Mule Kick Blues Book Release with Anne Waldman and Eileen Myles
2021-05-08 15:00 - 17:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA
Book Launch for
Mule Kick Blues: And Last Poems
published by City Lights
The last book by the late Beat Generation legend Michael McClure
with Anne Waldman and Eileen Myles
and featuring Garrett Caples
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register.
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(Click Here) to pre-order/purchase book.
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This event is followed by a livestreamed tribute to the life of Michael McClure with a roster of special guests happening on Sunday, May 9th. Go here to register for that event too!

The final book of poems from a Beat Generation legend, Mule Kick Blues finds McClure restlessly innovating until the end.
Mule Kick Blues is the final book of poems by Beat Generation legend Michael McClure. A powerful collection of new work written during the last years of McClure’s life, Mule Kick Blues was readied for publication before the poet’s death in May 2020. Its opening section gives us a rare view into his thoughts about his own mortality, particularly in the moving sequence “Death Poems.” The book takes its title from an innovative series of homages to blues musicians like Leadbelly and Howlin’ Wolf, and evoking Kerouac’s concept of “blues” poems. Featuring shout-outs to lifelong friends like Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima, and Gary Snyder, the long poem “Fragments of Narcissus,” and the eco-logical and zen-infused themes for which he is known, Mule Kick Blues is a definitive statement by one of the most significant American poets of the last sixty years. Introduction by poet Garrett Caples, McClure’s editor at City Lights.
Eileen Myles is an acclaimed poet and writer who has published over twenty works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and libretto. Their prizes and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Warhol/Creative Capital grant, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Anne Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she still teaches. Her poetry collections include Iovis I, Iovis II, Fast Speaking Woman, Helping the Dreamer, Kill or Cure, and Trickster Feminism. She is a recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award.

This event has been sponsored by the City Lights Foundation

Splitting the World Open: An International Roundtable of Dangerous Women Writers
2021-05-09 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
In 1968, poet Muriel Rukeyser famously wrote, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” More than half a century later, women themselves feel split into a million pieces. This past year has been especially challenging for women, typically society’s primary caretakers. Indeed, mothers have been carrying an especially heavy load. Speaking one’s truth is hard when you’re totally exhausted.
So what better Mother’s Day gift for women (and all who love them) to spend an hour, free of charge, with three brilliant female authors, writing from and about multiple corners of the globe—India, the Middle East, North Africa, South America, the United States—with woman-focused stories? And these aren’t just any stories: the work of all three novelists was shortlisted for the Booker Prize or the Booker International Prize, the most prestigious literary awards in the world.
In Burnt Sugar, Dubai-based Indian author Avni Doshi explores the intimate dynamics of mother-daughter conflict and postpartum depression with an ambivalence and caustic wit that ruffled some feathers. It’s that fearless artistry that landed her on the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist with Ethiopian-American novelist Maaza Mengiste, whose novel The Shadow King (“a masterpiece,” said the Washington Post) features a female soldier fighting fascism during Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. The story is inspired by the author’s great-grandmother, one of those women who, in Mengiste’s words, “stepped forward out of the shadows and made themselves known.” Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán, trained as a human rights lawyer before turning to literary work, wrote The Remainder, a finalist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, to delve into the legacy of Chile’s military dictatorship. Her new novel, Las Homicidas, to appear in English translation in 2021, explores an arguably even more dangerous topic: how rage against injustice can be so profound that it drives some women to kill, and how that rage, as with the frustrated anger of any oppressed group, is often minimized and deflected.
This conversation offers a Mother’s Day like no other! The event is co-presented by Words Without Borders and moderated by Karen Phillips, its executive director. Words Without Borders expands cultural understanding through the translation, publication, and promotion of the finest contemporary international literature.
Register Here
Free of charge, but you must register to receive the viewing link.
This event is also part of the Festival’s Women Lit series

Virtual Event: Eric Nguyen and Lydia Kiesling
2021-05-10 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Monday, May 10 at 6pm PT when Eric Nguyen joins us to discuss his debut novel, Things We Lost to the Water, with Lydia Kiesling on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88925265993

Praise for Things We Lost to the Water
“I was captivated. The writing is absolutely gorgeous…The voice is strong and this is a powerful novel…Well worth a read. Really enjoyed.”—Roxane Gay, via Goodreads

“This is an elemental book, of water, for sure, but also of other elements of life, including love and loss. Vietnamese people know all about these elements, coming from a country whose entire length is bordered by a sea, and from a history saturated with loss. Love is one element that has enabled their survival, but sometimes at a cost. Eric Nguyen’s powerful novel ripples and gleams with the unpredictable flow and surge of love, which, like water, can drown us or sustain us. From a war to a hurricane, from an ocean to a flood, Things We Lost to the Water proves itself to be a novel that sustains us.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

“Exquisitely well-written, Things We Lost to the Water is a tender, haunting story of loss, love, family and survival. A moving and powerful debut.”—Charles Yu, National Book Award-winning author of Interior Chinatown

About Things We Lost to the Water
A stunning debut novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped.

When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father.

But with time, Huong realizes she will never see her husband again. While she attempts to come to terms with this loss, her sons, Tuan and Binh, grow up in their absent father’s shadow, haunted by a man and a country trapped in their memories and imaginations. As they push forward, the three adapt to life in America in different ways: Huong gets involved with a Vietnamese car salesman who is also new in town; Tuan tries to connect with his heritage by joining a local Vietnamese gang; and Binh, now going by Ben, embraces his adopted homeland and his burgeoning sexuality. Their search for identity—as individuals and as a family—threatens to tear them apart, until disaster strikes the city they now call home and they are suddenly forced to find a new way to come together and honor the ties that bind them.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Aaron Carnes, In Defense of Ska
2021-05-10 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
VIRTUAL EVENT: Aaron Carnes, music editor at the Good Times, will be in conversation with Good Times editor Steve Palopoli about Carnes’ new book In Defense of Ska.
Register for this free Crowdcast event here!
Why doesn’t ska get its due as a rich, diverse genre the way punk, metal, hip-hop and electronic music does? Or more to the point, why are ska fans so embarrassed of this music they love? The era of ska shame is officially over. In Defense of Ska is the much-needed response to years of ska-mockery. No longer do ska fans need to hide in the basement, skanking alone in their sharp suits, slim ties and porkpie hats. Now the time to take to the streets and fight music snobbery, or at least crank up the ska without being teased ruthlessly.
In a mix of interviews, essays, personal stories, historical snapshots, obscure anecdotes, and think pieces, In Defense of Ska dissects, analyzes and celebrates ska in exactly the way fans have been craving for decades. This book will enlist ska-lovers as soldiers in the ska army, and challenge ska-haters’ prejudices to the core.
Aaron Carnes is a music journalist based out of Sacramento, California. His work has appeared in Playboy, Salon, Bandcamp Daily, Sierra Club, Noisey, Sun Magazine, and he’s the music editor at Good Times Santa Cruz weekly newspaper, where he tries to sneak in ska content whenever his boss isn’t looking. Aaron has been listening to ska since the early ’90s. He used to play drums in a ska band. Now he just plays ska on his car stereo. When he’s not defending ska, he enjoys backpacking with his wife Amy Bee, and talking about music from every existing genre. Ska will always be his favorite.
Carnes hosts the podcast In Defense of Ska and can be found on Twitter and Instagram @indefenseofska. His Substack newsletter is aaroncarnes.substack.com and Spotify playist, which consists of the songs and bands mentioned in the book, in order, can be found here.
Author photo credit: Amy Bee (Instagram: @_amy_bee)
Cover photo credit: Cam Evans (Instagram: @photofromcam)

VIRTUAL: Launch for Lara Bazelon / A Good Mother
2021-05-11 17:00 - 19:00 | CA
Booksmith and The Bindery are thrilled to host the virtual launch for Lara Bazelon and her debut novel A Good Mother! More to be announced soon, but won’t you save the date and join us?
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order A Good Mother here – we’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
About the book
When young decorated combat veteran Travis Hollis is found stabbed through the heart at a U.S. Army base in Germany, there is no doubt that his wife, Luz, is to blame. But was it an act of self defense? A frenzied attempt to save her infant daughter from domestic abuse? Or the cold blood murder of an innocent man?
As the case heads to trial in Los Angeles, hard-charging attorney Abby Rosenberg is eager to return from maternity leave—and her quickly fracturing home life—to take the case and defend Luz. Abby, a new mother herself, is committed to ensuring Luz avoids prison and retains custody of her daughter. But as the evidence stacks up against Luz, Abby realizes the task proves far more difficult than she suspected – especially when she has to battle for control over the case with her co-counsel, whose dark absorption with Luz only complicates matters further.
As the trial careens toward an outcome no one expects, readers will find themselves in the seat of the jurors, forced to answer the question – what does it mean to be a good mother? A good lawyer? And who is the real monster?
About the author
Lara Bazelon is an attorney, journalist, MacDowell Fellow, former public defender, and professor at the University of San Francisco School of Law, where she holds the Phillip and Muriel C. Barnett Chair in Trial Advocacy. She is also the author of Rectify: The Power of Restorative Justice After Wrongful Conviction, as well as the upcoming nonfiction book, Ambitious Like a Mother: Women, Ambition, and Motherhood, and her writing has been published widely in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Slate, The Washington Post, and many others. Photo by Richard Gilligan.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Policies

Refund Policy:
No refunds or returns. Contact events@booksmith.com with any questions.
Cancellation Policy:
If we have to cancel an event, you will be refunded within 4 business days of the event date.

This Is Now: Friendship in the Age of Loneliness
2021-05-11 18:00 | Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park , CA, 94025, United States
How do you make and keep friendships of a lifetime? Angie Coiro interviews Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky on Friendship in the Age of Loneliness.

About this Virtual Event

Research has shown that people with close friends are happier, healthier, and live longer than people who lack strong social bonds. Despite this, the average American hasn’t made a new friend in the past five years.
Why— when we are seemingly more connected than ever before— can it feel so difficult to create and maintain strong friendships? Why do we spend only four percent of our time with friends?
Millennial workplace expert and friendship visionary Adam “Smiley” Poswolsky proposes a new solution for the mounting pressures of this modern life: focus on your friendships.
In an hour-long interview with journalist-in-residence Angie Coiro about Friendship in the Age of Loneliness, this wonderful author offers practical habits and playful reminders on how to create meaningful connections, make new friends, and deepen relationships. Smiley will help you revisit your relationship with technology, encourage you to prioritize real-world experiences, send snail mail, and really see your friends. In doing this, he shares the key to a good life—a happier, healthier, longer, richer life.

Francisco Goldman in conversation with Valeria Luiselli
2021-05-11 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
discussing his new book
Monkey Boy: a novel
published by Grove Atlantic Press
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(CLICK HERE) to register.
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(CLICK HERE) to purchase book.
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Goldman’s first novel since his widely acclaimed, national bestselling Say Her Name (winner of the Prix Femina Etranger), Monkey Boy is a sweeping story about the impact of divided identity – whether Jewish/Catholic, white/brown, native/expat – and one misfit’s quest to heal his damaged past and find love.
Our narrator, Francisco Goldberg, has been living and working in Mexico City as a journalist for over a decade, but has recently returned to New York City in hopes of “going home again.” It’s been five years since the end of his last relationship and he is falling in love again. Soon he is beckoned back to Boston by the high school girlfriend who was witness to his greatest youthful humiliations, and his mother, Yolanda, around whom his story orbits like a dark star. Backdropping this five day trip to his childhood home is the specter of Frank’s recently deceased father, Bert, an immigrant from Ukraine, volcanically tempered, pathologically abusive, yet also at times infuriatingly endearing; as well as the high school bullies who gave him the moniker “monkey boy” and his estranged, larger-than-life sister, Lexi.
Told in an open, irresistibly funny and passionate voice, this extraordinary portrait of growing up outside the dominant culture unearths the hidden cruelties in a predominantly white, working-class Boston suburb where Francisco – aka Paco, aka Frankie Gee – came of age. A crowning achievement from one of the most important American voices in the last 40 years.
Francisco Goldman has published four novels and two books of non-fiction. The Long Night of White Chickens was awarded the American Academy’s Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction. His novels have been finalists for several prizes, including, twice, The Pen/Faulkner Prize. The Ordinary Seaman was a finalist for The International IMPAC Dublin literary award. The Divine Husband was a finalist for The Believer Book Award. The Art of Political Murder won The Index on Censorship T.R. Fyvel Book Award and The WOLA/Duke Human Rights Book Award. The Interior Circuit: A Mexico City Chronicle, published in 2013, was named by the LA Times one of 10 best books of the year and received The Blue Metropolis “Premio Azul” 2017. His most recent novel, Say Her Name, won the 2011 Prix Femina Etranger. His books have been published in 16 languages.

Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Korea, South Africa and India. An acclaimed writer of both fiction and nonfiction, she is the author of the essay collection Sidewalks; the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth; Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions and Lost Children Archive. She is the recipient of a 2019 MacArthur Fellowship and the winner of two Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, The Carnegie Medal, an American Book Award, and has been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize, and the Booker Prize. She has been a National Book Foundation “5 Under 35” honoree and the recipient of a Bearing Witness Fellowship from the Art for Justice Fund. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, and McSweeney’s, among other publications, and has been translated into more than twenty languages. She is a Writer in Residence at Bard College and lives in New York City.

Advance Praise for Monkey Boy
“Francisco Goldman . . . Francisco Goldberg? . . . Frankie Gee!—crafter of the tenderest dirtiest love scenes!—the wisest and spookiest children!—the fathers whose monstrosity breaks our hearts with compassion for them—who else can do all this? Francisco Goldman is uncategorizable, as is this book which made me grow a second heart just to contain all its fierce tenderness. Goldman has been my literary hero from his first entrancing Long Night of White Chickens to this latest take-no-prisoners Monkey Boy. He is a true original, that rarest of writers, the kind we cannot live without.”—Susan Choi

Virtual Event: Linda Rui Feng and Meng Jin with The Ruby
2021-05-11 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
PRESENTED BY THE RUBY

JOIN US TUESDAY, MAY 11 AT 6PM PT WHEN LINDA RUI FENG IS JOINED BY MENG JIN TO DISCUSS HER DEBUT NOVEL, SWIMMING BACK TO TROUT RIVER!
Click the link here to register for this event!
If you would like a signed copy of this book, click here and write “signed” in your order comment.
About this Event
[This is a Virtual Ruby event. Nonmembers are welcome to join; please donate if you are able! This event will take place over Zoom: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82204356202 ]
In partnership with Green Apple Books, join us in celebrating the launch of Linda Rui Feng‘s debut novel, Swimming Back to Trout River, a Most-Anticipated selection from Electric Literature, The Millions, and Paperback Paris, and hailed by award-winning author Garth Greenwall as“gorgeously orchestrated” and possessing “astonishing emotional force.” Linda will be in conversation with our very own Meng Jin, author of Little Gods.
Support the author and beloved SF indie bookstore, Green Apple Books by purchasing a signed copy of the book here (just indicate you’d like a signed copy in the “order comments” section)!

About Swimming Back to Trout River
How many times in life can we start over without losing ourselves?
In the summer of 1986 in a small Chinese village, ten-year-old Junie receives a momentous letter from her parents, who had left for America years ago: her father promises to return home and collect her by her twelfth birthday. But Junie’s life exists in the idyllic countryside with the beloved grandparents who raised her. Junie’s growing determination to stay put with her grandparents threatens to derail her family’s shared future.
What Junie doesn’t know is that her parents, Momo and Cassia, are newly estranged from one another in their adopted country, each holding close private tragedies and histories from the tumultuous years of their youth during China’s Cultural Revolution. While Momo grapples with his deferred musical ambitions and dreams for Junie’s future in America, Cassia finally begins to wrestle with a shocking act of brutality from years ago. In order for Momo to fulfill his promise, he must make one last desperate attempt to reunite all three members of the family before Junie’s birthday—even if it means bringing painful family secrets to light.
Swimming Back to Trout River weaves together the stories of Junie, Momo, and Cassia while depicting their heartbreak and resilience, tenderly revealing the hope, compromises, and abiding ingenuity that make up the lives of immigrants.

About Linda Rui Feng
Born in Shanghai, Linda Rui Feng has lived in San Francisco, New York, and Toronto. She is a graduate of Harvard and Columbia Universities and is currently a professor of Chinese cultural history at the University of Toronto. She has been twice awarded a MacDowell Fellowship for her fiction, and her prose and poetry have appeared in journals such as The Fiddlehead, Kenyon Review Online, Santa Monica Review, and Washington Square Review. Swimming Back to Trout River is her first novel. Visit LindaRuiFeng.com to learn more.
About Meng Jin
Meng Jin was born in Shanghai and currently lives in San Francisco. She is a Kundiman Fellow and graduate of the Hunter College MFA. Her novel, Little Gods, was released to critical acclaim in 2020. See more at www.mengj.in
About The Virtual Ruby
*While we shelter in place during the Covid-19 pandemic, The Ruby’s physical location will be closed. As a collective, we’ll continue to gather online for virtual workshops, events, and discussions. All are welcome to join us for these events. * For those who can afford it and would like to support The Ruby during this uncertain time, we are offering 3 tiers of virtual membership: $5/week, $15/week, and $25/week. (Though we have some money in our emergency savings account to get us through the next little while, we’re pretty nervous about the future, and how long this might go on for.) Please help only if it’s feasible for you. If you’re in a tough time financially right now, we absolutely get it. Please, take care of yourself and stay connected to this community so we can help.
Here are the tiers of virtual membership (use these links to sign up):
$5/week – https://www.joinit.org/o/the-ruby/aRsJyABygL4FvvEJT
$15/week – https://www.joinit.org/o/the-ruby/o56ggrnNNx9rzn6AA
$25/week – https://www.joinit.org/o/the-ruby/q37HfmWSQMoLzPt4p
Want to make a one-time donation of more or less? We can still accept donations through last year’s GoFundMe. Link is here.
Our Virtual Ruby calendar will be updated as events are added.
You can register for this event here.

THE NINE LIVES OF ROSE NAPOLITANO by Donna Freitas | GGP Online Book Club
2021-05-11 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Please join us on Tuesday, May 11, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of THE NINE LIVES OF ROSE NAPOLITANO by Donna Freitas.
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84073803712.
You can order a print copy at http://bit.ly/ggp9Lives or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at http://bit.ly/9LivesAB,
Description

A deeply moving novel about a woman who thought she never wanted to be a mother–and the many ways that life can surprise us
In every woman there are many stories . . .
Rose Napolitano is fighting with her husband, Luke, about prenatal vitamins. She promised she’d take them, but didn’t. He promised before they got married that he’d never want children, but now he’s changed his mind. Their marriage has come to rest on this one question: Can Rose find it in herself to become a mother? Rose is a successful professor and academic. She’s never wanted to have a child. The fight ends, and with it their marriage.
But then, Rose has a fight with Luke about the vitamins–again. This time the fight goes slightly differently, and so does Rose’s future as she grapples with whether she can indeed give up the one thing she thought she knew about herself. Can she reimagine her life in a completely new way? That reimagining plays out again and again in each of Rose’s nine lives, just as it does for each of us as we grow into adulthood. What are the consequences of our biggest choices? How would life change if we let go of our preconceived ideas of ourselves and became someone completely new? Rose Napolitano’s experience of choosing and then choosing again shows us in an utterly compelling way what it means, literally, to reinvent a life and, sometimes, become a different kind of woman than we ever imagined.
A stunning novel about love, loss, betrayal, divorce, death, a woman’s career and her identity, The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano is about finding one’s way into a future that wasn’t the future one planned, and the ways that fate intercedes when we least expect it.
About the Author

This is Donna Freitas’s first adult novel. She is the author of Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention, as well as books for young adults. Donna has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on NPR and the TODAY show. She’s on the faculty at Fairleigh Dickinson University’s MFA program and lives in Brooklyn and Connecticut.
Praise For…

Praise for The Nine Lives of Rose Napolitano:
“Freitas’s prose is engaging and precise, and her what-if format proves ideal for elegantly unpacking the tensions of the plot. She balances tightly written scenes of confrontation with Rose’s poignant reflections on how much she can compromise without losing herself completely. This isn’t one to miss. “
—Publishers Weekly (starred)

Alta Live: Mark Bittman and Alice Waters
2021-05-12 12:30 - 13:30 | online, CA, United States
Food doesn’t just keep us alive—it’s a vital and constantly evolving part of our global culture. Author and food journalist Mark Bittman’s new book, Animal, Vegetable, Junk, digs into the history of what, why, and how we eat. He’ll be joined by chef and author Alice Waters for a conversation about everything from slow versus fast food to regenerative agriculture to how we teach future generations to eat. Waters’s forthcoming book, We Are What We Eat, will be published in June. Their hour-long discussion will be moderated by Alta Journal editor and publisher Will Hearst, and the event is free and open to the public. Please join us!
REGISTER
ABOUT THE GUESTS:
Mark Bittman has been a leading voice in global food culture and policy for more than three decades. His first cookbook, Fish: The Complete Guide to Buying and Cooking, was published in 1994 and remains in print; since then, he has written or cowritten 30 others, including the How to Cook Everything series. A former New York Times columnist, television host, and regular on Today, Bittman has received six James Beard Awards, four IACP Awards, and numerous other honors.
Bittman is also the editor in chief of the Bittman Project, a newsletter and website focusing on all aspects of food, from political to delicious. His most recent book is Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal.
Alice Waters is a chef, an author, a food activist, and the founder and owner of Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California (est. 1971). She has been a champion of local sustainable agriculture for over four decades. In 1995, she founded the Edible Schoolyard Project, which advocates for a free regenerative school lunch for all children and a sustainable-food curriculum in every public school.
In 2015, Waters was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama, proving that eating is a political act and that the table is a powerful means to advancing social justice and positive change. She is the author of 16 books, including her critically acclaimed memoir, Coming to My Senses: The Making of a Counterculture Cook; The Art of Simple Food; The Art of Simple Food II; and Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea. Her latest work, We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto, will be available in June 2021.•

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN

Animal, Vegetable, Junk: A History of Food, from Sustainable to Suicidal by Mark Bittman
Houghton MifflinBookshop.org
$28.00

BUY THE BOOK

PENGUIN PRESS

We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto by Alice Waters
Penguin PressBookshop.org
$26.00

BUY THE BOOK

VIRTUAL: Booksmith and Mother Jones presents: Your Computer is on Fire
2021-05-12 17:00 - 19:00 | CA
Booksmith and Mother Jones present Your Computer is on Fire, an evening of conversation between Mother Jones data and interactives editor Sinduja Rangarajan and two editors of the new anthology Your Computer Is on Fire, Mar Hicks and Kavita Philip, along with contributor Halcyon M. Lawrence (pictured above, clockwise from top left).
Please note our start time of 5pm PT.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order Your Computer Is on Fire here. We are happy to fulfill orders anywhere in the world – international postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to contact us at events@booksmith.com.
About the book
Techno-utopianism is dead: Now is the time to pay attention to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.
This book sounds an alarm: after decades of being lulled into complacency by narratives of technological utopianism and neutrality, people are waking up to the large-scale consequences of Silicon Valley–led technophilia. This book trains a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases in our technological systems, showing how they are not just minor bugs to be patched, but part and parcel of ideas that assume technology can fix—and control—society.
The essays in Your Computer Is on Fire interrogate how our human and computational infrastructures overlap, showing why technologies that centralize power tend to weaken democracy. These practices are often kept out of sight until it is too late to question the costs of how they shape society. From energy-hungry server farms to racist and sexist algorithms, the digital is always IRL, with everything that happens algorithmically or online influencing our offline lives as well. Each essay proposes paths for action to understand and solve technological problems that are often ignored or misunderstood.
Contributors
Janet Abbate, Ben Allen, Paul N. Edwards, Nathan Ensmenger, Mar Hicks, Halcyon M. Lawrence, Thomas S. Mullaney, Safiya Umoja Noble, Benjamin Peters, Kavita Philip, Sarah T. Roberts, Sreela Sarkar, Corinna Schlombs, Andrea Stanton, Mitali Thakor, Noah Wardrip-Fruin
About the speakers
Sinduja Rangarajan is the data and interactives editor at Mother Jones. She previously worked at Reveal at the Center for Investigative Reporting, where her series on the lack of diversity in Silicon Valley led to many tech giants publicly releasing their data. Her work has won several awards, including the National Edward Murrow Award in 2019. She wrangles and analyzes datasets to tell stories and finds innovative ways to report on issues by collaborating with academics. She started her journalism career as a Google News Lab Fellow in 2015. She has a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Mumbai and a master’s from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. Email her tips at srangarajan@motherjones.com and follow her on Twitter @cynduja.
Mar Hicks is an author, historian, and professor doing research on the history of computing, labor, technology, and queer science and technology studies. Their research focuses on how gender and sexuality bring hidden technological dynamics to light, and how the experiences of women and LGBTQIA people change the core narratives of the history of computing in unexpected ways. Hicks’s multiple award-winning book, Programmed Inequality, looks at how the British lost their early lead in computing by discarding women computer workers, and what this cautionary tale tells us about current issues in high tech. Their new work looks at resistance and queerness in the history of technology. They also have a new co-edited book coming out in Spring 2021 from MIT Press called Your Computer Is On Fire, about how we can begin to fix our broken high tech infrastructures. Read more at: marhicks.com.
Kavita Philip is a historian of science and technology who has written about nineteenth-century environmental knowledge in British India, information technology in post-colonial India, and the intersections of art, science fiction, and social activism with science and technology. She is author of Civilizing Natures (2004), and Studies in Unauthorized Reproduction (forthcoming, MIT Press), as well as co-editor of five volumes curating new interdisciplinary work in radical history, art, activism, computing, and public policy.
Halcyon M. Lawrence is an assistant professor of technical communication and information design at Towson University. She has over 20 years of professional experience as a technical trainer, technical writer, and usability practitioner. Her research focuses on speech intelligibility and the design of speech interactions for voice technologies, particularly for under-represented user populations. She holds a Ph.D. in Technical Communication from the Illinois Institute of Technology. Her latest publication, “Siri Disciplines” is published in Your Computer is on Fire from MIT Press.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Virtual Event: Peter Filkins and Rosanna Warren
2021-05-12 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Wednesday, May 12 at 6pm PT when Peter Filkins and Rosanna Warren join us to discuss their latest collections, Water/Music and So Forth, on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84930241583

About Water/Music
Exploring the space between nature and culture, the poems of Water / Music anchor themselves in the timely and the timeless. Rich and diverse in their formal intricacy, they move with ease from narrative to meditation, from close physical observation to the haunts of memory, and from lyric sorrow to the pleasure of living in the world. Water / Music embraces and celebrates life’s mystery and the soul’s repose amid “talismans at twilight, the whir of birds.”

About So Forth
A lyrical new volume from a poet “beyond the achievement of all but a double handful of living American poets” (Harold Bloom).

With irony, in mourning tinged with eros, one of our most extraordinary poets blends the personal and the political to meditate on damage, aging, and injustice. The poems in So Forth surge back in memory, pondering guilt and forgiveness. Consciousness flows from singular to plural; identity in these poems does a round dance with other personae, with formidable women artists of the past in the powerful sequence “Legende of Good Women,” with pre-Socratic philosophers, and with lovers, children, and strangers—the strangest of whom is the face in the mirror. In response to griefs both historical and contemporary, So Forth contemplates the quest for the holy and traditions of the sacred.

Jhumpa Lahiri - Whereabouts (Online Event)
2021-05-12 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
A marvelous new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Lowland and Interpreter of Maladies—her first in nearly a decade.
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. The city she calls home, an engaging backdrop to her days, acts as a confidant: the sidewalks around her house, parks, bridges, piazzas, streets, stores, coffee bars. We follow her to the pool she frequents and to the train station that sometimes leads her to her mother, mired in a desperate solitude after her father’s untimely death. In addition to colleagues at work, where she never quite feels at ease, she has girl friends, guy friends, and “him,” a shadow who both consoles and unsettles her. But in the arc of a year, as one season gives way to the next, transformation awaits. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun’s vital heat, her perspective will change. This is the first novel she has written in Italian and translated into English. It brims with the impulse to cross barriers. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.
Jhumpa Lahiri is the author of four works of fiction: Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake, Unaccustomed Earth, and The Lowland; and a work of nonfiction, In Other Words. She has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize; the PEN/Hemingway Award; the PEN/Malamud Award; the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award; the Premio Gregor von Rezzori; the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature; a 2014 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama; and the Premio Internazionale Viareggio-Versilia, for In altre parole.

Forrest Gander: Twice Alive
2021-05-13 17:00 - 18:30 | online
Litquake’s Epicenter: A Virtual Series
Bringing writers from around the world to your computer screen
Co-presented by City Lights Books & Booksellers
Litquake is thrilled to present this launch event for the new poetry collection Twice Alive (New Directions), by Pulitzer Prize winner Forrest Gander. With these searing ecological love poems, Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and the tradition of Sangam literature, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations. Forrest will read from and discuss his work. Audience Q&A to follow.
FREE, $10-15 suggested donation
Registration required. Spots are limited.
Event will also be livecasted on Facebook Live.
While conducting fieldwork with a celebrated mycologist, Gander links human intimacy with the transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens.
Throughout Twice Alive, Gander addresses personal and ecological trauma—several poems focus on the devastation wrought by wildfires in California where he lives—but his tone is overwhelmingly celebratory. Twice Alive is a book charged with exultation and tenderness.
Forrest Gander was born in the Mojave Desert and grew up, for the most part, in Virginia. Trenchant periods of his life were spent in San Francisco, Dolores Hidalgo (Mexico), and Eureka Springs, Arkansas. With degrees in both geology and English literature, Gander is the author of numerous books of poetry, translation, fiction, and essays. He’s the A.K. Seaver Professor of Literary Arts and Comparative Literature at Brown University. A U.S. Artists Rockefeller fellow, Gander has been recipient of grants from the NEA, the Guggenheim, Howard, Witter Bynner and Whiting foundations. His 2011 collection Core Samples from the World was an NBCC and Pulitzer Prize finalist for poetry, and his 2018 collection Be With won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and was longlisted for the National Book Award.

Aunt Lute and POC United presents a Reading: Isolation
2021-05-13 17:00 - 18:30 | Virtual
Since the onset of the global pandemic in 2020, isolation has been, for good or bad, a major feature of life for many people across the world. In this 90-minute event, writers of color will share works honoring the pain, joy, injustice, comfort, and trauma of isolation.
Our readers:
Naima Coster is the author of two novels, What’s Mine and Yours and her debut, Halsey Street, which was a finalist for the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction. In 2020, she received the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” honor.
Nayomi Munaweera is an award-winning writer of the novels Island of a Thousand Mirrors and What Lies Between Us. She lives in Oakland, California, and is finishing her third novel, a psycho-sexual literary thriller.
Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, which won the 7th annual Crook’s Corner Book Prize (2020) for best debut novel set in the South, the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. The novel was named by The Washington Post as one of the 50 best books of 2019.
Alba Hernandez is a writer inspired by Puerto Rico, growing up in Bushwick, and salsa. Her writing was highly commended in the Poetry Project series ‘House Party,’ Like Light (Bright Hill Press), Calabash (A Journal of Caribbean and Arts and Letters), and most recently in Harvard’s Latinx Publication: PALABRITAS.
Tom Pyun has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Anthology award. He’s been awarded fellowships at Vermont Studio Center, VONA, and Tin House. His short fiction and creative nonfiction have appeared in The Bold Italic, The Rumpus, and Joyland, and placed in competitions such as The Blue Mesa Review’s Summer Story Contest.
This event is the last event of a collaborative project between Aunt Lute Books and POC United to support marginalized writers, made possible by funds from the California Arts Council.
Free
https://www.auntlute.com/ marketing@auntlute.com 415-826-1300

Nancy: Bruno Lloret and Ellen Jones in conversation with Kathryn Scanlan
2021-05-13 17:30 - 18:30 | online, CA, United States
Virtual Event

5:30 pm PT | 6:30 pm MT | 7:30 pm CT | 8:30 pm ET

Join us for an event celebrating Bruno Lloret’s Nancy, a powerful coming-of-age story that tracks Nancy’s youth through remote memories of her Chilean childhood, translated by Ellen Jones. Chilean author Bruno Lloret and translator Ellen Jones join Kathryn Scanlan to discuss his innovative use of typography and illustration to capture his narrator’s waning sense of consciousness.
Register for the event on our Crowdcast page.
Don’t forget to buy the book and support one of our favorite indy bookstores, Pilsen Community Books!

AUTHOR

Bruno Lloret

Bruno Lloret (Santiago de Chile, 1990) is a writer and researcher. He has published Nancy (Cuneta, Santiago de Chile, 2015; Two Lines Press, 2020), which received an honorable mention for the Roberto Bolaño Award for novella, and Leña (Overol, Santiago de Chile, 2018). He currently lives in London.

TRANSLATOR

Ellen Jones

Ellen Jones is a literary translator from Spanish to English, an editor, and an occasional writer based in Mexico City. Her book Language in Motion: Translating Multilingualism Across the Americas is forthcoming from Columbia University Press. You can find her at www.ellencjones.com.

AUTHOR

Kathryn Scanlan

Kathryn Scanlan is the author of Aug 9—Fog and The Dominant Animal. She lives in Los Angeles.

CONTACT:

Leslie-Ann Woofter
lwoofter@catranslation.org
415.512.8812

VIRTUAL: Lilly Dancyger with Alia Volz / Negative Space
2021-05-13 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Booksmith and The Bindery are thrilled to host Lilly Dancyger for her debut, Negative Space: A Memoir. She’ll be joined in conversation by Alia Volz (Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco).
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order the authors’ books below – we’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay:
Negative Space by Lilly Dancyger
Home Baked by Alia Volz
About the book
Despite her parents’ struggles with addiction, Lilly Dancyger always thought of her childhood as a happy one. But what happens when a journalist interrogates her own rosy memories to reveal the instability around the edges? A memoir from the editor of Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger, Negative Space explores Dancyger’s own anger, grief, and artistic inheritance as she sets out to illuminate the darkness that was hidden from her.
Dancyger’s father, Joe Schactman, was part of the iconic 1980s East Village art scene. He created provocative sculptures out of found materials, and brought his young daughter into his gritty, iconoclastic world. She idolized him—despite the escalating heroin addiction that sometimes overshadowed his creative passion. When Schactman died suddenly, just as Dancyger was entering adolescence, she went into her own self-destructive spiral, raging against the world that had taken him away. But as an adult, Dancyger began to question the mythology she’d created about her father—the brilliant artist, struck down in his prime—using his paintings, sculptures, and prints as a guide to piece together a truer story.
About the authors
Lilly Dancyger is a contributing editor at Catapult, and assistant editor at Barrelhouse Books. She’s the author of Negative Space, a reported and illustrated memoir selected by Carmen Maria Machado as one of the winners of the 2019 Santa Fe Writers Project Literary Awards; and the editor of Burn It Down, a critically acclaimed anthology of essays on women’s anger from Seal Press. Her writing has been published by Longreads, The Washington Post, Glamour, Playboy, Rolling Stone, and more. She lives in New York City, and you can find her on twitter at @lillydancyger.
Alia Volz is the author of Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana and the Stoning of San Francisco, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and winner of the 2020 Golden Poppy Award for Nonfiction from the California Independent Bookseller Alliance. Her essays are widely published, including in The New York Times, Bon Appetit, Guernica, The Best Women’s Travel Writing, and The Best American Essays. Her family story has been featured on Snap Judgment, Criminal, and NPR’s Fresh Air. Photo by Dennis Hearne.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Policies

Refund Policy:
No refunds or returns. Contact events@booksmith.com with any questions.
Cancellation Policy:
If we have to cancel an event, you will be refunded within 4 business days of the event date.

Reading: Rick Barot & Barbara Jane Reyes
2021-05-13 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
This Poetry Reading Series provides a unique opportunity to hear diverse and unusual sets of readers, pairing local Bay Area poets with visiting poets and writers.

Rick Barot‘s fourth book, The Galleons (Milkweed Editions) was included on the NY Public Library’s 2020 Top Ten Poetry Books and longlisted for the National Book Award. He has authored three other poetry books: Sarabande Books: The Darker Fall, Want, and Chord, and the chapbook, During the Pandemic (Albion Books, 2020). His poems and essays have appeared widely. He serves as the director of The Rainier Writing Workshop, the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Pacific Lutheran University.
Barbara Jane Reyes’ most recent collection is Letters to a Young Brown Girl, which was released in 2020. She was born in Manila and raised in the Bay Area. Her prior poetry books include: Gravities of Center, Poeta en San Francisco (James Laughlin Award), Diwata (Global Filipino Literary Award for Poetry), To Love as Aswang, and Invocation to Daughters. Her chapbooks include: Easter Sunday, Cherry, and For the City that Nearly Broke Me. She is adjunct professor at USF’s Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program.
Register here.

Poetry y Platica Live Online at The Green Arcade
2021-05-13 19:00 - 20:30 | online, CA, United States
Wow! Black Freighter Press (new press whose co-founder is San Francisco’s Poet Laureate Tongo Eisen-Martin) just published Josiah Luis’ book. The poems in Baby Axolotls & Old Pochos hold space inside a colonized time and place we can still recognize as San Francisco. Spanglish antepasado recuerdos and palabras of our neighborhood memories, the pocho American Dream stuffed into Donaldo Trump pinatas with the conejo en la luna looking down on us are spoken in three broken languages in these poems.
Join Josiah Luis Alderete and writer performer Baruch Porras-Hernandez for a special Zoomtastic event. Free. Free your mind!
Click HERE to join Zoom event.

MARY JANE by Jessica Anya Blau | A GGP Online Author Chat
2021-05-13 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Please join us on Thursday, May 13, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for an online author chat with Jessica Anya Blau discussing her novel, MARY JANE.
Our discussion will be webcast on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85002210763.
Order your copy of MARY JANE at https://bit.ly/ggpMaryJane, or in audiobook from Libro.fm at https://bit.ly/MaryJaneAB.
Staff Reviews

MARY JANE by Jessica Anya Blau is just plain awesome!
It takes place in Baltimore in 1975 and is a coming-of-age story of fourteen year old Mary Jane and what happens during that summer when everything she had always believed is turned upside down.
Mary Jane takes a summer nannying job with Cones and their precocious five year old daughter Izzy. What she doesn’t know is Dr. Cone is psychiatrist who specializes in addictions. When a rock star and his famous wife move into the Cone’s house for a 24 hour a day intensive therapy to kick his heroin addiction Mary Jane’s eyes are opened to a completely different world.
MARY JANE is a celebration of what family is. It’s also a book about letting go and learning how to really love each other despite their flaws and to embrace your own talent and creativity.
— Kathleen

Description

“I LOVED this novel….If you have ever sung along to a hit on the radio, in any decade, then you will devour Mary Jane at 45 rpm.” —Nick Hornby
Almost Famous meets Daisy Jones & The Six in this funny, wise, and tender novel about a fourteen-year-old girl’s coming of age in 1970s Baltimore, caught between her straight-laced family and the progressive family she nannies for—who happen to be secretly hiding a famous rock star and his movie star wife for the summer.
In 1970s Baltimore, fourteen-year-old Mary Jane loves cooking with her mother, singing in her church choir, and enjoying her family’s subscription to the Broadway Showtunes of the Month record club. Shy, quiet, and bookish, she’s glad when she lands a summer job as a nanny for the daughter of a local doctor. A respectable job, Mary Jane’s mother says. In a respectable house.
The house may look respectable on the outside, but inside it’s a literal and figurative mess: clutter on every surface, Impeachment: Now More Than Ever bumper stickers on the doors, cereal and takeout for dinner. And even more troublesome (were Mary Jane’s mother to know, which she does not): the doctor is a psychiatrist who has cleared his summer for one important job—helping a famous rock star dry out. A week after Mary Jane starts, the rock star and his movie star wife move in.
Over the course of the summer, Mary Jane introduces her new household to crisply ironed clothes and a family dinner schedule, and has a front-row seat to a liberal world of sex, drugs, and rock and roll (not to mention group therapy). Caught between the lifestyle she’s always known and the future she’s only just realized is possible, Mary Jane will arrive at September with a new idea about what she wants out of life, and what kind of person she’s going to be.
About the Author

Jessica Anya Blau was born in Boston and raised in Southern California. Her novels have been featured on The Today Show, CNN and NPR, and in Cosmo, Vanity Fair, Bust, Time Out, Oprah Summer Reads and other national publications. Jessica’s short stories and essays have been published in numerous magazines, journals and anthologies. Jessica co-wrote the script for Love on the Run starring Frances Fisher and Steve Howey. She sometimes works as a ghost writer and has taught writing at Johns Hopkins University, Goucher College and The Fashion Institute of Technology. Jessica lives in New York.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Robert Ritchie, The Lure of the Beach
2021-05-13 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Robert C. Ritchie will be in conversation with Gary Griggs about Ritchie’s fascinating new book, The Lure of the Beach: A Global History—a chronicle of humanity’s history with the coast, taking us from the seaside pleasure palaces of Roman elites and the aquatic rituals of medieval pilgrims, to the venues of modern resort towns and beyond.
Register for this free Crowdcast event by clicking here!
This is a free event. The featured book may be preordered below. You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!
Ritchie traces the contours of the material and social economies of the beach throughout time, covering changes in the social status of beach goers, the technology of transport, and the development of fashion (from nudity to Victorianism and back again), as well as the geographic spread of modern beach-going from England to France, across the Mediterranean, and from nineteenth-century America to the world. And as climate change and rising sea levels erode the familiar faces of our coasts, we are poised for a contemporary reckoning with our relationship—and responsibilities—to our beaches and their ecosystems. The Lure of the Beach demonstrates that whether as a commodified pastoral destination, a site of ecological resplendency, or a flashpoint between private ownership and public access, the history of the beach is a human one that deserves to be told now more than ever before.
Robert C. Ritchie is Senior Research Associate at the Huntington Library and author of Captain Kidd and the War Against the Pirates.
Gary Griggs is Distinguished Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences at the University of California Santa Cruz. Giggs has taught at U.C. Santa Cruz for 53 years and served as the Director of the University’s Institute of Marine Sciences for 26 years where he led the development of the Coastal Science Campus. His work has focused on the coast of California and includes coastal processes, hazards, and the impacts of climate change and sea-level rise. He recently published his 12th book.

On Awakening Your Inner Shaman
2021-05-14 12:00 - 13:30 | Virtual
The stress, conflict, and crises of the outer world are a signal: the time has come to awaken your inner shaman. However, you don’t need to be initiated into concealed mysteries to answer the call from Spirit. Marcela Lobos, one of the world’s most respected shamanic teachers, teaches us how to use the maps offered by the shamanic Medicine Wheel and the hero’s journey to activate our inner wisdom and live a self-realized existence of discovery, healing, and wholeness.
From her war-torn childhood, her initiation with the shamans of the Andes, and her life today as a teacher and medicine woman, Marcela’s story offers flesh-and-bones context for each step on the archetypal journey to Self. Her story is also an invitation to step out of your ordinary life and take the first steps on your quest for spiritual understanding and deep transformation.
Join CIIS faculty Susana Bustos for a conversation with Marcela as she talks about her latest book, Awakening Your Inner Shaman: A Woman’s Journey of Self-Discovery through the Medicine Wheel, and learn to walk the Medicine Path to find your own power and inner beauty.
Please Note: This live online conversation will have ASL interpretation.
Free, suggested donation of $10.
https://www.ciis.edu/public-programs/event-calendar/lobos-marcela-may-14-2021 ppforte@ciis.edu 415-575-6175

Virtual Event: Kristin Hersh and Black Francis
2021-05-14 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Friday, May 14 at 6pm PT when Kristin Hersh is joined by Black Francis to discuss her latest book, Seeing Sideways: A Memoir of Music and Motherhood, on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89661762829

About Seeing Sideways
A sequel to the critically acclaimed Rat Girl, this beautifully written memoir takes readers on an emotional journey through the author’s life as she reflects on thirty years of music and motherhood. Hersh’s follow up to the bookseller favorite, Don’t Suck, Don’t Die

Doony, Ryder, Wyatt, Bodhi. The names of Kristin Hersh’s sons are the only ones included in her new memoir, Seeing Sideways. As the book unfolds and her sons’ voices rise from its pages, it becomes clear why: these names tell the story of her life.

This story begins in 1990, when Hersh is the leader of the indie rock group Throwing Muses, touring steadily, and the mother of a young son, Doony. The chapters that follow reveal a woman and mother whose life and career grow and change with each of her sons: the story of a custody battle for Doony is told alongside that of Hersh’s struggles with her record company and the resulting PTSD; the tale of breaking free from her record label stands in counterpoint to her recounting of her pregnancy with Ryder; a period of writer’s block coincides with the development of Wyatt as an artist and the family’s loss of their home; and finally, soon after Bodhi’s arrival, Hersh and her boys face crises from which only strange angels can save them.

Punctuated with her own song lyrics, Seeing Sideways is a memoir about a life strange enough to be fiction, but so raw and moving that it can only be real.

About Kristin Hersh
Kristin Hersh is a solo artist and founding member of the bands Throwing Muses and 50 Foot Wave. She is the author of Don’t Suck, Don’t Die: Giving Up Vic Chesnutt, and Rat Girl, which was named one of the ten best rock memoirs ever written by Rolling Stone.

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #58
2021-05-14 18:00 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States
90 minutes
30 readers
3 minutes each
On Zoom!
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!
Sign up to read here:
https://forms.gle/4nYSi5fLNyo229Lj9
If you enjoy spaces like this and can swing it in these tight times, please consider supporting us via:
1) the Cash App to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress;
2) donating via the “ticket” option here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/…/nomadic-press-weekly…; OR
3) donating through the website at www.nomadicpress.org/donate
We have a short goal for the evening of $150.
Pandemic times continue in 2021 and we continue to gather our community virtually across state and country lines. Join us to read, join us to listen. All are welcome.
Hosted by Nazelah Jamison (with Tula Biederman on tech). It’s a continuing experiment, and we hope you can join us!
Our safe space process still applies to our collective virtual space, so please read this by visiting https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess.
Zoom Joining Info
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Weekly Virtual Open Mic
Time: Jan 1, 2021 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Every week on Fri, until Dec 10, 2021, 50 occurrence(s)
Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.
Weekly: https://us02web.zoom.us/…/tZcudeqoqjIiE9fnl7dxuB…/ics…
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83323049893
Meeting ID: 833 2304 9893
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Rikki Ducornet and Jeff VanderMeer
2021-05-14 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Jeff VanderMeer joins Rikki Ducornet for a conversation about her new novel, Trafik (Coffee House Press).
“Surrealism meets space opera in Trafik, Rikki Ducornet’s startlingly original look at a post-human and non-human pairing wandering through space while obsessed with the scattered fragments of a world they never knew. At once funny and absurd, Trafik peers at our own time through the lens of the future to reveal what we should regret losing and what would be better gone.” —Brian Evenson
This free event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Trafik
From the singularly inventive mind of Rikki Ducornet, Trafik is a buoyant voyage through outer space and inner longing, transposing human experiences of passion, loss, and identity into a post-Earth universe.
Quiver, a mostly-human astronaut, takes refuge from the monotony of harvesting minerals on remote asteroids by running through a virtual reality called the Lights, chasing visions of an elusive red-haired beauty. Her high-strung robot partner, Mic, pilots their Wobble and entertains himself exploring his records of the obliterated planet Earth, searching for Al Pacino trivia, unfamiliar recipes, and high fashion trends. But when an accident destroys their cargo, Quiver and Mic go rogue, setting off on a madcap journey through outer space towards an idyllic destination: the planet Trafik.
About the writers
Rikki Ducornet is a transdisciplinary artist. Her work is animated by an interest in nature, Eros, tyranny and the transcendent capacities of the creative imagination. She is a poet, fiction writer, essayist, and artist, and her fiction has been translated into fifteen languages. Her art has been exhibited internationally, most recently with Amnesty International’s traveling exhibit I Welcome, focused on the refugee crisis. She has received numerous fellowships and awards including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard College Arts and Letters Award, the Prix Guerlain, a Critics’ Choice Award, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. Her novel The Jade Cabinet was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Jeff VanderMeer is the author of Dead Astronauts, Borne, and The Southern Reach Trilogy, the first volume of which, Annihilation, won the Nebula Award and the Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Alex Garland starring Natalie Portman. VanderMeer speaks and writes frequently about issues relating to climate change. He grew up in the Fiji Islands and now lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, Ann VanderMeer, and their cats, plants, and bird feeders.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Julia Alvarez, Afterlife
2021-05-16 11:00 - 13:00 | CA
Bestselling author Julia Alvarez (In the Time of the Butterflies, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents) will be in conversation with Sylvanna Falcón about Alvarez’s most recent novel, Afterlife, now available in paperback. This event is cosponsored by Research Center for the Americas at UC Santa Cruz.
Register for this free Crowdcast by clicking here!

This is a free event. The book may be ordered below.
You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!
In Alvarez’s first adult novel in almost fifteen years, Antonia Vega, the immigrant writer at the center of Afterlife, has had the rug pulled out from under her. She has just retired from the college where she taught English when her beloved husband, Sam, suddenly dies. And then more jolts: her bighearted but unstable sister disappears, and Antonia returns home one evening to find a pregnant, undocumented teenager on her doorstep. Antonia has always sought direction in the literature she loves—lines from her favorite authors play in her head like a soundtrack—but now she finds that the world demands more of her than words.
Afterlife is a compact, nimble, and sharply droll novel. Set in this political moment of tribalism and distrust, it asks: What do we owe those in crisis in our families, including—maybe especially—members of our human family? How do we live in a broken world without losing faith in one another or ourselves? And how do we stay true to those glorious souls we have lost?
“A stunning work of art that reminds readers Alvarez is, and always has been, in a class of her own.” —Elizabeth Acevedo, National Book Award-winning author of the New York Times bestseller The Poet X
Julia Alvarez left the Dominican Republic for the United States in 1960 at the age of ten. She is the author of six novels, three books of nonfiction, three collections of poetry, and eleven books for children and young adults. She has taught and mentored writers in schools and communities across America and, until her retirement in 2016, was a writer in residence at Middlebury College. Her work has garnered wide recognition, including a Latina Leader Award in Literature from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute, the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, the Woman of the Year by Latina magazine, and inclusion in the New York Public Library’s program “The Hand of the Poet: Original Manuscripts by 100 Masters, from John Donne to Julia Alvarez.” In the Time of the Butterflies, with over one million copies in print, was selected by the National Endowment for the Arts for its national Big Read program, and in 2013 President Obama awarded Alvarez the National Medal of Arts in recognition of her extraordinary storytelling.
Sylvanna M. Falcón is an Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American and Latino Studies, Director of the Research Center for the Americas, and founder/director of the Human Rights Investigations Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Power Interrupted: Antiracist and Feminist Activists inside the United Nations, [University of Washington Press, 2016; winner of the National Women’s Studies Association’s Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Award] and the co-editor of Precarity and Belonging: Labor, Migration, and Noncitizenship [Rutgers University Press, 2021] and New Directions in Feminism and Human Rights [Routledge, 2011]. She is a former UN consultant to the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women.
Founded in 1992, the Research Center for the Americas at UC Santa Cruz is the first in the UC system to advance a broad program of interdisciplinary research that brings together Chicanx/Latinx and Latin American Studies.

Memory, Meaning and Memoir
2021-05-16 14:00 - 15:30 | online, CA, United States
Presented by the Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center as part of the 24th annual United States of Asian America Festival.

A presentation of readings by a diverse, intergenerational, cross-section of writers, who include visual artists, educators, activists and professionals from the AAPI community, who will share their stories and poems, ranging from immigration stories and family memoir to gender and racial oppression, anti-Asian hate and police violence, written during the course of a writing workshop conducted by poet-playwright, Genny Lim. The online APICC workshops have met every week, throughout the pandemic. These memoir pieces were written in response to weekly writing prompts provided by Genny Lim. All levels and ages, from emerging to advanced writers, were welcomed and encouraged to explore and develop their individual voices and craft in a safe and communal atmosphere that allowed for constructive critique, dialogue, mutual support and growth.

::READERS::
Leila Beltran
Sharleen Boummer
Vickie Ya Rong Chang
Carole Chinn Morales
Susan Hayase
Susan Kitazawa
Mei Lam
Mirah Lucas
Grace Morizawa
Shizue Shikuma
Leon Sun
Casimiro Tolentino
Leslie Yee-Murata

ABOUT GENNY LIM
Genny Lim is San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate emeritus. Lim’s award-winning play, Paper Angels, was the first Asian American play aired on PBS’s American Playhouse in 1985 and has been produced throughout the U.S., Canada and China. She is author of five poetry collections, Winter Place, Child of War, Paper Gods and Rebels, KRA!, La Morte Del Tempo, and co-author of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, winner of the American Book Award and an anthology of Senior Asian American memoirs, Window: Glimpses of Our Storied Past. She has worked with past Jazz legends, such as Max Roach, Herbie Lewis and Eddie Marshall and long-time collaborators, Jon Jang, John Santos, Francis Wong and Del Sol String Quartet.

ABOUT THE UNITED STATES OF ASIAN AMERICA FESTIVAL
This year’s 24th annual United States of Asian American Festival (USAAF) presents over 20 different programs reflecting the artistic accomplishments and cultural diversity of San Francisco’s Pacific Islander and Asian American communities. USAAF showcases artists representing a diverse range of ethnic and cultural groups and aims to heighten the visibility of Asian and Pacific Islander (API) artists working in all disciplines – theater, music, dance, film, literature, visual arts, and more! Our goal is to nurture and empower these groups to be self-sufficient while providing the support they need to grow.
This year’s theme, Forging Our Futures – SoMa & Chinatow n, explores how we are fostering recovery, resilience and regeneration in our communities, what place-making and community building looks like, past, present and future and how we’re imagining and manifesting empowered future for ourselves and our communities.

USAAF 2021 is funded by the San Francisco Arts Commission , San Francisco Grants for the Arts , California Arts Council , Fleishhacker Foundation , Zellerbach Family Foundation , startsmall and National Endowment for the Arts .

Michael McClure: East Coast Memorial & Tribute
2021-05-16 14:00 - 16:00 | CA
Please join The Poetry Project and City Lights as we celebrate and remember Michael McClure, poet and beloved friend.
Featuring readings and remembrances from: Ammiel Alcalay, David Brazil, Garrett Caples, Francesco Clemente, David Henderson, Bob Holman, Mary Norbert Korte, Filip Marinovich, Amy Evans McClure, Jackson Meazle, Uche Nduka, Lee Ranaldo, Ed Sanders, Declan Spring, Amber Tamblyn, and Jeffrey Yang
Event is free but requires registration.
(Register Here)
Michael McClure (1932-2020) was an award-winning American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he was one of the five poets who participated in the Six Gallery reading that featured the public debut of Allen Ginsberg’s landmark poem “Howl.” A key figure of the Beat Generation, McClure is immortalized as Pat McLear in Jack Kerouac’s novels The Dharma Bums and Big Sur. He also participated in the 60s counterculture alongside musicians like Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison. He taught for many years at California College of the Arts and lived with his wife, Amy, in the San Francisco Bay Area.
This event follows a series of celebrations for Michael McClure’s life and work. Here is the registration link for the launch of Michael McClure’s final book on May 8 with Anne Waldman and Eileen Myles; and here is the registration link with West Coast celebrants and friends in tribute to McClure on May 9.
Please note you must be logged in to your Eventbrite account to access the event’s zoom link. We will begin letting people into the reading from Eventbrite a few minutes before the start of the event. Please also note that if you are not logged into Eventbrite, you will receive a notification reading “You don’t have access to this event” when you click on the event link. This is an automatically generated notification indicating that you need to login, using the email address with which you registered for the event. You can do so using the button located directly below the notification. If you have any questions, have trouble accessing your Eventbrite account, or have trouble accessing Zoom after the event’s listed start time, please contact Poetry Project staff directly at info@poetryproject.org
The Poetry Project is committed to making our event programming inclusive and accessible for individuals with different experiences, and are continuously working to improve and expand upon accessibility measures. Our online broadcasts feature live transcription and are presented on broadcasts compatible with most screen readers. If you have a question about either of these resources, or an accessibility measure we haven’t described, please contact us at rm@poetryproject.org.

Lone Glen: de la Perrière/Hong/Hume
2021-05-18 17:30 - 18:30 | online, CA, United States
On Tuesday May 18th, the Lone Glen series will feature writers Donna de la Perrière, Anna Maria Hong, and Christine Hume. Join us on zoom to hear their forms reverberate from two coasts. This 31st Lone Glen will “open doors” at 5:30 pm PST and get going by 5:40. Bring your sense of humor, and a friend!

Lone Glen is a quarterly reading and performance series dedicated to fostering all writing and art genres within a spirit of collaborative, down-to-earth, and inclusive creative community. Launched in December 2011 in an apartment in the Mission District of San Francisco, Lone Glen was later an Oakland basement operation for several years before taking root at the Temescal Art Center in Oakland and The Bindery in San Francisco. We are hosting several virtual events in 2021.
About the writers:
Donna de la Perrière is the author of five collections of poetry: three books — Works of Love & Terror (2019), Saint Erasure (2010), and True Crime (2009), all from Talisman House — as well as two chapbooks, Night Calendar (Omerta, 2018) and First Love (The Poetry Center Chapbook Exchange Collection, 2013). Her work has appeared in journals such as Brooklyn Rail, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, and Volt, as well as anthologies such as No Gender: Reflections on the Life and Work of kari edwards (2009) and Bay Poetics (2006). The recipient of a 2009 Fund for Poetry Award and a 2016 Creative Work Grant from Intersection for the Arts, she founded and curated the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series (2004 – 2019) in San Francisco. She teaches at San Francisco State University, and lives in Oakland with poet Joseph Lease and cats Whitman and Dickinson. Read more at www.donnadelaperriere.net.
Anna Maria Hong is the author of three recent books: Age of Glass, winner of the Poetry Society of America’s Norma Farber First Book Award and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center’s First Book Poetry Competition, the novella H & G (Sidebrow Books), winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation’s Clarissa Dalloway Prize, and Fablesque, winner of Tupelo Press’s Berkshire Prize. A former Bunting Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, she has poetry and fiction published and forthcoming in publications including The Nation, Colorado Review, The Common, Shenandoah, Plume, Ecotone, Smartish Pace, The Hopkins Review, Poetry, Poetry Daily, Best New Poets, and The Best American Poetry. She is an Assistant Professor at Mount Holyoke College. https://www.annamariahong.net/
Christine Hume is the author of an experimental memoir in the form of three interlinked essays, Saturation Project (Solid Objects, 2021), as well as three books of poetry and six chapbooks. She recently edited a special issue of the American Book Review on Girlhood (April 2020) and finished a new manuscript on two despised subjects in America, sex offenders and women’s bodies. She is professor of English at Eastern Michigan University. https://christinehume.com/

Virtual Event: Kevin McIlovy and Peter Orner
2021-05-18 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Tuesday, May 18 at 6pm PT when Kevin McIlvoy discusses his latest novel, One Kind Favor, with Peter Orner on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88148839841

About One Kind Favor
Based loosely on a tragic real-life incident in 2014, ONE KIND FAVOR explores the consequences of the lynching of a young black man in rural North Carolina. After the lynching of Lincoln Lennox is discovered and subsequently covered up in the small fictional community of Cord, North Carolina, the ghosts who frequent the all-in-one bar and consignment shop take on the responsibility of unearthing the truth and acting as the memory for the town that longs to forget and continues to hate. A reimagined Kathy Acker, the groundbreaking literary icon, engages Lincoln in a love triangle and brings a transgressive post-punk esthetic to the mission. The down-the-rabbit-hole satirical storytelling of ONE KIND FAVOR, Kevin McIlvoy’s sixth novel, echoes Appalachian ghost stories in which haunting presences will, at last, have their way.

About Kevin McIlvoy
Kevin McIlvoy is the author of seven previous books: five novels, a book of short stories, and a book of prose poetry. He is a retired Regents Professor of Creative Writing from New Mexico State University and teaches at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program in Creative Writing. His short fiction has appeared in Harper’s, Southern Review, Ploughshares, Missouri Review, and other literary magazines. He lives in Asheville, North Carolina.
