Litseen

Virtual Event: Kim Addonizio and Bob Hicok
2021-03-22 18:00 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
JOIN US ON MONDAY, MARCH 22 AT 6PM PT WHEN KIM ADDONIZIO JOINS US TO DISCUSS HER LATEST COLLECTION, NOW WE’RE GETTING SOMEWHERE, WITH BOB HICOK ON ZOOM!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/86298421877
Or iPhone one-tap :
US: +16699009128,,86298421877# or +13462487799,,86298421877#
Webinar ID: 862 9842 1877
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbLep4IiCz
About Now We’re Getting Somewhere
A dark, no-holds-barred, and often hilarious collection from a prize-winning poet, veering between the poles of self and world.
Kim Addonizio’s sharp and irreverent eighth volume, Now We’re Getting Somewhere, is an essential companion to your practice of the Finnish art of kalsarikännit—drinking at home, alone in your underwear, with no intention of going out. Imbued with the poet’s characteristic precision and passion, the collection charts a hazardous course through heartache, climate change, dental work, Outlander, semiotics, and more.
Combatting existential gloom with a wicked, seductive energy, Addonizio investigates desire, loss, and the madness of contemporary life. She calls out to Walt Whitman and John Keats, echoes Dorothy Parker, and finds sisterhood with Virginia Woolf.
Sometimes confessional, sometimes philosophical, these poems weave from desolation to drollery and clamor with raucous imagery: an insect in high heels, a wolf at an uncomfortable party, a glowing and self-serious guitar.
A poet whose “voice lifts from the page, alive and biting” (Sky Sanchez, San Francisco Book Review), Addonizio reminds her reader, “if you think nothing & / no one can / listen I love you joy is coming.”
About Kim Addonizio
Kim Addonizio is the author of eight poetry collections, two novels, two story collections, and two books on writing poetry: The Poet’s Companion (with Dorianne Laux) and Ordinary Genius. Her poetry collection Tell Me was a finalist for the National Book Award, and her 2016 collection, Mortal Trash, won the Paterson Poetry Prize. Addonizio’s awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among other honors. She lives in Oakland, California.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Evening Literary Seminar: The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
2021-03-22 17:00 - 18:30
The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
This lush, engaging novel invites readers in to the fascinating lives of one Indian family. The story toggles between the single day in 1969 when the entire family was upended by the mysterious event that keeps you madly turning pages—and 1993, when the main characters, fraternal twins, are reunited.
Roy won huge American acclaim, a Booker Prize and obscenity charges—always a good sign!— with this debut in 1997. Last year it was named one of the BBC’s 100 Most Influential Novels. Roy’s work is immersive and wide-in-scope, kind of like the very best John Irving crossed with Wes Anderson’s The Darjeeling Express.
Join Kimberly for an entertaining and instructive look at the book’s remarkable structure, characters, themes and haunting, gorgeous sense of place.

Maxima Kahn and Indigo Moor
2021-03-21 15:00 - 16:00 | online
Poetry Flash presents a poetry reading by Maxima Kahn, Fierce Aria, and Indigo Moor, Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something , online via Zoom, free, 3:00 pm PDT (Register to attend: please click here; you will receive an email with a link to join the reading)
MORE ABOUT THE READERS
Please join us for a Poetry Flash virtual reading on Sunday, March 21 at 3:00 pm PDT! We are excited to bring you Maxima Kahn and Indigo Moor via Zoom. To register for this reading, please click on the link in the calendar listing above. After you register, you will receive an email invitation with a link to join the reading. Thank you for continuing to support Poetry Flash and our reading series during these unprecedented times.
This reading is co-sponsored by Moe’s Books in Berkeley; the featured books are available at bookshop.org/lists/poetry-flash-readings.
Maxima Kahn’s first full-length collection of poems is Fierce Aria. Annie Finch says, “I have learned to walk into the valley of my fears and losses,” writes Maxima Kahn, and the evidence of what she has learned is all over these amazing poems. Fierce Aria is a book with a post-Wallace Stevens mission: to coax the still perfection of ideas out of the abstract realm, so they can take shape in the messy wilderness of reality. Distinctive, honed, vulnerable, musical, courageous, honest, Maxima Kahn’s poems are fully ripened, fully considered—each one ready to drop richly into the hand like a subtly contoured fruit.” Kahn also writes poetry, essays and fiction. Her work has been featured in numerous literary journals, and on blogs such as The Creative Penn, Tiny Buddha, Positively Positive and The Startup; her own blog is Creative Sparks at BrilliantPlayground.com. She is also an improvisational violinist, a composer, and a dancer. She lives in the Sierra Nevada in California.
Indigo Moor’s new book is Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something, recipient of The Backwaters Prize in Poetry, Honorable Mention, University of Nebraska Press. Cornelius Eady says, “I strongly suggest you carry Moor’s brilliant book, Everybody’s Jonesin’ for Something, home.…In this dazzling book, you will read just how closely this poet has been paying attention, to us, to his histories, foreign and domestic, to our mighty (and sometimes mighty confusing) nation. Jonesin’ is a verse flashlight to all the corners you thought no one was supposed to pay attention to, line by beautifully crafted line, truth by earned truth. You’ll reach the last line of the last poem, and trust me, that’s when the hunger for more will begin.” Also a scriptwriter, Moor is Poet Laureate emeritus of Sacramento. His other works include Tap-Root, Through the Stonecutter’s Window (winner of the Northwestern University’s Cave Canem Prize), and In the Room of Thirsts and Hungers: The Mirrored Tragedies of Paul Robeson and Othello.

Sandra Salsbury on Crowdcast
2021-03-21 13:00 - 14:00
virtually launching Best Friend in the Whole World, a charming picture book about compassion and friendship in which a lonely rabbit, a quiet pinecone, and their perfect bond are tested.
“Who is the ‘Best Friend in the Whole World’? After reading this sweet, sensitive tale, children can decide for themselves.”—New York Times
She’ll read her book and show us how to draw a best pine cone friend. Be sure to have your drawing materials ready! The book is recommended for ages 3-7.
This is a free event, though we encourage you to purchase a signed copy of the book through our website and/or to make a donation to support Mrs. Dalloway’s virtual events. Be sure to add your contribution before you “Save your Spot” on Crowdcast. Thank you!

Sunday, March 21, 2021 – 1:00pm

Roland lives a quiet life filled with books, music, and tea parties for one, but sometimes he feels rather lonely. When Roland finds the perfect companion in Milton (Good listener! Enjoys music! Also alone!), he is overjoyed. It’s okay that Milton is just a pine cone; they have so much in common. But clues start popping up in the woods, suggesting someone else might be missing their best pine cone friend. Roland must decide if it’s worth leaving someone else in their loneliness to keep Milton in his life.
Sandra Salsbury received the 2018 SCBWI Don Freeman Illustration Grant. She has a BFA and MFA in Illustration from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco and lives in Berkeley, where she cares for numerous house plants and a software engineer.

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

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

Gina Apostal Book Talk
2021-03-20 14:00 - 16:00
Join us online for a book talk on The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata with award-winning author Gina Apostal and host MT Vallarta.
Hosted by Eastwind Books of Berkeley
RSVP FOR ACCESS TO ZOOM EVENT
About the book:
Gina Apostol’s riotous second novel takes the form of a memoir by one Raymundo Mata, a half-blind bookworm and revolutionary, tracing his childhood, his education in Manila, his love affairs, and his discovery of writer and fellow revolutionary, Jose Rizal. Mata’s 19th-century story is complicated by present-day foreword(s), afterword(s), and footnotes from three fiercely quarrelsome and comic voices: a nationalist editor, a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst critic, and a translator, Mimi C. Magsalin. In telling the contested and fragmentary story of Mata, Apostol finds new ways to depict the violence of the Spanish colonial era, and to reimagine the nation’s great writer, Jose Rizal, who was executed by the Spanish for his revolutionary activities, and is considered by many to be the father of Philippine independence. The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata offers an intoxicating blend of fact and fiction, uncovering lost histories while building dazzling, anarchic modes of narrative.
Praise for The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata:
Winner of 2010 Philippine National Book Award
Winner of 2010 Gintong Aklat (Golden Book) Award
“Gina Apostol’s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata weaves the complex tangle of Philippine history, literature, and languages (along with contemporary academic scholarship) into a brilliant tour de force of a novel. Brava!”
–John Barth
“Gina Apostol tells our revolutionary history–or fragments of our history–using a pastiche of writing from the academe, a diary, stories within stories, jokes, puns, allusions, a virtual firecracker of words. Her novel is fearlessly intellectual, anchored firmly on the theories of Jacques Lacan. But it is also funny and witty as it picks–lice, nits, and all–on the hoaxes in our history. It affirms, if it still needs to be affirmed, the power of fiction to shape and reshape the gaps in the narratives of our history as a nation. The main character here is History, and its protagonist, Imagination. For this audacious sword-play of a novel, the National Book Award is given to Gina Apostol’s The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata.”
–Judges’ Citation, Philippine National Book Award
“Edward Said wrote that the role of the intellectual is to present alternative narratives on history than those provided by the ‘combatants’ who claim entitlement to official memory and national identity–who propagate ‘heroic anthems sung in order to sweep all before them.’ In this fearlessly intellectual novel, Gina Apostol takes on the keepers of official memory and creates a new, atonal anthem that defies single ownership and, in fact, can only be performed by the many–by multiple voices in multiple readings. We may never look at ourselves and our history the same way again.”
–Eric Gamalinda, author of My Sad Republic
About the Author:
Gina Apostal is the PEN Open Book Award-winning author of Gun Dealers’ Daughter, as well as a two-time winner of the National Book Award in the Philippines for her novels Bibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. Her short stories have appeared in various anthologies and journals including The Gettysburg Review and the Penguin anthology of Asian American fiction, Charlie Chan Is Dead, Volume 2.
About the host:
MT Vallarta is a poet and Ph.D. candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Riverside, where they study feminist theory, queer theory, and Filipinx poetics. Their poetry and scholarship is published and forthcoming in The Velvet Light Trap, The Asian American Literary Review, Breadcrumbs, Nat. Brut, Apogee Journal, and others. They were raised and live in Historic Filipinotown, Los Angeles.
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To purchase copies of the featured authors’ work, visit www.asiabookcenter.com
Hardcover:
https://www.asiabookcenter.com/store/p2950/Revolution_According_to_Raymundo_Mata.html
Eastwind Books Multicultural Services (EBMS) is a 501(3)c non-profit dedicated to the promotion and accessibility of Asian American and Ethnic Multicultural Literature. EBMS is the community education arm of Eastwind Books of Berkeley which is comprised of a dedicated staff of booksellers, artists, poets, and community workers. Our events are for educational purposes and we appreciate your tax-deductible donations and continued support.

Pola Oloixarac in conversation with John Freeman
2021-03-20 12:00 - 14:00
reading and discussing her new novel
MONA
Translated by Adam Morris, published by Farrar Straus Giroux
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register. to register.
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Mona, a Peruvian writer based in California, presents a tough and sardonic exterior. She likes drugs and cigarettes, and when she learns that she is something of an anthropological curiosity—a woman writer of color treasured at her university for the flourish of rarefied diversity she brings—she pokes fun at American academic culture and its fixation on identity.
When she is nominated for “the most important literary award in Europe,” Mona sees a chance to escape her downward spiral of sunlit substance abuse and erotic distraction, so she trades the temptations of California for a small, gray village in Sweden, close to the Arctic Circle. Now she is stuck in the company of all her jet-lagged—and mostly male—competitors, arriving from Japan, France, Armenia, Iran, and Colombia. Isolated as they are, the writers do what writers do: exchange compliments, nurse envy and private resentments, stab
rivals in the back, and hop in bed together. All the while, Mona keeps stumbling across the mysterious traces of a violence she cannot explain.
As her adventures in Scandinavia unfold, Mona finds that she has not so much escaped her demons as locked herself up with them in the middle of nowhere. In Mona, Pola Oloixarac paints a hypnotic, scabrous, and ultimately jaw-dropping portrait of a woman facing down a hipster elite to which she does and does not belong. A survivor of both patronization and bizarre sexual encounters, Mona is a new kind of feminist. But her past won’t stay past, and strange forces are working to deliver her the test of a lifetime.
Pola Oloixarac was born in Buenos Aires in 1977. Her debut novel Savage Theories was a breakout bestseller in Argentina and Spain, and was nominated for a Best Translated Book Award; in 2010 Granta recognized her as one of the best young contemporary novelists in Spanish. Oloixarac is a regular contributor to The New York Times, and her fiction has appeared in Granta, n+1, The White Review, and in an issue of Freeman’s dedicated to “The Future of New Writing.” Previously a resident of San Francisco, CA, Oloixarac currently resides in Barcelona.
John Freeman is the editor of Freeman’s, a literary biannual of new writing, and executive editor of Literary Hub. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing (forthcoming), as well as a trilogy of anthologies about inequality, including Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, and Tales of Two Planets (forthcoming), which features storytellers from around the globe on the climate crisis. Maps, his debut collection of poems, was published in 2017. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. He is the former editor of Granta and is a Writer in Residence at New York University.

Praise for Mona

“Smart, provocative . . . The rich inner life of its namesake character propels this vibrant examination of the writing world.” —Publishers Weekly
“A rapturous tour de force by Pola Oloixarac—one of the few writers I cannot live without—Mona is that novel that, once finished, leaves its reader perfectly, beautifully undone. Part mystery, part send-up of a literary world, part journey into night, Mona reminds us that no matter how far you fly, the past is always near. If Mona were any smarter, any funnier, any truer, I’m not sure my tender heart could have taken it.” —Junot Diaz, author of This is How You Lose Her
“Sly, bitter, and smart, Mona is at once a satirical comedy, a harrowing psychological portrait of a woman’s dissociation, and a philosophical indictment of the hubris of now. Read it and be surprised.” —Siri Hustvedt, author of Memories of the Future
“Pola Oloixarac’s Mona is, simultaneously, a hilarious satire of literary pretensions, a sincere exploration of a damaged psyche, and a brilliantly unnerving new chapter in this writer’s inimitable body of work. It reads as though Rachel Cusk’s Outline Trilogy was thrown in a blender with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, and then lightly seasoned with the bitter flavor of Horacio Castellanos Moya. In other words: Oloixarac is one of my new favorite writers.” —Andrew Martin, author of Cool for America

Denise Riley and Jennifer Soong, reading and in conversation
2021-03-20 12:00 - 13:00 | online
Remote access event, free and open to the public
REGISTER TO ATTEND
—or—
Watch this program at YouTube
With emcee, Brandon Brown
Co-sponsored with NYRB Poets and Futurepoem
Supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts
This remote-access event starts promptly at 12:00 pm Pacific Time, and is free and open to the public. Real-Time Captioning link will be provided at the event. Media Captioning provided after the event, at our YouTube channel and at Poetry Center Digital Archive. For other reasonable accommodations please contact poetry@sfsu.edu
Please note early start-time, to accommodate our guest and audience in the UK, and elsewhere.

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

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

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

The Augurs

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

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

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center

Register to Attend:

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEARN MORE | TICKETS

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #51
2021-03-19 18:00 - 19:30 | online
90 minutes
30 readers
3 minutes each
On Zoom!
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!

Sign up to read here:
https://forms.gle/4nYSi5fLNyo229Lj9

If you enjoy spaces like this and can swing it in these tight times, please consider supporting us via:

1) the Cash App to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress;
2) donating via the “ticket” option here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/…/nomadic-press-weekly…; OR
3) donating through the website at www.nomadicpress.org/donate
We have a short goal for the evening of $150.
Pandemic times continue in 2021 and we continue to gather our community virtually across state and country lines. Join us to read, join us to listen. All are welcome.
Hosted by Nazelah Jamison (with Tula Biederman on tech). It’s a continuing experiment, and we hope you can join us!

Our safe space process still applies to our collective virtual space, so please read this by visiting https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess.

Zoom Joining Info
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Weekly Virtual Open Mic
Time: Jan 1, 2021 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Every week on Fri, until Dec 10, 2021, 50 occurrence(s)
Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.
Weekly: https://us02web.zoom.us/…/tZcudeqoqjIiE9fnl7dxuB…/ics…
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mai c. doan
2021-03-19 17:00 - 18:00 | online
Friday, March 19, 2021 | 5:00 pm PDT | Zoom (RSVP to receive the event link)
mai c. doan is a mixed femme poet and writer from Southern California. She has published and performed her work though the National Queer Arts Festival, Entropy Magazine, the Poetry Project, and more. She holds an MFA from Mills College, where she attended as a Community Engagement Fellow. water/tongue (Omnidawn, 2019), her first full-length book, is a 2020 Lambda Literary Award nominee, is. Find her on the internet at maicdoan.com.

Afternoon Literary Seminar: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
2021-03-19 13:00 - 14:30
THIS SESSION IS ONLINE
The Color Purple by Alice Walker
Wow do you owe it to yourself to (re)read The Color Purple. The linguistic richness, the twist on the epistolary structure, the breadth of warm, complex characters—all of this makes The Color Purple a must-(re)read. Dive in for Walker’s amazing use of dialect alone!
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, Walker’s 1982 novel has been one of the nation’s most “challenged” books, often banned for violence and (excellent, progressive) sexual content. While all the awards are exceedingly well deserved, Kimberly mostly couldn’t believe just how smart, absorbing and inspirational the book feels in 2020.
Perhaps overshadowed by the works of Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou and even the inimitable Zora Neale Hurston—whom Walker resurrected from literary oblivion—Walker’s masterpiece deserves more attention and our careful dissection. Join Kimberly for this delicious novel, one that’s particularly important as we Americans examine longstanding thoughts about sex, race and inequity.
Book will be shipped directly to you so that you may read it prior to the seminar. You may also choose to pick the book up at Kepler’s in Menlo Park as another option.

Virtual Speaking Axolotl Reading and Open Mic #33
2021-03-18 20:00 - 22:00 | online
A Latinx poetry reading series y open mic entering into our 3rd consecutive year that happens every third Thursday of the month en el Zoom mundo. Curated y hosted by Josiahluis Alderete.

Sign up for the 10-slot virtual open mic by filling out this form:
https://forms.gle/aHgoJxdUFXZXHjgQA

This month’s features: TBA

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Zoom Joining Info
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Monthly Speaking Axolotl
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CLA Presents: Laila Lalami
2021-03-18 19:00 - 20:00 | online
What does it mean to be American? In this starkly illuminating and impassioned book, Pulitzer Prize–finalist Laila Lalami recounts her unlikely journey from Moroccan immigrant to U.S. citizen, using it as a starting point for her exploration of the rights, liberties, and protections that are traditionally associated with American citizenship. Tapping into history, politics, and literature, she elucidates how accidents of birth—such as national origin, race, and gender—that once determined the boundaries of Americanness still cast their shadows today.
Lalami poignantly illustrates how white supremacy survives through adaptation and legislation, with the result that a caste system is maintained that keeps the modern equivalent of white male landowners at the top of the social hierarchy. Conditional citizens, she argues, are all the people with whom America embraces with one arm and pushes away with the other.
Brilliantly argued and deeply personal, Conditional Citizens weaves together Lalami’s own experiences with explorations of the place of nonwhites in the broader American culture.
Laila Lalami was born in Rabat and educated in Morocco, Great Britain, and the United States. She the author of four novels, including ‘The Moor’s Account’, which won the American Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and ‘The Other Americans’, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The Nation, Harper’s, the Washington Post, and the New York Times. She has received fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, and the Guggenheim Foundation and is currently a professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles.

You’re Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes... an Online Open Mic & Community Listening Space
2021-03-18 18:30 - 21:00 | online
w/Ned Buskirk & the You’re Going to Die team…
Thursday, March 18th
Virtual Doors at 6:30pm PST
Show at 7pm
REGISTER FOR FREE NOW: http://bit.ly/2ZXYbJp
You’re Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes… is an ONLINE open mic event, the communal offering for us to gather during these uniquely difficult times, to witness & be witnessed, to embrace our shared mortality together, to grieve, bereave & honor what we’ve lost & love… while all the while making room for simply being ALIVE.
Sign-ups will be during the Zoom Call & the list will fill up quickly, so if you want to share, say so sooner rather than later.
If you’re going to perform, keep it under 5 MINUTES. That’s right: 5 MINUTES. WE WILL TIME YOU. And YES – We will, as kindly & gently as possible, let you know when your time is UP.
Poetry, prose, music, dancing, artwork, photography, comedy, drama, happy, sad, & on & on & on… Remember: EVERYTHING GOES, so share whatever you want. And you don’t have to perform anything; the audience is as essential as the performers.
Like so many other artists & nonprofits with a live event focus, much of our in person work for the foreseeable future is cancelled. For this special online event, we suggest that people pay between $10-50, but do not hesitate to go above or below based on what you feel is possible. And PLEASE, if you are in financial danger, DO NOT pay us. We’re just happy you’re alive & able to join. If you’re still earning income (or are just generally resourced), we very much welcome your generosity.
You can donate via…
VENMO: https://venmo.com/YG-2D or @YG-2D
or
PAYPAL: chelsea@yg2d.com

Open Mic Night | Featuring Joshua Merchant
2021-03-18 18:00 - 20:00 | online
OPEN MIC THURSDAYS continue. Join us on ZOOM twice a month for our virtual Open Mic. Look for MoAD Open Mic every other Thursday this month. Hosted by poet Nia McAllister, join us for an evening of spoken word, featuring amazing poets and musicians from throughout the Bay Area and beyond. Participate or just watch. Everyone is welcome.
All interested performers, please sign up below. For those interested in listening as part of the audience, no need to fill out the form, just follow the zoom link below:
Sign up to perform below. Everyone is welcome.

Open Mic, March 18 2021

First Name

Last Name

Email

Donations of any amount are always welcome, so if you are able to, please consider donating to MoAD online HERE, or donating through Give by Cell by texting the word: MOADSF to the number: 56512 on your cell phone, then follow the link provided to make a donation. All donations will go towards supporting MoAD and continuing to bring you engaging programming.
Here are the instructions for joining via ZOOM:
FOLLOW THE ZOOM LINK TO RECEIVE A LOGIN TO JOIN THE PROGRAM
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEtdemurjwjHdOrRhd3OOzfRBjqx50s-EN5
Once you register via Zoom, you will receive an email with the link to join the program.
Our Featured Artist: Joshua Merchant

Joshua A. Merchant is a native of East Oakland exploring queerness, blackness, and the complexities of their intersection through literary arts. Merchant has had the honor to be published as a finalist for the June Jordan Poetry Prize anthology ‘Walk These Streets’ in 2007, a collaboration with Alice Walker and OUSD.

TICKETED VIRTUAL EVENT: Gabriela Epstein, The Baby-Sitters Club: Claudia and the New Girl
2021-03-18 18:00 - 20:00
TICKETED VIRTUAL EVENT: Illustrator Gabriela Epstein will be in conversation with Katy Farina about Claudia and the New Girl, a brand-new Baby-sitters Club graphic novel, adapted by Epstein.
“Vibrant, sweet, and full of energy and heart. Gabriela is going to knock your socks off!” — Gale Galligan
CLICK HERE FOR TICKETS!
Claudia has always been the most creative kid in her class… until Ashley Wyeth comes along. Ashley’s really different: She wears hippie clothes and has multiple earrings, and she’s the most fantastic artist Claudia has ever met.
Ashley says Claudia is a great artist, too, but thinks she’s wasting her artistic talent with The Baby-sitters Club. When Claudia starts spending more time with Ashley and missing BSC meetings, it becomes clear that Claudia has to make a decision—one of them has to go!
Ann M. Martin is the creator of The Baby-sitters Club, which has more than 180 million books in print, making it one of the most popular series in the history of publishing. Her novels include A Corner of the Universe (a Newbery Honor Book), Belle Teal, Here Today, A Dog’s Life, On Christmas Eve, and the Main Street and Family Tree series, as well as the much-loved collaborations P.S. Longer Letter Later and Snail Mail No More, with Paula Danziger. Ann lives in upstate New York.
Gabriela Epstein graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in illustration, and has worked as a character designer for TV animation. When she isn’t making comics, she enjoys yo-yoing, listening to spooky podcasts, and watching historical documentaries. She lives in Austin, Texas. Visit her online at gre-art.com.
Katy Farina is the creator of the New York Times bestselling graphic novel adaptations of Karen’s Witch, Karen’s Roller Skates, and Karen’s Worst Day by Ann M. Martin. She has painted backgrounds for She-Ra and the Princesses of Power at DreamWorks TV and has also done work for BOOM! Studios, Oni Press, and Z2 Comics. She lives in Los Angeles. Visit her online at katyfarina.com.

Patricia Engel joined by Roberto Lovato, Jean Guerrero, Juliana Delgado Lopera
2021-03-18 18:00 - 20:00
Patricia Engel is joined by Roberto Lovato, Jean Guerrero, Juliana Delgado Lopero
celebrating the launch of her new novel
Infinite Country
published by Simon and Schuster
———-
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
———-
Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register.
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For readers of Valeria Luiselli and Edwidge Danticat, an urgent and lyrical novel about a Colombian family fractured by deportation, offering an intimate perspective on an experience that so many have endured—and are enduring right now.
Talia is being held at a correctional facility for adolescent girls in the forested mountains of Colombia after committing an impulsive act of violence that may or may not have been warranted. She urgently needs to get out and get back home to Bogotá, where her father and a plane ticket to the United States are waiting for her. If she misses her flight, she might also miss her chance to finally be reunited with her family in the north.
How this family came to occupy two different countries, two different worlds, comes into focus like twists of a kaleidoscope. We see Talia’s parents, Mauro and Elena, fall in love in a market stall as teenagers against a backdrop of civil war and social unrest. We see them leave Bogotá with their firstborn, Karina, in pursuit of safety and opportunity in the United States on a temporary visa, and we see the births of two more children, Nando and Talia, on American soil. We witness the decisions and indecisions that lead to Mauro’s deportation and the family’s splintering—the costs they’ve all been living with ever since.
Award-winning, internationally acclaimed author Patricia Engel, herself a dual citizen and the daughter of Colombian immigrants, gives voice to all five family members as they navigate the particulars of their respective circumstances. And all the while, the metronome ticks: Will Talia make it to Bogotá in time? And if she does, can she bring herself to trade the solid facts of her father and life in Colombia for the distant vision of her mother and siblings in America?
Rich with Bogotá urban life, steeped in Andean myth, and tense with the daily reality of the undocumented in America, Infinite Country is the story of two countries and one mixed-status family—for whom every triumph is stitched with regret, and every dream pursued bears the weight of a dream deferred.

Patricia Engel is the author of The Veins of the Ocean, winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award; and Vida, a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway and Young Lions Fiction Awards, New York Times Notable Book, and winner of Colombia’s national book award, the Premio Biblioteca de Narrativa Colombiana. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her stories appear in The Best American Short Stories, The Best American Mystery Stories, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and elsewhere. Born to Colombian parents, Patricia teaches creative writing at the University of Miami.
Roberto Lovato is a journalist and a member of The Writers Grotto. He is one of the country’s leading writers and thinkers on Central American gangs, refugees, violence and other issues. Lovato is also a co-founder of #DignidadLiteraria, the national movement formed to combat the invisibility and silencing of Latinx stories and books in the U.S. publishing industry. He is also recipient of a reporting grant from the Pulitzer Center and a former fellow at UC Berkeley’s Latinx Research Center. His essays and reporting have appeared in numerous publications including Guernica, Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, Guardian, Los Angeles Times, Der Spiegel, La Opinion, and other national and international publications. His most recent book is Unforgetting: A Memoir of Family, Migration, Gangs, and Revolution in the Americas published by Harper Collins. He lives in San Francisco.
Jean Guerrero is an investigative journalist, author and former foreign correspondent. She is the author of Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir (2018, One World,) winner of the PEN/FUSION Emerging Writers Prize. Ms. Guerrero is the recipient of an Emmy Award for the KPBS Sereis AMERICA’S WALL. She is a contributor to the New York Times as well as NPR, PBS, and other public media, and her writing is featured in Best American Essays 2019, edited by Rebecca Solnit. She is the author of the book HATE MONGER: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda. Guerrero lives in La Mesa, California.
Juliana Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer, historian, speaker and storyteller based in San Francisco. They’re the author of The New York Times acclaimed novel Fiebre Tropical, out March 2020 from The Feminist Press. Juli is also the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017) and ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute 2017) an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award. Juli’s received awarded fellowships and residencies from Hedgebrook, Headlands Center for The Arts, Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and The SF Grotto. Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Teen Vogue, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, The White Review, LALT, Four Way Review, Broadly, TimeOut Mag to name a few. They are the former executive director of RADAR Productions a queer literary non-profit in San Francisco.

Praise for Infinite Country:

“Patricia Engel is a wonder; her novels are marvels of exquisite control and profound and delicately evoked feeling. Infinite Country knocked me out with its elegant and lucid deconstruction of yearning, family, belonging, and sacrifice. This is a book that speaks into the present moment with an oracle’s devastating coolness and clarity.” —Lauren Groff, author of Florida and Fates and Furies
“Clear, moving, and perfectly calibrated, Infinite Country follows the members of one mixed-immigration status family as they navigate dreams, distance, and the bonds of love and memory. Patricia Engel is a stunning writer with astonishing talents.” —Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers
“Infinite Country is a wonder, and Patricia Engel is a magician. Epic yet exquisitely private, a book to make you marvel.” —R.O. Kwon, author of The Incendiaries
“Engel’s vital story of a divided Colombian family is a book we need to read… The rare immigrant chronicle that is as long on hope as it is on heartbreak.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred)

“A memorable line—”It was her idea to tie up the nun.”— launches the narrative with the force of a cannon as it switches back and forth between the present and the past. The immigrant’s story might be well-traveled ground, but Engel (The Veins of the Ocean, 2016) constructs a layered narrative outlining how the weight of every seemingly minor choice systematically cements into a crushing predicament…Lively folktales of the Muisca peoples punctuate Engel’s remarkable novel as it illuminates the true costs of living in the shadows. Told by a chorus of voices and perspectives, this is as much an all-American story as it is a global one.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Powerful and poignant, Infinite Country crystallizes the questions we are asking today about migration, family, and our vision of the future. Patricia Engel has written a memorable and brutally honest response to the simplistic notion of what constitutes the American Dream.” —Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King
“Infinite Country is both a timely and timeless novel. In beautiful prose, Patricia Engel brings to life the courage and complexity of the immigrant experience, illuminating the hardship of life between two countries and two languages, and the search for family and belonging.” —Jennifer Clement, author of Gun Love
“Everything Patricia Engel writes is lit up from the inside with beauty and power. Her prose is gorgeous and her characters are always achingly alive. —Carolina de Robertis, author of Cantoras
“What a breathtaking novel this is, about family, forgiveness, and love while contending with the terrifying unknowns of being an immigrant in a merciless era. There is mercy, however, in every scene of Infinite Country—the kind of profound, understated mercy that manifests in exceptional works of fiction. Patricia Engel is a tremendous writer, and Infinite Country is her best novel yet.” —Idra Novey, author of Those Who Knew
“A tender, beautifully written, and deeply transporting story springing with love and hope. The questions at the heart of Infinite Country are some of the most urgent of our time: Who is allowed in? How will I be known? What is home? Clever, strong, and born searching, Talia hooked me the second she decided to tie up that nun.” —Dina Nayeri, author of The Ungrateful Refugee

“Patricia Engel has an elegant voice. But that finesse has a way of making the shocks and surprises in her fiction more stunning. Infinite Country is her most satisfying work. You won’t be sorry. Well, you will be sorry when it ends.” —Luis Alberto Urrea, author of House of Broken Angels and The Devil’s Highway

Juli Delgado Lopera is an award-winning Colombian writer, historian, speaker and storyteller based in San Francisco. They’re the author of The New York Times acclaimed novel Fiebre Tropical, out March 2020 from The Feminist Press. Juli is also the author of Quiéreme (Nomadic Press 2017) and ¡Cuéntamelo! (Aunt Lute 2017) an illustrated bilingual collection of oral histories by LGBT Latinx immigrants which won a 2018 Lambda Literary Award and a 2018 Independent Publisher Book Award. Juli’s received awarded fellowships and residencies from Hedgebrook, Headlands Center for The Arts, Brush Creek Foundation of the Arts, Lambda Literary Foundation, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and The SF Grotto. Their work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Teen Vogue, The Kenyon Review, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, The White Review, LALT, Four Way Review, Broadly, TimeOut Mag to name a few. They are the former executive director of RADAR Productions a queer literary non-profit in San Francisco.

Virtual Event: Kazim Ali and Layli Long Soldier
2021-03-18 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Join us on Thursday, March 18th at 6pm PT when Kazim Ali discusses his book, Northern Light: Power, Land, and the Memory of Water, with Layli Long Soldier on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88443144613

About Northern Lights

“Places do not belong to us. We belong to them.”

The child of South Asian migrants, Kazim Ali was born in London, lived as a child in the cities and small towns of Manitoba, and made a life in the United States. As a man passing through disparate homes, he has never felt he belonged to a place. And yet, one day, the celebrated poet and essayist finds himself thinking of the boreal forests and lush waterways of Jenpeg, a community thrown up around the building of a hydroelectric dam on the Nelson River, where he once lived for several years as a child. Does the town still exist, he wonders? Is the dam still operational?

When Ali goes searching, however, he finds not news of Jenpeg, but of the local Pimicikamak community. Facing environmental destruction and broken promises from the Canadian government, they have evicted Manitoba’s electric utility from the dam on Cross Lake. In a place where water is an integral part of social and cultural life, the community demands accountability for the harm that the utility has caused.

Troubled, Ali returns north, looking to understand his place in this story and eager to listen. Over the course of a week, he participates in community life, speaks with Elders and community members, and learns about the politics of the dam from Chief Cathy Merrick. He drinks tea with activists, eats corned beef hash with the Chief, and learns about the history of the dam, built on land that was never ceded, and Jenpeg, a town that now exists mostly in his memory. In building relationships with his former neighbors, Ali explores questions of land and power―and in remembering a lost connection to this place, finally finds a home he might belong to.

Praise for Northern Lights

“Ali’s lyrical, hypnotic storytelling takes us on an unlikely journey to a place that only now exists in his childhood memories: a remote industrial community in the boreal forest of northern Canada. I was mesmerized by the voice of a poet who methodically and artistically recounts his once-i- a-lifetime journey to connect with a Cree tribe called the Pimicikamak, the original owners and occupiers of the land and water that mesmerized him as a child. The human landscape Kazim Ali creates in his work, interweaving his own familial and cultural disruption – with those of the Pimicikamak Cree is intriguing and profound.”—Darrel McLeod, author of Mamaskatch

“Ali’s lyrics are crafted with a controlled, delicate quality that never stops questioning, never stops teaching, never stops astounding.”—American Poet

“Lyrical, political, humorous, light and deep—Ali strikes out in many directions. . . . The resulting harmonies—and even the discord—are beautiful.”—Justin Torres, author of We the Animals

Jenny Offill in conversation with Brit Marling
2021-03-18 18:00 - 19:00 | online
City Arts & Lectures presents: Jenny Offill in conversation with Brit Marling
Thursday, March 18, 2021
6:00pm Pacific Time
KQED Broadcast: 03/28/2021, 03/30/2021, 03/31/2021
TICKETS
This event appears in the series
Fiction/Friction: A Miniseries
“Offill’s fragmentary structure evokes an unbearable emotional intensity: something at the core of the story that cannot be narrated directly, by straight chronology, because to do so would be like looking at the sun…” —The New York Times
Jenny Offill is the author of the novels Last Things, Dept. of Speculation, and, most recently, Weather–an ambitious work that balances the concerns of daily life as a wife and mother with the looming apocalypse of climate change. Both hilarious and heartbreaking, the novel asks readers to think about the mundane ways we live and grapple with our rapidly deteriorating environment. Offill lives in upstate New York and teaches at Syracuse University and in the low residency program at Queens University.

Reading: Crystal Williams & Yona Harvey
2021-03-18 17:00 - 18:00 | online
This Poetry Reading Series provides a unique opportunity to hear diverse and unusual sets of readers, in this case pairing long-time friends who rarely have the opportunity to appear together.
Yona Harvey has published two collection of poetry: Hemming the Water, for which she received the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love (2020). Harvey’s work has appeared in Letters to the Future: Black WOMEN / Radical WRITING, A Poet’s Craft: A Comprehensive Guide to Making and Sharing Your Poetry and The Force of What’s Possible: Accessibility and the Avant-Garde. She contributed to Marvel’s World of Wakanda with Ta-Nehisi Coates and Roxane Gay.

Crystal Williams’ fourth book of poetry, Detroit as Barn was a finalist for the National Poetry Series, Cleveland State Open Book Prize, and the Maine Book Award. Troubled Tongues was awarded the 2009 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2009 Oregon Book Award, the Idaho Poetry Prize, and the Crab Orchard Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, PEN: America, The Indiana Review, The Sun, Tin House, Ms. Magazine, Ploughshares, and Callaloo.

Register here.

Perfectly Queer Reading "Queer Flannery O'Connor Award Winners"
2021-03-17 19:00 - 20:00 | online
The Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction is an annual publication prize named for author Flannery O’Connor. This month, Perfectly Queer welcomes three Queer winners of this award to read from their winning short story collection. Lori Ostlund reads from THE BIGNESS OF THE WORLD, Anne Raeff from THE JUNGLE AROUND US, and Patrick Earl Ryan from IF WE WERE ELECTRIC. A discussion will follow the readings, including O’Connor’s racism.

This event will be broadcast via Zoom Wednesday, March 17, from 7pm to 8pm Pacific time. Get the Zoom link by rsvping on this Facebook event page or by emailing perfectlyqueersf@gmail.com. The link will be sent by Messenger or return email.
You can buy these award-winning books from Dog Eared Books Castro at www.dogearedbookscastro.com/shop

Launch for Jeff Chang & Dave "Davey D" Cook / Can't Stop Won't Stop (Young Adult Edition): A Hip-Hop History
2021-03-17 18:30 - 19:30
Booksmith and The Bindery are very pleased to host the virtual launch for Jeff Chang and Dave “Davey D” Cook for the Young Adult Edition of their classic, American Book Award-winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A Hip-Hop History.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order Can’t Stop Won’t Stop (Young Adult Edition) here – we’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay.
About the book
From award-winning author Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop is the story of hip-hop, a generation-defining movement and the music that transformed American politics and culture forever.
Hip hop is one of the most dominant and influential cultures in America, giving new voice to the younger generation. It defines a generation’s worldview. Exploring hip hop’s beginnings up to the present day, Jeff Chang and Dave “Davey D” Cook provide a provocative look into the new world that the hip hop generation has created.
Based on original interviews with DJs, b-boys, rappers, activists, and gang members, with unforgettable portraits of many of hip hop’s forebears, founders, mavericks, and present day icons, this book chronicles the epic events, ideas and the music that marked the hip hop generation’s rise.
About the authors
Jeff Chang has been a hip-hop journalist for more than a decade and has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, The Village Voice, Vibe, The Nation, URB, Rap Pages, Spin, and Mother Jones. He is the author of several books, including the American Book Award-winning Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation. He was a founding editor of Colorlines Magazine, senior editor at Russell Simmons’s 360hiphop.com, and cofounder of the influential hip-hip label SoleSides, now Quannum Projects. He lives in California. Author photo by Jeremy Keith Villaluz.
Dave ‘Davey D’ Cook is a nationally recognized journalist, adjunct professor at San Francisco State, Hip Hop historian, political commentator, syndicated talk show host, radio programmer, media justice and community activist. Author photo by BFRESH Photography.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Lyrics & Dirges in Translation
2021-03-17 18:30 - 19:15 | online
Lyrics and Dirges returns with a fabulous reading focusing on literary translation. We have three translators who are also poets and writers to present their recent translations as well as speaking about how translating and their own creative writing inform each other.

We are on Zoom (link below) and FB Live (Lyrics & Dirges page)

Anna Christine Rodas
Kaveh Bassiri
Zackary Sholem Berger

Anna Christine Rodas is an itinerant teacher and educator from the San Francisco Bay Area. She holds a Master’s Degree in Community Development and worked in this field both here in the Bay Area and internationally. Her academic research in Central American Literary Studies explores the social realities of war, violence, and trauma. Her poetry is an effort to bring the voices of these experiences to the page, especially those of women. She views the female body as a colonized space and the written word as a practice to reclaim sovereignty.

Kaveh Bassiri is the author of two chapbooks: 99 Names of Exile (2019), winner of the Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, and Elementary English (2020), winner of Rick Campbell Chapbook Prize. He is also the recipient of a 2019 translation fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. His translations have appeared in The Common, Chicago Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Two Lines, The Los Angeles Review, and The Massachusetts Review.

Zackary Sholem Berger (zackarysholemberger.com, Twitter @DrZackaryBerger) is a poet and translator in English, Yiddish, and Hebrew. He writes frequently for the Yiddish Forward and other publications. His latest translation is Essential Prose of Avrom Sutzkever (White Goat Press, 2020).

Join from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/j/94477442252
Or iPhone one-tap (US Toll): +16699006833,94477442252# or +12532158782,94477442252#
Or Telephone:
Dial:
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Meeting ID: 944 7744 2252
International numbers available: https://cccconfer.zoom.us/u/ab18rLmNGx

Evening Literary Seminar: The Color Purple by Alice Walker
2021-03-17 17:00 - 18:30

Poetry Reading featuring Terrance Hayes and Simone White
2021-03-17 16:00 - 17:30 | YouTube
Please join the Arts Research Center in welcoming two of America’s most compelling poets, Terrance Hayes and Simone White, on Wednesday, March 17, 2021 at 4pm PST. This event is part of ARC’s Poetry and the Senses program, generously funded by Engaging the Senses Foundation. Following their individual readings, they will be in conversation with UC Berkeley professor and Poetry & the Senses board member Chiyuma Elliott. This event will be live streamed on ARC’s YouTube channel, and live captioned. All of ARC’s programs are free and open to the public.
During spring 2021, ARC will celebrate poetry and explore the theme of emerge/ncy: voices to carry with us in times of crisis, with group readings every month, and short flash readings released online. This semester-long festival of poetry is generously funded by Engaging the Senses Foundation, and is part of ARC’s Poetry & the Senses initiative.

Terrance Hayes is the author of six poetry collections: American Sonnets for My Past And Future Assassin, a finalist for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and TS Eliot Prize; How to Be Drawn; Lighthead, winner of the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; Muscular Music, recipient of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award; Hip Logic, winner of the 2001 National Poetry Series, and Wind in a Box. His prose collection, To Float In The Space Between: Drawings and Essays in Conversation with Etheridge Knight, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. Hayes has received the MacArthur Foundation Genius Award, two Pushcart selections, eight Best American Poetry selections, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and the Guggenheim Foundation. His poems have appeared in literary journals and magazines including The New Yorker, Poetry, The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Fence, The Kenyon Review, Jubilat, and Harvard Review. He is a professor of English at New York University.

Simone White is the author of or, on being the other woman (forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2021), Dear Angel of Death (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem, 2016), and House Envy of All the World (Factory School, 2010), the poetry chapbook, Unrest (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), and the collaborative poem/painting chapbook, Dolly (with Kim Thomas) (Q Ave, 2008). Her poetry and prose have been featured in Artforum, e-flux, Harper’s Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Chicago Review, The New York Times Book Review, and Harriet: The Blog. Her honors include a 2021 Creative Capital Award, a 2017 Whiting Award in Poetry, Cave Canem Foundation fellowships, and recognition as a New American Poet for the Poetry Society of America in 2013. A graduate of Wesleyan University, she holds a JD from Harvard Law School, an MFA from the New School, and a PhD in English from CUNY Graduate Center. She is the Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the writing faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She lives in Brooklyn.

Chiyuma Elliott is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarly work and teaching focus on poetry and poetics, visual culture, and intellectual history from the 1920s to the present. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, Elliott was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford, and Assistant Professor of English, Creative Writing, and African American Studies at the University of Mississippi. A Cave Canem Alumni Fellow, she has also received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the James Irvine Foundation, and the Vermont Studio Center. She earned her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College and her Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. Elliott has published three books of poetry: At Most (2020), Vigil (2017), and California Winter League (2015) and her creative work has appeared in the African American Review, Callaloo, the Collagist, the Notre Dame Review, the PN Review, and other journals.

This event is part of the Arts Research Center’s Poetry & the Senses program, a two-year initiative (Jan 2020 – Dec 2021) that explores the relevance and urgency of lyrical making and storytelling in times of political crisis, and the value of engaging the senses as an act of care, mindfulness, and resistance. Funded by the Engaging the Senses Foundation.
Image credit: Simone White by Dana Scruggs.
