The End of the End of the World Word Cabaret - Three Local Authors Read From New Books
2018-03-28 19:00 - 20:30 UTC | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Join the End of the End of the World Word Cabaret & The Green Arcade in a reading from three Bay Area authors reading from their books (two of them first novels).
Ananda Esteva‘s novel The Wanderings of Chela Coatlicue is the first installment of a trilogy of coming-of-age adventures that follows a young brazen musical prodigy in search of a sacred bass once owned by legendary blues musician Sugar Rivera. Filled with breathtaking action, border perils, magic and passion, this fantasy novel takes readers through numerous plot developments and twists that lead them to a variety of choices and outcomes, as Chela travels from the punk rock slums of Mexico City to the suburbs of Los Angeles. Unfolding in the present tense from the second-person point of view, events, actions and consequences hit the reader with immediacy, making this novel the ultimate exploration of border politics, indie music culture, and one young woman’s self-discovery in the mystery surrounding Rivera.

Adam Smyer‘s debut novel Knucklehead introduces the reader to Marcus Hayes, a black lawyer who regulates everyday bad behavior with short, sharp bursts of retribution, and “struggles to keep his cool in the personally and politically turbulent ’90s.” Like Smyer, the book has a wicked sense of humor, even as it gives the reader a tour of the dystopian Clinton years. Comparisons to James Baldwin, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston are well earned.

Asked why he chose to set his book in the 1990’s, Smyer says, “I think that the ’90s have been overlooked in a way. I think that on some level the prevailing narrative has become that everything was fine before 9/11. But everything was definitely not fine. We had militias and the Unabomber and Tim McVeigh and Columbine. The amount of hate and hysteria that we normalized back then laid the groundwork for what is happening today. It was fertile ground for storytelling.”

Kate Jessica Raphael is the author of Murder Under the Bridge and Murder Under the Fig Tree (She Write Press). In the latter book, Hamas has taken power in Palestine, and the Israeli government is rounding up people considered threats. Palestinian policewoman Rania Bakara finds herself thrown in prison, though she has never been part of Hamas. Chloe flies in from San Francisco to free her friend – and rekindle her romance with Tina, a beautiful Palestinian Australian. The only way Rania can get out of jail is by agreeing to investigate the death of a young gay Palestinian in a village near her home.

Zachary Lazar with special guests The Kitchen Sisters
2018-03-28 19:30 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
celebrating the release of Zachary Lazar’s new novel
VENGEANCE
from Catapult Books
Zachary Lazar’s powerful and important novel was inspired by a passion play, The Life of Jesus Christ, he witnessed at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. As someone who writes “fiction, nonfiction, sometimes a hybrid of both,” the narrator of Vengeance, a character much like Lazar himself, tries to accurately view a world he knows is “beyond the limits of my small understanding.” In particular, he tries to unravel the truth behind the supposed crime of an inmate he meets and befriends, Kendrick King, who is serving a life sentence at Angola for murder.
As the narrator attempts to sort out what happened in King’s life—paying visits to his devoted mother, his estranged young daughter and her mother, his girlfriend, his brother, and his cousin—the writer’s own sense of identity begins to feel more and more like a fiction. He is one of the “free people” while Kendrick, who studies theology and philosophy, will never get his only wish, expressed plainly as “I just need to get out of here.” The dichotomy between their lives forces the narrator to confront the violence in his own past, and also to reexamine American notions of guilt and penance, racial bias, and the inherent perversity of punitive justice.
It is common knowledge that we have an incarceration crisis in our country. Vengeance, by way of vivid storytelling, helps us to understand the failure of empathy and imagination that causes it.
Zachary Lazar is the author of three previous books, including the novel Sway, chosen as a Best Book of 2008 by the Los Angeles Times, Rolling Stone, Publishers Weekly, and Newsday, and the memoir Evening’s Empire: The Story of My Father’s Murder, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of 2009. Lazar is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and, most recently, the John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for “a writer in mid-career whose work has demonstrated consistent excellence.” He lives in New Orleans.
The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson & Nikki Silva) are Peabody Award winning independent producers who create stories for NPR and other public media.
Advance praise for Zachary Lazar’s VENGEANCE
“I am stunned by the daring, meticulous, and unsentimental intelligence of this riveting book . . . Vengeance is a masterwork, the most important American book I’ve read this year, and the most moving and mesmerizing. —Francisco Goldman, author of Say Her Name
“More than any book I’ve read in the twenty-first century, Zachary Lazar’s Vengeance makes the reader reckon with the questions of what’s real, what’s imagined, and why those questions matter more in 2017 than at any other time in our nation. . . . Vengeance reminds me of what is possible through deft, imaginative, ‘real’ storytelling.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division
“A tale so true and raw, that you’ll swear that it is non-fiction… rich in detail, elegant in its telling, the story that unfolds will have you reminding yourself ‘This is fiction’ on repeat. One of the most daring and important true-to-life tales to be imagined.” —Shannon Alden, Literari Bookstore (Ann Arbor, MI)

Harry Mathews Tribute
2018-03-28 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Join us for a special night of stories and memories to celebrate the life of Harry Mathews and the publication of his last novel, The Solitary Twin. With readings by Daniel Levin Becker, Roman Muradov, Brandon Bussolini, and Gordon Faylor.

About Harry Mathews

Experimental poet and prose writer Harry Mathews grew up on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and was educated at Princeton University and Harvard University, where he earned a BA. Between stints at school, he served briefly in the Navy. After graduation, he moved to Paris and turned his attention to poetry. In Paris, Mathews met John Ashbery, who shared with him the work of avant-garde writer Raymond Roussel. In an interview with the Paris Review, Mathews stated, “In Roussel I discovered you could write prose the way you do poetry. You don’t approach it from the idea that what you have to say is inside you. It’s a materialist approach, for want of a better word. You make something. You give up expressing and start inventing.”
Mathews’s poetry and prose often use overarching formal constraints to examine the relationship between sound and meaning or pattern and lyric. Times Literary Supplement critic Barry Schwabsky noted that Mathews’s “writing is imbued with a childlike sense of wonder at both language and the world it can conjure, though always tinged with poignancy, with the transience of both words and things.” Mathews’s collections of poetry include Armenian Papers: Poems 1954–1984 (1987) and The New Tourism (2010). His short stories are collected in The Human Country (2002) and his essays in The Case of the Persevering Maltese (2002). Mathews is the author of several novels, including The Conversions (1962), Tlooth (1966), Cigarettes (1987), and My Life in CIA (2005). With Alastair Brotchie, he edited the anthology Oulipo Compendium (1998, revised edition 2005).
Mathews was the only American member of the French avant-garde literary society Oulipo, and he has also been associated with the New York School of Poets. With John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and James Schuyler, he started the literary magazine Locus Solus in 1960. His honors included a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and an award for his fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
With his wife, novelist Marie Chaix, Mathews divided his time between New York City; Key West, Florida; and Paris. He died in 2017.

Courtney Peppernell / Pillow Thoughts
2018-03-28 19:30 - 21:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts a special evening with Australian sensationCourtney Peppernell as part of her first US tour. She’ll be reading from her books Pillow Thoughts I and The Road Between. Please join us!
Peppernell’s Pillow Thoughts — originally self-published and recently re-issued by Andrews McMeel — is in its fifth print run and beloved by young women around the world. Her poetry validates her readers and encourages them to find joy in the smallest moments. Her striking vignettes speak to the love she has shared with other women and the love she’s come to find for herself.
Pillow Thoughts is a collection of poetry and prose about heartbreak, love, and raw emotions. It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most. Make yourself a cup of tea and let yourself feel.
—
Courtney Peppernell is an LGBT author from Sydney, Australia. In October 2016 she released the best-selling poetry collection Pillow Thoughts. Courtney has been writing her whole life and currently writes Young Adult novels and poetry collections. In February 2017 she released her second novel, Keeping Long Island. In August 2017 she published Pillow Thoughts and The Road Between via US publisher Andrews McMeel Publishing. Pillow Thoughts II: Healing The Heart, is forthcoming in August 2018.

An Honors College Reading with Craig Santos Perez
2018-03-28 19:30 - 21:30 | USF Fromm Hall – FR 125 – Maraschi Room, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA, 94117, United States
In fall 2018, the University of San Francisco will launch an Honors Collegethat helps top students become global citizens equipped to meet the challenges of the 21st Century.
Please join us for this pre-launch event featuring a reading from USF alumnus Craig Santos Perez ’06, MFA in Writing.
Craig Santos Perez is the author of four collections of poetry, including from unincorporated territory [lukao] (2017), from unincorporated territory [hacha] (2008), from unincorporated territory [saina] (2010), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry and winner of the PEN Center USA/Poetry Society of America Literary Award, and from unincorporated territory [guma’] (2014), winner of the 2015 American Book Award. He is the co-founder of Ala Press and co-editor of two anthologies: Chamoru Childhood (2009) and Home Islands (2015). A native Chamorro from the Pacific Island of Guam, Perez lives in Hawaii, where he is an Associate Professor of English and affiliated with the Center for Pacific Islands Studies and the Indigenous Politics Program at the University of Hawaii, Mānoa. Perez is an alumnus of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

An Honors College Reading with Craig Santos Perez
2018-03-28 19:30 - 21:30 | Fromm Hall – FR115 – Berman Room, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA, 94117-1080, United States
WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28 7:30 – 9:30 p.m.
Fromm Hall – FR 115 – Berman Room

Free and open to the public.

Bruce Holbert in conversation with Suzanne Lang
2018-03-29 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Bruce Holbert in conversation with Suzanne Lang

discussing his new novel
Whiskey
from Farrar, Strauss, Giroux/MCD
Brothers Andre and Smoker were raised in a cauldron of their parents’ failed marriage and appetite for destruction, and find themselves in the same straits as adults—navigating not only their own marriages, but also their parents’ frequent collision with the law and one another. The family lives in Electric City, Washington, just a few miles south of the Colville Indian Reservation. Fiercely loyal and just plain fierce, they’re bound by a series of darkly comedic and hauntingly violent events: domestic trouble; religious fanaticism; benders punctuated with pauses to dry out that never stick.
When a religious zealot takes off with Smoker’s daughter, there’s no question that his brother—who continues doggedly to try and put his life in order—will join him in an attempt to return her. Maybe the venture will break them both beyond repair or maybe it will redeem them. Or perhaps both.
Whiskey is the story of two brothers, their parents, and three wrecked marriages, a searching book about family life at its most distressed—about kinship, failure, enough liquor to get through it all, and ultimately a dark and hard-earned grace. With the gruff humor of Cormac McCarthy and a dash of the madcap irony of Charles Portis, and a strong, authentic literary voice all his own, Bruce Holbert traverses the harsh landscape of America’s northwestern border and finds a family unlike any you’ve met before.
Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Other Voices, The Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, and The New York Times. He grew up on the Columbia River and in the shadow of the Grand Coulee Dam. His great-grandfather was an Indian scout and among the first settlers of the Grand Coulee. Holbert is the author of The Hour of Lead, winner of the Washington State Book Award, and Lonesome Animals.
Suzanne Lang is a reporter for KQED and the host of “A Novel Idea” on KRCB .
Praise for Whiskey:
“[An] impressive novel . . . Like Cormac McCarthy, another bard of the modern West’s brutality, Holbert finds beauty and cruelty in the land, in the tease and punch of eloquently elliptical dialogue, and in the way humans struggle for love, self-knowledge, and a grip on life . . . He writes terse prose whittled to essentials and grained with vernacular . . . His characters may well brand a reader’s memory. A gut-punch of a bleak family saga that satisfies on many levels.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

C. Dale Young / The Affliction
2018-03-29 19:30 - 21:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery is thrilled to host acclaimed poet C. Dale Young reading from his debut novel in stories, The Affliction. Reading with him will be poet Javier Zamora—don’t miss it!
“…It is never easy to know a story well. Sometimes, all one can gather is an impression. Sometimes, Time itself muddies
the details to the point little if any fact remains….”
from “Inside the Great House”
Javier Castillo was born with the strange ability to disappear; it takes up to three minutes. Rosa Blanco sits in her small kitchen, replaying a moment from the past over and over again. Leenck is aware of his impending death, but no one is aware of him. C. Dale Young’s fiction debut The Affliction: A Novel in Stories weaves together the lives of these characters, lives lived in the cracks and seams of cities like Los Angeles and Santa Monica. Reminiscent of Julia Alvarez and Manuel Muñoz, The Affliction makes audible the voices we have heard “whispering in the air as the sun left the sky.”
Young, the prize-winning author of four collections of poetry, deftly explores the inexplicable as it haunts the everyday: “What I know clearly is that the rain pelted everything, and the deck, the dock, the very earth between the boat and my father’s small house, suddenly took on the dark stain of rainwater, a stain not quite as dark as the heart, a stain not quite as dark as blood.” Young writes of people who know what it is to be disappeared—desaparecidos— and of those who know what it is to have to hide. He renders the grueling, distorting effect of such disappearances on individuals and on those who know them in love or fear or wonder. The Affliction provides powerful testament to the notion of stories as resistance to loss. This is a book of necessary, clear-hearted affirmation in troubled times.
—
C. Dale Young practices medicine full-time and teaches in the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers. He is the author of four poetry collections, most recently The Halo (Four Way Books, 2016); this is his first fiction collection. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation. His fiction and poetry have appeared in many publications, includingThe Atlantic Monthly, Guernica, The Hopkins Review, Normal School, The Paris Review, andPloughshares, as well as anthologies, including several editions of The Best American Poetry.
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and migrated to the US when he was nine. He is a 2016-2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts, Poetry Foundation, and Yaddo. The recipient of a 2017 Lannan Literary Fellowship, the 2017 Narrative Prize, and the 2016 Barnes and Noble Writer for Writers Award; Zamora’s poems appear in Granta, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The New York Times, and elsewhere. Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press, Sept. 2017) is his first collection.
—
Please note: this event will be at The Bindery, 1727 Haight. RSVP appreciated but not required.
If you cannot attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of any books by the authors, order below and put your request in the comments field.

Bruce Holbert in conversation with Suzanne Lang
2018-03-29 19:30 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
discussing his new novel
Whiskey
from Farrar, Strauss, Giroux/MCD
Brothers Andre and Smoker were raised in a cauldron of their parents’ failed marriage and appetite for destruction, and find themselves in the same straits as adults—navigating not only their own marriages, but also their parents’ frequent collision with the law and one another. The family lives in Electric City, Washington, just a few miles south of the Colville Indian Reservation. Fiercely loyal and just plain fierce, they’re bound by a series of darkly comedic and hauntingly violent events: domestic trouble; religious fanaticism; benders punctuated with pauses to dry out that never stick.
When a religious zealot takes off with Smoker’s daughter, there’s no question that his brother—who continues doggedly to try and put his life in order—will join him in an attempt to return her. Maybe the venture will break them both beyond repair or maybe it will redeem them. Or perhaps both.
Whiskey is the story of two brothers, their parents, and three wrecked marriages, a searching book about family life at its most distressed—about kinship, failure, enough liquor to get through it all, and ultimately a dark and hard-earned grace. With the gruff humor of Cormac McCarthy and a dash of the madcap irony of Charles Portis, and a strong, authentic literary voice all his own, Bruce Holbert traverses the harsh landscape of America’s northwestern border and finds a family unlike any you’ve met before.
Bruce Holbert is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. His work has appeared in The Iowa Review, Hotel Amerika, Other Voices, The Antioch Review, Crab Creek Review, and The New York Times. He grew up on the Columbia River and in the shadow of the Grand Coulee Dam. His great-grandfather was an Indian scout and among the first settlers of the Grand Coulee. Holbert is the author of The Hour of Lead, winner of the Washington State Book Award, and Lonesome Animals.
Suzanne Lang is a reporter for KQED and the host of “A Novel Idea” on KRCB .
Praise for Whiskey:
“[An] impressive novel . . . Like Cormac McCarthy, another bard of the modern West’s brutality, Holbert finds beauty and cruelty in the land, in the tease and punch of eloquently elliptical dialogue, and in the way humans struggle for love, self-knowledge, and a grip on life . . . He writes terse prose whittled to essentials and grained with vernacular . . . His characters may well brand a reader’s memory. A gut-punch of a bleak family saga that satisfies on many levels.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Veronica Gerber Bicecci and Christina MacSweeney
2018-03-29 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Veronica Gerber Bicecci discusses her new novel, Empty Set, with translator Christina MacSweeney. Sponsored by The Center for the Art of Translation.

Praise for Empty Set

“Verónica Gerber writes with a luminous intimacy; her novel is clever, vibrant, moving, profoundly original. Reading it made me feel as if the world had been rebuilt.” —Francisco Goldman

“From the very beginning, Verónica Gerber set out to write a novel that would end up at a loss for words. She alone could achieve this feat: because she’s a visual artist who takes everything she reads in as concentric circles threaded with color, and because she writes essays on painters who write across canvasses and writers who paint plots from the realities of life. . . . She alone could bring the necessary silence to a novel so perfect it ended up leaving me speechless as well.” —Jorge F. Hernández

“Empty Set(ES) belongs to the set of Great Fragmentary Novels(GFN), which in turn fits plainly and simply within the set of Great Novels(GN). Verónica Gerber writes with the modesty and care of those who may seem to belong more to the set of Visual Artists(VA) than Writers(W)—each fragment is a precious miniature that exudes subtle, melancholy humor.” —Juan Pablo Villalobos

About Empty Set

How do you draw an affair? A family? Can a Venn diagram show the ways overlaps turn into absences, tree rings tell us what happens when mothers leave? Can we fall in love according to the hop skip of an acrostic? Empty Set is a novel of patterns, its young narrator’s attempt at making sense of inevitable loss, tracing her way forward in loops, triangles, and broken lines.

Verónica Gerber Bicecci
2018-03-29 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Mexican visual artist who writes, Verónica Gerber Bicecci discusses her novel Empty Set, with critically acclaimed translator Christina MacSweeney, who brought it into English. A novel of patterns, Empty Set traces and reconstructs its young narrator’s attempt at making sense of inevitable loss, tracing her way forward in loops, triangles, and broken lines.

Saturday Night Special, an "Ekphrastic" open mic
2018-03-31 19:00 - 21:30 | Nick’s Lounge, 3218 Adeline St., Berkeley, CA, 94703, United States
“Ekphrastic poems [or stories] focus on works of art—usually paintings, photographs, or statues. And modern ekphrastic poems have generally shrugged off antiquity’s obsession with elaborate description, and instead have tried to interpret, inhabit, confront, and speak to their subjects ” (https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poems?field_form_tid=408)
Your SNS challenge for March, is to write something new based on or inspired in some way by a piece of art.
As always, we’d love to hear your (three-minute) poems, stories, comedic sketches, songs, or dances, on our optional theme (or any topic).
Our featured readers for March are Miah Jeffra (and one more tba)
—
First come first served. Sign-up starts at 7pm and closes when it fills up or when the reading starts, so get there early if you want to read! (Note: Sometimes the list is full by 7:03pm)
Each reader will have 3 minutes maximum. For prose writers this is about one and a half double-spaced pages.
PLEASE NOTE: We are strict about the 3 minute max. When you reach your time limit at SNS, we turn on the disco lights! So, please plan ahead. Practice your piece out loud. Time yourself!
After the reading, stick around for karaoke starting at 10pm
Saturday, March 31, 2018
7 – 9:30 pm
Nick’s Lounge (21+)
3218 Adeline Street, Berkeley, CA
1 block south of Ashby BART
Between Fairview St & Martin Luther King Jr Way
FREE!
But bring CASH if you want to buy drinks (which you sort of have to, because there’s a 1-drink minimum!)
Hosted by Hollie Hardy
Please help out by liking our FB page, where you can also find more details and photos from past events:
https://www.facebook.com/Saturday-Night-Special-an-East-Bay-open-mic-112174188880786/
BIOS
MIAH JEFFRA is author of the essay collection “The First Church of What’s Happening” (Nomadic Press 2017). He has been awarded the New Millennium Prize for fiction, the Sidney Lanier Prize for fiction, The Oregon Writers Colony Award for nonfiction, a Lambda Literary Fellowship, a Ragdale Fellowship & Residency, and other residencies at Hub City Writers Project, Arteles and Red Gate. Miah is editor of queer literary collaborative, Foglifter Press. His favorite color is fried chicken.

Diana Khoi Nguyen
2018-03-31 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Diana Khoi Nguyen reads from her new poetry collection, Ghost Of. Also featuring readings by fellow poets, Jane Wong, Ingrid Rojas, Diana Arterian and Juliana Xuan Wang.

About Ghost Of

Ghost Of is a mourning song, not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which he cut himself out before his death), Nguyen wrestles with what remains: memory, physical voids, and her family captured around an empty space.

About Diana Khoi Nguyen

Born in Los Angeles, Diana Khoi Nguyen is a poet and multimedia artist whose work has appeared widely in literary journals such as Poetry, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, PEN America, and The Iowa Review, among others. A winner of the 92Y’s Discovery / Boston Review 2017 Poetry Contest, she is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Denver.

Lunada Literary Lounge
2018-03-31 19:30 - 21:00 | Galería de la Raza, 2857 24th Street, San Francisco , CA, 94110, United States
Under the Blue Moon of March, on the final night of Mes Internacional de la Mujer, Lunada is honored to host award winning internationally renowned Chicana author and maestra LUCHA CORPI, and emerging jazz salsa vocalist, ADRIANA MARRERO who will share an intimate set of jíbaro salsa soul favorites from Puerto Rico.
OPEN MIC: Sign-up at 7pm, 10 spots on the list, 5 min. ea. Poets, storytellers, emcees, musicians, laureates, veteranos, and first-timers invited to share their voices under our bilingual lunar spotlight.
DOORS OPEN AT 7:00pm
$5.00 Admission
GALERÍA DE LA RAZA
2857 24th Street, at Bryant
SF, CA 94110
LUNADA is the Bay Area’s only full moon bilingual literary ritual & performance gathering devoted to spoken word, música, song, and story. Located in the heart of the Mission District at Galería de la Raza, and guest curated by some of the Bay Area’s most dynamic word slingers and artists, each LUNADA features community poets, local legends, visiting mystics, and other mero meros of the stage. Voted Best Literary Night two years in a row by the SF Bay Guardian, 2016 & 2017.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
LUCHA CORPI is an internationally renowned poet, novelist, and children’s book author. She is the author of several mystery novels published by Arte Público Press: Death at Solstice: A Gloria Damasco Mystery (Sept. 2009), Eulogy for a Brown Angel (2002), Black Widow’s Wardrobe (1999), Cactus Blood (1995), and Crimson Moon (Arte Público Press, 2004). Loa a un angel de piel morena (2012) is the pioneering first installment in the Gloria Damasco Mystery series now available in Spanish. Her poetry collection, reissued by Arte Público Press in 2001, is entitled Palabras de mediodía / Noon Words (2001). A Piñata Books picture book for children, The Triple Banana Split Boy / El niño goloso was published in 2009. Most recently, Corpi has written a moving memoir, Confessions of a Book Burner: Personal Essays and Stories (Arte Público Press, 2014), that sheds light on the creative process, political activism and bilingual, bi-cultural life in the U.S. She is the recipient of numerous awards and citations, including a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Prize in fiction, and the Multicultural Publishers Exchange Book Award of Excellence in Adult Fiction. Corpi was a tenured teacher in the Oakland Public Schools Neighborhood Centers Program for over 30 years.
ADRIANA MARRERO is a Puerto Rican jazz and salsa singer, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is a founding member, lyricist and vocalist of Soltrón, has performed with Bay Area Latin jazz legends such as John Santos, and collaborates with Bay Area musicians such as keyboardist Eli Goldlink in their project The Astronauts. She will share an intimate set of jíbaro salsa soul favorites from Puerto Rican.

Richard A. Walker
2018-04-01 17:00 - 18:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Richard A. Walker

celebrating his new book
Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area
from PM Press
The San Francisco Bay Area is currently the jewel in the crown of capitalism—the tech capital of the world and a gusher of wealth from the Silicon Gold Rush. It has been generating jobs, spawning new innovation, and spreading ideas that are changing lives everywhere. It boasts of being the Left Coast, the Greenest City, and the best place for workers in the USA. So what could be wrong? It may seem that the Bay Area has the best of it in Trump’s America, but there is a dark side of success: overheated bubbles and spectacular crashes; exploding inequality and millions of underpaid workers; a boiling housing crisis, mass displacement, and severe environmental damage; a delusional tech elite and complicity with the worst in American politics.
This sweeping account of the Bay Area in the age of the tech boom covers many bases. It begins with the phenomenal concentration of IT in Greater Silicon Valley, the fabulous economic growth of the bay region and the unbelievable wealth piling up for the 1% and high incomes of Upper Classes—in contrast to the fate of the working class and people of color earning poverty wages and struggling to keep their heads above water. The middle chapters survey the urban scene, including the greatest housing bubble in the United States, a metropolis exploding in every direction, and a geography turned inside out. Lastly, it hits the environmental impact of the boom, the fantastical ideology of TechWorld, and the political implications of the tech-led transformation of the bay region.
Richard A. Walker is professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1975 to 2012. Walker has written on a diverse range of topics in economic, urban, and environmental geography, with scores of published articles to his credit. He is coauthor of The Capitalist Imperative (1989) and The New Social Economy (1992) and has written extensively on California, including The Conquest of Bread (2004), The Country in the City (2007) and The Atlas of California (2013).
Walker is currently director of the Living New Deal Project, whose purpose is to inventory all New Deal public works sites in the United States and recover the lost memory of government investment for the good of all. Walker now splits time between Berkeley and Burgundy.
Praise for the work of Richard Walker:
“San Francisco has battened from its birth on instant wealth, high tech weaponry, and global commerce, and the present age is little different. Gold, silver, and sleek iPhones—they all glitter in the California sun and are at least as magnetic as the city’s spectacular setting, benign climate, and laissez-faire lifestyles. The cast of characters changes, but the hustlers and thought-shapers eternally reign over the city and its hinterland, while in their wake they leave a ruined landscape of exorbitant housing, suburban sprawl, traffic paralysis, and delusional ideas about a market free enough to rob the majority of their freedom. Read all about it here, and weep.”
—Gray Brechin, author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin
“Too many studies of cities dwell on their peculiarities; this fascinating book balances the dramatic story of the Bay Area against a profound understanding of urbanization. It eschews a descriptive narrative in favor of hard-hitting critical analysis. The book is not only about the inherently contradictory development of the San Francisco region, but also about where it stands in relation to the rest of the United States, even the world and why it matters so much. No one but Richard Walker combines such an intimate knowledge one city with the theoretical insights necessary to make sense of it.”
—Kevin Cox, author of The Politics of Urban and Regional Development and the American Exception
“Debunking the Horatio Alger promotional blather of self-flattering tech moguls, the real Bay Area comes into view, based on nurses and teachers, drivers and clerks, homeless and the desperate. Real estate bubbles have given way to tech bubbles which have given way to housing bubbles, and now have given way to a chimerical prosperity that is as fragile as any of the prior ones.”
—Chris Carlsson, San Francisco historian and cofounder of Critical Mass
“Walker has given us a brilliantly accessible and fact-laden political economy of the San Francisco Bay Area—America’s richest and fastest changing metropolis. Pictures of a Gone City explains both the miracle of Silicon Valley and the heavy price, in growing inequality, unaffordability, and environmental impact, that the Bay Area is paying for it.”
—Wendy Brown, author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
“With Pictures of a Gone City, California’s greatest geographer tells us how the Bay Area has become the global center of hi-tech capitalism. Drawing on a lifetime of research, Richard Walker dismantles the mythology of the New Economy, placing its creativity in a long history of power, work, and struggles for justice.”
—Jason W. Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life

Bazaar Writers Salon
2018-04-01 18:00 - 20:00 | Bazaar Cafe, 5927 California St, San Francisco, CA, 94121, United States
Readings by Marcelo Hernandez Castillo, Kara Krewer, Kim Magowan, and Brynn Saito
Hosted by Peter Kline
Poet, essayist, translator, and immigration advocate Marcelo Hernandez Castillo was born in Zacatecas, Mexico, and emigrated from Tepechitlan with his family at age five to the California Central Valley. He earned a BA at Sacramento State University and is the first undocumented student to earn an MFA at the University of Michigan. He is the author of the chapbook DULCE, winner of the 2017 Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize. His debut full-length collection is Cenzontle (BOA Editions, 2018), which was chosen by Brenda Shaughnessy as the winner of the 2017 A. Poulin, Jr. prize.
Kara Krewer was raised on an orchard in rural Georgia. She likes skee-ball, horror movies, and museums. She has a BA from Knox College and an MFA from Purdue University, where she was editor-in-chief of Sycamore Review, and has been a faculty member of Interlochen Arts Camp. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming from The Adroit Journal, Best New Poets 2017, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. She’s currently a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. She lives in Santa Clara, California, with her husband and their cat.
Kim Magowan’s short story collection Undoing won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source is forthcoming from 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Bird’s Thumb, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, New World Writing, Sixfold, and many other journals. She lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College.
Brynn Saito is the author of two books of poetry, Power Made Us Swoon (2016) and The Palace of Contemplating Departure (2013), winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She also co-authored, with Traci Brimhall, the chapbook Bright Power, Dark Peace (Diode Editions, 2016). Brynn is a recipient of the Kundiman Poetry Fellowship and a California State Library Civil Liberties Public Education grant. Originally from Fresno, Brynn lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she is the Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary’s College of California and co-directs, with Nikiko Masumoto, the Yonsei Memory Project.

Legacy of Poetry Festival: Javier Zamora
2018-04-02 16:00 - 17:00 | Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, 150 East San Fernando Street Room 590, San Jose, CA, 95112, United States
Poetry reading and conversation with Javier Zamora.
Meet one of the most important younger poets emerging in the United States, Javier Zamora. Author of the 2017 poetry collection Unaccompanied and 2016 – 2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, Zamora is also the recipient of a prestigious 2017 Lannan Fellowship. He earned his B.A. from University of California—Berkeley and his MFA in Creative Writing from NYU.
Born in La Herradura, El Salvador in 1990. His father fled El Salvador when he was a year old; and his mother when he was about to turn five. Both parents’ migrations were caused by the US-funded Salvadoran Civil War (1980-1992).In 1999, Javier migrated through Guatemala, Mexico, and eventually the Sonoran Desert. Before a coyote abandoned his group in Oaxaca, Javier managed to make it to Arizona with the aid of other migrants. His first full-length collection,Unaccompanied, explores how immigration and the civil war have impacted his family.
Cosponsored by Poetry Center San Jose

Tananarive Due
2018-04-03 17:30 - 19:00 | Mills Hall Living Room, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland , CA, 94613, United States
Tananarive Due is a screenwriter, award-winning novelist, and leading voice in black speculative fiction. Her most recent book, Ghost Summer, won a British Fantasy Award and was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Due is the author of 12 novels and a civil rights memoir. She teaches Afrofuturism and black horror at UCLA and creative writing in the MFA program at Antioch University.

Kaya Press @ City Lights
2018-04-03 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Kaya Press @ City Lights

Sesshu Foster reads from City of the Future
Max Yeh reads from Stolen Oranges
about City of the Future
Twenty-one years after Kaya Press first published Sesshu Foster’s City Terrace Field Manual, a powerful collection of prose poems that map the East Los Angeles neighborhood of Foster’s childhood, comes a new collection of poetry and prose that takes on gentrification, modernization and globalization, as told from the same corner of this rapidly changing metropolis.
These poems are, in the poet’s words: “Postcards written with ocotillo and yucca. Gentrification of your face inside your sleep. Privatization of identity, corners, and intimations. Wars on the nerve, colors, breathing. Postcard poems of early and late notes, mucilage, American loneliness. Postcard poems of slopes, films of dust and crows. Incarceration nation ‘Wish You Were Here’ postcards 35 cents emerge from gentrified pants. You can’t live like this. Postcards sent into the future. You can’t live here now; you must live in the future, in the City of the Future.”
Poet, teacher, and community activist Sesshu Foster grew up in in East Los Angeles. He earned his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and returned to LA to continue teaching, writing, and community organizing. His first collection of poetry, City Terrace Field Manual (1996), celebrates the neighborhood Foster grew up in. He has said that representing his community as one of his central tasks. He is the author of American Loneliness: Selected Poems (2006). His third collection of poetry, World Ball Notebook (2009), won an American Book Award and an Asian American Literary Award for Poetry. Foster is the author of the novel of speculative fiction Atomik Aztex (2005), which won the Believer Book Award and imagines an America free of European colonizers. Foster’s work has been published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry (2000), Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East, Asia and Beyond (2008), and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems (2008). He co-edited the anthology Invocation L.A.: Urban Multicultural Poetry (1989). Foster has taught in East LA for 25 years as well as at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, Pomona University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. He lives in Los Angeles.
about Stolen Oranges
A Chinese American historian discovers six anonymous documents in Spanish and Chinese in places ranging from the archives of Imperial China to a rare book shop in Mexico City and constructs a hitherto unknown correspondence between the Chinese Ming Emperor Wanli and Miguel Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. Difficulties in translation and the years-long, perilous voyages undertaken by conscripted letter couriers highlight the intensive labor and sheer serendipitous luck required to make this seemingly impossible 17th-century exchange possible. This reimagined history brings together the disparate histories of the Emperor, Cervantes, and the historian, united through time by their deep interest in literature, philosophy, politics, and the burden of demented mothers. As he did in his acclaimed previous novel, The Beginning of the East, Yeh continues to remap literary conventions. Layering documentary evidence, conflicting translations, and cultural contexts, Yeh sends ripples through the idea of historical fiction in the vein of Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Described as “a writer on a rampage, with an appetite for history,” by E.L. Doctorow, Yeh’s Stolen Oranges reimagines the relationships of the past and the present.
Max Yeh, described as “a writer on the rampage” by E.L. Doctorow, is the author of The Beginning of the East (FC2, 1992). He was born in China, educated in the United States and has lived in Europe and Mexico. He has taught at the University of California, Irvine, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and New Mexico State University. He lives in the New Mexico mountains with his wife and daughter, where he works on a wide range of subjects including literary theory, linguistics, art history and science.
Founded in 1994, Kaya Press has established itself as the premier publisher of cutting-edge Asian and Pacific Islander diasporic writers in the United States. Their diverse list of titles includes experimental poetry, noir fiction, film memoir, avant-garde art, performance pieces, “lost” novels, and everything in between. Kaya and its authors have been the recipients of numerous awards, including the Gregory Kolovakas Prize for Outstanding New Literary Press, the American Book Award, the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award, the PEN Beyond Margins Open Book Prize, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop Award, and the PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Prize. Their books have become cornerstone texts in American Studies and Asian American Studies curricula at major universities throughout the country.

Curtis White
2018-04-04 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Curtis White

reading from his new novel
LACKING CHARACTER
from Melville House
The man Paul Auster called “a master of bewitchments” and a founder of the Fiction Collective returns to the novel after twenty years

In the spirit of “transcendental buffoonery,” Curtis White’s return to fiction is fun in the extreme. The story begins when a masked man with “a message both obscure and appalling” appears at the door of the Marquis claiming a matter of life and death, declaring, “I stand falsely accused of an atrocity!”
Dispatched by the Queen of Spells from the Outer Hebrides, the Masked Man’s message was really just a polite request for the Marquis (a video game-playing burnout) to help him enroll in some community college vocational classes. But the exchange gets botched… badly. And our masked man is now lost in America, encountering its absurdities at every turn, and cursing those responsible for this cruel fate — including the author that created him.
In a time obsessed with the crisis du jour, White asks us to remember what it’s like to laugh, to be a little silly even, in order to reclaim what used to be fundamental to us — the strength to create our own worlds.
CURTIS WHITE has published seven earlier books of fiction, including Memories of My Father Watching TV. His non-fiction includes The Middle Mind, The Science Delusion, and We, Robots. His essays have appeared in Harper’s, the Village Voice, Orion, Salon, Tricycle, and Playboy.
Praise for the work of Curtis White:
“Fun fact: Jonathan Swift spent four decades living incognito in the Midwest USA writing books under the name Curtis White.” —Joshua Cohen, author of The Book of Numbers and Moving Kings
“Raw, rude and rowdy metaphysical slapstick, packed with buffoonery, frantic, at times wistful — Lacking Character is meant to amuse, piss off and, above all, distract from prevailing, pandemic lunacies.” —Rikki Ducornet, author of Brightfellow
“Lacking Character is marvelous. It is what writing must be (what is required) in this very moment of the Kali Yuga.” —Mark Leyner, author of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack and My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist
“The most inspiringly wicked social critic of the moment.” —Will Blythe, Elle
“Cogent, acute, beautiful, and true.” —David Foster Wallace
“Absolutely indispensable.” —Slavoj Žižek
“A master of bewitchments, parodies, and dazzling tropes.” —Paul Auster
“Splendidly cranky.” —Molly Ivins

Sarah Andersen / Herding Cats
2018-04-04 19:00 - 21:00 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith welcomes Sarah Andersen back for her new book, Herding Cats! Please join us.
More #relatable comics from Sarah’s Scribbles!

Please note: this is a free event, but seating is limited. If you’d like to reserve a seat, purchase a copy of Herding Cats below and put your request in the special field.
—
Sarah Andersen is a young cartoonist and illustrator who lives in Portland, Oregon. She’s actually really cool and collected in real life. Definitely.

Pandemonium Press: Whan That Aprile . . .
2018-04-04 19:00 - 21:00 | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Featured readers: Judy Wells, Kirk Lumpkin, Mary Mackey, Rafael Jesús González. Late Night Open Mic follows the featured readers. Sign-up now for Ist Annual Open Mic Award’s Contest (see below). Book & Broadside Giveaway. Free, 7-9 pm. The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St., Oakland.

Elaine Castillo
2018-04-04 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Elaine Castillo discusses her debut novel, America Is Not The Heart.

Praise for America Is Not The Heart

“Elaine Castillo’s entrancing and magnificent debut is set to be a standout work of literature. Don’t say you were not told. What a dazzling book!”—NoViolet Bulawayo author of We Need New Names

“With the sheer propulsive power of her voice, Elaine Castillo blasts readers into her story.”—John Freeman, editor of Freeman’s

“The creative accomplishments of this story are incredible: this unexpected family, this history, this embrace of the sacred and the profane, this easy humor, this deeply felt human-ness, this messy, perfect love story. Elaine Castillo is a masterful, heartfelt writer.”—Jade Chang author of The Wangs vs. the World

About America Is Not The Heart

Three generations of women from one immigrant family trying to reconcile the home they left behind with the life they’re building in America.

How many lives can one person lead in a single lifetime? When Hero de Vera arrives in America, disowned by her parents in the Philippines, she’s already on her third. Her uncle, Pol, who has offered her a fresh start and a place to stay in the Bay Area, knows not to ask about her past. And his younger wife, Paz, has learned enough about the might and secrecy of the De Vera family to keep her head down. Only their daughter Roni asks Hero why her hands seem to constantly ache.

Illuminating the violent political history of the Philippines in the 1980s and 1990s and the insular immigrant communities that spring up in the suburban United States with an uncanny ear for the unspoken intimacies and pain that get buried by the duties of everyday life and family ritual, Castillo delivers a powerful, increasingly relevant novel about the promise of the American dream and the unshakable power of the past. In a voice as immediate and startling as those of Junot Diaz and NoViolet Bulawayo, America Is Not the Heart is a sprawling, soulful telenovela of a debut novel. With exuberance, muscularity, and tenderness, here is a family saga; an origin story; a romance; a narrative of two nations and the people who leave home to grasp at another, sometimes turning back.

Facades Everywhere
2018-04-04 19:30 - 21:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
On Thursday, April 4, 2018, The Bindery will become a truth machine. Three writers, Devi S. Laskar, Claudia H. Long,Crystal Jo Reiss, and a surprise poet/novelist, will ferry readers across borders, around the world, and through time. In an era of despotism, misrepresentations, fake news and “fake news,” forced migrations, and missing time, facades fall away and bare the truth. Come find your truth with writers who don’t flinch when questions become inquisitions, maps are revised, and skies fall onto pages that will not turn anyone away.
—
Devi S. Laskar is a native of Chapel Hill, N.C. She holds an MFA from Columbia University in New York. A former newspaper reporter, she is now a poet, photographer and artist. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Atlanta Review, Fairy Tale Review, Tin House and The Raleigh Review, which nominated her for Best New Poets 2016. She is an alumna of both TheOpEdProject and VONA/Voices, and poetry workshops at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. Finishing Line Press published the first of two poetry chapbooks, “Gas & Food, No Lodging” in March 2017 and has nominated her for a Pushcart Prize—and will publish Anastasia Maps in December. She now lives in California.
Claudia H. Long is the author of three books about the Spanish Inquisition in Mexico: Josefina’s Sin, The Duel for Consuelo, and just out, Chains of Silver. Her books have been described as “riveting”, “beautifully researched and lyrically written,” “spell-binding” and “very, very sexy.” She grew up in Mexico City, and makes her home in the East Bay, with her husband, nearby grown children, perfect grandson, and anywhere from three to five dogs, depending on who’s home. When she isn’t writing she practices law, mediating ugly business disputes and employment discrimination cases.
Crystal Jo Reiss began her writing career with the publication of her first poem, The Girl Who Pricked Her Finger, in The Louisville Review’s anthology of children’s poetry. Years later, while working on her M.F.A. in Creative Writing at Columbia University, she wrestled with narrative and drafted her first novel. Later, she attended The Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference, and spent a summer at The Edward Albee Foundation and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony. Between assisting a renowned physical anthropologist, serving as a transcription editor for a law firm that represented members of the Cosa Nostra, teaching college-level composition, and working on spreadsheets for nurse practitioners, she wrote for a variety of publications, including a trade magazine focused on post-production houses in the advertising industry. She has since cofounded an editorial and design business, and is celebrating the publication of her novel, Jane is Everywhere. She lives with her husband and son in Oakland, California.

Shanthi Sekaran
2018-04-04 19:30 - 21:30 | Hagerty Lounge, SMC, 1928 Saint Mary's Road, Moraga , CA, 94575, United States
Shanthi Sekaran lives in Berkeley, California. Her latest novel, Lucky Boy,was named an Indie Next Great Read and an Amazon Editors’ Pick. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New York Times, Canteen Magazine, Huffington Post and Best New American Voices. She’s a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto and a Distinguished Visiting Writer in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction at Saint Mary’s College. www.shanthisekaran.com

Matthew Zapruder
2018-04-05 12:10 - 12:50 | Morrison Library, UC Berkeley, 2000 Carleston Street, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
Matthew Zapruder is the author most recently of Sun Bearand Why Poetry, a book of prose about poetry. An Associate Professor in the MFA program at Saint Mary’s College of California, he is also Editor at Large at Wave Books, and from 2016-7 was Editor of the Poetry Column for the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Oakland, CA.

Presidio Live - Western Hemisphereans
2018-04-05 19:00 - 20:00 | Presidio Officers’ Club, 50 Moraga Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94129
PRESIDIO LIVE – Thursday Evenings at 7 pm
In Presidio Live, experience live music, theatre, dance, film, and dialogues that offer a contemporary take on the history and nature of the Presidio and the culture of our diverse Bay Area community.
Toss your expectations aside and come hear contemporary work from teachers and visionaries from many parts of this side of the planet. All of these writers — Avotcja, Linda Noel, San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck, Rene Voz and Norman Zelaya — have indigenous connections to the western hemisphere.
Photo: San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck

Presidio Live | Literary Reading: Western Hemisphereans
2018-04-05 19:00 - 20:00 | Presidio Officers’ Club, 50 Moraga Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94129, United States
In Presidio Live, experience live music, theatre, dance, film, and dialogues that offer a contemporary take on the history and nature of the Presidio and the culture of our diverse Bay Area community. On April 5, come hear contemporary work from teachers and visionaries hailing from many parts of this side of the planet. All of these writers — Avotcja, Linda Noel, San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck, Rene Voz and Norman Zelaya– have indigenous connections to the western hemisphere.
Photo: San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck

Henri Cole
2018-04-05 19:00 - 20:30 | Mechanics Institute, 57 Post St 4th Floor Boardroom, San Francisco, CA, 94104, United States
City Lights Booksellers in conjunction with Mechanics’ Institute Library and NYRB present

Henri Cole celebrating the release of

Orphic Paris
from New York Review Books
Henri Cole’s Orphic Paris combines autobiography, diary, essay, and prose poetry with photographs to create a new form of elegiac memoir. With Paris as a backdrop, Cole, an award-winning American poet, explores with fresh and penetrating insight the nature of friendship and family, poetry and solitude, the self and freedom.
Cole writes of Paris, “For a time, I lived here, where the call of life is so strong. My soul was colored by it. Instead of worshiping a creator or man, I cared fully for myself, and felt not guilt and confessed nothing, and in this place, I wrote, I was nourished, and I grew.” Written under the tutelary spirit of Orpheus—mystic, oracular, entrancing—Orphic Paris is an intimate Paris journal and a literary commonplace book that is a touching, original, brilliant account of the city.
What has been said about the work of Henri Cole
Henri Cole’s Orphic Paris is a remarkable work—a poet’s most intimate diary, written entirely in Paris, in a sequence of visits that take us into the interior of the city as into the interior of the questing poet’s soul. The voice of the poet here is confiding, erudite, tender, unexpected in its sympathies and discoveries; like Henri Cole’s extraordinary poetry, it is both finely crafted and yet—seemingly—artless, unpretentious. One of the great pleasures of Orphic Paris is the poet’s delight in the work and words of others—fellow poets, artist-friends, Parisians who drift into his ardently observant life, and move on.
—Joyce Carol Oates
Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, to a French mother and an American father. He has published nine collections of poetry, including Middle Earth, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer. He has received many awards for his work, including the Jackson Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Award, and the Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent collection of poetry is Nothing to Declare. He teaches at Claremont McKenna College and lives in Boston.
Visit https://www.milibrary.org for more info on ticket availability

Dan Bransfield / Pizzapedia
2018-04-06 18:30 - 20:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery is excited to host a launch for Dan Bransfield’sPizzapedia. Join us for a meet and greet, pizza (obviously), and a cash bar!
A book for the pizza obsessed, with 80 charming illustrations and information about the history, ingredients, and lore of everyone’s favorite food.
Pizza is a food that lends itself to legend and obsession, spanning geography, generations, and gender. In lavish illustrations and hand-lettered text, Pizzapedia celebrates all there is to fixate about: the stories behind its origin (we have the ancient Greeks to thank before the Italians); the delectable ingredients, from San Marzano tomatoes to buffalo mozzarella; the failed and the famous inventions (like “the pizza saver,” the piece of plastic that prevents a pizza delivery box top from drooping into the pie); the merits of Sicilian vs. New York vs. Chicago vs. new (Detroit?!) styles; and much more. Like the universally beloved food, this art-driven book of miscellany is inviting, colorful, and a delicious gift to give and get.

—
Dan Bransfield is a food-loving illustrator and pun enthusiast. Much of his illustration work is made for the food and dining industry, including True Story Foods, Applegate Farms, Beringer Winery ads in The New Yorker, NOPA restaurant, and regular contributions to the Rumpus and Edible San Francisco magazine.
