LEGACY OF POETRY SLAM: FINALS
2018-03-22 18:00 - 20:30 UTC | Student Union Theater, San Jose State University, 1 Washington Square, San Jose , CA, 95192, United States
The Legacy of Poetry Slam’s purpose is to promote poetry as a vital art form with a broad authorship. The diversity of poetry in the United States and in California by writers born outside the United States or who are the children or grandchildren of immigrant families facilitates cultural awareness and cross-cultural communication and understanding.
Our 8 finalists will perform their poem in front of a great audience and judges at the SJSU Student Union Auditorium. So, come out and support these amazing poets who will pour out a myriad of words in form of poems around our theme: migration and diaspora.

Legacy of Poetry Slam: Finals
2018-03-22 18:00 - 20:30 | Student Union Theater, San Jose State University, 1 Washington Square, San Jose , CA, 95192, United States
The Legacy of Poetry Slam’s purpose is to promote poetry as a vital art form with a broad authorship. The diversity of poetry in the United States and in California by writers born outside the United States or who are the children or grandchildren of immigrant families facilitates cultural awareness and cross-cultural communication and understanding.
Our 8 finalists will perform their poem in front of a great audience, judges and emcee Mighty Mike McGee, Santa Clara County Poet Laureate. So, come out and support these amazing poets who will pour out a myriad of words in form of poems around our theme: migration and diaspora.

Matthew Dickman and Emily Strelow
2018-03-22 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Matthew Dickman celebrates the release of a new poetry collection
Wonderland
from W.W. Norton
Emily Strelow celebrates the release of her new novel
The Wild Birds
from Rare Bird Lit
about Wonderland
Luminous and hypnotic, this dynamic collection explores the dark edges of childhood, violence, race, class, and masculinity, by one of the most fearless poets of his generation.
“Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure” (Major Jackson), award-winning poet Matthew Dickman returns with a collection that engages the traces of his own living past, suffusing these poems with ghosts of longing, shame, and vulnerability. In the southeast Portland neighborhood of Dickman’s youth, parents are out of control and children are in chaos. With grief, anger, and, ultimately, understanding, Dickman confronts a childhood of ambient violence, well-intentioned but warped family relations, confining definitions of identity, and the deprivation of this particular Portland neighborhood in the 1980s. Wonderland reminds us that, while these neighborhoods are filled with guns, skateboards, fights, booze, and heroin, and home to punk rockers, skinheads, poor kids, and single moms, they are also places of innocence and love.
Luminous and hypnotic, this dynamic collection explores the dark edges of childhood, violence, race, class, and masculinity, by one of the most fearless poets of his generation.
“Known for poems of universality of feeling, expressive lyricism of reflection, and heartrending allure” (Major Jackson), award-winning poet Matthew Dickman returns with a collection that engages the traces of his own living past, suffusing these poems with ghosts of longing, shame, and vulnerability. In the southeast Portland neighborhood of Dickman’s youth, parents are out of control and children are in chaos. With grief, anger, and, ultimately, understanding, Dickman confronts a childhood of ambient violence, well-intentioned but warped family relations, confining definitions of identity, and the deprivation of this particular Portland neighborhood in the 1980s. Wonderland reminds us that, while these neighborhoods are filled with guns, skateboards, fights, booze, and heroin, and home to punk rockers, skinheads, poor kids, and single moms, they are also places of innocence and love.
about The Wild Birds
Cast adrift in 1870s San Francisco after the death of her mother, a girl named Olive disguises herself as a boy and works as a lighthouse keeper’s assistant on the Farallon Islands to escape the dangers of a world unkind to young women. In 1941, nomad Victor scours the Sierras searching for refuge from a home to which he never belonged. And in the present day, precocious fifteen year-old Lily struggles, despite her willfulness, to find a place for herself amongst the small town attitudes of Burning Hills, Oregon. Living alone with her hardscrabble mother Alice compounds the problem―though their unique relationship to the natural world ties them together, Alice keeps an awful secret from her daughter, one that threatens to ignite the tension growing between them.
Emily Strelow’s mesmerizing debut stitches together a sprawling saga of the feral Northwest across farmlands and deserts and generations: an American mosaic alive with birdsong and gunsmoke, held together by a silver box of eggshells―a long-ago gift from a mother to her daughter. Written with grace, grit, and an acute knowledge of how the past insists upon itself, The Wild Birds is a radiant and human story about the shelters we find and make along our crooked paths home.
Matthew Dickman is the author of All-American Poem (American Poetry Review/ Copper Canyon Press, 2008), 50 American Plays (co-written with his twin brother Michael Dickman, Copper Canyon Press, 2012), Mayakovsky’s Revolver (W.W. Norton & Co, 2012), Wish You Were Here (Spork Press, 2013), 24 HOURS (One Star Press, Paris, France, 2014), Brother (Faber&Faber UK, 2016), and the forthcoming poetry collection Wonderland (W.W. Norton & Co, 2018) He is the recipient of The May Sarton Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Kate Tufts Award from Claremont College, and a 2015 Guggenheim. His poems have appeared in Poetry London, McSweeny’s, The London Review of Books, Esquire Magazine, Best American Poetry and The New Yorker among others.
Emily Strelow was born and raised in Oregon’s Willamette Valley but has lived all over the West and now, the Midwest. For the last decade she combined teaching writing with doing seasonal avian field biology with her husband. While doing field jobs she camped and wrote in remote areas in the desert, mountains and by the ocean. She is a mother to two boys, a naturalist, and writer. The Wild Birds is her first novel.

InsideStoryTime: Symptoms
2018-03-22 19:00 - 21:00 | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Teadings from Pola Oloixarac (Savage Theories), Raina Leon (Profeta Without Refuge), Anne-christine d’Adesky (The Pox Lover), Eryk Salvaggio (Antlers), and Faruk Ates.

Kirstin Chen / Bury What We Cannot Take
2018-03-22 19:30 - 21:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery is thrilled to host Kirstin Chen as she launches her new novel Bury What We Cannot Take. Join us!
One summer day in 1957, nine-year-old San San and her twelve-year-old brother, Ah Liam, discover their grandmother taking a hammer to a framed portrait of Chairman Mao. To prove his loyalty to the Party, Ah Liam reports his grandmother to the authorities. But his belief in doing the right thing sets in motion a terrible chain of events. Now the family must flee their home on Drum Wave Islet, which sits just a few hundred meters across the channel from mainland China. But when their mother goes to procure visas for safe passage to Hong Kong, the government will only issue them on the condition that she leave behind one of her children as proof of the family’s intention to return. San San’s family must grapple with their agonizing decision, its far-reaching consequences, and their hope for redemption.
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“This beautifully plotted, suspenseful, and deeply compassionate novel shows Kirstin Chen, whose work I’ve long admired, at her absolute finest. Bury What We Cannot Take is a vital book.”—Laura van den Berg, author of Find Me
“San San’s family flee Drum Wave Islet, leaving her behind. An epic story follows that explores gender roles, oppressive ideologies, sacrifice, and what it means to be free, all through the microcosm of one family. This is a book set in the past, on the other side of the world, that is more than relevant in today’s America. Chen delivers a page turner that holds a historical mirror up to our fuzzy, complicit world.”—Matthew Salessas, author of The Hundred Year Flood
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Kirstin Chen is the author of the novels Bury What We Cannot Take, forthcoming from Little A in 2018, and Soy Sauce for Beginners, a Kindle First selection, an O, The Oprah Magazine “book to pick up now,” and a Glamour book club pick. She has received awards from the Steinbeck Fellows Program, Sewanee, Hedgebrook, and the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference. She is the fall 2017 NTU-NAC National Writer in Residence in Singapore.
—
Please note: This event will be at The Bindery, at 1727 Haight. RSVP appreciated but not required.
If you cannot attend this event but would like to request a signed copy of Bury What We Cannot Take, order here and put your request in the comments field.

Michael David Lukas
2018-03-22 19:30 - 21:00 | Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
reads from his new novel, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo.
“A beautiful, richly textured novel, ambitious and delicately crafted.”– Rabih Alameddine

Thursday, March 22, 2018 – 7:30pm

In this spellbinding novel, a young man journeys from California to Cairo to unravel centuries-old family secrets.
Joseph, a literature student at Berkeley, is the son of a Jewish mother and a Muslim father. One day, a mysterious package arrives on his doorstep, pulling him into a mesmerizing adventure to uncover the tangled history that binds the two sides of his family. For generations, the men of the al-Raqb family have served as watchmen of the storied Ibn Ezra Synagogue in Old Cairo, built at the site where the infant Moses was taken from the Nile. Joseph learns of his ancestor Ali, a Muslim orphan who nearly a thousand years earlier was entrusted as the first watchman of the synagogue and became enchanted by its legendary–perhaps magical–Ezra Scroll. The story of Joseph’s family is entwined with that of the British twin sisters Agnes and Margaret, who in 1897 depart their hallowed Cambridge halls on a mission to rescue sacred texts that have begun to disappear from the synagogue.
The Last Watchman of Old Cairo is a moving page-turner of a novel from acclaimed storyteller Michael David Lukas. This tightly woven multigenerational tale illuminates the tensions that have torn communities apart and the unlikely forces–potent magic, forbidden love–that boldly attempt to bridge that divide.
Michael David Lukas is the author of the internationally bestselling novel The Oracle of Stamboul, which was a finalist for the California Book Award, the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association Book of the Year Award, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and has been published in fifteen languages. He has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a student at the American University of Cairo, and a night-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv. A graduate of Brown University, he has received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and his writing has appeared in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He works in the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley and lives in Oakland.

Two Languages / One Community w/ Poets Chun Yu and Michael Warr
2018-03-23 13:00 - 14:00 | Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 9th St Ste 290, Oakland, CA, 94607, United States
Over the course of three workshops, participants will be guided by the authors through structured exercises, individually, and in small groups, with the goal of supporting participants as they chronicle their experiences through creative storytelling. Participants will write an original short poem or memory, which will be translated into English and Chinese, published, and shared at a public culminating event at OACC in May. The workshops will be conducted at OACC on Fridays 2/23, 3/23, and 4/13 from 1-2p, with optional time from 2-3p for participants to continue writing or working together. Workshops are limited to ten participants who can commit to attending the entire series, and who would ideally be willing to share their work both verbally at a culminating event at OACC in May 2018, and in print.
The poem “Black Star” based on the photograph of Michael Warr’s mother, Gaynell Warr, has been translated into Mandarin by Chun Yu.
Sign-up online at https://tinyurl.com/2Lang1Community or call 510-637-0455. Registration deadline noon on Wed. 2/21/18.

Gearbox Poetry
2018-03-24 14:00 - 16:00 | Gearbox Gallery, 770 nW. Grand, Oakland
Please join us for an afternoon of poetry!
We meet the fourth Saturday every month.
Gearbox Poetry
Saturday, March 24, 2018
at Gearbox Gallery
770 West Grand Avenue, Oakland.
Poetry Feature: Clive Matson. Clive began his career as a poet among the Beats in 1960s Greenwich Village. He was mentored and influenced by Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners,
Diane di Prima and Herbert Huncke. He is the author of 9 volumes of poetry and the creative writing text “Let The Crazy Child Write!” and has been a creative writing teacher for 30 years. He frequently performs his works in Bay Area reading venues and will perform excerpts from his newest poem, “Hello Paradise, Paradise Good-bye”. The long poem was premiered last year in Paris, France, the city of Climate Accord, and treats the topic of modern day threats of extinction and civil unrest. Clive is the recipient of the Berkeley Lifetime Achievement in Poetry Award in 2012, was named the Best East Bay Writing Teacher in 2006 and received a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles National Award in 2003. To learn more, visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Matson and http://matsonpoet.com/
Please join us for Clive’s reading, along with an open mic.
The poetry reading is from 2 – 4 pm, with open mic sign-up starting at 1:30.
Hosted by David Zeltzer, dzeltzer@acm.org.

National Geographic and the White Gaze
2018-03-25 15:30 - 18:00 | DESAI | MATTA GALLERY, CIIS Main Building, 1453 Mission Street, San Francisco, 94103
Please join us for an artists’ talk and book party with Michelle Dizon and Viet Le in conversation with Laura Fantone and Targol Mesbah. In conjunction with the exhibition WHITE GAZE, these artists and scholars will be talking about the role of photography-and specifically the images of National Geographic-in reinforcing racist hierarchies in the cultural imaginary of the West.
WHITE GAZE, an exhibition of works by Michelle Dizon with the poetry of Viet Le. deconstructs an archive of National Geographic magazines to explore the visual and narrative structure of the publications’s White Gaze, the Western-centric bias that informed its editorial decision-making for decades. Drawing from her archive of magazines, Dizon uses poetic subtraction, the erasure of most of the text on the page, to give us back the original language in fragments or threads that together write a decolonial counterpoint to the Western-centric focus of the pictures.
In April National Geographic will publish an issue that explicitly embarks on a reckoning with its past and its complicity in reinforcing the racism of the white American narrative through a photographic language. Join us to talk about this history and explore the implications of the magazine’s decision.
White Gaze has also been published as a book by Bay Area-based Sming Sming Books, Chicago-based Candor Arts, and Los Angeles-based at lands edge, and includes text by Viet Le, who uses Dizon’s work as a starting point for a poetic exploration of the legacies of war and empire.

The Racket #17 : Ghosts
2018-03-26 19:00 - 20:00 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
We’re seven months from Halloween, but what the hell, let’s talk about GHOSTS. The ones that haunt mansions, the ones that haunt our pasts, the ones that linger just behind our shadows.

Luis Alberto Urrea
2018-03-26 19:00 - 20:30 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz , CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop welcomes award winning author Luis Alberto Urrea for a book discussion and signing of The House of Broken Angels.
In his final days, beloved and ailing patriarch Miguel Angel De La Cruz, known affectionately as Big Angel, has summoned his entire clan for one last legendary birthday party. But as the party approaches, his mother, nearly one hundred, dies herself, leading to a farewell doubleheader. Across one bittersweet weekend in their San Diego neighborhood, the revelers mingle among the palm trees and cacti, celebrating the lives of Big Angel and his mother, and recounting the many tales that have passed into family lore, the acts both ordinary and heroic that brought them to a fraught and sublime country and allowed them to flourish in the land they have come to call home.The story of the De La Cruzes is the American story. This indelible portrait of a complex family reminds us of what it means to be the first generation and to live two lives across one border. Teeming with brilliance and humor, authentic at every turn, The House of Broken Angels is Luis Alberto Urrea at his best, and it cements his reputation as a storyteller of the first rank.
“[Urrea]’s most personal book… One of the most vivid and engrossing family epics in the last twenty years.” —Dave Eggers
“In one of the spring’s must-read fiction titles, Luis Alberto Urrea tells a layered, complex, galvanizingly authentic story of the Mexican-American immigrant experience and what it means to live two lives across one border.” —Entertainment Weekly
In 2017, Luis Alberto Urrea received an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, the latest prestigious honor in a long and distinguished career, one full of accolades. His books, which have frequently been listed as among the best of the year by numerous publications, have also been finalists for the Pulitzer Prize (The Devil’s Highway) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (The Water Museum); winners of an American Book Award (Nobody’s Son), the Lannan Literary Award (The Devil’s Highway again), and the Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize (The Hummingbird’s Daughter); and a Big Read selection by the National Endowment for the Arts (Into the Beautiful North).
This free event will take place at Bookshop Santa Cruz. Open seating. Seats are generally set up one hour prior to the event’s start time.

THE RACKET! #17
2018-03-26 19:00 - 20:30 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Details soon!
Hosted by Noah B. Sanders

Writers on Writing: Michael Nava
2018-03-26 19:00 - 21:45 | San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
Michael Nava reads from and discusses his fiction work. His latest book is Street People: A Novella (Korima Press, 2017). “Nava writes an excellent mystery featuring crisp dialogue, diabolical suspense and a subtle wit, but it’s his unflinching look at what it’s like to be an openly gay man today that makes this series special.” — Booklist. Free.

Location: Humanities Building, Room 211

Directions: View on Google Maps

Nava is the author of an acclaimed series of seven crime novels featuring gay, Latino criminal defense lawyer Henry Rios. The Rios novels won six Lambda Literary awards and Nava was dubbed “one of our best” by The New York Times. In 2001 he won the Bill Whitehead Lifetime Achievement Award in LGBT literature. A native Californian and the grandson of Mexican immigrants, he divides his time between San Francisco and Palm Springs. Nava has also had a distinguished legal career, having earned his law degree from Stanford University. He retired from the law in July 2016.

The Creative Writing Department opens its Writers on Writing course to the public this spring. Taught by Dodie Bellamy, the course features faculty and visiting writers reading from their works and discussing their creative process.

Fady Joudah
2018-03-27 17:30 - 19:00 | Mills Hall Living Room, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland , CA, 94613, United States
Fady Joudah’s fourth poetry collection is Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance. His poetry and translations have earned him numerous national and international prizes, the Yale Series, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Griffin Poetry prize among others. He is a practicing physician of internal medicine in Houston, Texas.

Katherine Applegate
2018-03-27 18:00 - 19:00 | Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park , CA, 94025, United States
Meet beloved author Katherine Applegate and fall in love with Wishtree, a heartwarming story that reveals the powers of love, healing, and community

Red is an oak tree who is many rings old. Red is the neighborhood “wishtree”―people write their wishes on pieces of cloth and tie them to Red’s branches. Along with a crow named Bongo and other animals who seek refuge in Red’s hollows, this wishtree watches over the neighborhood. You might say Red has seen it all. Until a new family moves in. Not everyone is welcoming, and Red’s experience as a wishtree is more important than ever.
Funny, deep, warm, and nuanced, this is Katherine Applegate at her very best―writing from the heart and from a completely unexpected point of view.
Katherine Applegate is the Newbery Medal–winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author of numerous books for young readers, including The One and Only Ivan, Crenshaw, Wishtree, and the Animorphs series.

Songs of Dismantling: Standing as Witness in the 21st Century
2018-03-27 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Poets Randall Mann and Fernando Pérez
read poetry and discuss the poetic experience as a method of cultural healing
moderated by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
A night of reading and discussion where “Standing as witness” is the over-riding theme. An exploration of the demonization and marginalization of the “other” in the U.S. What do we need to admit to ourselves to move beyond injustice and totalitarian impulses. What memes could be useful to us in spreading a message of inclusion. Poetry is explored as a vehicle to transform culture.
Fernando Pérez celebrates the release of a new book of poetry
A Song of Dismantling: Poems
published by University of New Mexico Press
In this dynamic debut collection, Fernando Pérez employs lyric and nonce forms to interrogate identity politics and piece together a complex family history. The book embodies fragmentation in form and story, exploring how migration affects relationships between people of different generations. Pérez invites readers on the journey as his family story unfolds over time and distance.
Randal Mann’s most current collection is titled:
Proprietary
published by Persea Press
Proprietary and critiques corporate culture, depicting (and slyly rebuking) the American materialism that erupted in the 1980s and has metastasized ever since. For years, Randall Mann has been hailed as one of contemporary American poetry’s most daring formalists, expertly using craft as a way of exploring racy subjects with trenchant wit and aplomb.
Fernando Pérez teaches at Bellevue College. His poems have been widely published in literary journals, including Crab Orchard Review, Más Tequila Review, Exquisite Corpse, and Hinchas de Poesia.
Randall Mann is the author of Complaint in the Garden (2004), which won the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry; Breakfast with Thom Gunn (2009), finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the California Book Award; Straight Razor (2013), also a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award; and Proprietary (2017). He is co-author of the textbook Writing Poems (2007). Mann received the 2013 J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize from Poetry. His most recent book is Proprietary: Poems, published by Persea Press.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras is the 2014 recipient of the Mary Tanenbaum Literary Award in Nonfiction from the San Francisco Foundation. She has received awards and support from Bread Loaf, Hedgebrook, the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto, Djerassi Artist Residency, National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, and the San Francisco Arts Commission. Currently, she is working on a memoir about her grandfather, a medicine man from Colombia who it was said could move clouds.

Sébastien Régnier and Barbara Browning / Who the Hell is Imre Lodbrog?
2018-03-27 19:30 - 21:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery welcomes Sébastien Régnier and Barbara Browning for a reading and live music in celebration of their new book, Who the Hell is Imre Lodbrog?. Join us!
A very true love story, told in counterpoint, about friendship, politics and rock n roll.
In Barbara Browning’s eyes, Imre Lodbrog is the greatest aging French rock star you’ve never heard of, with the appeal of “Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan or Serge Gainsbourg on shrooms.” For Imre Lodbrog, music is an alter-ego experience―a late-in-life outlet for a mild-mannered screenwriter deeply shaped by the generation of May ‘68. Both ask the same questions: What revolution has wreaked more havoc and beauty than rock ‘n’ roll? And why do a certain few geniuses inside every revolution go silent and unrecognized?
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Sébastien Régnier is an award-winning screenwriter from France (Kabloonak, Martha Martha).
Barbara Browning has published three novels, including The Gift (or, Techniques of the Body) – a New York Times Editor’s Choice – as well as I’m Trying to Reach You and The Correspondence Artist.

THERE
2018-03-28 08:00 - 17:00 | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
NEXT THERE: THERE 22 – Friday, April 20, 2018, with award-winning Oakland author Nayomi Munaweera, local novelist Yang Huang, East Bay writer Stevan Cavalier and the debut of local musical group Postcapitalism.
THERE (THe Eastbay Reading Extravaganza) is a reading series showcasing emerging and established writers from Oakland and Berkeley, with the occasional San Franciscan. Doug hosts it on the third Friday of each month at Octopus Literary Salon in Uptown Oakland. It also features a live original musical performance by a local musical artist at “halftime” of each month’s reading, and Doug’s famous original LitQuiz literary trivia contest. It’s from 7:00-9:00pm. THERE has been putting the there back in Oakland since 2015!

Ally Carter at the Livermore Public Library
2018-03-28 18:00 - 19:30 | Livermore Public Library, 1188 S. Livermore Ave., Livermore, 94550
Join us as we welcome Ally Carter to the Livermore Public Library for an author talk and book signing!
Ally Carter is the author of the Gallagher Girls, Heist Society, and Embassy Row young adult series. Carter’s new book, Not if I Save You First, comes out on March 27, 2018.
Preorder a copy of Not if I Save You First from Towne Center Books at 925-846-8826 and it will be available for pickup at the signing or at the bookstore on its release date.
Pizza and refreshments will be available while supplies last

Perfectly Queer East Bay Reading "Lesbian Romance Novels"
2018-03-28 19:00 - 20:00 | Laurel Book Store, 1423 Broadway, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Perfectly Queer East Bay presents “Lesbian Romance Novels,” 4 authors reading from new books, Wednesday, March 28, 7pm Laurel Book Store, 1423 Broadway, Oakland. Free admission, free refreshments & door prizes! Our readers: Eliza Andrews, Heather Blackmore, Kathleen Knowles, and Cass Sellars. http://bit.ly/2FZr8tt A free romantic gift for everyone attending!
About the Authors:
Eliza Andrews is an author of novels that feature lesbian and bisexual protagonists. She’s also a personal trainer, a meditator, a sci-fi geek, and a hick from the South who recently moved to Southern California. In addition to Reverie, Eliza’s lesfic titles include To Have Loved & Lost, Anika takes the long way home up soul mountain, and Paradise (a novella).
Heather Blackmore oversees finance for technology startups. In a counter-intuitive move, she got her MSA and CPA with the goal of one day being able to work part-time so she could write. The right and left sides of her brain have been at war ever since. Heather was a Goldie award finalist for debut author and a Rainbow award finalist in the contemporary lesbian romance and debut author categories for her first novel, Like Jazz.
Kathleen Knowles has written her whole life but published for the first time in 2012. Her first novel, Awake Unto Me, won the GCLS 2013 prize for historical romance and was named by Out in Print as one of 2012 Notable Books. She has written six romance novels. The seventh, The Last Time I Saw Her, will be published in June 2018. She is married and she and her spouse and pets live atop one of San Francisco’s forty-nine hills.
Cass Sellars is a certified fraud examiner and criminal justice professional. She has led criminal, financial fraud, and theft investigations. The Lightning Series, including Lightning Strikes and Lightning Chasers, incorporates powerful lesbian characters who fight for justice where wealth and politics are not always the only winning assets. Unexpected Lightning, Book 3, will be released in Fall, 2018. She lives near San Francisco.

Zachary Lazar with special guests The Kitchen Sisters
2018-03-28 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Zachary Lazar with special guests The Kitchen Sisters

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)

The End of the End of the World Word Cabaret - Three Local Authors Read From New Books
2018-03-28 19:00 - 20:30 | 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.
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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)
