Spirit Houses: KSW Presents Maw Shein Win & Khaty Xiong
2021-03-19 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | online
On Friday, March 19th, KSW Presents “Spirit Houses” a reading featuring Maw Shein Win, author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) and Khaty Xiong, author of Poor Anima (Apogee Press, 2015). This event is a celebration of Maw Shein Win’s newest collection and of both poets’ powerful work performing rituals of grief, pain, and the life after it and with it.

LEARN MORE | TICKETS

Tres Pochos Y Black Freighter
2021-03-19 19:00 - 20:00 | online
This event is a collaboration between Black Freighter Press & Alley Cat Books in San Francisco

Illuminate: A Night of Poetry in Solidarity with Asian and Asian American Communities
2021-03-19 19:00 - 20:30 | online
ILLUMINATE is a virtual poetry reading and open mic in response to the rise in Anti-Asian violence and hate crimes, which have increased by 1900% since the start of the pandemic. Open mic will center Asian, Asian American, and BIPOC poets standing in solidarity with the Asian and Asian American community during this time.
ILLUMINATE is co-curated by Greer Nakadegawa-Lee and Lauren Ito. This programming is presented as part of the Political Inheritance Exhibition co-presented by the Asian American Women Artists Association, and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center.
Click Here for Open Mic Sign-Ups Here!
**Please note that once Zoom Webinar reaches capacity, you will still be able to view the event through our YouTube Stream.
Featured Poetry Readers
Yume Kim
Maya Looney
Jenny Qi
Greer Nakadegawa-Lee
Lauren Ito
Yume Kim
Yume Kim is an alumni of San Francisco State University, with an MA in English and an MFA in Creative Writing. She is a Kundiman fellow recipient, as well as the runner-up for the Michael Rubin Book Award in 2013. Her debut publication, Reserve the Right, is now available through Nomadic Press. Website: www.yumekim-poet.com
Maya Looney
Maya is a junior at Skyline Highschool and takes poetry classes in the basement of Temescal Library. She’s read poems for a couple years at the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival, which when it’s not on zoom takes place near a bookstore where she spends too much money on art books. Instagram: @meyerlemonsketches
Greer Nakadegawa-Lee
Greer Nakadegawa-Lee is 16 years old and a junior at Oakland Technical High School. She has written a poem every day for over two years now, and she is the 2020 Oakland Youth Poet Laureate. Her first chapbook , “A Heart Full of Hallways” is out now with Nomadic Press.
Lauren Ito
Lauren Ito is a Gosei (fifth generation person of Japanese ancestry) poet, community craftswoman, and organizer committed to advancing equity through art and design. As an artist and organizer Lauren delves into the tensions inherited within diasporic experiences, including explorations of American concentration camps, political agency, and home. Lauren’s work has been featured by The San Francisco Public Library, The Seattle Times, Japanese American National Museum, and various performance venues. Instagram: @Lauren.Ito

Book Launch for Neon: A Light History (East Coast and European audiences)
2021-03-20 11:00 - 13:00 | online
East Coast and European audiences are invited to celebrate the book launch of Neon: A Light History
About this Event
Join us for the virtual book launch of Neon: A Light History, which unearths neon’s vibrant legacy of scandal, murder, fascists, and forgotten inventors. For this special morning program, audiences across the globe will have the opportunity to celebrate this indispensable neon “bible.” Hosted by SF Neon, this program will include a panel discussion with authors Dydia DeLyser and Paul Greenstein plus special guests including Tom Rinaldi, author of New York Neon.
*****************************************
This event is part of Seasons of Neon, an ongoing series of illuminating talks and tours presented by the Tenderloin Museum and SF Neon that celebrate the recent publication of Neon: A Light History (Giant Orange Press, 2021) and explore San Francisco history through the city’s rich legacy of iconic glowing signs.
Existing at the intersection of material culture and built environment, neon signs are emblematic of the many small businesses that comprise a vital thread in the dynamic tapestry of the urban ecosystem. The Tenderloin and Mid-Market sport the densest concentration of extant neon in the Bay Area, which makes the Tenderloin Museum an ideal forum to consider neon and its powerful, often overlooked ability to chronicle a city and its people.

Source:: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-launch-for-neon-a-light-history-east-coast-and-european-audiences-tickets-140884636741

Denise Riley and Jennifer Soong, reading and in conversation
2021-03-20 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, Brandon Brown
Co-sponsored with NYRB Poets and Futurepoem
Supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts
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.

The Poetry Center is honored to welcome poets Denise Riley, in a rare US appearance, and Jennifer Soong. Joining us, respectively, from London and the Eastern US, the poets will each read from their work, then engage in conversation, along with emcee Brandon Brown, and the audience.
Maybe; maybe not

When I was a child I spoke as a thrush, I
thought as a clod, I understood as a stone,
but when I became a man I put away
plain things for lustrous, yet to this day
squat under hooves for kindness where
fetlocks stream with mud—shall I never
get it clear, down in the soily waters.
—Denise Riley, from Say Something Back

British poet Denise Riley is one of the finest and most individual writers at work in English today, and well-known among her peers as one of a generation of poets whose works and correspondences reach across the Atlantic. A distinguished philosopher and feminist theorist as well as poet, Riley has produced a body of work both intellectually uncompromising and emotionally open. Her first collection of poems from an American press appeared in 2020 in the New York Review of Books Poets series—Say Something Back / Time Lived, Without Its Flow includes her widely acclaimed lyric meditation on bereavement, composed, as she has written, “in imagined solidarity with the endless others whose adult children have died, often in far worst circumstances.” The accompanying prose work returns to the subject of grief. Time Lived, Without Its Flow is a book, as she indicates, “not…about death, but an altered condition of life.”
Riley’s poetry collections include Marxism for Infants (1977), Dry Air (1985), Mop Mop Georgette (1993), two selections in the Penguin Modern Poets series (with Douglas Oliver and Iain Sinclair, 1996; and, in 2017, with Maggie Nelson and Claudia Rankine), and, most recently, Selected Poems 1976–2016 (2019). Her critical and philosophical works include War in the Nursery: Theories of the Child and Mother (1983); “Am I That Name?”: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (1988); The Words of Selves: Identification, Solidarity, Irony (2000); The Force of Language (with Jean-Jacques Lecercle, 2004); and Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (2005).

The Augurs

Come July, the yolk of a year
is dragged to lie on lawns of velvet sheen.
Dark-light blades, one-tenth-an-inch wide
over which the red sun hunches, immobilized.
With what do we lie, waiting the night
and the hot black earth to erupt from us
a muddled report? How little we do.
How little we rest. How much we demand
from the daily murders passing
Vulture-like, like stars.

—Jennifer Soong, from Near, At
Jennifer Soong was born in central New Jersey in the nineties. Her writing has appeared in Social Text, Berfrois, Prelude Magazine, DIAGRAM, and Fanzine, among other places, and been translated into Spanish. She holds a B.A. in English and Visual Studies from Harvard College and is currently a doctoral candidate at Princeton University, where she works on poetry and forgetting. Near, At is her first book.

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center

Register to Attend:

https://sfsu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_prhew-KzRQmpM9aTE8V9Bw

Jingletown Reading & Open Mic
2021-03-20 14:00 - 16:00 | online
Jingletown Reading & Open Mic is a monthly event that celebrates writers & artists committed to social justice and determined to make a positive change in our communities.

3rd Saturday of the Month
2-4 pm
Curators/Hosts: Adela Najarro & harold terezon

Virtual Event: Kim Addonizio and Bob Hicok
2021-03-22 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Join us on Monday, March 22nd at 6pm PT when Kim Addonizio joins us to discuss her latest collection, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, with Bob Hicock on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86298421877

About Now We’re Getting Somewhere
A dark, no-holds-barred, and often hilarious collection from a prize-winning poet, veering between the poles of self and world.

Kim Addonizio’s sharp and irreverent eighth volume, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, is an essential companion to your practice of the Finnish art of kalsarikännit—drinking at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out. Imbued with the poet’s characteristic precision and passion, the collection charts a hazardous course through heartache, climate change, dental work, Outlander, semiotics, and more.
Combatting existential gloom with a wicked, seductive energy, Addonizio investigates desire, loss, and the madness of contemporary life. She calls out to Walt Whitman and John Keats, echoes Dorothy Parker, and finds sisterhood with Virginia Woolf.

Sometimes confessional, sometimes philosophical, these poems weave from desolation to drollery and clamor with raucous imagery: an insect in high heels, a wolf at an uncomfortable party, a glowing and self-serious guitar.

A poet whose “voice lifts from the page, alive and biting” (Sky Sanchez, San Francisco Book Review), Addonizio reminds her reader, “if you think nothing & / no one can / listen I love you joy is coming.”

About Kim Addonizio
Kim Addonizio is the author of eight poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her 2016 collection, Mortal Trash, won the Paterson Poetry Prize. Addonizio’s awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. She lives in Oakland, California.

Mindfulness & Medicine with Larry Brilliant & Jack Kornfield
2021-03-23 18:00 - 19:00 | online
City Arts & Lectures presents: Mindfulness & Medicine
with Larry Brilliant & Jack Kornfield
Tuesday, March 23, 2021
6:00pm Pacific Time
KQED Broadcast: 04/04/2021, 04/06/2021, 04/07/2021
TICKETS
This event appears in the series
Conversations on Science & Health: A Miniseries

A man who has always been in the right place at the right time, Larry Brilliant has engaged with some of the most prominent thought leaders, spiritual masters, heroes, and icons in the world–including Neem Karoli Baba (Maharajji), Martin Luther King, Jr., Steve Jobs, Mikhail Gorbachev, Wavy Gravy, the Grateful Dead, the Dalai Lama, and Barack Obama. Brilliant’s life’s journey across continents has resulted in the direct involvement of some of the most significant medical, spiritual, and social achievements of the past century: the eradication of smallpox in India, curing blindness in over 4 million people, introducing the teachings of the Maharajji to the Woodstock Generation, launching Google’s philanthropic enterprises, and more. In a new book, Sometimes Brilliant, he reflects on his remarkable life and his extraordinary experiences as a doctor, innovator, philanthropist, and cultural revolutionary.

Jack Kornfield trained as a Buddhist monk in the monasteries of Thailand, India and Burma. He has taught meditation internationally since 1974 and was one of the key teachers to introduce Buddhist mindfulness practice to the West. After graduating from Dartmouth College in Asian Studies in 1967, he joined the Peace Corps and worked on rural health and tropical medicine teams in northeast Thailand, which is home to several of the world’s oldest Buddhist forest monasteries. After returning to the United States, Kornfield co-founded the Insight Meditation Society in Massachusetts. He is also a founding teacher of the Spirit Rock Center in Woodacre, California. Over the past 40 years, Kornfield has taught in centers and universities worldwide, led International Buddhist Teacher meetings with the Dalai Lama, and worked with many of the great teachers of our time. He holds a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and is a father and activist. His many books include The Wise Heart: A Guide to the Universal Teachings of Buddhist Psychology, A Path with Heart, and After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

At The Door: Chapter Two
2021-03-27 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Join us for our monthly reading series, featuring only Black & Brown voices. We’re already a chapter in – join us for the incredible lineup we have for “Chapter Two”!

Featured Readers:
Josiah Alderete
Kathleen Naytia
Rosa De Anda
Yeva Johnson
Rebeca Flores
Brian Kim Stefans

WHEW – we just got chills thinking about what this night is gonna be like. Come through!

Seismic Salons: Tom Perrotta
2021-04-01 17:00 - 18:30 | online
Seismic Salon: Tom Perrotta
Thu Apr 1st 5:00pm – 6:30pm
Buy Tickets

If you’ve ever wondered what it’s like to have your fiction translated to the screen not once but many times, to be nominated for numerous awards including the Oscar and the Golden Globe, and to walk a red carpet, join us for a fascinating conversation with Tom Perrotta. This Seismic Salon features the bestselling author of nine works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into Oscar-nominated films, and The Leftovers, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed, Peabody Award-winning HBO series. His other books include Bad Haircut, The Wishbones, Joe College, The Abstinence Teacher, Nine Inches, and his newest, Mrs. Fletcher. His work has been translated into a multitude of languages. Perrotta grew up in New Jersey and lives outside of Boston.
Buy Tom Perrotta’s books at the Litquake Bookshop.
Seismic Salons are a series of fundraisers offering conversation time with A-list authors for 10 lucky participants. All proceeds benefit Litquake’s on-going programs.

Youmna Chlala and Ken Chen, reading and in conversation
2021-04-01 19:00 - 20:00 | online
Remote access event, free and open to the public
Registration link pending
With emcee, Brent Awa Jensen
Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts
Details tba here

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center

Better Ancestors: Kai Sugioka-Stone, Amanda Muñiz, Isabelle Khoo-Miller, Arlene Biala and Melissa Merin
2021-04-05 18:00 - 19:30 | online
Quiet Lightning presents the second Better Ancestors, featuring readings and performance by Kai Sugioka-Stone, Amanda Muñiz, Isabelle Khoo-Miller, Arlene Biala and Melissa Merin! This show curated by the artists who performed at the first Better Ancestors (pictured top left, clockwise L-R): Josiah Luis Alderete, Aja Couchois Duncan, Greer Nakadegawa-Lee, Nia McAllister and Brontez Purnell—find out more about them and watch their performances here, then join us on April 5!
ABOUT THE AUTHORS (pictured above, clockwise from top right)
Kai Sugioka-Stone is a Japanese-American poet, mindfulness-based meditator, musician, actor, photographer, and upcoming filmmaker. His writing focuses on liminal identity, and growing up in the era of California Wildfires, the Trump presidency, and COVID. He featured at San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck’s event Sudden Return of The Fire Thieves. His work was featured in the San Francisco Public Library’s Poem of the Day Project. He was published in The Berkeley Times’ Poetry Edition Vol. 10, No. 16, as well as Quiet Lightning’s zine sPARKLE & bLINK #104. He read at Tea Root’s Recovery A.C.T. and gave an online writing workshop reflecting on Japense-American identity with Nikkei Rising. He is part of Lauren Ito’s upcoming exhibit, Political Inheritcance. Photo by Kristen Murakoshi.
Amanda Muñiz is a Mexican writer born in Puebla and raised in Oakland, California. She majored in English Literature from San Francisco State University. Her work has been published by Pochino press and more recently in the Translating Migration poetry anthology project. Amanda has been a featured reader in various shows in the Bay Area including the electrifying ¿Donde Esta Mi Gente? the hilarious ¿Donde Esta mi Comedy?, BEASTCrawl, Literary Speakeasy, LitQuake’s legendary LitCrawl, as well as the Carnival of Poetry organized by Writers of Singapore. The immigrant experience has inspired most of her writing, which she considers a reflection and a testament of her family’s resilience as well as a never-ending letter of love and gratitude to her parents. Photo courtesy of the author.
Isabelle Khoo-Miller is a child of earth, like all of us. They are alive and in abundant love. They create in many mediums, including imagination. They are from the ocean and have roots and familia in Coastal Miwok and Ohlone land, the Bay Area. Photo courtesy of the author.
Arlene Biala (she/her) is a Pinay poet born in San Francisco and raised in the South Bay. She has been participating in poetry performances and workshops for over 30 years and was the 2016-2017 Santa Clara County Poet Laureate. She is the author of several collections of poetry: bone, continental drift and her beckoning hands, which won the 2015 American Book Award. Her latest book, one inch punch, was published in January 2019. Photo courtesy of the author.
Melissa Merin has been writing since she could hold a crayon. She is established as a parent, a lover & partner, a queer, an anti-authoritarian and, a consistently retiring punker. Melissa believes in utilizing a diversity of tactics to build the world we need; one of her favorite tactics is writing. Melissa is also a long-time educator and agitator and has never been able to get it together to “publish” though, many zines and blogs tell the story of trying. Melissa has the distinction of being one of a few Black cis-women of her generation to not love Beyonce or Oprah.
ABOUT THE SERIES
One of Quiet Lightning’s efforts to diversify and move toward racial equity, Better Ancestors is a new quarterly showcase of writers of color. Developed in partnership with Michael Warr, the series features 5 authors reading or performing whatever they choose. Each author selects one performer for the following show, so the series – and community – is self-generating. All authors are paid and published in an end of the year anthology.
Why Better Ancestors? As one of our initiatives to diversify from a board that has historically been mostly white, this showcase aims to provide a long-term, forward-thinking goal. As a society, we are suffering the consequences of pervasive systemic injustice against people of color, queer and trans people, the poor, disabled, and otherwise disadvantaged. But we are all ancestors of the future. If the planet is to remain inhabitable; if the function of humanity is not to sort and oppress our descendants based on their skin color, accent, or material property, we must be better ancestors. This begins by listening to one another, and by giving each other space to be heard.

ABOUT MICHAEL WARR (pictured above, right)
Michael Warr’s books include Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmet Till to Trayvon Martin, edited by Michael Warr (W.W. Norton), and from Tia Chucha Press The Armageddon of Funk, We Are All The Black Boy, and Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry From Chicago’s Guild Complex. In 2017 he was named a San Francisco Library Laureate. Other poetry honors include a Creative Work Fund award for his multimedia project Tracing Poetic Memory in Bayview Hunters Point, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. Michael is the former Deputy Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora and has extensive experience in community-based arts. He became a board member of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library in 2018. In 2020, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Follow his creative work at https://michaelwarr-creativework.tumblr.com/.

ABOUT QUIET LIGHTNING
Now in its 11th year, Quiet Lightning is a literary movement to create and foster community around the written and spoken word. QL aims to democratize public space by offering performances, curation opportunities, and programming with no barriers to entry, providing a launchpad for new and emerging artists, a reliable platform for professional writers, and an inclusive, accessible gathering place for the public. QL is committed to care-taking and progressing the rich threads of literary culture that exist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Recognized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as one of the 100 “people, organizations, and movements who are shaping the future of culture”, Quiet Lightning’s flagship is the literary mixtape, a submission-based series with a blind selection process and different curators for each show. The shows, which are free to attend, are published as books, handed out free to the first 100 people, and all participating artists are paid. QL has now produced 137 shows featuring 1,673 readings by 879 local authors in 91 venues, ranging from dive bars and art galleries to state parks and national landmarks, and has published 115 books and produced two films, all selected by 74 different curators. In 2019, Quiet Lightning pioneered an application process for limited-term board-membership, called Disruptors, to regularly bring new ideas and energy into the organization. QL maintains Litseen.com, a daily calendar of literary events.
MAKE A ONE-TIME DONATION OR SUPPORT US ON PATREON
Every tax deductible donation helps Quiet Lightning invest in a sustainable, ethical arts ecosystem, with the goal of building that culture into the fabric of our lives. You can donate by Venmo or PayPal or pledge a recurring donation by becoming one of our supporters on Patreon, which comes with a few additional perks and helps us expand on the work that we do.

Mazza Writer in Residence Brontez Purnell, reading and in conversation
2021-04-07 16:00 - 17:00 | online
Remote access event, free and open to the public
Registration link pending
With emcee, TreVaughn Malik Roach-Carter
Supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation
Details tba here

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center, Mazza Writer in Residence

Aunt Lute and POC United presents the Panel: Creating Our Own 'Table'
2021-04-07 17:00 - 18:00 | Virtual
Many marginalized writers celebrate the moment that they receive “a seat at the table,” and this is quite often their goal. Yet, others of us believe that having a seat at the table is another way of waiting to be included or invited to attend, thereby still centering whiteness. This panel will focus on writers of color who are creating their own tables, including Tongo Eisen-Martin, Tara Betts, and Neelanjana Banerjee.
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin was recently named San Francisco’s eighth poet laureate and is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of Black people throughout the United States. He is launching Black Freighter Press, a platform for building movement culture and supporting Black literary arts, with a specific focus on incarcerated poets, Bay Area poets of color, and Black women.
Tara Betts is the author of the poetry collections Break the Habit, Arc & Hue, and the forthcoming Refuse to Disappear. Aside from coediting several anthologies, Tara is Poetry Editor at The Langston Hughes Review and the Lit Editor at Newcity. She is currently working on establishing The Whirlwind Learning Center on Chicago’s South Side as a space for arts education, community space, and cultural programming.
Neelanjana Banerjee’s writing has appeared in Prairie Schooner, PANK Magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, World Literature Today and many other places. She is the Managing Editor of Kaya Press, an independent press dedicated to Asian Pacific American and Asian Diasporic literature. She teaches writing and literature classes at UCLA and Loyola Marymount University. She lives in Los Angeles, and is at work on a novel.
This event is the second installment of a collaborative project between Aunt Lute Books and POC United to support marginalized writers, made possible by funds from the California Arts Council.
https://www.auntlute.com/ marketing@auntlute.com 415-826-1300

You're Going to Die Presents: GRIEF & HEALING w/Writing & Music
2021-04-07 19:00 - 2021-04-28 20:45 | online
a YG2D Workshop
This 4-session communal workshop offers a chance to creatively express ourselves & engage with our own [& collective] grief & healing through writing & music. It’s a chance to connect to community, remember we’re not alone, and tap into our innate wisdom to creatively face our unique experiences of being mortal.
FOUR SESSIONS!
WHEN: Wednesdays, April 7th-April 28th
TIME: 7-8:45p
LOCATION: ZOOM
PRICE: Sliding Scale $80-250
We offer the workshop on a sliding scale, but ask about further financial support if you need it to attend!
***Two (2) full scholarships are available for BIPOC***
In order to preserve the uniquely intimate & personalized nature of this offering, space for this event will be limited, & registration is required to attend.
FOR MORE DETAILS EMAIL: ned@yg2d.com
EVENT ON FACEBOOK

Gabriela Garcia: Of Women and Salt
2021-04-08 17:00 - 18:30 | online
Litquake’s Epicenter: A Virtual Series
Bringing writers from around the world to your computer screen
Co-presented by Green Apple Books on the Park
Litquake and Green Apple Books are honored to host the launch event for Gabriela Garcia’s Of Women and Salt (Flatiron Books), a sweeping, masterful debut about a daughter’s fateful choice, a mother motivated by her own past, and a family legacy that begins in Cuba before either of them were born. Gabriela will read from and discuss her work. Audience Q&A to follow. FREE, $10-15 suggested donation
Registration required. Spots are limited.
Event will also be livecasted on Facebook Live.
From 19th-century cigar factories to present-day detention centers, from Cuba to Mexico, Of Women and Salt is a kaleidoscopic portrait of betrayals—personal and political, self-inflicted and those done by others—that have shaped the lives of a collection of extraordinary women. A haunting meditation on the choices of mothers, the legacy of the memories they carry, and the tenacity of women who choose to tell their stories despite those who wish to silence them, this is more than a diaspora story; it is a story of America’s most tangled, honest, human roots.
In present-day Miami, Jeanette is battling addiction. Daughter of Carmen, a Cuban immigrant, she is determined to learn more about her family history from her reticent mother and makes the snap decision to take in the daughter of a neighbor detained by ICE. Carmen, still wrestling with the trauma of displacement, must process her difficult relationship with her own mother while trying to raise a wayward Jeanette. Steadfast in her quest for understanding, Jeanette travels to Cuba to see her grandmother and reckon with secrets from the past destined to erupt.
Gabriela Garcia is author of the novel Of Women and Salt (March 30, 2021). Her fiction and poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Tin House, Zyzzyva, Iowa Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. She received a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award, a Steinbeck Fellowship, and residencies and fellowships from Breadloaf, Sarabande Books, Lighthouse Works, the Keller Estate, and the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. She has an MFA in fiction from Purdue University, where she also taught creative writing. The daughter of immigrants from Cuba and Mexico, Gabriela was raised in Miami and currently lives in the Bay Area. In her past life she worked in music, magazines, technology, and feminist and immigrant rights organizing. Follow her at www.gabrielagarciawriter.com.

Kim Shuck's Poetry Night, One City One Book Edition
2021-04-08 18:00 - 19:00 | online
REGISTER
Natasha Dennerstein, Molly Fisk, Kelly Grace Thomas, Kelliane Parker and Ramona “Mona” Webb lead a One City One Book inspired reading.
Natasha Dennerstein was born in Melbourne, Australia. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University. Dennerstein has had poetry published in many journals internationally. Her collections Anatomize (2015), Triptych Caliform (2016) and her novella-in-verse About a Girl (2017) were published by Norfolk Press in San Francisco. Her trans chapbook Seahorse (2017) was published by Nomadic Press in Oakland. She lives in Oakland, California, where she is an editor at Nomadic Press and works at St James Infirmary, a clinic for sex-workers in San Francisco. She was a 2018 Fellow of the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat.
Molly Fisk edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She’s the author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and Houston, We Have a Possum among other books and has won grants from the NEA, the California Arts Council and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Fisk lives in the Sierra foothills, where she teaches writing to cancer patients, provides weekly commentary to community radio and works as a radical life coach. Connect – Website | Patreon | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Kelly Grace Thomas is the winner of the 2017 Neil Postman Award for Metaphor from Rattle, a 2018 finalist for the Rita Dove Poetry Award, a multiple Pushcart Prize nominee and Best of the Next nominee. Boat Burned, her first full-length collection, was released by YesYes Books in January 2020. Their poems have appeared or are forthcoming in: Best New Poets 2019, the Los Angeles Review, Tinderbox, Nashville Review, Sixth Finch, Muzzle, DIAGRAM and more. They have received fellowships from Tin House, Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, Kenyon Review Young Writers’ and more. Connect – Website | Instagram | Twitter | Facebook
Kelliane Parker is a Bay Area poet and co-host of My Word Open Mic. Parker has performed in the Bay Area, and her work has been featured in local anthologies. Her work gives voice to survivors of sexual abuse and other violent trauma to heal and break the cycle.
Ramona “Mona” Webb is a scholar, practitioner, teaching performance artist and Afro-Creek queer activist. Mona formerly served as Artistic Director of Project ABLE and Lyrical Minded415, which is an Art Based Learning for Equity seasonal course implemented in SFUSD’s Title I Neglected school sites. For 10 years Mona served as poetry Slammaster of San Francisco.

One City One Book

Events and workshops curated around SFPL’s One City One Book selection. One City One Book: San Francisco Reads is a citywide literary event that encourages members of the San Francisco community to read the same book at the same time. For more information, see sfpl.org/onecityonebook.

Open Mic Night | Featuring Daniel B. Summerhill
2021-04-08 18:00 - 20:00 | online
OPEN MIC THURSDAYS continue. Join us on ZOOM twice a month for our virtual Open Mic. Look for MoAD Open Mic every other Thursday this month. Hosted by poet Nia McAllister, join us for an evening of spoken word, featuring amazing poets and musicians from throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Participate or just watch. Everyone is welcome.
All interested performers, please sign up below. For those interested in listening as part of the audience, no need to fill out the form, just follow the zoom link below:
Sign up to perform below. Everyone is welcome.

Open Mic Night, April 8 2021

First Name

Last Name

Email Address

Donations of any amount are always welcome, so if you are able to, please consider donating to MoAD online HERE, or donating through Give by Cell by texting the word: MOADSF to the number: 56512 on your cell phone, then follow the link provided to make a donation. All donations will go towards supporting MoAD and continuing to bring you engaging programming.
Here are the instructions for joining via ZOOM:
FOLLOW THE ZOOM LINK TO RECEIVE A LOGIN TO JOIN THE PROGRAM
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZwkc–sqjMvGtGhX_EMTqCBCfQsJKvF_gJG
Once you register via Zoom, you will receive an email with the link to join the program.
Our Featured Artist: Daniel B. Summerhill
Daniel B. Summerhill is Assistant Professor of Poetry/Social Action and Composition Studies at California State University Monterey Bay. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Obsidian, Button Poetry, Rust and Moth, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Hellebore, The Lilly Review and others. He has performed in over 30 states, The UK and was invited by the U.S Embassy to guest lecture and perform in Durban, South Africa. He holds an MFA from Solstice of Pine Manor College.

Mazza Writer in Residence Brontez Purnell and Friends, reading and in conversation
2021-04-08 19:00 - 20:00 | online
Remote access event, free and open to the public
Registration link pending
With emcee, TreVaughn Malik Roach-Carter
Supported by the Sam Mazza Foundation
Details tba here

Image: film still from 100 Boyfriends Mixtape (2016), 14 min.

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Pitch-o-Rama, literary agent pitch festival
2021-04-10 08:00 - 13:00 | online
As you likely know, we have been holding the Pitch-o-Rama literary pitch festival annually for more than 20 years. In 2020, we changed to a digital format.
On April 10, 2021, we will hold our second-ever virtual Pitch-O-Rama. We have learned a lot from last year to make it even better for you and are greatly expanding our great group of fiction editors, agents, and publishers. You gave excellent feedback last year, we listened and are excited to have fab new folks to hear your marvelous book ideas. The feedback we received for last year’s Pitch-o-rama was fantastic, most said they preferred pitching virtually for many reasons.
Join us for Virtual Pitch-O-Rama 2021! Click here to see a full list of agents and publishers.

Alonzo King in conversation with Steven Winn
2021-04-14 18:00 - 19:00 | online
City Arts & Lectures presents: Alonzo King in conversation with Steven Winn
Wednesday, April 14, 2021
6:00pm Pacific Time
TICKETS

Hailed as a visionary choreographer, Alonzo King is altering the way we look at ballet. King calls his works “thought structures” created by the manipulation of energies that exist in matter through laws, which govern the shapes and movement directions of everything that exists. He has guided Alonzo King LINES Ballet with his unique artistic vision since 1982. A former commissioner for the city and county of San Francisco, and a writer and lecturer on the art of dance; his contributions appear in the books Masters of Movement: Portraits of American Choreographers and in Dance Masters: Interviews with Legends of Dance.

High Dawn 8: Choi / Morgan / Foster / Suzuki
2021-04-16 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Presented in partnership with UC Berkeley Poetry Colloquium
RSVP for Zoom link: spt-april.eventbrite.com

Based in Berkeley, CA, 최 Lindsay is a poet and translator working between English, Korean, and Swedish. They are the author of Transverse (Futurepoem, 2020), and a chapbook, Matrices (speCt! books, 2017). They are a Kundiman fellow and a Ph.D. student in English literature at UC Berkeley. More of their work can be found in Omniverse, Amerarcana, and Aster(ix) Journal, and elsewhere.
Recent projects include a creative manuscript in and out of translation on the colonial history of leprosy in Korea. Their editorial work includes a print journal of translations and experiments in collaboration between Swedish and American poets, released in Sweden, Denmark, and the U.S, edited collaboratively by Berkeley Poetry Review and Ordkonst. They are a founding co-editor, with Noah Ross, of the chapbook press MO(O)ON/IO. Their work has been translated to French, and will appear in the forthcoming issue of NIOQUES, 22/23: Nouvelle Poésie Des États-Unis (New U.S. Poetry), edited by DoubleChange Collective, and translated by Abigail Lang. Visit them at lindsaychoi.com.

As a writer and artist, Saretta Morgan’s current work uses text, etching, sculpture, and video to engage relationships between ecology, Black diaspora and migration in the United States Southwest. She is based between Phoenix and Mohave Valley, Arizona where she teaches creative writing at Arizona State University and is an active member of the grassroots humanitarian aid organization, No More Deaths Phoenix, which supports the safe passage of migrants in the U.S. Mexico borderlands.
Saretta is author of the chapbooks, Feeling Upon Arrival (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) and room for a counter interior (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs, 2017). She has received support from the Jerome Foundation, Arizona Commission on the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Center for African American Poetry and Poetics, Virginia Piper Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, among others. Recent work can be found at Triple Canopy, The Colorado Review, and Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day.

Photo credit: Ted Roeder

Poet, essayist, and educator Tonya M. Foster is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, and the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; the chapbook A History of the Bitch (forthcoming, Sputnik and Fizzle, 2020); and co-editor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her next poetry collection, Thingification is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse in 2021. Monkey Talk, a multi-genre series about race, paranoia, aesthetics and surveillance is in development with support from a 2020 Creative Capital Foundation grant. She has been an artist-in-Residence at the San Francisco Museum of the African Diaspora, at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and at Macdowell. A 2020-2021 Lisa Goldberg Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute of Harvard University, Dr. Foster holds the George and Judy Marcus Endowed Chair in Poetry at San Francisco State University. She was raised in New Orleans, and her family goes generations back in Louisiana.

kaori suzuki is a tokyo-born music maker/composer currently living in oakland, ca. seeking modes of heightened listening-and-being in her spiraling sound visions, she uses high-droning modified acoustic instruments, electroacoustic sound technologies, intensely high register electronics, tape, and other elements necessary to spin her often loud, auditory transmissions.
her projects include solo compositions and durational music for vhf-combination tones; collaborative immersive light-sound happenings; drumming in the oakland-based minimalist psych-punk group, night collectors; and playing amplified cello and guitar in the ecstatic music band.
suzuki has performed widely in numerous venues across the u.s, japan, europe, mexico, and canada, and has published her recordings on independent labels in germany and the u.s. she currently teaches in the music department at the center for contemporary music at mills college.

Virtual Event: Frank Mortimer and Bob Tanem
2021-04-16 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Join us on Friday, April 16 at 6pm PT when Frank Mortimer discusses his new book, Bee People and the Bugs They Love, with KSFO’s Bob Tanem, on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85795539844

Praise for Bee People and the Bugs They Love
“It is an achievement to convey so much knowledge so accessibly without once seeming overbearing. The main reason it all works is the honest descriptions of friendships that spring up around a shared, all-absorbing interest in bees. The book is written in a stylistically assured voice and with a structure that makes it easy to follow. And Mortimer intersperses useful facts about his passion in a successful and funny book that is sure to swell the ranks of the world’s beekeepers.”
—The New York Times

“Frank Mortimer’s BEE PEOPLE AND THE BUGS THEY LOVE is the bee’s knees and getting a ton of buzz. Bee smart, people, and read this un-BEE-lievably interesting look at the quirky world of beekeeping.”
—Harlan Coben, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“If the world of beekeepers has a top ambassador, it’s Frank (The Beeman) Mortimer. Bee People and the Bugs They Love is a delightful portrayal for non-beekeepers of what life is like for those of us who are always thinking about bees.
—Tom Seeley, author of The Lives of Bees

”Bee People takes a long look at your first beekeeper’s meeting, that first bee sting, capturing your first swarm and tasting your first honey…My advice, read Mortimer’s book first, before you become a beekeeper. If you do, you will become a beekeeper. He gets it right. And Bee Nerd Alert: You will meet some of the best people in the world – beekeepers.“
—Kim Flottum, author, The Backyard Beekeeper, and editor-in-chief of Bee Culture Magazine

About Bee People and the Bugs They Love
A fascinating foray into the obsessions, friendships, scientific curiosity, misfortunes and rewards of suburban beekeeping—through the eyes of a Master Beekeeper…

Who wants to keep bees? And why? For the answers, Master Beekeeper Frank Mortimer invites readers on an eye-opening journey into the secret world of bees, and the singular world of his fellow bee-keepers. There’s the Badger, who introduces Frank to the world of bees; Rusty, a one-eyed septuagenarian bee sting therapist certain that honey will be the currency of the future after the governments fail; Scooby the “dude” who gets a meditative high off the awesome vibes of his psychedelia-painted hives; and the Berserker, a honeybee hitman who teaches Frank a rafter-raising lesson in staving off the harmful influences of an evil queen: “Squash her, mash her, kill, kill, kill!”

Frank also crosses paths with those he calls the Surgeons (precise and protected), the Cowboys (improvisational and unguarded) and the Poseurs, ex-corporate cogs, YouTube-informed and ill-prepared for the stinging reality of their new lives. In connecting with this club of disparate but kindred spirits, Frank discovers the centuries-old history of the trade; the practicality of maintaining it; what bees see, think, and feel (emotionless but sometimes a little defensive); how they talk to each other and socialize; and what can be done to combat their biggest threats, both human (anti-apiarist extremists) and mite (the Varroa Destructor).

With a swarm of offbeat characters and fascinating facts (did that bee just waggle or festoon?), Frank the Bee Man delivers an informative, funny, and galvanizing book about the symbiotic relationship between flower and bee, and bee and the beekeepers who are determined to protect the existence of one of the most beguiling and invaluable creatures on earth.

Poetry and Environmental Justice, Writers tba
2021-04-17 12:00 - 13:00 | online
Remote access event, free and open to the public
Registration link pending, will be announced here
With emcee, Elise Ficarra
Presented in conjunction with the Poetry Coalition
Supported by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to the Academy of American Poets in support of Poetry Coalition programs
Details tba

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center, in conjunction with the Poetry Coalition

Virtual Event: Jonathon Keats and Alla Efimova
2021-04-18 18:00 - 19:00
Join us on Sunday, April 18 at 6pm PT when Jonathon Keats is joined by Alla Efimova to discuss the new monograph, Thought Experiments: The Art of Jonathon Keats, on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82380142783

About Thought Experiments
Jonathon Keats’ work as an artist and thinker is compelling for our time. Keats poses critical questions, asks us to fundamentally reconsider our assumptions, and proposes radical methods of response. In a time when the environment and human lifeways are experiencing unprecedented change, thought leaders like Keats are needed to encourage us to consider possibilities—from the absurd to the profound. Since the turn of the millennium, Keats has comprehensively extended his academic training in philosophy by prolifically presenting conceptual art projects that he refers to as “thought experiments.” These include installations and performances in museums and galleries around the globe. His motivations are to make space for exploring ideas, offering provocations, and confronting systems we generally take for granted. By prototyping alternative realities—systematically asking “what if?”—these projects probe the world in which we live, exploring the potential for societal change.

About Alla Efimova
Alla Efimova, Ph.D., is a contemporary art curator and museum specialist with a background in critical theory. She is the founder and principal of KunstWorks, a consulting firm that addresses the growing need for legacy planning among artists of the post-war generation. As the former Director and Chief Curator of The Magnes at the University of California Berkeley, one of the largest museum collections of Jewish art and history, Efimova engaged cutting-edge scholars as guests curators and collaborators and commissioned important regional and international artists to create site-specific projects, including two works by Jonathon Keats. She also co-published two of his artist books together with Modernism Inc.: Yod the Inhuman and Zayin the Profane. Efimova is an author of several books and catalogs and has taught at the University of California Berkeley, Santa Cruz, and Irvine as well as the San Francisco Art Institute.

About Jonathon Keats
Acclaimed as a “poet of ideas” by The New Yorker and a “multimedia philosopher-prophet” by The Atlantic, Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer and experimental philosopher based in the United States and Europe. His conceptually-driven transdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society, adapting methods from the sciences and the humanities. He has exhibited and lectured at dozens of institutions worldwide, from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to Stanford University to the Triennale di Milano, and from SXSW to CERN to UNESCO. He is the award-winning author of four books of nonfiction on subjects ranging from science and technology to art and design – most recently You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future (Oxford University Press) – and three book-length works of fiction. A contributing editor to both Discover Magazine and Art & Antiques, he also authors a weekly online art and design column for Forbes. He has been an artist-in residence at the Fraunhofer Institute for Building Physics, UC Berkeley’s Sagehen Creek Field Station, and the LACMA Art + Technology Lab, a Black Mountain College Legacy Fellow at the University of North Carolina-Asheville, an Imaginary Fellow at Arizona State University’s Center for Science and the Imagination, and a research fellow at the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for Art + Environment. He is currently a Polar Lab artist at the Anchorage Museum, a visiting scholar at San Jose State University’s CADRE Laboratory for New Media, a research associate at the University of Arizona’s Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, and an artist-in-residence at both the SETI Institute and UC San Francisco’s Memory and Aging Center. He serves as co-director and principal philosopher for Earth Law Center’s Interspecies Technology Transfer Consortium and as founding director and curator of the Museum of Future History. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.

Virtual Event: Jakob Guanzon and Lysley Tenorio
2021-04-21 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Wednesday, April 21 at 6pm PT when Jakob Guanzon discusses his debut novel, Abundance, with Lysley Tenorio on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84964860993

Praise for Abundance
“Jakob Guanzon’s excellent debut novel, Abundance, is the story of a father and son scraping by in a country that relegates its most vulnerable to day-to-day survival. Despite that struggle, Guanzon infuses his characters with spirit and fight, and renders them in prose that is sharp, blunt, and lyrical, all at once. To read Abundance is to understand America in ways both shockingly new and startlingly familiar. Contemporary American fiction is lucky to add this book to its shelves.”—Lysley Tenorio, author of The Son of Good Fortune

“From the table of contents, Guanzon had me hooked. This haunting and fiercely passionate story takes America’s capitalist heart to task. Here is an unforgettable accounting of family, fever, and the fortunes of our strip mall society.”—Samantha Hunt, author of The Dark Dark

“A quest, a page-turner, and above all a love story, Abundance lays bare one father’s brutal, tender hustle to care for his son in a winner-take-all world. Henry’s meticulously plotted journey, unfolding in heart-stopping prose, marks Jakob Guanzon as a debut author with compassion and talent to burn.”—Mia Alvar, author of In the Country

About Abundance
A wrenching debut about the causes and effects of poverty, as seen by a father and son living in a pickup

Evicted from their trailer on New Year’s Eve, Henry and his son, Junior, have been reduced to living out of a pickup truck. Six months later, things are even more desperate. Henry, barely a year out of prison for pushing opioids, is down to his last pocketful of dollars, and little remains between him and the street. But hope is on the horizon: Today is Junior’s birthday, and Henry has a job interview tomorrow.

To celebrate, Henry treats Junior to dinner at McDonald’s, followed by a night in a real bed at a discount motel. For a moment, as Junior watches TV and Henry practices for his interview in the bathtub, all seems well. But after Henry has a disastrous altercation in the parking lot and Junior succumbs to a fever, father and son are sent into the night, struggling to hold things together and make it through tomorrow.

In an ingenious structural approach, Jakob Guanzon organizes Abundance by the amount of cash in Henry’s pocket. A new chapter starts with each debit and credit, and the novel expands and contracts, revealing the extent to which the quality of our attention is altered by the abundance—or lack thereof—that surrounds us. Set in an America of big-box stores and fast food, this incandescent debut novel trawls the fluorescent aisles of Walmart and the booths of Red Lobster to reveal the inequities and anxieties around work, debt, addiction, incarceration, and health care in America today.

Unity and Struggle: A Collective Address with Tongo Eisen-Martin, San Francisco's Poet Laureate
2021-04-21 18:00 - 19:30 | online
Register Here

Co-presented with San Francisco Public Library
Please join Tongo Eisen-Martin, San Francisco’s 8th Poet Laureate, and family for an evening of poetry and exposition on the revolutionary potentials of art; as beautifully no incarnation of craft exists outside of the movements, renaissances; the people who pass us through. FREE
Registration required. Event to be held on Zoom.
Featuring:

Marc Bamuthi Joseph
Biko Eisen-Martin
Mahogany Browne
Jive Poetic
Joyce Lee

Eisen-Martin is a poet and the founder of Black Freighter Press. His book Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights, Pocket Poet series), received a 2018 American Book Award, the 2018 California Book Award for Poetry and was short-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize. His previous book, someone’s dead already (Bootstrap Press, 2015), was nominated for a California Book Award. His forthcoming book, A Good Earth: City Lights Pocket Poets Series No 62, will be published in September 2021.
Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He is a graduate of Columbia University.
Born and raised in San Francisco, Eisen-Martin spent time as a child hanging out at the Western Addition Cultural Center, now the African American Art and Culture Complex, where he later taught writing workshops. In his vision for Poet Laureate, he aims to organize poetry circles in underserved neighborhoods throughout the City and recruit and nurture artists from San Francisco’s marginalized communities.

Launch Event for American Geography in Honor of Barry Lopez
2021-04-22 16:00 - 17:30 | online
Radius Books and The Green Arcade invite you to join Sandra S. Phillips, Debra Gwartney, Toby Jurovics, and Beverly Dahlen to celebrate the launch of AMERICAN GEOGRAPHY: PHOTOGRAPHS OF LAND USE FROM 1840 TO THE PRESENT, including live readings of recent work from Robert Adams and Barry Lopez.

Books signed by Sandra Phillips can be ordered from The Green Arcade’s Online Shop: www.TheGreenArcade.com

Here is the link to register: https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_Q5YOD4eKT12vqHqyW534EA

Drawing primarily from the vast permanent collection of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, American Geography charts a visual history of land use in the United States.

From the earliest photographic records of human habitation to the latest aerial and digital imagery, from nearly uninhabited desert and isolated mountainous territories to suburban sprawl and densely populated cities, this compilation offers an increasingly nuanced perspective on the American landscape.
Divided by region, these photographs address ways in which different histories and traditions of land use have given rise to different cultural transitions: from the Midwestern prairies and agricultural traditions of the South, to the riverine systems in the Northeast, and the environmental challenges and riches of the far West.
American Geography provides a complex, thought-provoking survey featuring work from Robert Adams, Dawoud Bey, Barbara Bosworth, Debbie Fleming Caffery, William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein, Terry Evans, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Emmet Gowin, Lee Friedlander, Dorothea Lange, An-My Lê, Trevor Paglen, Wendy Red Star, Mark Ruwedel, Victoria Sambunaris, Stephen Shore, Alec Soth, and Carleton E. Watkins, among others.

Seismic Salon: T.J. Stiles
2021-04-22 17:00 - 18:30 | online
Buy Tickets

News alert, nonfiction fans! Litquake has secured the participation of two-time Pulitzer Prize winning biographer T.J. Stiles for our Seismic Salon series. Called “a superb researcher” by the Washington Post, Stiles received the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in History for Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, and the 2010 Pulitzer for Biography (as well as the 2009 National Book Award for Nonfiction) for The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt. He is also author of Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War, which was a New York Times notable book and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Biography. A Guggenheim fellow, he has taught creative nonfiction at Columbia. He currently serves on the governing boards of the Authors Guild, the Organization of American Historians, and the Society of American Historians. And if politics are your thing, T.J. loves to talk about that as well.
Buy T.J. Stiles’ books at the Litquake Bookshop.
Seismic Salons are a series of fundraisers offering conversation time with A-list authors for 10 lucky participants. All proceeds benefit Litquake’s on-going programs.

Open Mic Night | Featuring Jewelle Gomez
2021-04-22 18:00 - 20:00 | online
OPEN MIC THURSDAYS continue. Join us on ZOOM twice a month for our virtual Open Mic. Look for MoAD Open Mic every other Thursday this month. Hosted by poet Nia McAllister, join us for an evening of spoken word, featuring amazing poets and musicians from throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Participate or just watch. Everyone is welcome.
All interested performers, please sign up below. For those interested in listening as part of the audience, no need to fill out the form, just follow the zoom link below:
Sign up to perform below. Everyone is welcome.

Open Mic, April 22 2021

First Name

Last Name

Email Address

Donations of any amount are always welcome, so if you are able to, please consider donating to MoAD online HERE, or donating through Give by Cell by texting the word: MOADSF to the number: 56512 on your cell phone, then follow the link provided to make a donation. All donations will go towards supporting MoAD and continuing to bring you engaging programming.
Here are the instructions for joining via ZOOM:
REGISTER IN ADVANCE VIA ZOOM TO RECEIVE A LINK TO JOIN THE PROGRAM
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZUtce2vrzwiEt0a_Tbt0aZXjd2UWKjmTNNB
Once you register, you will receive an email with the link to join the program.
Our Featured Artist: Jewelle Gomez
Jewelle Gomez, (Cape Verdean/Wampanoag/Ioway) is a novelist, essayist, poet, educator, and public speaker. She’s the author of eight books including the first Black Lesbian vampire novel, THE GILDA STORIES, which has been in print more than 25 years and was recently optioned by Cheryl Dunye for a TV mini-series. Her work has appeared numerous anthologies including “Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora,” and “Red Indian Road West.” Her plays about James Baldwin and Alberta Hunter have been produced in San Francisco and New York City. Follow @VampyreVamp
