which features work by intense wordsmiths – including those you’ll hear tonight – along with an interview with musician and artist Walter Steding. Come prepared for revelations, epiphanies, and a few broad smiles.
This evening features writers from across the US and beyond, including Neeli Cherkovski (SF), Joan Gelfand (SF), Matthew Hupert (NYC), Deborah Kennedy (San Jose), Mira Martin-Parker (SF), Richard Loranger (Oakland), and SB Stokes (Oakland).
Hosted by great weather editor Jane Ormerod (from NY and UK).
Based in New York City, great weather for MEDIA publishes established and emerging writers from across the United States and beyond.
Please stop by, get yourself dangerously verbiaged up, and pick up a copy of Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea to call your very own.

Release party for new great weather for MEDIA Anthology
Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea

a reading by
Neeli Cherkovski
Joan Gelfand
Matthew Hupert
Deborah Kennedy
Mira Martin-Parker
Richard Loranger
and SB Stokes
plus a brief open mic
hosted by Jane Ormerod

PERFORMER BIOS
Neeli Cherkovski was born in Los Angeles. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Animal (1996), Leaning Against Time (2005), From the Canyon Outward (2009), and The Crow and I (2015). He is the co-editor of Anthology of L.A. Poets (with Charles Bukowski) and Cross-Strokes: Poetry between Los Angeles and San Francisco (with Bill Mohr). In addition, Neeli has written biographies of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Charles Bukowski, as well as the critical memoir Whitman’s Wild Children. His papers are held at the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Neeli received the 2017 Jack Mueller Poetry Prize awarded at the Jack Mueller Festival in Fruita, Colorado. He has lived in San Francisco since 1974.
Joan Gelfand is the author of You Can Be a Winning Writer: The 4 C’s of Successful Authors (Mango Press), three volumes of poetry, and an award-winning chapbook of short fiction. Joan’s novel set in a Silicon Valley startup is forthcoming from Mastodon  /  C&R Press. Recipient of numerous awards and honors, Joan’s work appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Prairie Schooner, Toronto Review, Marsh Hawk Review, Kalliope, Rattle, Levure littéraire, and many other journals.
Matthew Hupert is a writer and multi-media artist. He is the founder of the NeuroNautic Institute and its associated poetry workshop and of NeuroNautic Press which just released his latest collection, Secular Pantheism. He is the author of Ism is a Retrovirus (Three Rooms Press) and several chapbooks, and his writing has appeared in numerous publications including Midstream Magazine, Maintenant, and Sonnets: 150 Contemporary Sonnets. When not writing, Matthew can be found cooking for his family. He lives in New York City.
Deborah Kennedy is an author and artist whose recent book, Nature Speaks: Art and Poetry for the Earth, combines illustrations and poetry focusing on the ecological themes of our time. The book’s honors include the 2016 Eric Hoffer Poetry Book Award and a 2017 Silver Nautilus Poetry Book Award. Her writing has appeared in First Literary Review-East and Canary: A Literary Journal of the Environmental Crisis. Deborah lives in San Jose and teaches college classes and poetry workshops. She often hikes in an urban riparian corridor where she spots osprey, hawks, and herons. In the evening she watches for moonbows, earthshine, and other modern miracles.
Mira Martin-Parker earned an MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University. Her work has appeared in various publications, including Istanbul Literary Review, North Dakota Quarterly, Mythium, and Zyzzyva.
Richard Loranger is a multi-genre writer, performer, musician, visual artist, and all-around squeaky wheel, currently residing in Oakland, CA. He is the founder of Poetea, a monthly literary conversation group. His publications include the books Sudden Windows, Poems for Teeth, The Orange Book, nine chapbooks, and work in over 100 magazines and journals. He curates the reading series Babar in Exile, and the queer talk and reading series #we. You can find more about his work and scandals at www.richardloranger.com.
S B Stokes writes, draws, designs, and produces in the hills behind a lake in Oakland, California. His publications include a full-length poetry collection called A History of Broken Love Things (Punk Hostage Press, 2014), a chapbook entitled DARK ENTRIES (Gorilla Press  / The Pedestrian Press, 2014), and a self-published chapbook called Let’s Call This Nothing (2018). S  B is one of the founding producers of Beast Crawl, an annual literary festival in Oakland which features over thirty readings and is 100% free.
Jane Ormerod is the author of the full-length poetry collections Welcome to the Museum of Cattle and Recreational Vehicles on Fire (both from Three Rooms Press), and the chapbook 11 Films (Modern Metrics/EXOT Books). Her work also appears in publications including Maintenant, Flapperhouse, Marsh Hawk Press Review, Post (BLANK), Sensitive Skin, and Paris Lit Up. Born on the south coast of England, Jane now lives in New York City and performs extensively across the United States and beyond. She is a founding editor of great weather for MEDIA.

Shannon Pufahl: On Swift Horses
2019-11-05 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Shannon Pufahl discusses hew new novel, On Swift Horses.
Praise for On Swift Horses
“Once in a rare while you come across a novel of such transfixing beauty that it enlarges your faith in the medium itself. On Swift Horses is, for me, one of those books. As an exploration of life lived in the outer distances of plain sight, it is suffused with hazard and touched by grace, furnished with the longevity of a postwar classic and the immediacy of the present tense. It is, simply put, a masterpiece.”—Anthony Marra, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena
“On Swift Horses is about both risk and the risqué, about daring to know, name, and act on our own desires. Read this book for the adventure, for the keening lyricism of the lost and searching, but mostly read this book because no one writes like Shannon Pufahl. Her voice is muscular, awesome, and pure. This book knocked me flat on my back.” —Justin Torres, author of We the Animals
“On Swift Horses is a marvel, a beautifully written novel that traces its raw, guarded characters from California to Las Vegas to Mexico with grace and inevitability. Shannon Pufahl’s mid-century West is dead-on right, as recognizable as a box of old photos and yet completely original in voice and scope.” —Jess Walter, author of Beautiful Ruins
About On Swift Horses
A lonely newlywed and her wayward brother-in-law follow divergent and dangerous paths through the postwar American West.
Muriel is newly married and restless, transplanted from her rural Kansas hometown to life in a dusty bungalow in San Diego. The air is rich with the tang of salt and citrus, but the limits of her new life seem to be closing in: She misses her freethinking mother, dead before Muriel’s nineteenth birthday, and her sly, itinerant brother-in-law, Julius, who made the world feel bigger than she had imagined. And so she begins slipping off to the Del Mar racetrack to bet and eavesdrop, learning the language of horses and risk. Meanwhile, Julius is testing his fate in Las Vegas, working at a local casino where tourists watch atomic tests from the roof, and falling in love with Henry, a young card cheat. When Henry is eventually discovered and run out of town, Julius takes off to search for him in the plazas and dives of Tijuana, trading one city of dangerous illusions and indiscretions for another.
On Swift Horses is a debut of astonishing power: a story of love and luck, of two people trying to find their place in a country that is coming apart even as it promises them everything.

Tamim Ansary discusses The Invention of Yesterday
2019-11-06 19:30 - 21:30 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
Wednesday, November 6, 730pm
Pegasus Books Downtown
Tamim Ansary discusses and signs copies of The Invention of Yesterday: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Conflict, and Connection.

ABOUT
From language to culture to cultural collision: the story of how humans invented history, from the Stone Age to the Virtual Age
Traveling across millennia, weaving the experiences and world views of cultures both extinct and extant, The Invention of Yesterday shows that the engine of history is not so much heroic (battles won), geographic (farmers thrive), or anthropogenic (humans change the planet) as it is narrative.
Many thousands of years ago, when we existed only as countless small autonomous bands of hunter-gatherers widely distributed through the wilderness, we began inventing stories–to organize for survival, to find purpose and meaning, to explain the unfathomable. Ultimately these became the basis for empires, civilizations, and cultures. And when various narratives began to collide and overlap, the encounters produced everything from confusion, chaos, and war to cultural efflorescence, religious awakenings, and intellectual breakthroughs.
Through vivid stories studded with insights, Tamim Ansary illuminates the world-historical consequences of the unique human capacity to invent and communicate abstract ideas. In doing so, he also explains our ever-more-intertwined present: the narratives now shaping us, the reasons we still battle one another, and the future we may yet create.
PRAISE
“A beautifully written world history focused on the stories different civilizations have told about who we are. It ends with a fundamental question: In today’s extraordinary world, can we build new narratives that are inclusive and global enough to encourage worldwide cooperation in the task of building a better future for humanity?”―David Christian, distinguished professor, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia, and author of Maps of Time: An Introduction to Big History and Origin Story: A Big History of Everything
“Tamim Ansary has done it again, writing an expansive, wonderfully readable account of our present world. With deft examples drawn from across history, he skewers the idea that there’s anything pure about culture or race. Ideas have blended and meshed across space and time to make the modern world what it is. Ansary is a charming guide to this blesh of civilizations, and to the world’s permanent-and hopeful-capacity for change.”―Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved: The Hidden Battle for the World Food System
“Brimming with essential insights and yet always approachable, this is the global history we need now.”―Lynn Hunt, author of Writing History in the Global Era
“Weaving together multiple complex strands of the human experience into a single compelling storyline, Ansary delivers-in his usual down-to-earth yet erudite style-an engaging global ‘narrative of narratives’ informed by decades of critical study, reflection, and personal transcultural experience. A deeply enriching, highly relevant read from an important, unique voice of our day.”―R. Charles Weller, Central Eurasian and Islamic world history, Washington State and Kazakh National University
“The Invention of Yesterday is an insightful guide into human civilization packed with information that shows how we have been connected globally since the beginning of history. Tamim Ansary unpacks complicated theories to make sense of how we became who we are today.”―Fariba Nawa, author of Opium Nation: Child Brides, Drug Lords and One Woman’s Journey through Afghanistan
“Ansary offers a remarkable big-picture synthesis that draws upon geography but resists determinism, and celebrates diversity while embracing humanity’s commonalities.”―Booklist

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tamim Ansary is the author of Destiny Disrupted and Games without Rules, among other books. For ten years he wrote a monthly column for Encarta.com, and has published essays and commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Alternet, TomPaine.com, Edutopia, Parade, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Bill Moyers, PBS The News Hour, Al Jazeera, and NPR. Born in Afghanistan in 1948, he moved to the U.S. in 1964. He lives in San Francisco.

Event date:

Wednesday, November 6, 2019 – 7:30pm

Event address:

Pegasus Books Downtown
2349 Shattuck Ave

Berkeley, CA 94704

Monica Youn
2019-11-07 12:10 - 12:50 | Morrison Library, UC Berkeley, 2000 Carleston Street, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
Monica Youn is the author of three books of poems, most recently BLACKACRE (2016), which won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America and was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, and longlisted for the National Book Award. Her book IGNATZ (2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a Stegner Fellowship, among other awards. She teaches at Princeton and in the MFA programs at NYU and Columbia. She is a former lawyer, a daughter of Korean immigrants, and a member of the curatorial collective The Racial Imaginary Institute.

Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series: Cardboard House Press/Cartonera Collective: Giancarlo Huapaya, Omar Pimienta, José Antonio Villarán
2019-11-07 19:00 - 21:00 | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
The Poetry Center’s Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series continues in its second year, as welcome Giancarlo Huapaya, Omar Pimienta, and José Antonio Villarán—all three poets involved in the outstanding literary small publisher Cardboard House Press, dedicated to work in translation from Latin America and Spain, and its offshoot, Cartonera Collective, “a team of book makers devoted to the production of bilingual book art from Latin American authors.” This event at The Poetry Center is co-sponsored with Latina/Latino Studies, SF State. The following evening the poets will be reading and conversing at The Green Arcade, on Market at Gough, in San Francisco. Both events are free and open to the public. Please come!
• For this occasion, Tripwire journal will be producing a new Cardboard House/Cartonera Collective volume in its Tripwire Pamphlet Series!
Giancarlo Huapaya (Lima, Peru) has published three collections of poetry, the most recently, Taller Sub Verso (Sub Verse Workshop) (2011, 2013). His poems and translations have appeared in the anthologies 4M3R1C4 (Chile), Aguas Móviles (Peru), Cholos (Guatemala), OOMPH! (US), and in the journals Erizo (Mexico-EEUU), Buenos Aires Poetry (Argentina), Poesía (Venezuela), Zunái (Brazil), Jacket2 (US), Anomaly (US), Periódico de Poesía de la UNAM (México), among others. He is Founder and Editor of Cardboard House Press, a nonprofit publishing house for Latin American and Spanish literature in translation. As a curator of visual poetry, he has presented exhibitions at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco and the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson. In 2016, he edited the anthology Pulenta Pool: Peruvian Poets in the United States for Hostos Review. As literary translator, he has translated into Spanish work by C.D Wright, Susan Briante, Ross Gay, Carmen Giménez Smith and Alli Warren. Currently, he is MFA candidate in Creative Writing at The University of Texas at El Paso.
Omar Pimienta is a writer/artist who lives and works in the San Diego / Tijuana border region. His artistic practice examines questions of identity, trans-nationality, emergency poetics, sociopolitical landscape and memory. He has published four books of poetry in U.S, México and Spain. Album of Fences, translated by José Antonio Villarán, was published by Cardboard House Press in 2018. He won the Emilio Prado 10th International Publication prize from the Centro Cultural Generación del 27 Malaga Spain. His work as a visual artist has been recently shown, at the 3ème Biennale Internationale de l’Art Contemporain de Casablanca Maroc, and was part of the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time LA/LA. In 2017-18 he was awarded an Art Matters Grant. More here.
Jose Antonio Villarán (parent/writer/teacher) is the author of two books of poetry: la distancia es siempre la misma (Matalamanga, 2006) & el cerrajero (Album del Universo Bakterial, 2012); one book of translation, Album of Fences, by Omar Pimienta (Cardboard House Press, 2018); and creator of the AMLT project, an exploration of hypertext literature and collective authorship, which was sponsored by Puma from 2011-2014. His third book, titled open pit, is forthcoming from AUB in 2019. He holds an MFA in Writing from the University of California San Diego, and is currently a PhD Candidate in Literature at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Give Us The Word
2019-11-07 19:00 - 21:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Give Us The Word, Queer Rebels present an evening of words of wisdom, words of resistance, words to inspire, words that heal. Words that help QTPoC folks get to the other side. We need US. QTPOC writers, readers, singers, talkers, storytellers and thought makers speak to our lives, loves and desires in this world and in this crazy moment. Our very Special Guest: Blackberri Singer, Chibueze Crouch, Mason Jairo, Carolyn Wysinger and Dazie Grego-Sykes. This is A Free Event
Queer Rebels is supported by The California Arts Council, SFAC, The Zellerbach Foundation Grants for The Arts and Intersection For The Arts

Julia Scheeres hosting Q & A with author Mary Merv Ladd
2019-11-07 19:00 - 22:00 | East Bay Booksellers, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 94618
Mary Ladd will co-host a book-signing and Q&A with author and journalist Julia Scheeres.
The Wig Diaries is Mary Ladd’s debut disrespectful cancer book, delivered with bold gallows humor to intimately address the gravity of cancer, invites the reader to bear witness to both the horror and the joke(s). Armed with humor and creative sensibility, Ladd robs her diagnosis of its dour weightiness. Refusing to tiptoe around the gnarlier elements of treatment and recovery, the narrative is powerful in its unvarnished honesty. Infused with a contagious lust for life and exemplified by hilarious anecdotes.
· A uniquely fresh modern and black comedy take on cancer
· Covers and pokes fun at everything from diagnosis to treatment to medical bills
· Illustrated by San Francisco Chronicle cartoonist Don Asmussen, who has brain cancer for the second time
“I love this book.”—Mary Roach, author of the books Grunt, Stiff, Spook, and Bonk
“This looks like a hoot and a half. I want more.”—Daniel Handler (aka Lemony Snicket), author of A Series of Unfortunate Events
“Clear-eyed, fun, and reassuring, it’s the perfect guide!”—Vanessa Hua, author of A River of Stars and Deceit and Other Possibilities

Eves at the Beat: Womxn Reading at The Beat Museum
2019-11-07 19:30 - 21:30 | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
During Women’s History month a constellation of events brought together a group of fabulous womxn+ writers. The meeting of these hearts and minds exploded into something powerful and a new monthly reading series concept was born, “Eves at the Beat”.
This months Eves at the Beat is curated by the fabulous Thea Matthews And MC’d Shelley Wong
Readers for this event:
Audrey T. Williams is a Poet|Writer|Activist. In 2018, she earned her MFA in Writing from CCA. She writes through a lens of Black, multi-cultural ancestry infused with flights of fantasy. Current projects: Of Chutneys and Chitlins: Stories from a Multi-cultural American Girl and Liberation Spells: What to Say to Center Yourself.
Marguerite Munoz writes mostly in East Bay and from her sickbed when she has a cold. Her work speaks to interconnectedness sensed through spirit, blurred boundaries between inner and outer worlds, and the nameless desires she holds as a woman surviving in today’s modern world. Under the sponsorship of Alley Cat Books and Poet Laureate Alejandro Murguia, she co-curates the six-year-old multilingual reading series Voz sin Tinta, which is committed to showcasing writers whose voices may otherwise go unheard.
@Katie Aliferis is the Poet Laureate of feta cheese and Greek seas. She has been a featured performer at Greek Writers Night, the SFSU Center for Modern Greek Studies, VelRo’s Global Voices: A Celebration of Translation and International Creative Writing, and other events. Find Katie (in person) to commune over Greek coffee or (online, if that’s your thing) at KatieAliferis.com and @Katie_Aliferis (Twitter and Instagram).
Connie Zheng is a project-based artist, writer and filmmaker who was born in China, grew up in the Northeastern United States, and is currently based out of Berkeley, California. Her work is interested in developing new language around the apocalypse, the difference between “disaster porn” and “disaster erotica”, diasporic place-making, and the political potentials enabled by fantasy as a means of community- building amidst climate change. She received an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley, as well as a BA in Economics and English (Creative Nonfiction) from Brown University. Currently, she is a Graduate Fellow at the Headlands Center for the Arts.
Lisa Galloway is a queer San Francisco-based poet, Litquake’s Elder Project Director, and Foglifter Press’ Development Director. She is a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA program in Poetry and was a 2014 Lambda Literary Fellow. She is the author of Liminal: A Life of Cleavage from Lost Horse Press. In her free time, she enjoys riveting conversations with her best editor, a wily, orange, polydactyl cat named Snacks.
Amanda Moore‘s poetry has appeared in journals and anthologies including ZZYZVA, Cream City Review, and Best New Poets, and her essays have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Hippocampus Magazine, and on the University of Arizona Poetry Center’s blog. She is a Contributing Poetry Editor at Women’s Voices for Change, a Board member for the Marin Poetry Center, a 2019 Fellow at The Writers Grotto, and a new recipient of the Brown-Handler Writer’s Residency through the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library. Amanda is a high school teacher and lives by the beach in the Outer Sunset neighborhood of San Francisco with her husband and daughter. More at http://amandapmoore.com
@Yeva Johnson, a Black American Jewish queer Lesbian feminist mother and musician, is an emerging poet whose day job is in the health professions.
“Eves at the Beat” is a monthly first Thursday reading series at The Beat Museum with occasional readings in Kerouac Alley featuring womxn and non-binary people. Each first Thursday there will be a new curator and MC invited from the previous month. This will give many people the opportunity to step into these roles and make the culture of the readings more equitable and circular, rather than hierarchal.
This is a donation based event. We will pass a hat so bring a contribution for the readers.
We will also be accepting packages of dry goods, new socks, and sanitary items for the local homeless community.

Release Party for New great weather for MEDIA Anthology
2019-11-08 18:30 - 21:00 | Perch Coffee House, 440 Grand Ave, Oakland, CA, 94610, United States
Perch Coffee House and great weather for MEDIA present an inspiring evening of cutting edge poets and prose writers from across the Bay Area and the U.S. They come together to celebrate the release of great weather’s new anthology, Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea, which features work by intense wordsmiths – including those you’ll hear tonight – along with an interview with musician and artist Walter Steding. Come prepared for revelations, epiphanies, and a few broad smiles.
This evening features writers from across the US and beyond, including Mary Mackey (Berkeley), Julian Mithra (Oakland), Guy Biederman (Sausalito), Carol Dorf (Berkeley), Kit Kennedy (Rossmoor, CA), Cathyann Cusimano (Mountain View, CA), Richard Loranger (Oakland), and great weather editor Jane Ormerod (from NY and UK).
Based in New York City, great weather for MEDIA publishes established and emerging writers from across the United States and beyond.
Please stop by, get yourself dangerously verbiaged up, and pick up a copy of Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea to call your very own.

Release party for new great weather for MEDIA Anthology
Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea

a reading by
Mary Mackey
Julian Mithra
Guy Biederman
Carol Dorf
Kit Kennedy
Cathyann Cusimano
Richard Loranger
and Jane Ormerod
plus a brief open mic
hosted by Richard Loranger

PERFORMER BIOS
Mary Mackey became a poet by running high fevers, tramping through tropical jungles, dodging machine gun fire, being caught in volcanic eruptions, swarmed by army ants, stalked by vampire bats, threatened by poisonous snakes, making catastrophic decisions with regard to men, and reading. She is the author of 14 novels, one of which made The New York Times bestseller list; and 8 collections of poetry including Sugar Zone, which won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence, and The Jaguars That Prowl Our Dreams: New and Selected Poems 1974 to 2019, which won a 2018 CIIS Women’s Spirituality Book Award and the 2019 Erich Hoffer Award for the Best Book Published by a Small Press. You can contact her at https://marymackey.com.
Julian née Sara Mithra’s first book If the Color Is Fugitive (Nomadic Press, 2018) traces queer desire on the frontier of the American West and was a finalist for the 2019 Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Poetry. They eke out a living in Oakland encouraging young people to write.
Guy Biederman is the author of Soundings and Fathoms (Finishing Line Press). He has won awards in Exposition Review’s Flash 405 contests, and his stories and poems appear in journals such as Carve, Flashback Fiction, and Sea Letter. Guy hosts This Day Afloat on Radio Sausalito, lives on a houseboat with his wife and two mutinous cats, and walks the planks daily.
Carol Dorf has two chapbooks available: Some Years Ask (Moria Press) and Theory Headed Dragon (Finishing Line Press). Her poetry appears in Bodega, E-ratio, About Place, Glint, Slipstream, The Mom Egg, Sin Fronteras, Surreal Poetics, The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Scientific American, Maintenant, and The Other Side of Violet (great weather for MEDIA). She is poetry editor of Talking Writing and teaches math in Berkeley.
Kit Kennedy serves as Poet in Residence of SF Bay Times and Poet in Residence of her church. She has published six collections of poetry. She regrets little except she never (to date) has skateboarded but she is an avid pickleball player.
Cathyann Cusimano’s work has a way of making the ordinary speak as if it were a stop along a traveler’s journey. She is at once academic and undisciplined, is rebellious and constrained by the polite dance of her own way of seeing. Cathyann has published four books of poetry: Being Myself on Fire, The Soul Made Visible, The Main Content, and Ordinarily Divine.
Richard Loranger is a multi-genre writer, performer, musician, visual artist, and all-around squeaky wheel, currently residing in Oakland, CA. He is the founder of Poetea, a monthly literary conversation group. His publications include the books Sudden Windows, Poems for Teeth, The Orange Book, nine chapbooks, and work in over 100 magazines and journals. He curates the reading series Babar in Exile, and the queer talk and reading series #we. You can find more about his work and scandals at www.richardloranger.com.
Jane Ormerod is the author of the full-length poetry collections Welcome to the Museum of Cattle and Recreational Vehicles on Fire (both from Three Rooms Press), and the chapbook 11 Films (Modern Metrics/EXOT Books). Her work also appears in publications including Maintenant, Flapperhouse, Marsh Hawk Press Review, Post (BLANK), Sensitive Skin, and Paris Lit Up. Born on the south coast of England, Jane now lives in New York City and performs extensively across the United States and beyond. She is a founding editor of great weather for MEDIA.

Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series: Cardboard House Press/Cartonera Collective: Giancarlo Huapaya, Omar Pimienta, José Antonio Villarán
2019-11-08 19:00 - 21:00 | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
The Poetry Center’s Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series welcomes Giancarlo Huapaya, Omar Pimienta, and José Antonio Villarán—all three poets involved in the outstanding literary small publisher Cardboard House Press, dedicated to work in translation from Latin America and Spain, and its offshoot, Cartonera Collective, “a team of book makers devoted to the production of bilingual book art from Latin American authors.” Thursday November 7 they present their work at The Poetry Center, co-sponsored with Latina/Latino Studies, SF State. Then Friday evening we’ll all be at The Green Arcade, on Market at Gough, in San Francisco. Both events are free and open to the public. Please join us!
• For this occasion, Tripwire journal will be producing a new Cardboard House/Cartonera Collective volume in its Tripwire Pamphlet Series!
Giancarlo Huapaya (Lima, Peru) has published three collections of poetry, the most recently, Taller Sub Verso (Sub Verse Workshop) (2011, 2013). His poems and translations have appeared in the anthologies 4M3R1C4 (Chile), Aguas Móviles (Peru), Cholos (Guatemala), OOMPH! (US), and in the journals Erizo (Mexico-EEUU), Buenos Aires Poetry (Argentina), Poesía (Venezuela), Zunái (Brazil), Jacket2 (US), Anomaly (US), Periódico de Poesía de la UNAM (México), among others. He is Founder and Editor of Cardboard House Press, a nonprofit publishing house for Latin American and Spanish literature in translation. As a curator of visual poetry, he has presented exhibitions at the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco and the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson. In 2016, he edited the anthology Pulenta Pool: Peruvian Poets in the United States for Hostos Review. As literary translator, he has translated into Spanish work by C.D Wright, Susan Briante, Ross Gay, Carmen Giménez Smith and Alli Warren. Currently, he is MFA candidate in Creative Writing at The University of Texas at El Paso.
Omar Pimienta is a writer/artist who lives and works in the San Diego / Tijuana border region. His artistic practice examines questions of identity, trans-nationality, emergency poetics, sociopolitical landscape and memory. He has published four books of poetry in U.S, México and Spain. Album of Fences, translated by José Antonio Villarán, was published by Cardboard House Press in 2018. He won the Emilio Prado 10th International Publication prize from the Centro Cultural Generación del 27 Malaga Spain. His work as a visual artist has been recently shown, at the 3ème Biennale Internationale de l’Art Contemporain de Casablanca Maroc, and was part of the Getty Foundation, Pacific Standard Time LA/LA. In 2017-18 he was awarded an Art Matters Grant. More here.
Jose Antonio Villarán (parent/writer/teacher) is the author of two books of poetry: la distancia es siempre la misma (Matalamanga, 2006) & el cerrajero (Album del Universo Bakterial, 2012); one book of translation, Album of Fences, by Omar Pimienta (Cardboard House Press, 2018); and creator of the AMLT project, an exploration of hypertext literature and collective authorship, which was sponsored by Puma from 2011-2014. His third book, titled open pit, is forthcoming from AUB in 2019. He holds an MFA in Writing from the University of California San Diego, and is currently a PhD Candidate in Literature at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Shanthi Sekaran, Rachel Howard, and Nathaniel Popkin
2019-11-08 19:00 - 21:00 | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Parents and Children, Hope and Despair: Three Novels
Join Wolfman Books for an evening of fiction with Shanthi Sekaran (Lucky Boy), Rachel Howard (The Risk of Us), and Nathaniel Popkin (The Year of the Return). Each author will give a reading, followed by a discussion of their work and a book signing.
This event is free and open to the public!
* * * * *
About the authors:
Shanthi Sekaran is a writer and educator from Berkeley, California. Her recent novel, Lucky Boy (Putnam/Penguin), was named an IndieNext Great Read, and an NPR Best Book of 2017. Her writing has also appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, LA Review of Books and Huffington Post. She teaches creative writing and literature at Mills College in Oakland, CA.
Rachel Howard earned her MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College and is the author of a novel, The Risk of Us, and a memoir, The Lost Night. She is the recipient of a MacDowell Colony fellowship, and her fiction and nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, ZYZZYVA, and other journals. She lives in Nevada City, California.
Nathaniel Popkin is a nationally recognized writer and editor of fiction and non-fiction, film, criticism, and journalism. He is the author of three books of non-fiction and two novels, including Everything Is Borrowed (New Door Books) and Lion and Leopard (The Head and The Hand Press), which reimagines the life and tragic death of the first American genre painter, John Lewis Krimmel. Lion and Leopard was a finalist for the Foreword Reviews Indie Book of the Year Award. He is also the co-editor of a recent anthology, Who Will Speak for America? (Temple University Press). In 2018, he turned his attention to the ecological crisis, describing the present era as an “age of loss” in a short essay in The New York Times.

Esti Skloot: Uprooted
2019-11-09 14:00 - 15:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Esti Skloot discusses her new book, Uprooted: A Memoir of a Marriage.
About Uprooted
When pregnant Esther–a young, adventurous, British-born Israeli–follows her new husband, Steve, to America, she has no idea what she’s getting herself into. Even before their baby is born, Esther discovers the dark side of her charming film production manager husband, and learns that she must cope with his moodiness and domineering personality. Left alone day after day in a high-rise apartment in Queens, Esther struggles with culture shock, homesickness, and adapting her husband’s whims–like the baby goat he brings home to their eighth-floor apartment to keep as a pet. Ten years and two more children later, thirty-four-year-old Steve is diagnosed with a malignant brain tumor. Despite aggressive treatments, he succumbs to the disease, leaving Esther to care for their three children alone, Esther at first feels lost and bewildered; as time goes on, however, she discovers that there is a freedom in her new situation–and that she has a greater inner strength than she ever before realized.

Book Launch for Heidi Van Horn's Belated Poem, with Sarah Heady and Nancy Au
2019-11-09 16:00 - 17:30 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts San Francisco poet Heidi Van Horn for her debut collection, Belated Poem. Reading with her are poet Sarah Heady and ﬁction writer Nancy Au. Please join us!
Belated Poem (Drop Leaf Press, 2019) is a book-length sequence of text + image diptychs distilling landscape, color, and language into a poetics of interiority. Van Horn’s spare lines and arresting photographs are narratively linked yet marked by rupture, elusion, and unsettledness. Deploying vocabularies of intimacy and ephemerality as deftly as those of abstraction, physics, and geologic time (volcanic island-building; fault-block mountains), Belated Poem ultimately speaks in human terms: perception and consciousness, shadow states, and severance at the seam of Self and Other.
Heidi Van Horn is a poet who takes lots of photographs. Her multi-disciplinary practice explores the complexity of selfhood and the space of the encounter. Heidi recently joined the editorial staﬀ at Drop Leaf Press, where she will be focusing on artist + poet collaborative works. She is also co-authoring, with David Makaaha Kwon, “House of David,” a poetic assemblage exploring the personal and political geography of mass incarceration. Heidi received her BA in Social Welfare from UC Berkeley and her MFA in Poetry from San Francisco State University. She has worked as the assistant director of the UC Berkeley Public Service Center and currently serves as a youth justice mentor. She lives in San Francisco with her children. More at hvanhorn.com.
Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment. She is the librettist of Unﬁnished: An Opera, a new work about the death and life of a women’s college, currently in development with composer Joshua Groﬀman and producer Vital Opera. Sarah is also the author of Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills), winner of the 2013 Michael Rubin Book Award, and Tatted Insertion, a letterpress collaboration with book artist Leah Virsik. Her manuscript “Comfort” was a ﬁnalist for the 2019 Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the 2017 National Poetry Series. Sarah is a co-editor of Drop Leaf Press, a small women-run poetry collective. More at sarahheady.com.
Nancy Au is an Oakland-based writer and co-founder of The Escapery. She received her MFA in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She teaches creative writing (to biology majors!) at California State University Stanislaus. Her writing appears in Redivider, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Jellyﬁsh Review, Lunch Ticket, Pithead Chapel, The Forge Literary Magazine, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. She is the winner of Redivider’s 2018 Blurred Genres Contest and The Vestal Review’s 2018 VERA Flash Fiction Prize, and her ﬂash ﬁction is included in The Best Small Fictions 2018. Her debut full-length collection, Spider Love Song and Other Stories, published by University of Cincinnati’s Acre Books, just launched this September. More at peascarrots.com.
“Belated Poem speaks in a mesmerizing incantation of precision and haunting as it seeks to observe and record the vast geographies of the interstices between people. A poet with a barometer, a scientist in a fugue state, Van Horn converges photography, text, and space in order to trace the complicated textures of intimacy and distance, attachment and rupture, amid the debris of an altered relationship. From the subtle doubling in her photographs and the spatial undertow of her lines emerges a lyrical sequence that, in its unearthing of “your body next to mine at the event horizon,” also unearths the inconsolable beauty of the interior terrain and those places that are hardest to voice.” – Jennifer S. Cheng
“Belated Poem greets time after its becoming – exceeding a certain intensity – a relational experience or a lesson that befalls us in space. In the aftermath of “the jade- / blue slope of a line” or “the cusp of the caldera,” we become offspring of the “event horizon.” Here are vital forces – landscape, creative, combinatorial – shifting, intimate, foreshadowing and spilling us into “catastrophic events” or “a nest / out of dark matter.” Image and poem in this beautiful sequence conﬁrm the open-ended aliveness of traces and our distributed brave interface with the world.” – Hazel White

Heather Christle: The Crying Book
2019-11-09 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Heather Christle discusses her new book, The Crying Book.
Praise for The Crying Book
“In The Crying Book, Heather Christle makes a poignant and piercing examination of the phenomenon of tears—exhaustive, yes, but also open-ended, such that I was left clutching this book to my chest with wonder, asking myself when the last time was that I cried, and why. A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book.” —Esmé Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias
“This is a wonderful and profound look at the act of crying–something human and yet hidden, common and yet mysterious. I found myself reading with a thirst for the tears Heather Christle collects here–instances within literature, film, history, and the author’s own life all add up to a greater understanding of what makes us human.” —Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else
About The Crying Book
Why do we cry? How do we cry? And what does it mean? A scientific, cultural, artistic examination by a young poet on the cusp of motherhood.
Heather Christle has just lost a dear friend to suicide and now must reckon with her own depression and the birth of her first child. As she faces her grief and impending parenthood, she decides to research the act of crying: what it is and why people do it, even if they rarely talk about it. Along the way, she discovers an artist who designed a frozen-tear-shooting gun and a moth that feeds on the tears of other animals. She researches tear-collecting devices (lachrymatories) and explores the role white women’s tears play in racist violence.
Honest, intelligent, rapturous, and surprising, Christle’s investigations look through a mosaic of science, history, and her own lived experience to find new ways of understanding life, loss, and mental illness. The Crying Book is a deeply personal tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears and the unexpected resilience of joy.

Mary Ladd in conversation with SF Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik
2019-11-10 16:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
Mary Ladd, author of The Wig Diaries, will be in conversation with SF Chronicle columnist Leah Garchik at The Bindery.

Odd Mondays Non-Fiction November: Three Histories
2019-11-11 18:30 - 19:30 | Folio Books, 3957 24th St, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
November is non-fiction month at Odd Mondays! November 11, three authors read from their brand-new histories at Folio Books San Francisco, 3957 24th St. Join us at 6:30 p.m. for this free event. Tamim Ansary reads from THE INVENTION OF YESTERDAY: A 50,000-Year History of Human Culture, Brandon Brown from THE APOLLO CHRONICLES: Engineering America’s First Moon Missions, and Julia Flynn Siler from THE WHITE DEVIL’S DAUGHTERS: Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown. A book signing follows the readings.
Here’s information on the authors:
Tamim Ansary grew up in Afghanistan and grew old in America. His grandparents were Slavic, Finnish, Arab, and Mongolian. His books include West of Kabul, East of New York, San Francisco’s One City One Book for 2008, and Destiny Disrupted, A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, which won an NCBA Award in 2009. His new book, The Invention of Yesterday, explores how we humans got to be so interconnected and why we’re still fighting.
Brandon R. Brown is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of San Francisco. He writes about science through such outlets as Smithsonian, Slate, and Scientific American. His books include a biography, Planck, winner of the 2016 Housatonic Award for non-fiction, and The Apollo Chronicles, an immersive engineering history.
Julia Flynn Siler is a New York Times best-selling author and journalist. Her most recent book, The White Devil’s Daughters: The Women Who Fought Slavery in San Francisco’s Chinatown, is a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her other books are Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure andThe House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty, which was a finalist for a James Beard Award and a Gerald Loeb Award for distinguished reporting. A veteran journalist, Siler is a longtime contributor and former staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and has been a guest commentator on the BBC, CNBC, and CNN. She lives in Northern California with her husband and their two sons.

Teaching Resistance: Radicals, Revolutionaries and Cultural Subversives in the Classroom
2019-11-11 19:00 - 20:30 | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Teaching Resistance is a collection of the voices of activist educators from around the world who engage inside and outside the classroom from pre-kindergarten to university and emphasize teaching radical practice from the field. Written in accessible language, this book is for anyone who wants to explore new ways to subvert educational systems and institutions, collectively transform educational spaces, and empower students and teachers alike to fight for genuine change.

John Mink is a social studies teacher who has worked at the high school and adult school levels and refuses to hide his political radicalism from his students. He has been a contributing writer and editor for underground publications and zines including Slingshot, Absolutely Zippo, and Collapse Board. Editor of the Maximum Rocknroll monthly column “Teaching Resistance” and a vocalist/bassist for several internationally recognized punk bands, John lives in Berkeley, California, with his partner Megan March, who is also his bandmate in the truewave/punk group Street Eaters.

Editor John Mink talks about his book Teaching Resistance
2019-11-11 19:00 - 21:00 | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
