Two Poets: One A Former ANC Militant; the Other a Theorist of Afro-Pessimism
2019-02-16 19:00 - 20:30 UTC | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
These two poets will read as part of The SF Poetry Center’s first annual Black Study Series.
Frank B. Wilderson, III is an award-winning writer, poet, scholar, activist and emerging filmmaker. Dr. Wilderson spent five years in South Africa as an elected official in the African National Congress during the country’s transition from apartheid and was a member of the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto We Sizwe. His books include Incognegro: a Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (Duke University Press, 2015) and Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010). Novelist Ishmael Reed called Incognegro “an important contribution to the African and African American canons and a rare American work that bridges two cultures [Black American and Black South African].” Wilderson’s collection of poems, Sideways Between Stories, was published as a pamphlet by Commune Editions.
D.S. Marriott is originally from the UK, but now lives in Oakland, California. His poetry is often associated with the Cambridge school of poetry. And as a scholar, he has been a leading theorist of afro-pessimism. In addition to Duppies, just out in the US from Commune Editions, his recent books of poetry include Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman, 2008) and In Neuter (Equipage, 2012). Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford University Press, 2018) joining his earlier critical works, On Black Men (Columbia University Press, 2000) and Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity (Rutgers, 2007).

Frank B. Wilderson, III and D.S. Marriott read from their poetry as part of The SF Poetry Center's first annual Black Study Series
2019-02-16 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Frank B. Wilderson, III is an award-winning writer, poet, scholar, activist and emerging filmmaker. Dr. Wilderson spent five years in South Africa as an elected official in the African National Congress during the country’s transition from apartheid and was a member of the ANC’s armed wing Umkhonto We Sizwe. His books include Incognegro: a Memoir of Exile and Apartheid (Duke University Press, 2015) and Red, White, & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Duke University Press, 2010). Novelist Ishmael Reed called Incognegro “an important contribution to the African and African American canons and a rare American work that bridges two cultures [Black American and Black South African].” Wilderson’s collection of poems, Sideways Between Stories, was published as a pamphlet by Commune Editions.
D.S. Marriott is originally from the UK, but now lives in Oakland, California. His poetry is often associated with the Cambridge school of poetry. And as a scholar, he has been a leading theorist of afro-pessimism. In addition to Duppies, just out in the US from Commune Editions, his recent books of poetry include Hoodoo Voodoo (Shearsman, 2008) and In Neuter (Equipage, 2012). Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford University Press, 2018) joining his earlier critical works, On Black Men(Columbia University Press, 2000) and Haunted Life: Visual Culture and Black Modernity(Rutgers, 2007).

Poetry at Green Apple Books on the Park, featuring Heather June Gibbons, Randall Mann,Barbara Jane Reyes and Michelle Brittan Rosado
2019-02-16 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Heather June Gibbons is the author of the poetry collection Her Mouth as Souvenir, winner of the 2017 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize and published by the University of Utah Press. She teaches at San Francisco State University.
Barbara Jane Reyes is an adjunct professor in Philippine Studies at University of San Francisco and the author of Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Publishers, 2017), and four previous collections of poetry.
Michelle Brittan Rosado is the author of Why Can’t It Be Tenderness, winner of the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018). She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from California State University, Fresno, and is currently a PhD candidate in Creative Writing & Literature at the University of Southern California.
Randall Mann is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Proprietary (Persea Books, 2017), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and Northern California Book Award. A book of criticism, The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry, is forthcoming from Diode Editions in March 2019.

The Poetry Center presents a solo reading and conversation with Annie Finch
2019-02-18 16:30 - 18:30 UTC | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
4:30pm
The Poetry Center presents
a solo reading and conversation with Annie Finch
at The Poetry Center
San Francisco State University
1600 Holloway Avenue
San Francisco
free

POETS! - featured readers followed by an open mic
2019-02-18 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA

Ayesha Harruna Attah
2019-02-19 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from
The Hundred Wells of Salaga: A Novel
published by Other Press

Based on true events, a story of courage, forgiveness, love, and freedom in precolonial Ghana, told through the eyes of two women born to vastly different fates.
Aminah lives an idyllic life until she is brutally separated from her home and forced on a journey that transforms her from a daydreamer into a resilient woman. Wurche, the willful daughter of a chief, is desperate to play an important role in her father’s court. These two women’s lives converge as infighting among Wurche’s people threatens the region, during the height of the slave trade at the end of the nineteenth century.
Through the experiences of Aminah and Wurche, The Hundred Wells of Salaga offers a remarkable view of slavery and how the scramble for Africa affected the lives of everyday people.
Ayesha Harruna Attah grew up in Accra, Ghana and was educated at Mount Holyoke College, Columbia University, and New York University. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Asymptote Magazine, and the 2010 Caine Prize Writers’ Anthology. Attah is an Instituto Sacatar Fellow and was awarded the 2016 Miles Morland Foundation Scholarship for nonfiction. She lives in Senegal.

Marlon James
2019-02-19 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Nourse Theatre, 275 Hayes Street, San Francisco, CA, 94117, United States
Buy Tickets | Buy Series Tickets | 415.392.4400

Marlon James is the author of the novels A Brief History of Seven Killings, John Crow’s Devil, and The Book of Night Women, all of which explore and retell twentieth-century Jamaica through a litany of perspectives. His forthcoming novel, Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the first in the Dark Star Trilogy, a fantasy series rooted in African legend, which James describes as an “African Game of Thrones” (Entertainment Weekly). Born in Kingston, James was the first Jamaican author to win the Man Booker Prize in 2015. He has published short pieces in Black Noir, Esquire, Granta, Harper’s, The Caribbean Review of Books, New York Times Magazine, and elsewhere. In his 2016 viral video Are you Racist? ‘No’ isn’t a good enough answer, he makes a case for more rigorous anti-racism, as opposed to mere non-racist complacency. James lives and teaches in Minnesota, and spends the rest of his time in New York

GennaRose Nethercott and Miriam Bird Greenberg
2019-02-20 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | Green Apple Books, 506 Clement St, San Francisco , CA, 94118, United States
GennaRose Nethercott discusses her new collection, The Lumberjack’s Dove with Miriam Bird Greenberg. Also featuring live shadow puppetry!

“Serious art does not need to be weighty or explicitly topical. It can be, as it is here, apparently as light as a feather: The Lumberjack’s Dove is, in its manner, a folktale; it is also a meditation on attachment, on loss, on transformation. Like its less humble relatives, myth and parable, it is pithy, magical, its many insights, its cautions and clarifications, unfolding in a chain of brief scenes and koan-like revelations. This is a book of unexpected lightness and buoyancy, as necessary in our tense period as the more urgent confrontations.” –Louise Gluck
A boldly original and visceral debut collection from the winner of the 2017 National Poetry Series Competition, selected by Louise Gluck
In the ingenious and vividly imagined narrative poem The Lumberjack’s Dove, GennaRose Nethercott describes a lumberjack who cuts his hand off with an axe—however, instead of merely being severed, the hand shapeshifts into a dove. Far from representing just an event of pain and loss in the body, this incident spirals outward to explore countless facets of being human, prompting profound reflections on sacrifice and longing, time and memory, and—finally—considering the act of storytelling itself. The lumberjack, his hand, and the axe that separated the two all become participants in the story, with unique perspectives to share and lessons to impart. “I taught your fathers how to love,” Axe says to the acorns and leaves around her. “I mean to be felled, sliced to lumber, & reassembled into a new body.”
Inflected with the uncanny enchantment of modern folklore and animated by the sly shifting of points-of-view, The Lumberjack’s Dove is wise, richly textured poetry from a boundlessly creative new voice.

Chloe Aridjis
2019-02-21 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from
Sea Monsters: A Novel
published by Catapult Press
Pulsing to the soundtrack of Joy Division, Nick Cave, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, an intoxicating portrait of Mexico in the late 1980s by this brilliant Guggenheim fellow and Prix du Premier Roman Étranger–winning author.
One autumn afternoon in Mexico City, seventeen-year-old Luisa does not return home from school. Instead, she boards a bus to the Pacific coast with Tomás, a boy she barely knows. He seems to represent everything her life is lacking—recklessness, impulse, independence. Tomás may also help Luisa fulfill an unusual obsession: she wants to track down a traveling troupe of Ukrainian dwarfs. According to newspaper reports, the dwarfs recently escaped a Soviet circus touring Mexico. The imagined fates of these performers fill Luisa’s surreal dreams as she settles in a beach community in Oaxaca. Surrounded by hippies, nudists, beachcombers, and eccentric storytellers, Luisa searches for someone, anyone, who will “promise, no matter what, to remain a mystery.” It is a quest more easily envisioned than accomplished. As she wanders the shoreline and visits the local bar, Luisa begins to disappear dangerously into the lives of strangers on Zipolite, the “Beach of the Dead.”
Meanwhile, her father has set out to find his missing daughter. A mesmeric portrait of transgression and disenchantment unfolds. Sea Monsters is a brilliantly playful and supple novel about the moments and mysteries that shape us.
Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican-American writer who was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Oxford in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic shows, she lived for nearly six years in Berlin. Her debut novel, Book of Clouds, has been published in eight languages and won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France. Aridjis sometimes writes about art and insomnia and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. In 2014, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in London.

Poetry Center Book Award Reading: Lauren Levin and Melissa Mack, reading and in conversation
2019-02-21 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
Thursday, February 21 – 7:00 pm

The Poetry Center, HUM 512, San Francisco State University

I eat crumbs out of the baby’s neck
I’m glad there are no great poems by women
I’m glad there are no great poems by Jews
I’m glad there are no great poems about motherhood
I’m glad no great poems have ever been written.
—Lauren Levin, from The Braid
The Poetry Center presents Poetry Center Book Award winner Lauren Levin, author of The Braid, (Krupskaya Books), together with award judge Melissa Mack. Both poets read from their work, then engage in conversation with each other and the audience. This event is free and open to the public.

Many of the books I read for the Poetry Center Book Award spoke to me, were doing urgent and interesting work, shared vital rhythms, sounds, forms, and concerns. But The Braid rose. It articulated and worried—as in worked, as in worried—some of my (and I would venture to say ‘our’) most pressing concerns. What I’m looking for is a way to join with the world / and love won’t let me do that any more than hatred will. And the way it did so was expansive and specific, so good at the vague grammar of consciousness and the precision of “personal” experience. Maybe I should call this poem that refuses to stop / ‘the care-giver’ / or ‘the shepherdess’ or ‘the murderess’… Levin’s long poems made of long lines allow tenderness and aggression to coexist, like in the game Levin plays with daughter Alejandra, “Little bee, little bee, don’t sting your mama” / while she nudges my face with her mouth and nose … / and shouts into my mouth, STING! Also, the principal of the braid as a combinatory form in which the source materials remain fully themselves, even when brought together, I found so respectful and responsible in this era of cooption, merging, networks. Different bodies at different times in different places have different experiences. The obvious things are worth saying instead. Once, my niece, five years old or so, told me, of a party she’d been to, “There was a part where I didn’t feel included.” I felt included in this braid alright. Levin’s examination of whiteness as the pastoral—willful innocence and a desire to be soothed, to be able to exit the scene at any time—and of persistent anxiety was gripping. But I do believe that it is meaningful / where relief and solace come from // If I am not afraid / because I have been listening to Reagan speeches / vs. if I am not afraid // Because the bravery of my murdered friends / has taken my fear away / That is a meaningful distinction. The Braid is rigorous and uncomfortable and beautiful and I am glad to have picked it for this award and I hope everyone reads it.
—Melissa Mack, judge’s citation for the Poetry Center Book Award

Lauren Levin is a poet, mixed-genre writer and art critic, author of The Braid (Krupskaya, 2016) and Justice Piece // Transmission (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018). Their gender identity is some mix of belated queer, Jewish great-aunt, and aspirational Frank O’Hara. They are still figuring it out. They live in Richmond, CA, are from New Orleans, LA, and are committed to queer art, intersectional feminism, being a parent, and anxiety.
Melissa Mack is the author of The Next Crystal Text (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018) and the chapbook Includes All Strangers (Hooke Press, 2014). Her work has also appeared in a variety of anthologies, journals, poet’s theater, and that most ephemeral of forms, the public reading. She organizes with the Oakland Summer School, a collaborative, non-institutional space of gathering & study created by a group of activists, artists, and educators, and she lives and works in Oakland.

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event phone:

415-338-2227

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center

Gloria Steinem: More Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions
2019-02-21 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Castro Theatre, 429 Castro Street, San Francisco, 94114
Gloria Steinem in conversation with Favianna Rodriguez, moderated by Lauren Schiller.
Thursday, February 21, 2019, 7 p.m.
The Castro Theatre, 429 Castro Street, San Francisco, CA 94114
General Admission $20; Students $15
What is Gloria Steinem thinking about today in our era of #MeToo and intersectionality? How can today’s feminists learn from our foremothers, and vice versa? We’ll celebrate an updated, third edition of Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions, originally published in 1983 – a book that has sold over half a million copies, and counting. As author Susan Faludi (Backlash) put it, Outrageous Acts “will always be… a required feminist reader.” From satires to moving tributes, confessions (yes, the Playboy bunny essay is in here) and analyses, the book includes classics along with new material.
Steinem will talk with artist and activist Favianna Rodriguez of CultureStrike, and Lauren Schiller, host of Inflection Point from KALW will moderate the conversation. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear from an ever-relevant icon in a smart, sassy conversation that will provoke and inspire you.
Special promo! Join Women Lit at any level and receive many benefits, including a complimentary ticket (more at higher donation levels!), priority seating, and first access to the book signing line for the Steinem event.
$20.00.
Presented by Bay Area Book Festival.

Marina Mularz
2019-02-21 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | Green Apple Books, 506 Clement St, San Francisco , CA, 94118, United States
Marina Mularz discusses her new story collection, Welcome to Freedom Point.

Praise for Welcome to Freedom Point
“Fresh, witty, delightfully weird, Welcome to Freedom Point is equally infused with quirky charm, youthful energy, and the palpable sense of age-old loneliness that can sneak up and gut you. A collection of deeply human contradictions.”– GINA FRANGELLO Author of A Life in Men and Every Kind of Wanting
About Welcome to Freedom Point
It’s all happening in the small town of Freedom Point, Wisconsin Karlee Starr explores the rhythms of young love and snot-soaked heartache on a middle school dance floor. Thirteen-year-old Jacob Kentor suffers an identity crisis at Hooters. Desperate yeti hunting conceals the death of a marriage. A motivational speech ends in arrest. Equal parts humor and heartbreak, Welcome to Freedom Point dissects the thrills and spoils of small-town adolescence in a series of linked stories that captures the essence of what it means to come of age…at any age. In the spaces between each uproarious episode, the good people of Freedom Point collectively celebrate–or simply survive–the deeply human art of aiming for more one uncomfortable leap at a time.

Edna in a Bottle (tastes funny)
2019-02-21 20:00 - 22:00 UTC | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
Edna in a Bottle (tastes funny) is a new San Francisco comedy hour at The Bindery in the Haight district. Edna and her friends are trapped in a bottle and dying to perform! A colorful splash of sketch scenes, story-telling, circus talent and wacked-out adult comedy. And there’s nothing wrong with an eating contest here and there. Mark your calendars and come let us out of the bottle!

Tickets can be purchased in advance for $12. If available, tickets at the door will be $15.

Please note: this event will be held at The Bindery, 1727 Haight.

This event is for mature audiences only. If you have any questions about the content, don’t hesitate to reach out to events AT booksmith DOT com. Generally speaking, we’d suggest the show is suitable for ages 18+.

Doors open at 7:30pm. Show starts at 8pm.

RSVP appreciated but not required.

More details coming soon — save the date and join us!

Creating Leonardo: Celebrating 500 Years of Leonardo’s Legacy
2019-02-22 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Marines’ Memorial Club, 609 Sutter St., San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Humanities West brings together a panel of noted scholars and performers for a two-day program of lectures, dramatic readings and music to celebrate and explore the cultural contributions of Leonardo da Vinci and the mythologized legacy that has developed over the 500 since his death. In 1519 da Vinci died in France and a myth was born. Now considered the quintessential “Renaissance man” his paintings and drawings continue to inspire and his inventions still fascinate us. Presenters include Paula Findlen (Stanford), Martin Kemp (Oxford), Kip Cranna (SF Opera), Monica Azzolini (University of Bologna) Pamela O. Long (MacArthur Fellow) and Deborah Loft (College of Marin). The program features a performance by the men’s classical vocal ensemble Clerestory, and a spoken word performance by acclaimed Bay Area actor James Carpenter.

The program takes place on Friday, February 22, from 7:30pm to 9:30pm, and Saturday, February 23, from 10am to 4pm, at Marines’ Memorial Theatre, located in downtown San Francisco.

Bawdy Storytelling "Dirty Dozen"
2019-02-23 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa St, San Francisco , CA, 94110, United States
Saturday February 23rd, 2019

at the Verdi Club (2424 Mariposa, San Francisco, CA)

Remember: Bang-O at 6:00 PM, Stories at 7:00 PM

(NOTE: This is our Early Show)

Tickets $25 in Advance / $30 at the Door

Or see BOTH SHOWS with a Full Evening Wristband!

Want to sample Bawdy Storytelling? Listen to our podcast at

http://bit.ly/bawdypodcast

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This Evening of Stories and Songs includes:
❤ Artist, Educator & ‘SuperNova of Kink’ Midori
❤ More Storytellers to come – stay tuned!
❤ Sexual Folklorist Dixie De La Tour
❤ Custom Bawdy Songs by Rachel Lark

❤ Play Bang-O & WIN Prizes, just for making new friends

❤ Reserved Seating puts you right up in the action
❤ Sexy cocktails to help you Libate #ItsOK#PublicLibationIsLegal

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On Saturday February 23rd, come to Bawdy – the birthday candle you just can’t blow out – to celebrate TWELVE YEARS of Groundbreaking Storytelling-with-an-Edge.

For this big Anniversary blowout, we’ll have the notorious and heroic onstage to tell their own scandalously revealing tales, so expect a star-slutted event that will leave no turn un-stoned, go behind the green door, and give you everything you’ve come to love about Bawdy.

For the past Decade (plus 2), Sexual Folklorist Dixie De La Tour has brought the Nation’s Perverrati together on the Bawdy Storytelling stage to tell their own infamously true tales of lust, love, kinky collisions, gender redefinition, sexual identity, life-changing hook-ups, educational one-night stands & everything in between.

P.S. We’re always the best date in town but this one – this one is mega-date material! VIP Packages will be chock full of brand new bawdiness to take home with you. Our VIP & Reserved packages are sold only in advance, so get yours before they’re gone – our Anniversary shows always SELL OUT.

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About Bawdy Storytelling:

Bawdy Storytelling – the Original Sex + Storytelling series – features Real People & Rockstars sharing their Bona Fide Sexual Exploits Live Onstage; think of us as a One Night Stand with the Moth & Savage Love. Storytellers are an eclectic mix of Authors, Porn Stars, Sex Educators, Comics & More, along with Regular Joes just like you who submitted their stories online and were chosen for their panache and sense of (Mis)Adventure.

Bawdy Storytelling features tales of Carnal Wins & Epic Fails with No Scripts, No Nets, and No Holds Barred. These folks aren’t reading from cue cards: this is honest-to-badness story time with true sexcapades and poignant, transformational tales at each and every show. Join Sexual Folklorist Dixie De La Tour & hand-picked Rockstars as they share their own stories of Love, Lust, and making you feel funny in your bathing suit area. Hey, you may even go home with a few new tricks for your boudoir arsenal!

Performer Bios:

❤ Sexual Folklorist Dixie De La Tour founded Bawdy Storytelling – the Nation’s original sex and storytelling series -a decade ago, despite being told repeatedly that nobody would get onstage to tell their stories of sex, kink and gender (Wrong!).This multi-city live storytelling event welcomes true stories from any and all communities (LGBTQIA, kink, polyamory, swingers, vanilla, and many more) and is bringing sex-positive storytelling to new cities all the time. Dixie and Bawdy Storytelling have been praised by press both big and small; She has been lauded as a “masterful emcee, and her show is everything that works for storytelling—she creates a warm, safe space in which stories can bloom with dark hilarity, salacious textures, and moments of deep connection.” Dixie has hosted and curated Bawdy Storytelling events at Yale Sex Week, the Bondage Awards, the Jewish Community Center of San Francicso, CatalystCon Sexuality Conference, Dark Odyssey, FetFest, and more, as well as her home turf of the Bawdy Mainstage and BawdySlam shows. She can be found at @Bawdy on Twitter, Bawdy Storytelling on Facebook and always, always at www.BawdyStorytelling.com

• No Refunds or Exchanges

• Lineup Subject to Change

• General Admission seating is first come, first served. We recommend you arrive by 6:15 for best seating (Reserved Seating guarantees you a seat right up front)

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Winner of SFist’s Best Storytelling Show of 2016, the SF Weekly’s Best of San Francisco & the LA Weekly’s Best Of Los Angeles (for Best Storytelling) & 2 Time Winner of the SF Bay Guardian’s Best of the Bay Award (Best Literary Event)

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“The Moth for Pervs” – LA Weekly

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“Dixie De La Tour’s scandalous, over-the-top Bawdy Storytelling series” – SF Weekly

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Want more Bawdy?

www.BawdyStorytelling.com

Twitter: @Bawdy

& at Facebook.com/BawdyStorytelling

Have questions about Bawdy Storytelling Celebrates a Dirty Dozen (7:00 PM, SF)? Contact Bawdy Storytelling

Bawdy Storytelling's 'Best of Bawdy' (10 PM, SF)
2019-02-23 22:00 UTC | Verdi Club, 2424 Mariposa St, San Francisco , CA, 94110, United States
Saturday February 23rd, 2019

at the Verdi Club (2424 Mariposa, San Francisco, CA)

Remember: Bang-O at 9:30 PM, Stories at 10:00 PM

(NOTE: This is our Late Show)

General Admission $25 in Advance / $30 at the Door

Or see BOTH SHOWS with a Full Evening Wristband!

Want to sample Bawdy Storytelling? Listen to our podcast at

http://bit.ly/bawdypodcast

•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

You choose the Winners! The evening includes:
❤ Best of Bawdy Survey coming soon

❤ Hosted by Bawdy’s Founder, Sexual Folklorist Dixie De La Tour
❤ Music by the inimitable Rachel Lark

❤ Play Bang-O & WIN Prizes, just for making new friends

❤ Reserved Seating puts you right up in the action

❤ Sexy cocktails to help you Libate #ItsOK#PublicLibationIsLegal

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

On Saturday February 23rd, come to Bawdy – the birthday candle you just can’t blow out – to celebrate TWELVE YEARS of Groundbreaking Storytelling-with-an-Edge.

For this big Anniversary blowout, we’ll have the notorious and heroic onstage to tell their own scandalously revealing tales, so expect a star-slutted event that will leave no turn un-stoned, go behind the green door, and give you everything you’ve come to love about Bawdy.

For the past Dozen years, Sexual Folklorist Dixie De La Tour has brought the Nation’s Perverrati together on the Bawdy Storytelling stage to tell their own infamously true tales of lust, love, kinky collisions, gender redefinition, sexual identity, life-changing hook-ups, educational one-night stands & everything in between.

P.S. We’re always the best date in town but this one – this one is mega-date material! VIP Packages will be chock full of brand new bawdiness to take home with you. Our VIP & Reserved packages are sold only in advance, so get yours before they’re gone – our Anniversary shows always SELL OUT.

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

About Bawdy Storytelling:

Bawdy Storytelling – the Original Sex + Storytelling series – features Real People & Rockstars sharing their Bona Fide Sexual Exploits Live Onstage; think of us as a One Night Stand with the Moth & Savage Love. Storytellers are an eclectic mix of Authors, Porn Stars, Sex Educators, Comics & More, along with Regular Joes just like you who submitted their stories online and were chosen for their panache and sense of (Mis)Adventure.

Bawdy Storytelling features tales of Carnal Wins & Epic Fails with No Scripts, No Nets, and No Holds Barred. These folks aren’t reading from cue cards: this is honest-to-badness story time with true sexcapades and poignant, transformational tales at each and every show. Join Sexual Folklorist Dixie De La Tour & hand-picked Rockstars as they share their own stories of Love, Lust, and making you feel funny in your bathing suit area. Hey, you may even go home with a few new tricks for your boudoir arsenal!

Performer Bios:

❤ Sexual Folklorist Dixie De La Tour founded Bawdy Storytelling – the Nation’s original sex and storytelling series -a decade ago, despite being told repeatedly that nobody would get onstage to tell their stories of sex, kink and gender (Wrong!).This multi-city live storytelling event welcomes true stories from any and all communities (LGBTQIA, kink, polyamory, swingers, vanilla, and many more) and is bringing sex-positive storytelling to new cities all the time. Dixie and Bawdy Storytelling have been praised by press both big and small; She has been lauded as a “masterful emcee, and her show is everything that works for storytelling—she creates a warm, safe space in which stories can bloom with dark hilarity, salacious textures, and moments of deep connection.” Dixie has hosted and curated Bawdy Storytelling events at Yale Sex Week, the Bondage Awards, the Jewish Community Center of San Francicso, CatalystCon Sexuality Conference, Dark Odyssey, FetFest, and more, as well as her home turf of the Bawdy Mainstage and BawdySlam shows. She can be found at @Bawdy on Twitter, Bawdy Storytelling on Facebook and always, always at www.BawdyStorytelling.com

• No Refunds or Exchanges

• Lineup Subject to Change

• General Admission seating is first come, first served. We recommend you arrive by 6:30 for best seating (Reserved Seating guarantees you a seat right up front)

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Winner of SFist’s Best Storytelling Show of 2016, the SF Weekly’s Best of San Francisco & the LA Weekly’s Best Of Los Angeles (for Best Storytelling) & 2 Time Winner of the SF Bay Guardian’s Best of the Bay Award (Best Literary Event)

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“The Moth for Pervs” – LA Weekly

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“Dixie De La Tour’s scandalous, over-the-top Bawdy Storytelling series” – SF Weekly

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Want more Bawdy?

www.BawdyStorytelling.com

Twitter: @Bawdy

& at Facebook.com/BawdyStorytelling

Have questions about Bawdy Storytelling’s ‘Best of Bawdy’ (10 PM, SF)? Contact Bawdy Storytelling

Bay Area Chinese Writers Discuss their Writing
2019-02-24 13:00 - 16:00 UTC | San Francisco Public Library, Main Branch, 100 Larkin St., San Francisco, CA, 94102
More than ten Chinese writers from the Bay Area will talk about their passion for literature and how and why they write. They will give tips on how to finish a book and share interesting stories from their writing journeys. The talk will be followed by Q&A, book signing, and refreshments provided by the writers. The program will be conducted in Mandarin.

Main Library
Latino/Hispanic Community Room A/B

Christie Aschwanden / Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery
2019-02-24 16:00 - 18:00 UTC | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts a special afternoon event with acclaimed FiveThirtyEight science writer Christie Aschwanden for her new book Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn from the Strange Science of Recovery. More information to be announced — please save the date and join us!

In recent years recovery has become a sports and fitness buzzword. Anyone who works out or competes at any level is bombarded with the latest recovery products and services: from drinks and shakes to compression sleeves, foam rollers, electrical muscle stimulators, and sleep trackers.

In Good to Go, Aschwanden takes readers on an entertaining and enlightening tour through this strange world. She investigates whether drinking Gatorade or beer after training helps or hinders performance; she examines the latest trends among athletes, from NFL star Tom Brady’s infrared pajamas to gymnast Simone Biles’ pneumatic compression boots to swimmer Michael Phelps’ “cupping” ritual; and she tests some of the most controversial methods herself, including cryochambers, float tanks, and infrared saunas.

At a time when the latest recovery products and services promise so much, Good to Go seeks answers to the fundamental question: Do any of them actually help the body recover and achieve peak performance?

Christie Aschwanden is the lead writer for science at FiveThirtyEight and health columnist for the Washington Post. A finalist for the National Magazine Award, her writing has appeared in Outside, Discover, Smithsonian and O, The Oprah Magazine. She lives in Colorado.

Please note: this event will be held at The Bindery, 1727 Haight.

This is an all ages event with mature themes. The bar opens with doors at 2pm; event starts at 4pm.

As with all of our events, seating may be limited; you can guarantee a seat by pre-purchasing the book below — when checking out, just be sure to include a note that you’d like to attend the event. If you cannot attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of Good to Go, order below and put your request in the comments field.

RSVP appreciated but not required.

Anya Martin and Nick Mamatas
2019-02-24 18:30 - 20:30 UTC | The American Bookbinders Museum, 355 Clementina Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States

Tommy Orange
2019-02-25 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Nourse Theatre, 275 Hayes Street, San Francisco, CA, 94117, United States
Buy Tickets | Buy Series Tickets | 415.392.4400

With his stunning debut novel, There There, Tommy Orange asks readers to examine their assumptions about who Native Americans are and how and where they live. The fierce and sorrowful novel grapples with the complex and painful history of a multigenerational Native American family living in Oakland, at once celebrating their rich spiritual heritage and illuminating the profound consequences of systematic discrimination. A recent graduate from the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Orange is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. He does not take the responsibilities and impact of his public voice lightly, telling PBS that “when people think the only way to be Native or the only way to look Native is based on a historical, head-dressed feathered image, you have already disappeared.”
Jeff Chang is a journalist, music critic, and the author of Who We Be, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop, and We Gon’ Be Alright. He is the former Director of the Institute for Diversity in the Arts at Stanford University and currently serves as Vice President of Narrative, Arts, and Culture at Race Forward

DESTINY BEYOND EARTH: INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL & IMMORTALITY WITH DR. MICHIO KAKU In Conversation with Alexis Madrigal
2019-02-26 08:00 - 17:00 UTC | Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
DESTINY BEYOND EARTH: INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL & IMMORTALITY WITH DR. MICHIO KAKU
In Conversation with Alexis Madrigal
Monday, April 8, 2019, 7:30 pm
Venue: Sydney Goldstein Theater
Series: Conversations on Science
Buy Tickets | Buy Series Tickets | 415.392.4400

Dr. Michio Kaku is a theoretical physicist and futurist, and the co-founder of string field theory, a branch of the theoretical framework of string theory. His work follows the directive of Einstein, attempting to develop a Theory of Everything that unites the four fundamental forces of the universe. His books include The Future of the Mind, Physics of the Future, Physics of the Impossible, and Parallel Worlds. His most recent, The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth considers the concrete, scientific possibility of moving human civilization to outer space, drawing upon astrophysics, artificial intelligence, and cutting-edge developments in robotics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology to make a case for the potentials of sustainable human life as it intersects with new technology. Dr. Kaku is also the science correspondent for CBS: This Morning, host of two weekly science radio programs, Science Fantastic and Explorations in Science and a Professor in Theoretical Physics at the City University of New York.

Alexis Madrigal is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of Powering the Dream: The History and Promise of Green Technology. He created and hosted Containers, a podcast about the machinery of global capitalism and the city of Oakland.

SPANISH LANGUAGE BOOK CLUB Meeting
2019-02-26 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Please join us for a lively discussion about “Patricia sigue Aqui” by Maria Minguez Arias.
For more information about the bookclub please contact J. Iranyi <iranyi@me.com>

Posted in BOOK CLUB

Maxine Gordon on the life and legacy of Jazz legend Dexter Gordon
2019-02-26 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
celebrating the release of
Sophisticated Giant:The Life and Legacy of Dexter Gordon
by Maxine Gordon (Author), Farah Jasmine Griffin (Foreword), Woody Louis Armstrong Shaw III (Afterword)
published by University of California Press
Sophisticated Giant presents the life and legacy of tenor saxophonist Dexter Gordon (1923–1990), one of the major innovators of modern jazz. In a context of biography, history, and memoir, Maxine Gordon has completed the book that her late husband began, weaving his “solo” turns with her voice and a chorus of voices from past and present. Reading like a jazz composition, the blend of research, anecdote, and a selection of Dexter’s personal letters reflects his colorful life and legendary times. It is clear why the celebrated trumpet genius Dizzy Gillespie said to Dexter, “Man, you ought to leave your karma to science.”
Dexter Gordon the icon is the Dexter beloved and celebrated on albums, on film, and in jazz lore–even in a street named for him in Copenhagen. But this image of the cool jazzman fails to come to terms with the multidimensional man full of humor and wisdom, a figure who struggled to reconcile being both a creative outsider who broke the rules and a comforting insider who was a son, father, husband, and world citizen. This essential book is an attempt to fill in the gaps created by our misperceptions as well as the gaps left by Dexter himself.

Maxine Gordon is an independent scholar with a lifetime career working with jazz musicians. As an oral historian and archivist in the fields of jazz and African American cultural history, Sophisticated Giant fulfills the promise she made to her late husband, jazz saxophonist and Academy Award-nominated actor Dexter Gordon, to complete his biography.

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
2019-02-27 08:00 - 17:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from
Minutes of Glory and Other Stories
published by The New Press
A dazzling short story collection from the person Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie calls “one of the greatest writers of our time”

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, although renowned for his novels, memoirs, and plays, honed his craft as a short story writer. From “The Fig Tree” (“Mugumo” in this collection), written in 1960, his first year as an undergraduate at Makerere University College in Uganda, to the playful “The Ghost of Michael Jackson,” written as a professor at the University of California, Irvine, these collected stories reveal a master of the short form.
Covering the period of British colonial rule and resistance in Kenya to the bittersweet experience of independence—and including two stories that have never before been published in the United States— Ngũgĩ’s collection features women fighting for their space in a patriarchal society; big men in their Bentleys who have inherited power from the British; and rebels who still embody the fighting spirit of the downtrodden. One of Ngũgĩ’s most beloved stories, “Minutes of Glory,” tells of Beatrice, a sad but ambitious waitress who fantasizes about being feted and lauded over by the middle-class clientele in the city’s beer halls. Her dream leads her on a witty and heartbreaking adventure.
Published for the first time in America, Minutes of Glory and Other Stories is a major literary event that celebrates the storytelling might of one of Africa’s best-loved writers.
One of the leading writers and scholars at work today, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o was born in Limuru, Kenya, in 1938. He is the author of A Grain of Wheat; Weep Not, Child; and Petals of Blood, as well as Birth of a Dream Weaver, Wrestling with the Devil, and Minutes of Glory (all from The New Press).
Currently Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine, Ngũgĩ is recipient of twelve honorary doctorates, among other awards.
What has been said about the work of

This thrilling testament to the human spirit had, for me, a fierce resonance. . . . I could not help feeling that his luminous words were meant for those victims and many others being persecuted across the world, a way of urging humanity to never surrender to the demons of fear and silence. (Ariel Dorfman, The New York Times Book Review)

“Engrossing … At once exhilarating and defiant, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s memoir is a thought-provoking document of a grim time in Kenyan history.” (Publishers Weekly)

The Washington Post reviews Birth of a Dream Weaver, saying “every page ripples with a contagious faith in education and in the power of literature to shape the imagination and scour the conscience.” (The Washington Post)

Nona Caspers and Friends
2019-02-27 18:00 - 19:30 UTC | James C. Hormel LGBTQIA Center of San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St. San Francisco,, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Join us to celebrate Nona Caspers’ latest book, the novel, The Fifth Woman. Publisher’s Weekly said, “This gem of a collection is a transcendent portrayal of bereavement, showing how death elevates the mundane and affects everything humans do, see and think.” The San Francisco Chronicle called the book “… mesmerizing, moving…”
Years after Caspers’s unnamed narrator loses her first lover in a tragic accident, she finds herself wondering, “What did she want from me? What are the things that matter?” In vivid, richly detailed vignettes, the book tracks the cyclical nature of grief and remembrance across a life fractured by loss. At times dryly comical, at other times radiantly surreal,The Fifth Woman is a testament to the resurrecting power of memory and enduring love.
Caspers will share the stage with two of her former graduate students from the Creative Writing program at SFSU. Author signing and book sale by Dog Eared Books Castro to follow event.

Lloyd Kahn
2019-02-27 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
A Celebration of The Pacific Ocean: Lloyd Kahn’s Latest Book, Driftwood Shacks: Anonymous Architecture Along the California Coast
from Shelter Publications
Preceded by Discussion and Vintage Photos of NorCal Surfing in the ’50s — Before Wetsuits

Lloyd Kahn is the editor-in-chief of Shelter Publications, an independent California publisher. Shelter Publications specializes in books on building and architecture,as well as health and fitness.

Renowned SF Poet Lew Ellingham Celebrates Birthday With Book Launch
2019-02-27 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Come celebrate Lew Ellingham’s 80+ (?) birthday wherein he will launch his new book, 2018; new narrative exponent, poet, and playwright Kevin Killian talks about his Semiotext(e) book Fascination, (his newest is Stage Fright: Selected Plays from San Francisco Poets Theater); and poet Patrick Mellon launches his first book, Alkali Shores, the most recent publication from local publisher Ithuriel’s Spear.

Lew’s new offering is 2018, “Give Me My Words”, the author’s manuscripts chronologically presented through 2018, with the addition of a memoir or eulogy, “Compton”, the final story of a friend who recently died, an Alzheimer’s victim — almost all the settings are in San Francisco, prose poems or stories usually a single page in length, gathered in a jumbled mind.

Patrick Mellor’s new poetry book from Ithuriel’s Spear, Alkali Shores, is his first book of poems and was written over the last 15 years. Its aim is to represent the intersection of biological and cultural history expressed in individual human cognition and universal mythology.
Mellor has studied paleobiology, botany, and philosophy at Oxford and San Francisco State universities, specializing in the botany and ecology of the California deserts, philosophy of mind and early modern rationalism.
Kevin Killian will read from Fascination, a memoir of gay life in 1970s Long Island by one of the leading proponents of the New Narrative movement.
Fascination brings together an early memoir, Bedrooms Have Windows (1989) and a previously unpublished prose work, Bachelors Get Lonely. The two together depict the author’s early years struggling to become a writer in the sexed-up, boozy, drug-ridden world of Long Island’s North Shore in the 1970s. Fascination offers a moving and often funny view of the loneliness and desire that defined gay life of that era—a time in which Richard Nixon’s resignation intersected with David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs—from one of the leading voices in experimental gay writing of the past thirty years. “Move along the velvet rope,” Killian writes in Bedrooms Have Windows, “run your shaky fingers past the lacquered Keith Haring graffito: ‘You did not live in our time! Be Sorry!'”

The fun begins at 7pm. All welcome.

REBECCA SOLNIT
2019-02-27 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Nourse Theatre, 275 Hayes Street, San Francisco, CA, 94117, United States
Buy Tickets | Buy Series Tickets | 415.392.4400

Rebecca Solnit is an incisive voice on topics ranging from feminism to the environment, western and indigenous history to literary criticism, and from hope and disaster to popular power and social change. She has published twenty books, including three collections of essays–Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, and The Mother of All Questions–as well as a trilogy of atlases of American cities and a work of literary criticism on Eadweard Muybridge. Her most recent work, Call Them By Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays), brings a measure of light and hope to the sobering topics of police brutality, lack of gun regulation, and other acts of violence in America. Solnit is a columnist at Harper’s and a frequent contributor to The Guardian.
Astra Taylor’s engagement with philosophy, democracy, and political organizing transcends form, emerging through documentary films, books, essays, and social activism. Her feature documentaries include Zizek! (2005) and An Examined Life (2008). Her most recent film, What is Democracy? (2018), collapses time and space, doggedly pursuing the eponymous question, while exploring a conglomeration of threads that refuse to be constrained by the camera’s frame, continuing the conversation rather than offering decisive answers. The film has been called “a deliberate challenge to complacency” (The Guardian), and features the political activists and thinkers Cornel West and Silvia Federici. Taylor is also the author of Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone, and the American Book Award-winning The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age. Her essays have been published in The Nation, The Washington Post, n+1, The New York Times, and The Baffler, where she is a contributing editor.

BERKELEY ARTS & LETTERS: Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI
2019-02-27 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St, Berkeley, CA, 94709, United States
Berkeley Arts & Letters presents a panel discussion on the future of artificial intelligence and the nature of human existence.

Please note: This event is ticketed, and will take place at Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar St., Berkeley. Tickets, including discounted book bundles, are available in advance here. Unless otherwise noted here, general admission tickets will be available at the door.

Advances in artificial intelligence have forever altered the way we live — from Alexa in your living room to autonomous vehicles and drone warfare — and AI is poised to define the coming decades for better or worse. Tech giants, including Google and Facebook, are engaged in an AI arms race, while Elon Musk, the late Stephen Hawking, and other thought leaders have warned that unsupervised, self-improving machine learning poses a major threat to society. So where is AI headed next, and how will this rapidly emerging technology impact our world?

In Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI, science world luminary John Brockman has assembled twenty-five of the most important scientific thinkers to discuss the groundbreaking opportunities and potential dangers that AI presents. The result is an unparalleled round-table examination of the mind, thinking, intelligence, and what it means to be human.

Joining us for an evening of conversation are four Bay Area contributors:

– Chris Anderson: former EIC of Wired; cofounder and CEO of 3DRobotics.
– Anca Dragan: UC Berkeley professor; cofounder of the prestigious Berkeley AI Research Lab.
Leading the panel is Possible Minds editor John Brockman, founder of the powerhouse international literary and software agency Brockman, Inc. as well as the publisher of Edge.org, an online salon that the Guardian has called the worlds smartest website.

Please join us!

“Pithy essays on artificial intelligence. . . . Readers . . . will not find a better introduction than this book.” – Kirkus

“While the [Possible Minds] authors disagree on the answers, they agree on the major question: what dangers might AI present to humankind? Within that framework, the essays offer a host of novel ideas. . . . Enlightening, entertaining, and exciting reading.” – Publishers Weekly

Please note:

– Duration of event is subject to authors’ preference.
– Signing and additional details coming soon.
– This event is all ages. RSVP is appreciated but not necessary.
– Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs of any kind, please write events AT booksmith DOT com and we will do our best to accommodate you.
– If you can’t attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of Possible Minds, and/or any of the authors’ books, order below and put your request in the comments field.

THE RACKET!
2019-02-28 19:00 - 20:30 UTC | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Details soon!
Hosted by Noah B. Sanders
