Litseen

Barry Gifford
2019-05-02 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Seven Stories and City Lights present
Barry Gifford
celebrating the release of
Southern Nights Trilogy: Night People, Arise and Walk, Baby Cat Face
from Seven Stories Press
Barry Gifford’s three Southern Gothic novels, Night People, Arise and Walk, and Baby Cat-Face, may be among the weirdest and best of Gifford’s novels for their sheer velocity–the copious, raw violence; the invented religions and gods that make people do things; and how the horrors somehow cohabit—affably—with the genuine pathos and loveliness of the unforgettable characters that live in these books and the things they say so easily that we’ve never heard anyone say before. God in these Southern Nights is only another possibly deranged near relative, cast in the only nonspeaking part in this human drama. Everyone else talks and talks. And it’s the dialogue in these novels that make them some of Gifford’s best, reminders of the author’s seemingly unlimited range and versatility, a comic-tragic genius for our time.
As a character in Night People says, “Safety first ain’t never been my motto.”
Barry Gifford is the author of more than forty works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into over twenty-five languages. From screenplays and librettos to his acclaimed Sailor and Lula novels, Gifford’s writing is as distinctive as it is difficult to classify. Born in the Seneca Hotel on Chicago’s Near North Side, he relocated in his adolescence to New Orleans. The move proved significant: throughout his career, Gifford’s fiction—part-noir, part-picaresque, always entertaining—is born of the clash between what he has referred to as his “Northern Side” and “Southern Side.” Gifford has been recipient of awards from PEN, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Library Association, the Writers Guild of America, and the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. His novel Wild at Heart was adapted into the 1990 Palme d’Or-winning film of the same name. Gifford lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Odd Salon: SAN FRANCISCO: BRAINSTORMING FOR JUNE
2019-05-02 19:00 - 21:00 | Beer Nerds, 3331 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94103
MAY 2 @ 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM
Free!

Once again we come together to pool brains ! Bring your mathematical quandaries, sweet solutions, high octane spirits and tales of sleuthing genius for Odd Salon PROOF, curated by Isolde Honore.
Brainstorming sessions are free open to all! Come out and grab a drink, meet the Oddlings, and share your ideas around the table.
Thursday, May 2nd at 7pm.
We’ll be in the back room at Beer Nerds, 3331 24th St, San Francisco, drinking and thinking. Just a couple of doors down from the 24th and Mission BART stop.
No formal RSVP needed – just come out and join us!

Mazza Writer in Residence Juliana Delgado Lopera with Joseph Cassara, reading and in conversation
2019-05-02 19:00 - 21:00 | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
Juliana Delgado Lopera and Joseph Cassara
“I could write simply, pero tengo la lengua salada”
Juliana Delgado Lopera
For the concluding event as Mazza Writer in Residence at The Poetry Center for Spring 2019, Juliana Delgado Lopera will be reading and in conversation with novelist Joseph Cassara, author of The House of Impossible Beauties, an acclaimed debut novel that “follows the lives of the major players in New York’s 1980s drag ball scene, made famous by Jennie Livingston’s 1990 film Paris Is Burning.” (full review at The Guardian) Supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation, this event is free and open to the public.
“I could write simply, pero tengo la lengua salada” (*) is the title for Juliana Delgado Lopera’s Mazza Residency with The Poetry Center. Prior to this evening with Joseph Cassara, she’ll by joined by special guest Monique Jenkinson, aka Fauxnique, for an “afternoon of literary drag,” Saturday April 27 at The Bindery, annex of The Booksmith and just across Haight Street, and will be visiting multiple classes at SF State, in Women and Gender Studies, Sexuality Studies, and Creative Writing, throughout the week of April 22.
Juliana Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer, historian, speaker, and performance artist based in San Francisco. The recipient of the 2014 Jackson Literary award, she’s the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017) and ¡Cuéntamelo!, an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award. She’s received fellowships from Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, and The SF Grotto, and an individual artist grant from the SF Arts Commission. She’s the recipient of the 2016 Jeanne Córdova Words Scholarship. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Eleven Eleven, Foglifter, Four Way Review, Broadly, and TimeOut Magto name a few. She’s the creative director of RADAR Productions a queer literary non-profit in San Francisco. Much more at julianadlopera.com
• Make sure to check out Juliana Delgado Lopera’s recent Ted Talk, “The Poetry of Everyday Speech,” which took place early this year at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Joseph Cassara is the author of The House of Impossible Beauties, which won the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Award for Best Fiction Book of 2018, is a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction, and was chosen by Barnes & Noble as a Discover Great New Writers selection. He holds degrees from Columbia University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and has received fellowships from the Macdowell Colony and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. He currently lives in Fresno, where he is an Assistant Professor of English at the California State University, Fresno. More at josephcassara.com
(*”but my tongue is salty”)
Related event:
Mazza Writer in Residence
Juliana Delgado Lopera with Monique Jenkinson, aka Fauxnique
an afternoon of literary drag
Saturday APRIL 27
3:00 pm @ The Bindery (door + bar at 2:00 pm)
1727 Haight Street (at Cole), San Francisco
free and open to the public
supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation
Event contact:
The Poetry Center
Event email:
poetry@sfsu.edu
Event phone:
415-338-2227
Event sponsor:
The Poetry Center, Mazza Writer in Residence project

Miriam Toews and Lydia Kiesling
2019-05-02 19:30 - 21:30 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Miriam Toews discusses her new novel, Women Talking with Lydia Kiesling.

Praise for Women Talking
“This amazing, sad, shocking, but touching novel, based on a real-life event, could be right out of The Handmaid’s Tale.” –Margaret Atwood, on Twitter
“An astonishment, a volcano of a novel with slowly and furiously mounting pressures of anguish and love and rage. No other book I’ve read in the past year has spoken so lucidly about our current moment, and yet none has felt as timeless; the always-wondrous Miriam Toews has written a book as close to a Greek tragedy as a contemporary Western novelist can come.” —Lauren Groff, author of FATES AND FURIES and FLORIDA
“I am in awe of this novel. In Toews’s brilliant design, eight women in a Mennonite hayloft manage to lay bare the rancid global root system of patriarchy. Their story is terrifying, joyful, gruesome, and magnetic. What a reckoning–and what a gift.” Leni Zumas, author of RED CLOCKS
“A flawless, ferocious work of art. I have yet to read a more scathing indictment of patriarchal violence, or a more illuminating quest to comprehend the most vital contours of the human experience: what is agency, what is meaning, what is justice, what is love. This is the kind of novel that changes you. Get ready.” —Laura van den Berg, author of THE THIRD HOTEL

About Women Talking
One evening, eight Mennonite women climb into a hay loft to conduct a secret meeting. For the past two years, each of these women, and more than a hundred other girls in their colony, has been repeatedly violated in the night by demons coming to punish them for their sins. Now that the women have learned they were in fact drugged and attacked by a group of men from their own community, they are determined to protect themselves and their daughters from future harm.
While the men of the colony are off in the city, attempting to raise enough money to bail out the rapists and bring them home, these women–all illiterate, without any knowledge of the world outside their community and unable even to speak the language of the country they live in–have very little time to make a choice: Should they stay in the only world they’ve ever known or should they dare to escape?
Based on real events and told through the “minutes” of the women’s all-female symposium, Toews’s masterful novel uses wry, politically engaged humor to relate this tale of women claiming their own power to decide.

EVES AT THE BEAT: WOMXN READING AT THE BEAT MUSEUM
2019-05-02 19:30 - 21:30 | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
EVES AT THE BEAT: WOMXN READING AT THE BEAT MUSEUM
During Women’s History month a constellation of events brought together a group of fabulous womxn+ writers. The meeting of these hearts and minds exploded into something powerful and a new monthly reading series concept was born, “Eves at the Beat”.
THURS. MAY 2ND, 7:30PM
Featuring:
SHELLEY WONG
THEA MATTHEWS
JENNY QI
ROSA DE ANDA
JENNIFER HASEGAWA
AISHWARYA VARDHANA
Curated by Cassandra Rockwood-Rice
MC’d by Nicole Noel
“Eves at the Beat” is a monthly first Thursday reading series at The Beat Museum with occasional readings in Kerouac Alley featuring womxn and non-binary people. Each first Thursday there will be a new curator and MC invited from the previous month. This will give many people the opportunity to step into these roles and make the culture of the readings more equitable and circular, rather than hierarchal.
This is a donation based event. We will pass a hat so bring a contribution for the readers.
We will also be accepting packages of dry goods, new socks, and sanitary items for the local homeless community.
