Litseen

The Poetry Center Book Award: Bao Phi with Sarah Menefee, reading and in conversation
2019-11-14 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
Thursday, November 14 – 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

The Poetry Center, Humanities 512, San Francisco State University

The Poetry Center Book Award Reading, co-sponsored this year by the Diasporic Vietnamese Artists Network (DVAN), features award winner Bao Phi, from Minneapolis, selected for his book Thousand Star Hotel (Coffee House Press, 2017), reading and in conversation with the award judge, Sarah Menefee. The Poetry Center Book Award has been presented annually since 1980 by The Poetry Center to a single outstanding book of poetry published in the previous year. The award carries a cash prize and an invitation to read, along with the award judge, at The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University. Supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, this event is free and open to the public.
Judge’s Statement: for Thousand Star Hotel, by Bao Phi

From the first poem in Bao Phi’s Thousand Star Hotel I was taken into a real world, particular to the poet but a shared world, in the best way, written with a sure and generous ear. A confidence by one retail worker to another in the first poem of this fine collection: a scene certainly familiar to me, and I know right off that the ways of the world and the heart are being masterfully revealed. The particulars of life, which constitute both poetry and the shared experience called ‘history,’ are here with their beautiful and brutal truths. In this case the war that was waged against the Vietnamese people, something that reverberates forever here, as part of this patched-together and unequal society of all of us from everywhere, where the truths told by father to son and father to daughter are freighted with love, ultimate innocence and experience. All these things weave through these poems, which are a pleasure and an adventure to read, best instances of the visionary real. At a time when there is so much dimensionless fantasy throughout this amnesiac culture, how refreshing to be told the real story! — revelation and recognition. “That a raindrop can weep inside of itself so hard it drowns and, looking at it, you would never know.” —Sarah Menefee

Bao Phi is a multiple-time Minnesota Grand Slam poetry champ and National Poetry Slam finalist, and the author of two collections of poetry, Thousand Star Hotel and Sông I Sing, both from Coffee House Press, and both of which are taught in classrooms across the country. He is also author of A Different Pond, a picture book which received a Caldecott honor, an Ezra Jack Keats new author honor, the Charlotte Zolotow award for excellence in children’s book writing, and six starred reviews, and He was Minnesota Monthly’s Author of the Year 2017 and City Pages’ Best Author 2018. He continues to tour as a featured guest speaker and artist across the country. He is the program director of events and awards at the Loft Literary Center, in Minneapolis. Photo: Anna Min.
San Francisco poet Sarah Menefee, originally from Reno, Nevada, is a homeless and poor people’s rights activist, a founding member of the League of Revolutionaries for a New America, the Revolutionary Poets Brigade, and ‘First they came for the homeless.’ Her poetry collections include I’m Not Thousandfurs, The Blood About the Heart, Human Star, In Your Fish Helmet, and Stella Umana (Italian & English), along with numerous chapbooks. She is a painter, a photographer and journalist for The People’s Tribune, with her articles and her poetry published widely in numerous political and literary journals and anthologies. She has worked in hospitals, bars, casinos, offices, day care centers and in many retail jobs, including bookstores. She is currently semi-retired, and works part-time as an artist’s model.

Featured:
Sarah Menefee, “First They Came for the Homeless,” at Cornell University Architecture Art Planning
KB Kinkel, The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #115: Bao Phi
Recipients of The Poetry Center Book Award, 1980–present

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event phone:

415-338-2227

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center and The Green Arcade

Babar in Exile #21: Till Death Do We Part
2019-11-14 19:00 - 21:00 | Himalayan Flavors, 1585 University Avenue, Berkeley, 94703
Babar in Exile continues it’s November tradition with “Till Death Do We Part”, a reading that celebrates our vociferous dead and the living who go right on singing despite it all. Presiding over the departed will be Vampyre Mike Kassel (1953-2008), who will be honored with the release of Bat Flower, a new compilation of his mixed-genre work by Deborah Fruchey and Last Laugh Productions. Representing the living will be Chris & Deirdre Trian, original denizens of the Café Babar readings who have been partnered for 47 years. Fantastic and skilled performers, they will each do a set of poetry and (if we’re lucky) song, and Chris will also be displaying some of his paintings during the event. We’ll have multiple genres, media, and states of being, meaning something for everyone on this fine autumn eve. With, as always, our fab open mic, which for this occasion will ask participants to read one poem from a departed Babarian along with their own. Books will be available to read from.
So come on down to check out a slice of Bay Area poetry history, now and in the making, and make your way home with a bindle full of inspiration and a thimbleful more hope for the species.

Babar in Exile #21: Till Death Do We Part
a revival of the Cafe Babar, Paradise Lounge, and Club Chameleon reading series

featuring
Chris Trian
Deirdre Trian
and the work of Vampyre Mike Kassel
and you, in our spooky open mic

Hosted by Richard Loranger and Paul Corman-Roberts

PERFORMER BIOS
Chris Trian was born in Hollywood, CA, and raised in San Francisco. He is a veteran of the bars and cheap hotels and poetry readings of North Beach. He has a full-length collection of poetry, When There’s No More Room in Heck, the Darned Will Walk the Earth, published by Zeitgeist Press, and has pieces in Howl magazine and the Street Spirit newspaper. He lives and writes with Deirdre Trian.
Deirdre Trian was born in Oakland, CA, and grew up in San Francisco after spending her first five years in Berkeley. She wrote from an early age since her great aunt and mother both wrote. Since her mother was blinded by spinal meningitis before she was born, Deirdre helped her to write by correcting spelling, et al. She has been writing since then with Christopher Trian, with whom she’s spent 47 years. She has been going to poetry readings with Chris throughout that time.
Born in 1953 in Boston, “Vampyre” Mike Kassel moved to San Francisco in 1974 and was given his nickname by an audience at the Mabuhay Gardens who called for “Vampire Mike.” In 1980 Mike’s play Bat Soup, a musical comedy version of Dracula, ran for 86 performances at the Hotel Utah. His bands included The Hellhounds, The Fabulous Dumonts, The Bones of Kryptos, the Welfare Cheats, and the ‘60s homage band The Mysterious Icewyrms. He established himself as a spoken word powerhouse in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s at the Cafe Babar and the Above Paradise Lounge. He had seven books, including Going for the Low Blow (Zeitgeist Press, 1989); I Want to Kill Everything (Zeitgeist Press, 1990); Graveyard Golf (Manic D Press 1991); The Worlds According to Loki (Valknot Publishing, 2001); and Toxic Vaudeville (Ajax Press of San Francisco, 2007). His work has been translated into German, Czech and Russian. He also wrote for the Western Edition newspaper, the quarterly Yggdrasil, and the Sunday magazine of the San Francisco Chronicle/Examiner. Mike died suddenly of pneumonia on March 22, 2008. Two posthumous books have emerged, The Dead Poet Talks Back (Zeitgeist Press 2009) and the newly released Bat Flower: Poems, Plays, and Other Perversions (Last Laugh Productions, 2019).

Oakland | Ivanna Baranova CONFIRMATION BIAS Launch & Reading
2019-11-14 19:00 - 21:00 | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Since November 19th Guatemalan-Slovak poet Ivanna Baranova has been touring across Canada and the US with her debut full-length poetry collection CONFIRMATION BIAS (Metatron Press, 2019). Now after a month, it’s finally here in Oakland, CA at Wolfman Books or one night only. I mean the book will be there afterwards (if it isn’t sold out!) but she won’t, so please join us for this launch event featuring readings from Ren Cook, Alexandra Naughton, Brent Reichenberger, and Jesse Prado.

The Oakland Poetry Slam Ft. L7
2019-11-14 19:00 - 23:00 | The Flight Deck, 1540 Broadway, Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
We’re back and better than ever! Come join us at our new venue, The Flight Deck, conveniently located in Downtown Oakland near 19th St BART Station . Bring your poetry, your music, your dance, you art, but most importantly bring yourself!
Our feature for the night is non other than Chris Cuadrado aka “L7!”
Chris “L7” Cuadrado is a culture worker & propagandist from Inglewood, CA. L7 uses words, sights, and sounds to further radical and critical thought. L7 draws from the aesthetic and political traditions of revolutionaries, agitators, and poor peoples movements from across the globe. L7 is committed to creating work that reflects the struggle of colonized and oppressed people, while aligning with their movements for liberation, self-determination, and decolonization.
L7 is also founder and co-host of the Poets of Color Podcast.
Live Stream Provided by Berkeley Poetry Slam!
Doors Open at 7 pm
Workshop @ 7:20
Sign up lists go out at 7:15 pm
Show starts at 8:15 pm!
💲Cover💲
$5 for performers
$10 for audience
Please email oakslambooking@gmail.com for any questions regarding the space, accessibility and accommodations!

Cherríe Moraga: Native Country of the Heart
2019-11-14 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Cherríe Moraga discusses her new memoir, Native Country of the Heart.
Praise for Native Country of the Heart
“I love A Native Country of the Heart‘s forthright blending of a bio of Moraga’s intriguing powerhouse mom, Elivira, with Moraga’s own queer evolution. And that the intimate facts of Cherríe Moraga’s family history get embedded alongside such valuable public secrets as the mass deportation of Mexican workers during the depression so that dust bowl farmers could have their jobs. This book is a coup.” —Eileen Myles, author of Afterglow
“A beautiful, painful, funny, heartening and heartfelt immersion in the life of one of the leading voices of Latino/a literature, our very own Cherríe Moraga. Part elegy, part history and part testimonio rife with storytelling, Native Country of the Heart, like all of Moraga’s work, charts the unmapped and unspoken territories of body, mind, heart and soul and refuses to be confined by any border or genre. Her memoir is a defiant, deep and soulful book about all our mothers, mother cultures, motherlands and languages. Telling her own mother Elvira’s story is both a political and ceremonial act. “We were not supposed to remember,” Moraga writes. She does remember, and in this moving and brave book she gives us all a reckoning our country needs now. —Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies
“Cherríe Moraga, a foundational contributor to modern Feminism, grapples with her fierce but withholding Mexican mother who—despite their struggles—remains her strongest touchstone of identification. A raw and vulnerable story of acceptance hard won.” —Sarah Schulman, author of The Cosmopolitans and Conflict is Not Abuse
“This a great book. In telling her mother’s life-story Cherríe Moraga ruthlessly examines her own heart and the deep complications of growing up mixed race and lesbian in a racist culture. But she also lays bare the spiritual core that strengthens and sustains her. The heart, the soul, familia and tribe, the native country is as narrow as the space between clenched fingers and as wide as the sightlines to the horizon.” —Dorothy Allison, author of Bastard Out of Carolina
About Native Country of the Heart
From the celebrated editor of This Bridge Called My Back, Cherríe Moraga charts her own coming-of-age alongside her mother’s decline, and also tells the larger story of the Mexican American diaspora.
Native Country of the Heart: A Memoir is, at its core, a mother-daughter story. The mother, Elvira, was hired out as a child, along with her siblings, by their own father to pick cotton in California’s Imperial Valley. The daughter, Cherríe Moraga, is a brilliant, pioneering, queer Latina feminist. The story of these two women, and of their people, is woven together in an intimate memoir of critical reflection and deep personal revelation.
As a young woman, Elvira left California to work as a cigarette girl in glamorous late-1920s Tijuana, where an ambiguous relationship with a wealthy white man taught her life lessons about power, sex, and opportunity. As Moraga charts her mother’s journey—from impressionable young girl to battle-tested matriarch to, later on, an old woman suffering under the yoke of Alzheimer’s—she traces her own self-discovery of her gender-queer body and Lesbian identity, as well as her passion for activism and the history of her pueblo. As her mother’s memory fails, Moraga is driven to unearth forgotten remnants of a U.S. Mexican diaspora, its indigenous origins, and an American story of cultural loss.
Poetically wrought and filled with insight into intergenerational trauma, Native Country of the Heart is a reckoning with white American history and a piercing love letter from a fearless daughter to the mother she will never lose.

Wendy Taylor Carlisle & Kimi Sugioka
2019-11-14 19:30 - 21:00 | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, BERKELEY, 94704-2322
WENDY TAYLOR CARLISLE’s new book is The Mercy of Traffic. Tony Hoagland said, “Wendy Carlisle’s poems come out wearing their red shoes and ready to dance. The lives she sketches flame underfoot so the soles of your feet are ‘burned like little suns’ and when we read this book of grace and empathy ‘we are assured there will be sparks, then blasts and blowups, offerings of flame and dust…’”Her publications include the full-length books Reading Berryman to the Dog and Discount Fireworks, plus five chapbooks, most recently They Went Down to the Beach to Play. Her work is in anthologies such as In Plein Air, Untold Arkansas, and 50/50: Poems and Translations by Womxn Over Fifty. She has an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and lives in the Arkansas Ozarks.

KIMI SUGIOKA’s brand new poetry book is Wile & Wing. Anne Waldman said, “Kimi Sugioka is a poet with a lot of guises: maternal, witchy, passionate, detached observer…She moves through the female cycle confidently, poised, strong in her observance and power.” Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina and raised in Berkeley, California, Kimi Sugioka is a poet, songwriter, and educator. She performs her work frequently throughout the Bay Area. She has worked in public education for decades, and earned her BA from San Francisco State University and MFA from the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

You’re Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes at TLC
2019-11-14 19:30 - 22:30 | The Lost Church, 65 Capp Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
You’re Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes… Open Mic at The Lost Church – San Francisco w/Ned Buskirk
$10 in advance & at the door.
TICKETS HERE: http://bit.ly/YG2D_Nov14
And support MORE with ticket tiers. You choose the amount.
The tickets tiers are direct ways of offering more support to YG2D, a 501(c)3 Non-profit bringing diverse communities creatively into the conversation of death & dying, inspiring life by unabashedly sourcing our shared mortality.
Thank you for any additional help you can offer.
And please contact ned@yg2d.com if you need financial support to be a part of the evening.
Venue: The Lost Church – San Francisco
The Lost Church is CASH ONLY at the door (at this time).
Doors at 7:30pm.
Show at 8:15pm.
All performances end at 10:30pm.
Seating is first come, first served.
We recommend you buy in advance to ensure being a part of the event (parlor shows often sell out), but you can also try purchasing at the door on the night of the show (although, we do NOT set aside a block of tickets for door purchase)
Ages 10 and over are welcome. (Parental discretion is advised for some events).
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
You’re Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes…
is an open mic event, the communal offering for us to explore the conversation of death & dying, to embrace our losses & mortality,
to grieve, bereave & honor those we’ve lost & love… while all the while making room for simply being ALIVE.
Sign-ups will be the night of & the list fills up quickly, so if you want to perform, you’d better get there early…
If you’re going to perform, keep it under 5 MINUTES. That’s right: 5 MINUTES. WE WILL TIME YOU. And we will hug you when we have to stop you [just to make it easier on you (or harder – depending on your propensity for intimacy)].
Poetry, prose, music, dancing, comedy, drama, happy, sad, & on & on & on… Remember: EVERYTHING GOES… so do whatever you want.
You don’t have to perform anything; the audience is as essential as the performers.
Please don’t perform anything with a setup that takes much more time than the time it takes for you to walk onstage. Honestly, plugging things in is endlessly boring. If you need to borrow an instrument, figure it out before you’re called to the stage.
IMPORTANT ::: DON’T TAKE YOURSELF SO SERIOUSLY. Come and have fun. The end. Remember. Someday, we won’t exist and neither will the English language. If you choose to take yourself seriously, then take yourself so seriously that it’s stupid. Ridiculousness is encouraged.
You’re Going to Die. No. Really. You are.

MFA in Writing Reading Series - Jamel Brinkley
2019-11-14 19:45 - 21:30 | USF Fromm Hall – FR 125 – Maraschi Room, 2130 Fulton Street, San Francisco, CA, 94117, United States
Jamel Brinkley is the author of A Lucky Man: Stories, a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction, the Story Prize, the John Leonard Prize, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, and winner of the Ernest J. Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. His writing has appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2018, Ploughshares, Gulf Coast, Glimmer Train, American Short Fiction, and Tin House. He is currently a 2018-20 Wallace Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University.

Love With Accountability: Digging Up The Roots of Child Sexual Abuse
2019-11-16 19:30 - 21:00 | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Despite the current survivor-affirming awareness around sexual violence, child sexual abuse, most notably when it’s a family member or friend, is still a very taboo topic. There are approximately 42 million child sexual abuse survivors in the U.S. and millions of bystanders who look the other way as the abuse occurs and cover for the harm-doers with no accountability. Documentary filmmaker and survivor of child sexual abuse and adult rape, Aishah Shahidah Simmons invites diasporic Black people to join her in transformative storytelling that envisions a world that ends child sexual abuse without relying on the criminal justice system. Love WITH Accountability features compelling writings by child sexual abuse survivors, advocates, and Simmons’s mother, who underscores the detrimental impact of parents/caregivers not believing their children when they disclose their sexual abuse. This collection explores disrupting the inhumane epidemic of child sexual abuse, humanely.

“With this brave and healing anthology of truth-telling about sexual abuse within Black families, Aishah Shahidah Simmons sets an example for all families. If we could all raise just one generation of children without violence or the threat of violence, who knows what might be possible?” – Gloria Steinem

These co-panelists (in alphabetical order) will join Simmons: Qui Alexander, Rosa Cabrera, Cecelia Falls, Thea Matthews, Loretta Ross and Gwendolyn Zoharah Simmons.

David L. Eng: Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation
2019-11-17 08:00 - 17:00 | UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies Library, 30 Stephens Hall, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
In Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation David L. Eng draws on psychoanalytic case histories from the mid-1990s to the present to explore how first- and second-generation Asian American young adults deal with difficulties such as depression, suicide, and coming out within the larger social context of race, immigration, and sexuality.
The New Yorker’s Hua Hsu writes: “There’s a power in being able to recognize our struggles as the result of paradoxes we live within rather than seeing them as purely private failings. It’s a step toward imagining lives that we might be the authors of, with endings that we write ourselves.”
David L. Eng is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Presented by Eastwind Books of Berkeley & Ethnic Studies
Free and open to the public; The ESL has an ADA accessible front entrance and access to two ADA accessible restrooms | asiabookcenter.com | 510-548-2350

Family Sacrifices: Book Talk with Dr. Russell Jeung
2019-11-17 18:00 - 20:00 | Oakland Asian Cultural Center, 388 9th St Ste 290, Oakland, CA, 94607, United States
The first book based on national survey data on Asian American religious practices, Family Sacrifices is a seminal text on the fastest-growing racial group in the United States. Fifty-two percent of Chinese Americans report having no religious affiliation, making them the least religiously identified ethnic group in the United States. Family Sacrifices reveals that Chinese Americans employ familism, not religion, as the primary narrative by which they find meaning, identity, and belonging.
Dr. Russell M. Jeung is Chair and Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. The author of books and articles on Asian Americans, religion, and race, he’s a community activist and church leader in East Oakland, CA. Dr. Jeung’s memoir, At Home in Exile, shares his family’s six generations in the U.S. and his life with refugees.
Co-sponsored by Oakland Asian Cultural Center, Eastwind Books of Berkeley, and San Francisco State University Asian American Studies Department.

The Racket #36 : SOUND
2019-11-18 19:00 - 20:30 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
To celebrate our third year of existence we’ve decided to tap the senses, to trod upon that which is most audible, to get a bunch of people in a room to hear other people talk about SOUND. We are people who are into sound(s), be it music or the chirps and tweets and gusty winds of the great outdoors or just the varied beeps and boops of our cellphone alarms in the morning. We love the power of the sonic wave and damn it, we wanted to ask some great writers to read about it.
Also, free beer until there is no free beer. At the event, not in the world.
The Readers (so far):
Roy Dufrain Jr.
Samantha Schoech
Danielle Truppi
Annelies Zijderveld
Sarah Bethe Nelson
James Cagney
Sage The Poet
Musical Performance by Bryson Schmidt

Joyce E. Young at Poetry Express Nov 18
2019-11-18 19:00 - 21:00 | Poetry Express, 1585 University Ave., Berkeley, CA, 94703, United States
Open Mic + free (except for restaurant purchases) 7pm. 11/18/2019
Joyce E. Young is the author of How it Happens, published by Nomadic Press. Her writing has been nominated for both a Pushcart and a California Book Award
and has appeared in Smith Alumnae Quarterly, WORDPEACE, riverbabble, The New Poets of the American West, and elsewhere. She has received grants from the California Arts Council, the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation and Writers on Site residency program at the Oakland Museum and Oakland Public Library through
Poets & Writers, Inc. Joyce has been awarded residencies at Virginia Center for
the Creative Arts, Hedgebrook, Soapstone and Vermont Studio Center. She works as a Writing Consultant at John F. Kennedy University, teaches writing privately, and is currently at work writing poetry, essays, and Parallel Journey, a novel.
Joyce maintains regular Yoga and Chi Gung practice and is a semi-retired Afro
Cuban folkloric and modern dancer. She keeps lots of music in her life,
particularly Jazz, Salsa, Reggae, Samba, and combinations of notes that defy
category. In reality, though, she really doesn’t like to assign categories for music.
Because
Like angels are supposed to
You don’t do it because
you want to be good,
get candy, or ice cream
You do it because you love
And forgetting all else
You tend to her or him,
watching, waiting, praying
for life, health, the best
for that person or persons
you love

East Bay Release for Disasterama! at Badass Bookworm’s Lit Loft
2019-11-18 19:00 - 21:00 | The Legionnaire Saloon, 2272 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
Join us for the East Bay release of “Disasterama”, Alvin Orloff’s fantabulous new memoir of ’90’s SF wild club kid, AIDS-activism, agitprop performance, and homocore culture. He hit it spot on with both wit and gravitas.
Alvin will read from the book, of course, preceded by shiny crew Sam Sax, Dena Rod, Richard Loranger, Vernon Keeve III, & Anna Allen. Clearly a gathering that is not to be missed.
I’ve made a second invite for this because Facebook, in all its culture-crushing wisdom, won’t let me send the original to more than 30 people or so. This one won’t even let me invite more than 50. I’ve tried to avoid repeats, but if you’ve received both, my apologies. If you can, PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD. 🙂

Andrew McAfee
2019-11-18 19:30 - 21:30 | SFJAZZ Center, 201 Franklin St, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Andrew McAfee, an MIT scientist and bestselling author, studies how modern digital technologies are reshaping our world.

Tickets will go on sale one month before the Seminar; you can follow Long Now on Twitter, Facebook and through our blog for updates on our live events, podcasts and videos on long-term thinking.

Love in the Time of Piñatas
2019-11-19 08:00 - 17:00 | Z Below, 470 Florida Street, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Written and Performed by Baruch Porras Hernandez
Directed by Richard A. Mosqueda
You’ve been invited! Join the writer, comedian, and solo performer Baruch Porras Hernandez as he breaks open his life and lets all the candy fall out. Watch him wrestle with immigrant guilt, make out with it a little, and transform it into a wickedly funny and moving show that asks, “what’s at the end of the Mexican immigrant road?” Baruch hopes it’s donuts.
Grab your and party hat and get ready to chill with horny Piñatas, hear stories about sex parties, and hang out with the ghost of Frida Kahlo in a show that pushes past the stereotypes to bring you a unique story of a Queer Latino and his family struggling to thrive in America.
This show contains Adult Content and Partial Nudity. Intended for Mature Audiences.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras
2019-11-19 17:00 - 18:00 | Writing Studio @ CCA, 195 De Haro Street, San Francisco, CA, 94107, United States
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree (Doubleday) is an Indie Next selection, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Buzzfeed, Nylon, and Guernica, among others. Rojas Contreras has received awards and fellowships from Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, VONA, Hedgebrook, The Camargo Foundation, and the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture. She teaches writing at the University of San Francisco, and is working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Colombia who it was said had the power to move clouds.
Because the reading immediately follows a class, we kindly ask that attendees arrive as close to the 5 pm start time as possible, but not before.

Savannah Shange
2019-11-19 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
discussing the subject of her new book
Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco
from Duke University Press
San Francisco is the endgame of gentrification, where racialized displacement means that the Black population of the city hovers just over 3 percent. The “Robeson Justice Academy” opened to serve the few remaining low-income neighborhoods of the city, with the mission of offering liberatory, social justice–themed education to youth of color. While it features a progressive curriculum where students read Frantz Fanon and Audre Lorde, the majority Latinx school also has the district’s highest suspension rates for Black students. In Progressive Dystopia Savannah Shange explores the potential for reconciling the school’s marginalization of Black students with its sincere pursuit of multiracial uplift and solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and six years of experience teaching at the school, Shange outlines how the school fails its students and the community because it operates within a space predicated on antiblackness. Seeing San Francisco as a social laboratory for how Black communities survive the end of their worlds, Shange argues for abolition over either revolution or progressive reform as the needed path toward Black freedom.
Savannah Shange is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and principal faculty in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
What has been said about Progressive Dystopia:

“By locating the everyday mechanisms of the neoliberal state in a progressive school in San Francisco, Savannah Shange brings the lived experiences of social actors often only talked about as ‘black and brown bodies’ into discussions of the afterlife of slavery. And in so doing, she reveals the fissures in Afropessimism and critical anthropology. Progressive Dystopia is scholarship at its finest and an essential contribution.” — Aimee Meredith Cox, author of Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship
“Who’s afraid of dystopia? Not Savannah Shange, whose provocative and audacious book exposes ‘progressive’ multiracial social justice initiatives for what they are: a golden noose. ‘Winning,’ she argues, does not disrupt state logics of captivity, containment, accumulation, and antiblackness. And fighting for utopias yet to be without attending to the dystopian present that is for the folks trapped in this ongoing settler-colonial catastrophe, will not make us free. Instead, Shange applies an abolitionist frame to reveal how Black and Brown kids who defy their saviors, disrupt liberal teleologies, and map new territory, make the road toward freedom by walking, talking, dancing, fighting, and thinking. Unsettling, persuasive, and beautiful, Progressive Dystopia is one of those rare books that will make you rethink everything.” — Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“At the center of Savannah Shange’s powerful analysis in progressive dystopia: abolition, anthropology, and race in the new San Francisco are the multiple and seemingly conflicting forces brought to bear on the Black girls and boys who attend the Robeson Justice Academy in the contested space that makes up Frisco. Shange theorizes a set of ‘common sense’ ‘progressive’ logics that reproduce the carceral—what she names progressive dystopia and carceral progressivism—and then the willful defiance that characterizes the refusals and political demands of the Black girl students, in particular, who refuse to bear and internalize what Hartman names as ‘burdened individualism.’ This is a profoundly important book.” — Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

Big Familia Book Launch
2019-11-19 19:00 - 21:00 | East Bay Booksellers, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 94618
I am both thrilled & nervous to announce the book release party for 💥Big Familia!! on November 19 at East Bay Booksellers / Diesel.
It’s a reading & conversation with Nancy Au.
Drinks & mingling & celebration.
Kid Friendly (though it’s a school night!)
TOMAS MONIZ edited Rad Dad, Rad Families, and the kids book Collaboration/Colaboración. He’s recently been published by Barrelhouse and Longleaf Review. In July 2019, he released a chapbook with Mason Jar Press and his debut novel, Big Familia, on Acre Books, will be out in November . He has stuff on the internet but loves letters and penpals: PO Box 3555, Berkeley CA 94703. He promises to write back.
Nancy Au’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Redivider, Gulf Coast, Michigan Quarterly Review, Cincinnati Review, and The Pinch, among many others. She has an MFA from San Francisco State University and teaches creative writing at California State University–Stanislaus. She is co-founder of The Escapery, a writing and art un-school. Her flash fiction, which is included in the Best Small Fictions 2018, also won The Vestal Review’s 2018 VERA Flash Fiction Prize as well as Redivider’s Blurred Genre Contest.

Raquel Salas Rivera and Carina del Valle Schorske
2019-11-20 19:00 - 21:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
AUTHOR
Raquel Salas Rivera

Raquel Salas Rivera is the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. They are the author of while they sleep (under the bed is another country), published by Birds, LLC in 2019, and the inaugural recipient of the Ambroggio Prize from the Academy of American Poets for their book x/ex/exis. They are also the author of six chapbooks and five full-length poetry books, including lo terciario/the tertiary, longlisted for the 2018 National book Award and winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. From 2016-2018, they edited The Wanderer and Puerto Rico en mi corazón, a collection of bilingual broadsides of contemporary Puerto Rican poets. They have received fellowships and residencies from Sundance Institute, the Kimmel Center for Performing Arts, the Arizona Poetry Center, and CantoMundo.

AUTHOR
Carina del Valle Schorske

Carina del Valle Schorske is a writer and translator living between New York City and San Juan, Puerto Rico. Her first book, No Es Nada: Notes from the Other Island, a psychogeography of Puerto Rican culture is forthcoming from Riverhead.

NOVEMBER 20, 2019 | 7:00PM
Raquel Salas Rivera and Carina del Valle Schorske

Alley Cat Books & Gallery | 3036 24th Street | San Francisco, CA

RSVP

Liska Jacobs: The Worst Kind of Want
2019-11-20 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Liska Jacobs discusses her new novel, The Worst Kind of Want with Rita Bullwinkel.
About The Worst Kind of Want
A trip to Italy reignites a woman’s desires to disastrous effect in this dark ode to womanhood, death, and sex
To cool-headed, fastidious Pricilla Messing, Italy will be an escape, a brief glimpse of freedom from a life that’s starting to feel like one long decline.
Rescued from the bedside of her difficult mother, forty-something Cilla finds herself called away to Rome to keep an eye on her wayward teenage niece, Hannah. But after years of caregiving, babysitting is the last thing Cilla wants to do. Instead she throws herself into Hannah’s youthful, heedless world—drinking, dancing, smoking—relishing the heady atmosphere of the Italian summer. After years of feeling used up and overlooked, Cilla feels like she’s coming back to life. But being so close to Hannah brings up complicated memories, making Cilla restless and increasingly reckless, and a dangerous flirtation with a teenage boy soon threatens to send her into a tailspin.
With the sharp-edged insight of Ottessa Moshfegh and the taut seduction of Patricia Highsmith, The Worst Kind of Want is a dark exploration of the inherent dangers of being a woman. In her unsettling follow-up to Catalina, Liska Jacobs again delivers hypnotic literary noir about a woman whose unruly desires and troubled past push her to the brink of disaster.

Marilyn Chin & Genny Lim
2019-11-20 19:30 - 21:00 | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, BERKELEY, 94704-2322
CO-SPONSORED BY PEN WEST
MARILYN CHIN’s new book of poems is A Portrait of the Self as Nation: New and Selected Poems. Adrienne Rich said, “Marilyn Chin’s poems excite and incite the imagination through their brilliant cultural interfacings, their theatre of anger, ‘fierce and tender,’ their compassion, and their high mockery of wit.” Born in Hong Kong, currently living in San Diego, she is the author of four previous poetry collections and a novel. Widely anthologized, in Best American Poetry, The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, and elsewhere, her honors include five Pushcart Prizes, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, and fellowships from the United States Artists Foundation and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She serves as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
GENNY LIM—San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate, born in San Francisco—is the author of the poetry collections Winter Place, Child of War, and Paper Gods and Rebels. She also wrote the plays Paper Angels and Bitter Cane and the children’s book Wings for Lai-Ho, among other works. Winner of the American Book Award in 1981, she founded the theater company Paper Angels Productions, later known as XX Theater, and produced many experimental performance pieces. Recipient of the Bay Guardian Goldie for Local Discovery in 1991, she went on to record and collaborate with musician-composers Jon Jang, Francis Wong, Anthony Brown, the late Max Roach, and Herbie Lewis. Her new poetry book KRA! is a power house political and historical, biographical work invoking figures such as James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, Francisco X. Alarcon, Fred Ho, and Alfonso Texidor, and is a salute to Flint, Michigan, Standing Rock, and Black Lives Matter.

Lyrics & Dirges: A Monthly Reading Series
2019-11-20 19:30 - 21:30 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
Wednesday, November 20, 7:30 pm
Pegasus Books Downtown
Lyrics & Dirges is our flagship monthly reading series featuring a mix of prominent, emerging and beginning writers. It’s aim is to highlight various forms of writing in an effort to spotlight the diverse literary community of the Bay Area. Hosted and curated by Sharon Coleman and Mk Chavez.
Reading in November:
Katherine Vaz
Jalyce Fairley
Casey Walker
Jeffery Leong
Monica Zarazua
Every third Wednesday of the month at Pegasus Books Downtown.

Event date:

Wednesday, November 20, 2019 – 7:30pm

Event address:

Pegasus Books Downtown
2349 Shattuck Ave

Berkeley, CA 94704

Event Category:

Shattuck Location

Berkeley Slam with Asha!
2019-11-20 20:00 - 23:00 | The Starry Plough, 3101 Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
Bringing you some of the best poetry from across the world every week since 1999, and third in the nation at the 2015 National Poetry Slam!
http://berkeleyslam.org/
Twitter: @berkeleyslam
Instagram: @berkeleyslam
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/berkeleyslam
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We’ll be bringing Asha to feature for slam this week!
Asha is an artist, educator, and revolutionary. Originally from LA, she worked as a community organizer for workers/tenant rights, and anti-police brutality, as well as a coach with the non-profit Playworks in East-Oakland. Her passion for social justice informs her work educating youth and prospective teachers. She is currently an 8th grade teacher and adjunct professor at USF. As a performer, she has toured London showcasing her poetry, including at the famous Troy Bar, Emceed the San Jose Womxn’s March in January 2017 and performed in 2018, as well as performed at the March For Our Lives Event in 2018. She has also Emceed the San Jose Womxn’s Showcase for all 3 years, featured at Cinequest Film Festival in 2017 and 2018, and graced the cover of South Bay’s CONTENT magazine in August of 2017. KQED created a short documentary on Asha and her artistry. Her music, art and spoken word act as a mirror into the passion and activism she lives out daily.
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UPCOMING
11/27: No slam
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THE STARRY PLOUGH
3101 Shattuck Avenue, 510-841-2082
(1 block uphill from the Ashby BART).
EVERY WEDNESDAY
$7 – $10 sliding scale (most nights)
Cash Prizes!
Workshop: 6:30 p.m. Sign-up: 7:30 p.m. Show: 8:15 p.m.
ALL AGES before 10 p.m.
Don’t have cash or Venmo? Like being extra prepared? Get a presale ticket while you can!

Third Thursdays @ Willow Glen Library
2019-11-21 19:00 - 20:30 | Willow Glen Library, 1157 Minnesota Ave, San Jose , CA, 95125, United States
Feature: Linda Lappin
Willow Glen Library
1157 Minnesota Avenue, San José, CA, 95125
(408) 808-3045 or (408) 266-1361
Free and open to the public.
Linda Lappin is a former Professor of English, retired in 2018. Her latest collection tentatively called “Falling Home” is in the first round of editing and revision work with April Ossmann (formerly with Alice James Books). She has an MFA from San Jose State University where she was fortunate in meeting and taking classes with Ishmael Reed, Naomi Shehab Nye, Jane Hershfield (through the Montalvo seminars), Sam Mao, and Alan Soldofsky. She has studied with Ellen Bass and Molly Fisk (poetry bootcamp). Through the MFA she published her first collection “Not Far from the Tree” and while there published individual poems in Convergence, Coe Review, Sanskrit, and Schuylkill Valley Journal. Though many of her poems are narrated from Boulder Creek, he now lives in San Jose, California. Do not confuse her with the other Linda Lappin living in Italy, please.
upcoming at Third Thursdays:
December: Laurence Snydal

Jerome Rothenberg
2019-11-21 19:00 - 21:00 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
celebrating two new books
The President of Desolation & Other Poems from Black Widow Press
The Mystery of False Attachments from Word Palace

Jerome Rothenberg is an internationally acclaimed poet and anthologist. His more than ninety books include the multivolume Poems for the Millennium, coedited with Pierre Joris, Jeffrey Robinson, and John Bloomberg-Rissman. He is Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts and Literature at the University of California, San Diego.

In Common Writers Series: Raquel Salas Rivera and Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, reading and in conversation
2019-11-21 19:00 - 21:00 | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
Thursday, November 21 – 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

The Poetry Center, Humanities 512, San Francisco State University

The Poetry Center’s In Common Writers Series welcomes two outstanding Latina poets, Puerto Rican poet and activist Raquel Salas Rivera, with us from her present home in Philadelphia, and writer, filmmaker, and artist Vanessa Angélica Villarreal, here from Southern California. Both poets read from their work, then join in conversation with one another and the audience. This evening at The Poetry Center—co-sponsored with Latina/Latino Studies and Women and Gender Studies, SF State—will be followed by a second reading the next night, Friday November 22, across the Bay at Moe’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. Supported by the Walter & Elise Haas Fund, both events are free and open to the public.
Raquel Salas Rivera es la Poeta Laureada de la ciudad de Filadelfia del 2018-19. Fue la recipiente inaugural del Premio Ambroggio y la Beca de Laureada, ambos de la Academia de Poetas Americanos. Cuenta con la publicación de seis plaquetas y cinco poemarios. Su cuarto libro, lo terciario/the tertiary, fue finalista para el Premio Nacional del Libro del 2018 y ganó el Premio Literario Lambda a una obra de poesía transgénero del 2018. Su quinto poemario, while they sleep (under the bed is another country), fue publicado por Birds, LLC en el 2019. Recibió su Doctorado en Literatura Comparada y Teoría Literaria de la Universidad de Pensilvania. Raquel ama y vive por Puerto Rico, Filadelfia y un mundo libre de la supremacía blanca. Por mas: raquelsalasrivera.com/es Foto por Kielinski Photography.
Raquel Salas Rivera is the 2018-19 Poet Laureate of Philadelphia. They are the inaugural recipient of the Ambroggio Prize and the Laureate Fellowship, both from the Academy of American Poets. They are also the author of six chapbooks and five full-length poetry books. Their fourth book, lo terciario/the tertiary, was on the 2018 National Book Award Longlist and won the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry. Their fifth book, while they sleep (under the bed is another country), was published by Birds, LLC in 2019. They received their Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania. Raquel loves and lives for Puerto Rico, Philadelphia, and a world free of white supremacy. More at raquelsalasrivera.com Photo by Kielinski Photography.
Vanessa Angélica Villarreal is the author of Beast Meridian (Noemi Press, 2017), a recipient of a 2019 Whiting Award, a 2018 Texas Institute of Letters Poetry Prize, and a 2019 Kate Tufts Discovery Award finalist. Her work appears or is forthcoming in The New York Times, Poetry Magazine, BuzzFeed, The Boston Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is currently pursuing her doctorate in Los Angeles, where she is raising her son with the help of a loyal dog. More at vanessaangelicavillarreal.com Photo by Beowulf Shehan.

Related event:
In Common Writers Series: Vanessa Angélica Villarreal and Raquel Salas Rivera, reading and in conversation

Friday, November 22 – 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue (btw Haste and Dwight Way), Berkeley

Featured:

“Fierce as Fuck: The Future of Poetry is Brown and Queer,” Vanessa Angélica Villarreal and Vickie Vértiz (interview by Sorayo Membreno), at Bitch Magazine

“The Anti-Lineage of Raquel Salas Rivera,” (interviewed by Candace Williams), at Shondaland

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event phone:

415-338-2227

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center, Latina/Latino Studies, and Women and Gender Studies, SF State

Bay Area Generations #75: Literary Salon | Foster City
2019-11-21 19:00 - 21:00 | Penelope’s Coffee & Tea, 3 Plaza View Ln, Ste N, Foster City, CA, 94404, United States
Bay Area Generations: Literary Salon #75
Thursday, November 21, 2019
7-9pm
at Penelope’s Coffee & Tea, Foster City
A literary salon featuring curated works of Bay Area poets, writers and storytellers. Powered by California Writers Club SF Peninsula Branch.
With fine Poets & Authors, featuring:
Jordan Sher + Neetal Parekh
Chuck Brickley + Aileen Cassinetto
Megan McDonald + Korie Pelka
Carole Bumpus + Lisa Meltzer Penn
Laila Kramer + Dana Kwan
& Special Musical Guest Karen Soohoo
Bay Area Generations: – Literary Salon #75
@ Penelope’s Coffee & Tea
Comfy cafe | Food available for purchase
Get Tickets! http://bit.ly/BAG75tx
Map: http://bit.ly/BAGPenelope
Doors Open: 6:30 p.m. Show: 7:00 p.m.
Suggested donation $10, includes chapbook
*No one turned away for lack of funds.*
Bay Area Generations literary reading series features paired readers of differing generations in a curated submission based show. Since 2013, over 400 hundred notable authors, poets, writers, playwrights and musicians have read poetry and stories, or performed at this celebrated literary salon.
Submit to our next show! http://bit.ly/BAG76fbs
Website: www.bayareagenerations.com
FB: www.facebook.com/bayareagenerations
Events: www.facebook.com/bayareagenerations/events
Help us keep presenting good literature readings.
Donate here: www.paypal.me/BayAreaGenerations
#reading #books #poetry #sflit #writers #openmic

Eric Thurm: Avidly Reads Board Games
2019-11-21 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Eric Thurm joins us to discuss his new book, Avidly Reads Board Games. Historic board games including, Busted!, a game from the 1970s about trying to start a career dealing weed, Class Struggle, the world’s first socialist board game, and The Grizzled, a modern cooperative game about being in the trenches in World War I, will be available to play.
Avidly―the online magazine founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood & Sarah Mesle and supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB)―specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to the intersection of expertise and passion. Now, Blackwood & Mesle are partnering with NYU Press to launch Avidly Reads, an exciting new series of books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author’s emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience.
In Board Games, writer and critic Eric Thurm digs deep into his own experience as a board game enthusiast to explore the emotional and social rules that games create and reveal, telling a series of stories about a pastime that is also about relationships. From the outdated gender roles in Life and Mystery Date to the cutthroat, capitalist priorities of Monopoly and its socialist counterpart, Class Struggle, Thurm thinks through his ongoing rivalries with his siblings and ponders the ways games both upset and enforce hierarchies and relationships―from the familial to the geopolitical. Like sitting down at the table for family game night, Board Games is an engaging book of twists and turns, trivia, and nostalgia.
Eric Thurm is a writer whose work has appeared in, among other publications, Esquire, WIRED, Real Life, and The New York Times.

The Best Small Fictions 2019
2019-11-21 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Join us to celebrate the release of The Best Small Fictions 2019 with readings by Lori Sambol Brody, Natalie Hernandez, Joy Lanzendorfer, Kim Magowan, J.L. Montavon, and Kara Vernor.
About The Best Small Fictions
The Best Small Fictions anthology, now in its fifth year, presents one hundred and forty-six pristinely crafted pieces from an array of authors representing twenty-six nations and six continents. These short, elliptical works are varied and edgy, sorrowful and triumphant, provocative and visionary. The small fictions enclosed within this volume are always vibrant. They scintillate. They linger. With each story brief enough to savor at a stoplight or quick coffee break, the tales contained within 2019’s The Best Small Fictions promise to leave a mark.
