Page Poets reading online event at The Green Arcade
2021-03-06 17:00 - 18:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | online
COVID wouldn’t stop Ovid! Or any other poets worth their salt, so please join us for an exciting online reading from The Page Poets Series and The Divers Collection this Saturday, March 6 from 5pm – 6:15.
Featured poets are Katharine Harer, Charlie Pendergast, Stan Stone, Garrett Caples, Mary Julia Klimenko, Tamsin Smith and Jason Morris.
Here’s how the press describes their work:
The Page Poets Series was conceived by friends on a bright day in a dark corner of The Page bar on Divisadero Street in San Francisco. We publish important Northern California poets whose work excites us.
The Divers Collection expands our horizons. It is dedicated to the discovery and exploration of eclectic creative treasures, which we wish to share.
To sign up for this Saturday’s reading click on this link: https://meet.google.com/vne-woki-ytq
For more info on their publications check their website: fmsbwpress.com
You will be able to order copies of some books from the evening’s poets from The Green Arcade by contacting us at: TheGreenArcade.com

Celebrating the Arrival of Black Freighter Press
2021-03-06 18:00 - 20:00 | online
Join us as we celebrate the arrival of Black Freighter Press! With readings by Josiah Luis Alderete, Alie Jones, Tongo Eisen-Martin reading QR Hand, Jr., James Cagney, Ayodele Nzinga, and Tureeda Mikell, it’ll be a great evening of fam and joy.

Event is free and all are welcome. Donations will be called for throughout the evening to support both Nomadic Press and Black Freighter Press.

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Nomadic & Black Freighter Press
2021-03-06 18:30 - 20:30 | CA
Black Freighter is honored to team up with our comrades at Nomadic Press for a joint reading celebrating resistance art.
JOIN US as we celebrate the arrival of Black Freighter Press! With readings by Josiah Luis Alderete, Alie Jones, Tongo Eisen-Martin reading QR Hand, Jr., James Cagney, Ayodele Nzinga, and Tureeda Mikell, it’ll be a great evening of fam and joy.
Event is free and all are welcome. Donations will be called for throughout the evening to support both Nomadic Press and Black Freighter Press.
Celebrating the Arrival of Black Freighter Press, RSVP Here

Suzanne Simard: Pioneering scientist discusses her anticipated book, Finding the Mother Tree
2021-03-07 12:00 - 14:00 | CA
Suzanne Simard, a pioneering scientist who has changed the way we understand forest ecosystems, joins us to discuss her highly anticipated first book, Finding the Mother Tree (Knopf).
“Suzanne Simard’s Finding the Mother Tree reminds us that the world is a web of stories, connecting us to one another. Her vivid manuscript carries the stories of trees, fungi, soil and bears—and of a human being listening in on the conversation . . . I have great admiration for her science and her storytelling alike. These are stories that the world needs to hear.” —Robin Wall Kimmerer
This event is co-sponsored by Emergence Magazine and will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTRATION INFO COMING SOON.
About Finding the Mother Tree
Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she’s been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls of James Cameron’s Avatar) and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.
Now, in her first book, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths–that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complicated, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.
Simard writes–in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways–how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies–and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.
Simard writes of her own life, born and raised into a logging world in the rainforests of British Columbia, of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the forest and how she came to love and respect them–embarking on a journey of discovery, and struggle. And as she writes of her scientific quest, she writes of her own journey–of love and loss, of observation and change, of risk and reward, making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology, that it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world, and, in writing of her own life, we come to see the true connectedness of the Mother Tree that nurtures the forest in the profound ways that families and human societies do, and how these inseparable bonds enable all our survival.
About Suzanne Simard
DR. SUZANNE SIMARD was born in the Monashee Mountains of British Columbia and was educated at the University of British Columbia and Oregon State University. She is Professor of Forest Ecology in the University of British Columbia’s Faculty of Forestry.

Bazaar Writers Salon
2021-03-07 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Readings by Jen Burke Anderson, Ryan Fox, Sarah Schweig, and Molly Spencer
Hosted by Peter Kline
Bazaar Writers Salon Zoom meeting – see link and password below.

Jen Burke Anderson is a San Francisco writer whose creative nonfiction story “Daybreak Nation” placed honorable mention in 2020’s Soul-Making Keats Literary Competition. Her short story “Soul Survivor,” winner of the 2018 Sue Granzella Humor Prize, appeared in BULL: Men’s Fiction in autumn 2020. This spring she’ll be acting in her radio drama “Paper Thin” on KFJC 89.7fm. You can find her on Instagram at jen.burke.anderson (no end period).
Ryan Fox is the recipient of an MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was Poetry Editor of Meridian, and a JD from Fordham University School of Law, where he was Editor-in-Chief of the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal. His poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Iowa Review, New Ohio Review, Caketrain, New Orleans Review, Prelude and others. A winner of the 2016 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Contest and the recipient of a residency from the Yaddo Corporation, he lives in New York City, where he practices copyright law.
Sarah V. Schweig is the author of Take Nothing with You (University of Iowa Press, 2016). Her poetry and criticism has appeared in BOMB, Boston Review, Granta, Iowa Review, The Literary Review, Public Seminar, Tin House, and elsewhere. She lives and works in New York City, where she also studies philosophy at The New School for Social Research.
Molly Spencer is a poet, critic, and editor. Her debut collection, If the House (2019), won the Brittingham Prize judged by Carl Phillips. A second collection, Hinge (2020) won the Crab Orchard Open Competition judged by Allison Joseph. Molly’s poetry has appeared in Blackbird, FIELD, New England Review, Ploughshares, and Prairie Schooner. Her critical writing has appeared at Colorado Review, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, and The Rumpus, where she is a senior poetry editor. She teaches at the University of Michigan’s Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy.

____

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Bazaar Writers Salon Zoom Meeting
2021-03-07 18:00 - 19:00 | CA

James Canton Discusses his new book, The Oak Papers
2021-03-08 12:00 - 14:00 | CA
James Canton joins us from the UK to discuss his book, The Oak Papers (HarperOne).
“A profound meditation on the human need for connection with nature, as one man seeks solace beneath the bows of an ancient oak tree.”—Peter Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees
This event will be streamed on Crowdcast.
REGISTER HERE
About The Oak Papers
Joining the ranks of The Hidden Life of Trees and H is for Hawk, an evocative memoir and ode to one of the most majestic living things on earth—the oak tree—probing the mysteries of nature and the healing role it plays in our lives.
Thrown into turmoil by the end of his long-term relationship, Professor James Canton spent two years meditating [PA1]beneath the welcoming shelter of the massive 800-year-old Honywood Oak tree in North Essex, England. While considering the direction of his own life, he began to contemplate the existence of this colossus tree. Standing in England for centuries, the oak would have been a sapling when the Magna Carta was signed in 1215.
In this beautiful, transportive book, Canton tells the story of this tree in its ecological, spiritual, literary, and historical contexts, using it as a prism to see his own life and human history. The Oak Papers is a reflection on change and transformation, and the role nature has played in sustaining and redeeming us.
Canton examines our long-standing dependency on the oak, and how that has developed and morphed into myth and legend. We no longer need these sturdy trees to build our houses and boats, to fuel our fires, or to grind their acorns into flour in times of famine. What purpose, then, do they serve in our world today? Are these miracles of nature no longer necessary to our lives? What can they offer us?
Taking inspiration from the literary world—Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Katherine Basford’s Green Man, Thomas Hardy, William Shakespeare, and others—Canton ponders the wondrous magic of nature and the threats its faces, from human development to climate change, implores us to act as responsible stewards to conserve what is precious, and reminds us of the lessons we can learn from the world around us, if only we slow down enough to listen.
About James Canton
Dr. James Canton runs the Wild Writing MA at the University of Essex and is the author of Ancient Wonderings and Out of Essex: Re-Imagining a Literary Landscape, which was inspired by his rural wandering in East Anglia. He was awarded his PhD by the University of Essex and reviews for the TLS, Caught by the River, and Earthlines. Canton is a regular on British television and radio and lectures frequently. He lives in Essex, England.

MFA Reading Series: Shapes of Native Nonfiction - Deborah Miranda, Theresa Warburton, Elissa Washuta
2021-03-08 17:30 - 18:30 | online
Deborah A. Miranda is the author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013), recipient of the PEN-Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award, a Gold Medal from the Independent Publishers Association, and short-listed for the William Saroyan Literary Award; and four poetry collections: Altar for Broken Things (2020), Raised by Humans (2015), The Zen of La Llorona (2005), and Indian Cartography (1999). She is co-editor of Sovereign Erotics: A Collection of Two-Spirit Literature, and her work has appeared in When the Light of the World was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: An Anthology of Native Nations Poetry (2020). She is the Thomas H. Broadus, Jr. Professor of English at Washington and Lee University, where she teaches literature of the margins and creative writing. She is an enrolled member of the Ohlone-Costanoan Esselen Nation of the Greater Monterey Bay Area in California.
Theresa Warburton is the author of Other Worlds Here: Honoring Native Women’s Literatures in Contemporary Anarchist Movements (forthcoming, Northwestern University Press). With Elissa Washuta, she is co-editor of Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is an Associate Professor of English at Western Washington University where she is also affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Canadian-American Studies. She lives on Lummi, Nooksack, and Coast Salish Territories in Bellingham, WA.
Elissa Washuta is the author of the nonfiction collections My Body Is a Book of Rules (2014), Starvation Mode (2018), and White Magic (forthcoming, Tin House Books). With Theresa Warburton, she is co-editor of the anthology Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers. She is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient, a Creative Capital awardee, and an assistant professor of creative writing at the Ohio State University. She is a member of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe.

Irvin D. Yalom with Lori Gottlieb
2021-03-08 18:00 - 19:00 | CA
This event is online.
How can we understand life, joy and love during the moment when they culminate in death and grief?
Internationally acclaimed psychiatrist and author Irvin D. Yalom devoted his career to counseling those suffering from loss and anxiety. But never had he faced the need to counsel himself until his wife and lifelong partner, the late esteemed historian and feminist author Marilyn D. Yalom, was diagnosed with cancer. Together, they chose to write about their shared experience during her final months, creating an unparalleled gift that Kirkus calls “A profound love story with lessons for how to live and how to die.”

Their memoir A Matter of Death and Life provides insight into grief from a remarkable couple who spent a life of close devotion from their teenage years onward. It catalogues the most intimate and daunting challenges two loved ones can undergo while trying to care for one another: Marilyn, to die a good death, and Irv to live on without her. During a year wracked with complex grief, their shared story is a beautiful work of writing that offers much needed guidance.
Through alternating stories of their last months together and Irv’s first months alone, A Matter of Death and Life rings with a depth of support, solace, and meaning around the process of grief… and also offers a warm, resonant tribute to life well-lived.
In an interview with Lori Gottlieb, Dr. Irvin Yalom visits with Kepler’s Literary Foundation online on March 8th to share A Matter of Death and Life. These two warm, witty writers will discuss what is a grippingly poignant account of not only grief, but the experience of love that gives it meaning.

IRVIN D. YALOM, emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, is the author of internationally bestselling books including Love’s Executioner, The Gift of Therapy, Becoming Myself, and When Nietzsche Wept. His impact in the field of psychiatry is profound, with one training text alone over 700,000 copies sold; but it is his lifelong passion for literature and fiction, paired with the deep human understanding of his psychiatric work, that makes Yalom’s writing distinctly beloved at Kepler’s.

LORI GOTTLIEB is psychotherapist and author of the bestselling Kepler’s Favorite Maybe You Should Talk to Someone, now being adapted for television. In addition to clinical practice, she writes The Atlantic’s weekly “Dear Therapist” column and is the co-host of the eponymous iHeart Radio podcast produced by Katie Couric. A member of the Advisory Council for Bring Change and one of the most-watched TED presenters of 2020, Lori’s expertise has made her a sought-after guest on media like The Today Show, Good Morning America, CBS This Morning, CNN, and NPR’s Fresh Air.
MARILYN YALOM (1932-2019) wrote many celebrated cultural histories and feminist works, including Blood Sisters, History of the Wife, The Birth of the Chess Queen and (together with her son) The American Resting Place. This year marks the release of her posthumously published Innocent Witness: Childhood Memories of World War II. A professor of French at Stanford University and senior scholar at the Clayman Institute for Gender Research, she received her PhD in comparative literature from Johns Hopkins and had a profound impact through both her academic contributions and teaching. Marilyn and Irv were married for sixty-five years.

** Please consider joining with a book purchase or donation to support Kepler’s Literary Foundation programs. **

CLA Presents: Laila Lalami
2021-03-08 19:00 - 20:00 | online
What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize–finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth—such as national origin, race, and gender—that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today.

Lalami poignantly illustrates how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation, with the result that a caste system is maintained that keeps the modern equivalent of white male landowners at the top of the social hierarchy. Conditional citizens, she argues, are all the people with whom America embraces with one arm and pushes away with the other.

Brilliantly argued and deeply personal, Conditional Citizens weaves together Lalami’s own experiences with explorations of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture.
Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She the author of four novels, including ‘The Moor’s Account’, which won the American Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and ‘The Other Americans’, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Nation, Harper’s, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. She has received fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, and the Guggenheim Foundation and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.

Kelly Loy Gilbert and Anna-Marie McLemore
2021-03-09 18:00 - 19:00 | CA
Two much loved critically acclaimed authors. Two fabulous eagerly awaited new books. Join us as we launch Kelly Loy Gilbert’s new book When We Were Infinite and celebrate a week early for Anna-Marie McLemore’s new book The Mirror Season.

Kelly Loy Gilbert is the author of the William C. Morris Debut Award finalist Conviction and Stonewall Honor Book Picture Us in the Light. When We Were Infinite is a powerful, achingly romantic drama about the secrets we keep, from each other and from ourselves.
All Beth wants is for her tight-knit circle of friends—Grace Nakamura, Brandon Lin, Sunny Chen, and Jason Tsou—to stay together. With her family splintered and her future a question mark, these friends are all she has—even if she sometimes wonders if she truly fits in with them. Besides, she’s certain she’ll never be able to tell Jason how she really feels about him, so friendship will have to be enough. Then Beth witnesses a private act of violence in Jason’s home, and the whole group is shaken. Beth and her friends make a pact to do whatever it takes to protect Jason, no matter the sacrifice. But when even their fierce loyalty isn’t enough to stop Jason from making a life-altering choice, Beth must decide how far she’s willing to go for him—and how much of herself she’s willing to give up.

Anna-Marie McLemore is the author of William C. Morris Debut Award Finalist The Weight of Feathers, Stonewall Honor Book When the Moon Was Ours, which was longlisted for the National Book Award, Wild Beauty , Blanca & Roja, and Dark and Deepest Red. The Mirror Season is “An unforgettable story of trauma and healing, told in achingly beautiful prose with great tenderness and care.” ―Karen M. McManus, #1 New York Times-bestselling author of One of Us Is Lying
When two teens discover that they were both sexually assaulted at the same party, they develop a cautious friendship through her family’s possibly-magical pastelería, his secret forest of otherworldly trees, and the swallows returning to their hometown.
This is sure to be a fantastic and thought provoking conversation.
A post-event temporary access recording of the webinar will be shared with all guests who register. Please consider joining with a book to support programs like this one.

Virtual Event: Rebecca Handler
2021-03-09 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Join us on Tuesday, March 9 for the launch of Rebecca Handler’s debut novel, Edie Richter is Not Alone on Zoom!
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Praise for Edie Richter is Not Alone
“Oh how I love this book. I finished Edie Richter Is Not Alone in one sitting, then reread it immediately. Hilariously heartbreakingly honest on every page, Rebecca Handler’s novel is that rare thing: a perfect book.”
—Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less
“Rebecca Handler’s debut novel Edie Richter Is Not Alone features a witty protagonist in the midst of an emotional and physical journey to Western Australia. Handler’s writing is spare and sharp and brings to mind the work of Mary Robison and Lorrie Moore—it made me laugh with recognition and tear up with empathy. Reading this book will make you feel the way all good literature does: it will make you feel less alone.”
—Vendela Vida, author of The Diver’s Clothes Lie Empty
About Edie Richter is Not Alone
Funny, acerbic Edie Richter is moving with her husband from San Francisco to Perth, Australia. She leaves behind a sister and mother still mourning the recent death of her father. Before the move, Edie and her husband were content, if socially awkward―given her disinclination for small talk.
In Perth, Edie finds herself in a remarkably isolated yet verdant corner of the world, but Edie has a secret: she committed an unthinkable act that she can barely admit to herself. In some ways, the landscape mirrors her own complicated inner life, and rather than escaping her past, Edie is increasingly forced to confront what she’s done. Everybody, from the wildlife to her new neighbors, is keen to engage, and Edie does her best to start fresh. But her relationship with her husband is fraying, and the beautiful memories of her father are heartbreaking, and impossible to stop. Something, in the end, has to give.
Written in clean spare prose that is nevertheless brimming with the richness and wry humor of the protagonist’s observations and idiosyncrasies, Edie Richter is Not Alone is Rebecca Handler’s debut novel. It is both deeply shocking and entirely quotidian: a story about a woman’s visceral confrontation with the fundamental meaning of humanity.

Joshua Mohr in conversation with Lidia Yuknavitch
2021-03-09 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
celebrating the launch of his new book
Model Citizen: a memoir
published by MCD/FSG
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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. (link to be posted soon)
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The intimate, gorgeous, garish confessions of Joshua Mohr—writer, father, alcoholic, addict.
After years of hard-won sobriety, while rebuilding a life with his wife and young daughter, Joshua Mohr suffers a stroke at the age of thirty-five—his third, it turns out—which uncovers a heart condition requiring surgery. And fentanyl, one of his myriad drugs of choice. This forced “freelapse” should fix his heart, but what will it do to his sobriety? And what if it doesn’t work?
Told in stunning, surreal, time-hopping vignettes, Model Citizen is a raw, revealing portrait of an addict. Mohr shines a harsh spotlight into all corners of his life, throwing the wild joys, tragedies, embarrassments, and adventures of his past into bold relief. His story is heartbreakingly real and yet unreal, which he captures in vivid, uncanny imagery, waking hallucinations that imagine hearts as hot air balloons, drug cravings as wry Nazi doctors, secrets as emaciated second selves.
And yet Mohr’s memoir pulses with humanity and humor, capturing the immediacy of an addict climbing out of the dark pit of his past, learning to love and be loved, while never letting go of those experiences that shaped him and broke him. A darkly beautiful, funny, incisive confession, Model Citizen is brimming with hope and resilience, drawing the universal and human out of every moment.
Joshua Mohr is the author of the memoir “Sirens” (2017), as well as five novels including “Damascus”, which The New York Times called “Beat-poet cool.” He’s also written “Fight Song” and “Some Things that Meant the World to Me,” one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle best-seller, as well as “Termite Parade,” an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times. His novel “All This Life” won the Northern California Book Award. He is the founder of Decant Editorial.
Lidia Yuknavitch is the National Bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan and The Small Backs of Children, winner of the 2016 Oregon Book Award’s Ken Kesey Award for Fiction as well as the Reader’s Choice Award, the novel Dora: A Headcase, and a critical book on war and narrative, Allegories Of Violence (Routledge). Her widely acclaimed memoir The Chronology of Water was a finalist for a PEN Center USA award for creative nonfiction and winner of a PNBA Award and the Oregon Book Award Reader’s Choice. The Misfit’s Manifesto, a book based on her recent TED Talk, was publishe by TED Books. Her new collection of fiction, Verge, was published by Riverhead Books in 2020. Her writing has appeared widely in publications that include Guernica Magazine, Ms., The Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Another Chicago Magazine, The Sun, Exquisite Corpse, TANK, and in the anthologies Life As We Show It (City Lights), Wreckage of Reason (Spuytin Duyvil), Forms at War (FC2), Feminaissance (Les Figues Press), and Representing Bisexualities (SUNY), as well as online at The Rumpus.

This event has been sponsored by the City Lights Foundation

Jeff Hawkins with Anil Ananthaswamy
2021-03-10 18:00 - 19:00 | CA
This event is online.
In a book that biologist Richard Dawkins calls “exhilarating,” author, neuroscientist and engineer Jeff Hawkins unveils a new theory of intelligence with awe-inspiring implications. Get ready for a dynamic and exciting conversation about the brain with Kepler’s.
In a century rife with neuroscientific and biological advances, researchers have made little progress one very big question: how do the simple cells of the brain create complex consciousness and intelligence?
Hawkins, cofounder of the neuroscience research company Numenta, dares to answer with A Thousand Brains. In a compulsively readable book accessible even to the casual science reader, he lays forth a simple and yet mold-breaking theory: that intelligence arises from the interaction of maplike reference structures in the brain, which build hundreds of thousands of interconnected models of everything a person knows. These maplike reference frames can tell you how to achieve goals, how to get from one place to another, who you are and how you’re connected to the world.
For the past fifteen years, Hawkins and his Silicon Valley based research team have studied the neocortex, the part of the brain we associate with everything responsible for intelligence. Now with his “thousand brains” theory of the structure that runs the show, Hawkins proposes answers to some of neurosciences most stubborn questions—questions about the very nature of consciousness.
On March 10th, join us for an online conversation between Jeff Hawkins and award-winning science journalist Anil Ananthaswamy as they share with us A Thousand Brains. Starting with basic information on how the brain works for anyone to understand, they’ll discuss a Jeff’s new theory and explore what it could mean not only for advancements in science like machine intelligence, but also its broader implications for all of us as people. This will be a smart, fun night celebrating a key moment in our understanding of the human brain: don’t miss it!
**Please consider joining with a book or donation to support the production of this event and make it possible for us to continue bringing you great conversations.
Registration will close one hour before the event; please reserve your spot early to guarantee access, as registrations are limited.**

Virtual Event: Sam Cohen and Andrea Lawlor
2021-03-10 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Join us on Wednesday, March 10th at 6pm PT when Sam Cohen discusses her story collection, Sarahland, with Andrea Lawlor on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85188314830

Praise for Sarahland
“A bold collection that explores how we might break free from or reimagine ourselves and our places in the universe.”—Kirkus, starred review

“Reading SARAHLAND is pure pleasure – what a voice! What a constant flow of funny and vulnerable and distinct awarenesses! Sam Cohen’s writing is joyously itself and places its own keen, insightful gaze on the ways we relate to ourselves and to others.”—Aimee Bender, author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake
“I’m deeply struck by the emotional wisdom, the cultural smarts, the literary vulnerability and serious skills happening in SARAHLAND. Rarely do I feel so seen by a book. I gobbled this work up with feverish excitement and gratitude, and weeks later feel like I am carrying these stories around in my head and in my heart.”—Michelle Tea, author of Against Memoir

“Cohen handles her sentences, her Sarah’s, both gently and confidently. The result: a debut of equal parts ugly and beauty, a debut full of heartbreakingly real characters.” —Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl
About Sarahland

“Queer, dirty, insightful, and so funny” (Andrea Lawlor), this coyly revolutionary debut story collection imagines new origins and futures for its cast of unforgettable protagonists—almost all of whom are named Sarah.

NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2021 BY THE MILLIONS * OPRAH MAGAZINE * ELECTRIC LITERATURE * REFINERY29

In Sarahland, Sam Cohen brilliantly and often hilariously explores the ways in which traditional stories have failed us, both demanding and thrillingly providing for its cast of Sarahs new origin stories, new ways to love the planet and those inhabiting it, and new possibilities for life itself. In one story, a Jewish college Sarah passively consents to a form-life in pursuit of an MRS degree and is swept into a culture of normalized sexual violence. Another reveals a version of Sarah finding pleasure—and a new set of problems—by playing dead for a wealthy necrophiliac. A Buffy-loving Sarah uses fan fiction to work through romantic obsession. As the collection progresses, Cohen explodes this search for self, insisting that we have more to resist and repair than our own personal narratives. Readers witness as the ever-evolving “Sarah” gets recast: as a bible-era trans woman, an aging lesbian literally growing roots, a being who transcends the earth as we know it. While Cohen presents a world that will clearly someday end, “Sarah” will continue.

In each Sarah’s refusal to adhere to a single narrative, she potentially builds a better home for us all, a place to live that demands no fixity of self, no plague of consumerism, no bodily compromise, a place called Sarahland.

Book Passage Presents: Elizabeth Wetmore - Valentine
2021-03-10 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Written with the haunting emotional power of Elizabeth Strout and Barbara Kingsolver, an astonishing debut novel that explores the lingering effects of a brutal crime on the women of one small Texas oil town in the 1970s.
Mercy is hard in a place like this . . .
It’s February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town’s men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow.
In the early hours of the morning after Valentine’s Day, fourteen-year-old Gloria Ramírez appears on the front porch of Mary Rose Whitehead’s ranch house, broken and barely alive. The teenager had been viciously attacked in a nearby oil field—an act of brutality that is tried in the churches and barrooms of Odessa before it can reach a court of law. When justice is evasive, the stage is set for a showdown with potentially devastating consequences.
Valentine is a haunting exploration of the intersections of violence and race, class and region in a story that plumbs the depths of darkness and fear, yet offers a window into beauty and hope. Told through the alternating points of view of indelible characters who burrow deep in the reader’s heart, this fierce, unflinching, and surprisingly tender novel illuminates women’s strength and vulnerability, and reminds us that it is the stories we tell ourselves that keep us alive.
Elizabeth Wetmore is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her fiction has appeared in Epoch, Kenyon Review, Colorado Review, Baltimore Review, Crab Orchard Review, Iowa Review, and other literary journals. She is the recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two fellowships from the Illinois Arts Council, as well as a grant from the Barbara Deming Foundation. She was also a Rona Jaffe Scholar in Fiction at Bread Loaf and a Fellow at the MacDowell Colony, and one of six Writers in Residence at Hedgebrook. A native of West Texas, she lives and works in Chicago.

Social Listening #4: Nathaniel Mackey & Fred Moten
2021-03-11 16:00 - 17:00 | online
Acclaimed poets and scholars, Nathaniel Mackey and Fred Moten will read from their poetry in the return of the We Are the Voices “Social Listening” series. Their works are profound explorations of the collocations of Black music and experimental poetics and of the “freedom drive” of Black life and the “fugitive impulses” in Black performance

Elemental: Earth Stories A celebration of the latest installment of the Calico Series from Two Lines Press
2021-03-11 17:30 - 19:30 | CA
Center for the Art of Translation presents Jessica Cohen, Allison Charette, and Brian Bergstrom in conversation about the latest installment in the Calico Series, Elemental: Earth Stories.
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Elemental: Earth Stories
A family’s heirloom stones unearth a story spanning war, illness, and radioactivity. A pipeline installed to protect a town from flooding results in a howling that disturbs the town’s inhabitants. A political prisoner embarks on an epic flight toward freedom, literally blown like a kite in the wind.
A whirlwind of fantastic new writing from Japan, Iran, Norway, Germany, Madagascar, Iraq, Poland, and Israel, this collection of fiction and reportage maps the intimate, ongoing relationship between human civilization and the natural world. Do we set the limits on our existence? Or is it wind, water, fire, and earth that define–even control–us? Borrowing from eco-literature and mythology, Elemental unflinchingly takes up the earth.
“Stone, earth, water, ice, wind, and burning heat. The stories here dig deep and unexpectedly into life’s fundamentals—the elements and the passions—bringing into English, many for the first time, writers of stature from across the globe. A celebration of both storytelling and translation, Elemental is essential, a gift that opens up the pleasures of new worlds.” —Hugh Raffles, author of The Book of Unconformities
About the Calico Series
The Calico Series, published biannually by Two Lines Press, captures vanguard works of translated literature in stylish, collectible editions. Each Calico is a vibrant snapshot that explores one aspect of our present moment, offering the voices of previously inaccessible, highly innovative writers from around the world today.

VIRTUAL: Arisa White / Who's Your Daddy, with Dan Alter, Michael 'MJ' Jones, Hernan De La Cruz Ramos & A.A. Vincent
2021-03-11 18:00 - 20:00 | CA
Booksmith and The Bindery are very pleased to host a virtual event with Arisa White for her new book Who’s Your Daddy. She’ll be joined for a group reading by former students (bottom row, from R-L) Dan Alter, Michael ‘MJ’ Jones, Hernan De La Cruz Ramos & A.A. Vincent.
Free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order a copy of Who’s Your Daddy here. We’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
About the book
A lyrical, genre-bending coming-of-age tale featuring a queer, Black, Guyanese American woman who, while seeking to define her own place in the world, negotiates an estranged relationship with her father.
“This beautifully, honestly conceived genius of a book shook me to the core.” – Dara Wier
“What she gives us are archives, allegories, and wholly new songs.” – Terrance Hayes
“In these crisply narrative poems, which unreel like heart-wrenching fragments of film, Arisa White not only names that gaping chasm between father and daughter, but graces it with its true and terrible face.” – Patricia Smith

About the authors
Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow and the author of You’re the Most Beautiful Thing That Happened, A Penny Saved, and Hurrah’s Nest. Her poetry has been nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, NAACP Image Award, California Book Award, and Wheatley Book Award. The chapbook “Fish Walking” & Other Bedtime Stories for My Wife won the inaugural Per Diem Poetry Prize. She’s the co-author of Biddy Mason Speaks Up, the second book in the Fighting for Justice series for young readers, which received the Nautilus Book Award Gold Medal for Middle-Grade Nonfiction and the Maine Literary Book Award for Young People’s Literature. Who’s Your Daddy is her poetic memoir debut from Augury Books. Arisa serves on the board of directors for Foglifter and Nomadic Press and is an assistant professor of creative writing at Colby College. Author photo by Nye’ Lyn Tho.
Dan Alter’s poems and reviews have been published in journals including Field, Fourteen Hills, Pank, and Zyzzyva; his first collection My Little Book of Exiles will be out in 2021 from Eyewear Press. He lives with his wife and daughter in Berkeley and makes his living as an IBEW electrician.
Michal ‘MJ’ Jones is a poet and parent in Oakland, CA. Their work is featured or forthcoming at Anomaly, Kissing Dynamite, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, and TriQuarterly Review. They are an assistant poetry editor at Foglifter Press, and have received fellowships from the Hurston/Wright Foundation, VONA/Voices, and Kearny Street Workshop. They are currently an MFA graduate fellow at Mills College.
Hernan De La Cruz Ramos is a poet from northern NJ and he currently resides in Oakland, CA. He has been published in The Night Heron Barks and can be found on social media @penpalsocks
A.A. Vincent is a disabled poet and essayist, and is a product of Chicago’s South Side and its suburbs. Her work has appeared in Santa Clara Review, SF Weekly, Quiet Lightning, and Street Sheet SF. She received her MFA in writing from the University of San Francisco.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poems from the Community of Writers
2021-03-11 18:30 - 19:30 | CA
The Mill Valley Public Library & The Marin Poetry Center invite you to a virtual book launch for Heyday Books’ release of Why to These Rocks: 50 Years of Poetry from the Community of Writers.
The evening will celebrate fifty years of poetry written in and inspired by the High Sierra workshop. Pulitzer Prize winners Forrest Gander, Robert Hass, Sharon Olds, and Greg Pardlo will join Brenda Hillman & other notables to read a poem from this unique collection. The evening of poetry and celebration, including a musical introduction by Cornelius Eady, is sure to inspire!
For more information about the anthology and how to order a copy, visit MPC’s Bookshop.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Joe Ide, Smoke
2021-03-11 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Join us for an online event with bestselling author and staff favorite Joe Ide, who will discuss Smoke, the newest installment in his IQ series. Isaiah Quintabe—an unlicensed detective for all seasons—and his best friend and masterful sidekick, Juanell Dodson, are at a crossroads in this latest installment of the “aggressively entertaining” IQ series (New York Times). This time, their lives may never be the same.
Register for this free Crowdcast event by clicking here!
Isaiah Quintabe is no longer IQ, the genius of East Long Beach; instead, he’s a man on the road and on the run, hiding in a small Northern California town when his room is broken into by a desperate young man on the trail of the state’s most prolific serial killer.
His old partner, Juanell Dodson, must go straight or lose his wife and child. His devil’s bargain? An internship at an LA advertising agency, where it turns out the rules of the street have simply been dressed in business casual, but where the aging company’s fortunes may well rest on their ability to attract a younger demographic. Dodson—”the hustler’s hustler”—just may be the right man for the job.
Ide is the crime writer’s crime writer, and he’s filled his best novel yet with desperate souls, courageous outcasts, an ex-stripper who’ll do anything to protect her son, and wild half-brothers who may be the very incarnation of evil. With deft plotting, lacerating humor, and a keen eye for the ways in which characters rise or fall based on their ties to one another, Smoke is Joe Ide’s crowning achievement.
“Ide has displayed a rare ability to mix dark comedy and gut-churning drama…mixmaster Ide’s compulsion to blend light and dark (Isaiah’s confrontation with the serial killers, while gruesome, takes the form of “a slapstick movie shot in a burning insane asylum”) affects the two plots in surprising ways, again producing an emotion-rich form of character-driven tragicomedy, but one in which peril forever loiters in the shallows.” —Booklist
Joe Ide is of Japanese American descent. Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, Joe’s favorite books were the Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes stories. The idea that a person could face the world and vanquish his enemies with just his intelligence fascinated him. Joe went on to earn a graduate degree and had several careers before writing his debut novel, IQ, inspired by his early experiences and his love of Sherlock Holmes. Joe lives in Santa Monica, California.

Book Launch of EVERYTHING AFTER with Author Jill Santopolo
2021-03-11 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
Please join us on Thursday, March 11, 2021 at 7 PM PST for an online discussion of one of Kathleen’s recent favorites, EVERYTHING AFTER, with author Jill Santopolo.
Our discussion will be webcast on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88322734719.
(Order your copy of EVERYTHING AFTER at https://bit.ly/ggpEverythingAfter, or in audiobook at http://bit.ly/EverythingAfterAB.
Description

The Light We Lost mixes with a touch of Daisy Jones and the Six in this novel of first love, passion, and the power of choice–and how we cannot escape the people we are meant to be.
Two loves. Two choices. One chance to follow her dreams.
Emily has come a long way since she lost her two passions fifteen years ago: music, and Rob. She’s a psychologist at NYU who helps troubled college students like the one she once was. Together with her caring doctor husband, Ezra, she has a beautiful life. They’re happy. They hope to start a family. But when a tragic event in Emily’s present too closely echoes her past, and parts of her story that she’d hoped never to share come to light, her perfect life is suddenly upturned. Then Emily hears a song on the radio about the woman who got away. The melody and voice are hauntingly familiar. Could it be? As Emily’s past passions come roaring back into her life, she’ll find herself asking: Who is she meant to be? Who is she meant to love?
About the Author

Jill Santopolo is the New York Times and internationally bestselling author of The Light We Lost and More Than Words. Her work has been translated into more than thirty-five languages. She received a BA from Columbia University and an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is also the author of three successful children’s and young-adult series and works as the associate publisher of Philomel Books. Santopolo travels the world to speak about writing and storytelling. A New Yorker at heart, Jill is currently living in Washington, D.C.

Virtual Event: Alan Chazaro, Raina J. León, Tongo Eisen Martin, and Barbara Jane Reyes
2021-03-11 19:00 - 21:00 | CA
JOIN US ON THURSDAY, MARCH 11 AT 7PM PT, FOR AN EVENING CELEBRATING BAY AREA POETRY AND ALAN CHAZARO’S LATEST COLLECTION PIÑATA THEORY, ON ZOOM!
FEATURED READERS INCLUDE:
ALAN CHAZARO, RAINA J. LEÓN, TONGO EISEN MARTIN, AND BARBARA JANE REYES
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84144654181
Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,84144654181# or +13462487799,,84144654181#
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kfZgMQqEA

Praise for Piñata Theory
Cante Jundo, or “Deep Song,” is what Garcia Lorca called poetry attached to the rhythms and waves of a continent, its people, its waters, its history. In Alan Chazaro’s Piñata Theory, those resonances echo across the field “between the countries of your body,” the shared stories of cousin-cultures stretching across manmade boundaries. “I’ve become a borderland of tongues,” writes Chazaro, “a mezcla of eyes.” Here is the piñata, unbroken, containing, holding together all the promise of youth and imagination. When it spills, it spills lavishly and generously its treasures.—D.A. Powell
The great American philosopher Jay Z once said, “You can’t heal/what you don’t reveal.” Such is the ethos of this debut collection. Pugilistic, unflinchingly honest, and damn right gorgeous, Piñata Theory no se raja in decirnos how broken we are, how broken we’ve been. Alan takes the hyphen in Mexican-American, this unruly papier-mache we’ve inherited, and clothes the hollow of us. So before leafing this book, dear reader, take a breath—for your sake, for those who still can’t breathe. Stomach his hard-hitting truth, because “We were made for beatdowns.” This some strong shit, as blunt as a spliffed Swisher, as the dusty 2×4’s we’d wield at dangling dulce. Whenever you ready, step inside this circle of homies. We’re cheering on our Yay Area champ as he plants both feet in this poetry world. It’s his turn. And as he swings for our freedom, sing like we did as kids, “Dale dale dale, no pierdas el tino.”—Antonio López
We don’t get to witness a root as it reaches out and absorbs from all around itself. But Piñata Theory by Alan Chazaro is evidence of this Mexican-American navigation—it is the bud and the strange blossom that doesn’t resist itself like Xicanos sometimes do. And in this way, it is like the serious ache a family joke leaves. It’s the men watching other men cry, lost gold teeth and the person that misses it, the thoughts loose like dogs on the street and how in their wildness, we must honor them. These poems reverb under the skin but not necessarily in the colonized body. The speaker in this collection knows better than to make their body fully responsible for the world. And yet, they know where they participate. They don’t “live with dust in [their] eyes,” or with unaccounted admiration for life. Piñata Theory is a record of layer, and speaks of us in a humor that is pure pocho-dimensional. Its truth is a deep wound and the “fuck it” that follows. And still, each poem seems to be written in a special wonder that gathers itself from many places inside the speaker’s one body, one root.—Sara Borjas
About Alan Chazaro
Alan Chazaro is the author of This Is Not a Frank Ocean Cover Album (Black Lawrence Press, 2019) and Piñata Theory (Black Lawrence Press, 2020). He is a graduate of June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley, a former Lawrence Ferlinghetti Fellow at the University of San Francisco, and co-founding editor of HeadFake, an online NBA zine. He chirps about Mexican memes, the Golden State Warriors, and Bay Area rap on Twitter @alan_chazaro

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #50
2021-03-12 18:00 - 20:00 | online
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
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VIRTUAL: Babylon Salon presents Roberto Lovato, Matt Bell, Elizabeth Geoghegan & Paulo K Tiról
2021-03-13 08:00 - 17:00 | CA
Booksmith and The Bindery are thrilled to partner with Babylon Salon for their Spring event, featuring readings by Roberto Lovato, Matt Bell, Elizabeth Geoghegan & Paulo K Tiról!
Please note: this is a free, virtual event. Zoom information will soon be announced here.
About the authors
Roberto Lovato is the author of Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs and Revolution in the Americas (Harper Collins), a New York Times “Editor’s Choice” that the paper’s Book Review hailed as a “powerful” nonfiction book and a “groundbreaking memoir.” Newsweek listed Lovato’s memoir as a “must read” 2020 book and the Los Angeles Times listed it as one of its 20 Best Books of 2020. Lovato is also an educator, journalist and writer based at The Writers Grotto in San Francisco, California. As a Co-Founder of #DignidadLiteraria, he helped build a movement advocating for equity and literary justice for the more than 60 million Latinx persons left off of bookshelves in the United States and out of the national dialogue. A recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center, Lovato has reported on numerous issues—violence, terrorism, the drug war and the refugee crisis—from Mexico, Venezuela, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, Haiti, France and the United States, among other countries. Order Unforgetting by Roberto Lovato.
Matt Bell’s next novel, Appleseed, is forthcoming from Custom House in July 2021. His craft book Refuse to Be Done, a guide to novel writing, rewriting, and revision, will follow in early 2022 from Soho Press. He is also the author of the novels Scrapper and In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, as well as the short story collection A Tree or a Person or a Wall, a non-fiction book about the classic video game Baldur’s Gate II, and several other titles. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, Tin House, Conjunctions, Fairy Tale Review, American Short Fiction, and many other publications. A native of Michigan, he teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. His novel In the House upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods was a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award and an Indies Choice Adult Book of the Year Honor Recipient, and was selected as the winner of the Paula Anderson Book Award, among other honors. Both In the House and Scrapper were selected by the Library of Michigan as Michigan Notable Books. Order books by Matt Bell.
Elizabeth Geoghegan was born in New York, grew up in the Midwest, and lives in Rome. She is the author of two short story collections eightball and Natural Disasters, and the bestselling memoir The Marco Chronicles. Her work has appeared in The Paris Review, The Best Travel Writing, TIME, El Pais, Words Without Borders, BOMB, and elsewhere. Order books by Elizabeth Geoghegan.
Paulo K Tiról is a composer, lyricist and bookwriter of musical theatre from Manila, Philippines. He was in the 2019-’20 class of Dramatist Guild Foundation Fellows, and an artist-in-residence at Access Theater with director Noam Shapiro. His projects include music and lyrics for On This Side of the World (NAMT Festival 2020, Prospect Theater Co.’s IGNITE series, workshop production at Access Theater, all dir. Noam Shapiro); book, music and lyrics for Called (DGF Fellows showcase, dir. May Adrales); and orchestrations for Ma-Yi Theater Co.’s Felix Starro. His work has been presented at Joe’s Pub, Barrington Stage, Prospect Theater Co.’s Musical Theater Lab, and more. Alongside his work in musical theatre, Paulo is also a composer of liturgical music, with work published by Oregon Catholic Press (OCP), and church music director working in New York City and Jersey City. Training: Ateneo de Manila University, Berklee College of Music, NYU Tisch Graduate Musical Theatre Writing Program (full tuition scholarship), BMI Musical Theatre Workshop. He lives in Jersey City, NJ with his husband Jeremy. More at www.paulophonic.com.

Please note: this is a free, virtual event. Zoom information will soon be announced here.

Word Week 2021 "Colm Toibin, Paula Meehan & Michelle Gallen Read Contemporary Irish Literature"
2021-03-13 11:00 - 12:00 | online
Irish authors Colm Toibin, Paula Meehan, and Michelle Gallen read from new work Saturday, March 13, 11 a.m. Pacific time via Zoom. Colm gives us a preview of his upcoming 2021 novel THE MAGICIAN, based on the life of Thomas Mann, from Los Angeles. Michelle reads from her rollicking debut novel set in Northern Ireland BIG GIRL, SMALL TOWN from Dublin (7 p.m. Irish time). Paula shares poetry from her just-published retrospective work AS IF BY MAGIC from Greece, where it will be 9 p.m.
This event will be broadcast via Zoom. Get the Zoom link by rsvping Going on this event page or by emailing wordweeknoevalley@gmail.com. In response, you will receive the Zoom information. Audience limit: 100 people.

Buy books from Folio Books at www.foliosf.com/word-week-2021.

Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series: Momtaza Mehri and Zoé Samudzi, reading and in conversation
2021-03-13 12:00 - 13:00 | online
Remote access event, free and open to the public
REGISTER TO ATTEND
—or—
Watch this program at YouTube
With emcee, alex cruse
This remote-access event starts promptly at 12:00 pm Pacific Time, and is free and open to the public. Real-Time Captioning link will be provided at the event. Media Captioning provided after the event, at our YouTube channel and at Poetry Center Digital Archive. For other reasonable accommodations please contact poetry@sfsu.edu
Please note early start-time, to accommodate our guest and audience in the UK, and elsewhere.
For our third program in the Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series, we are delighted to welcome two of the more outstanding young Black writers and intellectuals at work in the US and UK. Momtaza Mehri, in London, and Zoé Samudzi, here in the Bay Area, will each read from their work, engage in conversation with one another and with emcee alex cruse, and respond to questions from the audience. We welcome this rare opportunity to bring these two Afro-diasporan writers and thinkers together across continents.

“…A poet is drenched in a singularity, sodden with its viscous specificity. A poem speaks for itself exactly when it declares it speaks for others. The Black poet is an isotope of both hope & despair. The Black poet is both a reluctant & enthusiastic interlocutor of what is known as the Black condition, which conditions & structures the World that invented it. The Black poem asks you where it hurts & demands no particular answer. The Black poet knows this is a question one can spend a life trying to answer….”
—Momtaza Mehri, “Harlem Is Hijaz Is Havana Is Harar, Or: The Whole Point of the Black Arts Movement Is That They Were Moving”
“We [Afro-]diasporans joke often about the genre of poetry and prose born out of a longing for a motherland animated only by hungry verses. There’s a cowardice to this: nostalgic memory, a narrativized nostalgia for memories and experiences and beauty that never belonged to you, is easy. But situating oneself in the wake and afterlife of those traumas and beautiful/beautified struggles is far harder still.”
—Zoé Samudzi on Momtaza Mehri, The Poetry Project Newsletter, Summer 2020

Momtaza Mehri is a poet and independent researcher. Her work has been widely anthologised and has appeared in Granta, Artforum, The Guardian, BOMB, and Real Life Mag. She is the former Young People’s Laureate for London. Her latest pamphlet, Doing the Most with the Least, was published in 2019 by Goldsmiths Press. More here.

“As Black as Resistance [by Zoé Samudzi and William C. Anderson] is an urgently needed book…a call to action through an embrace of the anarchy of blackness as a recognition and a refusal of the deathly logics of liberalism and consumption. In the face of the ever expanding carceral state, levels of inequality, environmental degradation, and resurgent fascism, this book offers a map to imagining the liberated futures that we can and mus and do make.”
—Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Zoé Samudzi is a writer, photographer, and a doctoral candidate in Medical Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. Her writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Warscapes, Truthout, ROAR Magazine, Teen Vogue, BGD, Bitch Media, Open Space, and Verso, among others. With William C. Anderson, Samudzi is coauthor of As Black as Resistance: Finding the Conditions for Liberation (foreword by Mariame Kaba, AK Press, 2018). More here.

Featured:
Momtaza Mehri, Granta Podcast, Ep. 94, October 7, 2020
Momtaza Mehri, “Poets Should Ride the Bus: On Diane di Prima (1934–2020),” at Verso Books, November 3, 2020
Momtaza Mehri at Open Space, 2018
“Blackness As a State of Matter: A Conversation with Zoé Samudzi,” by Will Furtado, at Contemporary And, C&’s Top Articles of 2019
Zoé Samudzi at Open Space, 2018–2019
Video:
View earlier events in the Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center, Tripwire Cross-Cultural Poetics Series

Register to Attend:

https://sfsu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_3fVkVa5mS2iU5P5jmed6TQ

Joanell Serra - (Her)oics: Women’s Lived Experiences During the Coronavirus Pandemic (Virtual Event)
2021-03-13 16:00 - 18:00 | CA
(Her)oics: Women’s Lived Experiences During the Coronavirus Pandemic draws together the stories of fifty-two women across the U.S. during the Covid-19 pandemic. The collection encompasses the perspectives of women who are: front-line responders and recovering patients; going out to work, staying home to work, and losing their jobs; living with multiple generations and living in isolation; women grieving loved ones and celebrating new love; women preparing to give birth and supporting the dying. Although differing based on location, age, race, and health, they share the unique capacity of women to bring their strength, ingenuity and love—for others and for self—to an uncertain time. The anthology is inspired by both the risks of the pandemic inherent to women and their tremendous role in the country’s response.
Joanell Serra lives with her human and canine family in Sonoma, California. Her debut novel, The Vines We Planted, was inspired by the complex community and gorgeous scenery in the California Winery. Joanell also writes poetry, creative non-fiction, and plays. Her short plays have been produced and her work has been published in numerous literary magazines. The other hats she wears include licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, Impact Coach, retreat leader and non-profit consultant. She conducts workshops on writing and personal transformation around the country and abroad. More information and recent publications can be found at joanellserraauthor.com.
“I’m a proponent of sharing our truth. These womens’ stories are raw and real. They make me want to cry, or laugh, or call them up and say this sh** happened to me too! We’ve got this. These women really are the heroines of the pandemic: nurses, doctors, teachers, badass moms, women having a mental health crisis, healers, grandmas… I love this.”
—Jennifer Pastiloff, best-selling author of On Being Human
“The homefront has always been inhabited by women, including anyone who identifies with and enters the space of “woman” – caretakers and home keepers and compassionate community builders. This collection reminds us how the heart warriors never give up or in, which is the only reason we have a chance. Where are the purple heart medals for these legions of women. Secular Blessings on every one of their stories, every single body.”
—Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Verge: Stories

Kazuo Ishiguro - Klara and the Sun
2021-03-14 13:00 - 15:00 | CA
A magnificent new novel from the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro—author of Never Let Me Go and the Booker Prize-winning The Remains of the Day.
Klara and the Sun, the first novel by Kazuo Ishiguro since he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, tells the story of Klara, an Artificial Friend with outstanding observational qualities, who, from her place in the store, watches carefully the behavior of those who come in to browse, and of those who pass on the street outside. She remains hopeful that a customer will soon choose her.
Klara and the Sun is a thrilling book that offers a look at our changing world through the eyes of an unforgettable narrator, and one that explores the fundamental question: what does it mean to love?
In its award citation in 2017, the Nobel committee described Ishiguro’s books as “novels of great emotional force” and said he has “uncovered the abyss beneath our illusory sense of connection with the world.”
Kazuo Ishiguro was born in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1954 and moved to Britain at the age of five. His eight previous works of fiction have earned him many honors around the world, including the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Booker Prize. His work has been translated into over fifty languages, and The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go, both made into acclaimed films, have each sold more than 2 million copies. He was given a knighthood in 2018 for Services to Literature. He also holds the decorations of Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from France and the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Star from Japan.
Pico Iyer is a British-born essayist and novelist, often known for his travel writing. He is the author of numerous books on crossing cultures including Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, and The Global Soul, and is most recently the author of A Beginner’s Guide to Japan. An essayist for Time since 1986, he also publishes regularly in Harper’s, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times, and other publications. He has travelled widely, from North Korea to Easter Island, and from Paraguay to Ethiopia, while writing thirteen works of non-fiction and two novels. Since 1992 Pico has spent much of his time at a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California, and most of the rest in suburban Japan.

Conversations with Authors - Julia Turshen (Virtual Event)
2021-03-14 16:00 - 18:00 | CA
Julia Turshen’s Simply Julia: 110 Recipes for Healthy Comfort Food is her first collection of recipes featuring a healthier take on the simple, satisfying comfort food for which she’s known.
Julia has always been cooking. As a kid, she skipped the Easy-Bake Oven and went straight to the real thing. Throughout her life, cooking has remained a constant, and as fans of her popular books know, Julia’s approach to food is about so much more than putting dinner on the table—it is about love, community, connection, and nourishment of the body and soul.
In Simply Julia, readers will find 110 foolproof recipes for more nutritious takes on the simple, comforting meals Julia cooks most often. With practical chapters such as weeknight go-tos, make-ahead mains, vegan one-pot meals, chicken recipes, easy baked goods, and more, Simply Julia provides endlessly satisfying options comprised of accessible and affordable ingredients. Think dishes like Stewed Chicken with Sour Cream + Chive Dumplings, Hasselback Carrots with Smoked Paprika, and Lemon Ricotta Cupcakes—the kind of flavorful yet unfussy food everyone wants to make at home.
In addition to her tried-and-true recipes, readers will find Julia’s signature elements—her “Seven Lists” (Seven Things I Learned From Being a Private Chef that Make Home Cooking Easier; Seven Ways to Use Leftover Buttermilk; Seven Ways to Use Leftover Egg Whites or Egg Yolks), menu suggestions, and helpful adaptations for dietary needs, along with personal essays and photos and gorgeous food photography.
Julia is the bestselling cookbook author of Small Victories, named a Best Cookbook by the New York Times and NPR; Feed the Resistance, Eater’s Book of the Year, 2017; and Now & Again, named the Best Cookbook of 2018 by Amazon. She hosts the IACP-nominated podcast “Keep Calm and Cook On” and has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, and Saveur. She is the founder of Equity At The Table, an inclusive digital directory of women and non-binary individuals in food. Julia lives in the Hudson Valley with her wife and pets.
Ruth Reichl is the bestselling author of the memoirs Save Me the Plums, Tender at the Bone, Comfort Me with Apples, Garlic and Sapphires, and For You, Mom, Finally; the novel Delicious!; and the cookbook My Kitchen Year. She was editor in chief of Gourmet magazine for ten years. Previously she was the restaurant critic for The New York Times and served as the food editor and restaurant critic for the Los Angeles Times. She has been honored with six James Beard Awards for her journalism, magazine feature writing, and criticism. She lives in upstate New York with her husband and two cats.
