Litseen

Fiction Seminar with Lysley Tenorio and Anthony Doerr: SCENE-STEALING: Scenes by Contemporary Masters and What To Take From Them
2021-08-19 15:00 - 18:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | online, CA, United States
Register for a cocktail hour literary seminar with SMC MFA fiction Professor Lysley Tenorio with guest author Anthony Doerr
You know the saying: good artists borrow, great artists steal. In this class, we’ll aim for greatness, examining the ways contemporary fiction writers render scenes in their work. How do they use this building block of narrative to generate drama and suspense, and to develop both external and internal conflict in their fiction? How do they use dialogue, internal monologue, and action to develop character, in order to give readers an immersive emotional experience? By studying the strategies used by these celebrated authors, we’ll learn to use their techniques for our own work.
One of the writers we’ll read is Anthony Doerr, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the New York Times bestseller, All The Light We Cannot See. Doerr will make a special virtual visit to our class to offer advice on writing scenes. To celebrate this incredible opportunity, the class will include a signature cocktail, which you can prepare during the class break and enjoy during his visit. The cocktail recipe (with a non-alcoholic, mocktail option) will be sent to students in advance.
This three-hour class includes close readings and discussion, in-class writing and sharing, and an author visit. Recommended (but not required) readings will be sent to students one week before the class.
Lysley Tenorio is the author of the novel The Son of Good Fortune, and the story collection Monstress. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New American Voices Award, a Stegner fellowship, and the Rome Prize. His stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, and have been adapted for the stage in San Francisco and New York City. A finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, he will be a 2021-22 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. He is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Anthony Doerr is the author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons. His new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, will be published in the fall of 2021.
Funds raised from this seminar will go to support scholarships for BIPOC/Global Majority students and LGBTQ!+ students in the MFA in Creative Writing program

Lyrics & Dirges
2021-08-18 18:30 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States
3rd Wednesdays, 6:30pm. Here for the latest.

Kyle Beachy and José Vadi
2021-08-18 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
JOIN US ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 18 AT 6PM PT WHEN KYLE BEACHY JOINS US TO DISCUSS HIS BOOK, THE MOST FUN THING: DISPATCHES FROM A SKATEBOARD LIFE, WITH JOSÉ VADI ON ZOOM!
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ReuRjV4pQ6qwvwlDyWpHxA
Praise for The Most Fun Thing
“A candid, funny, and sometimes damning rumination on why we skateboard. The most thought-provoking writing on skateboarding I’ve ever read.”—Bing Liu, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary Minding the Gap
“As readable as a skate mag and as complex as the best fiction, THE MOST FUN THING imbricates themes of meaning, community, and the soul, and will leave you marveling at skateboarding’s mystery and hopeful for its future. A book as much for the skateboarder as the artist and the writer, the thinker, the feeler.”—Mark Suciu, professional skateboarder
“In THE MOST FUN THING, Kyle Beachy assembles critique, philosophy, anecdote, personal history and imagination, while being shrewd, witty, provocative and—above all—hugely engaging. This is my new favorite book on skateboarding.”—Iain Borden, author of Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History
About The Most Fun Thing
Perfect for fans of Barbarian Days, this memoir in essays follows one man’s decade-long quest to uncover the hidden meaning of skateboarding, and explores how this search led unexpectedly to insights on marriage, love, loss, American invention, and growing old.
In January 2012, creative writing professor and novelist Kyle Beachy published one of his first essays on skate culture, an exploration of how Nike’s corporate strategy successfully gutted the once-mighty independent skate shoe market. Beachy has since established himself as skate culture’s freshest, most illuminating, at times most controversial voice, writing candidly about the increasingly popular and fast-changing pastime he first picked up as a young boy and has continued to practice well into adulthood.
What is skateboarding? What does it mean to continue skateboarding after the age of forty, four decades after the kickflip was invented? How does one live authentically as an adult while staying true to a passion cemented in childhood? How does skateboarding shape one’s understanding of contemporary American life? Of growing old and getting married?
Contemplating these questions and more, Beachy offers a deep exploration of a pastime—often overlooked, regularly maligned—whose seeming simplicity conceals universal truths. THE MOST FUN THING is both a rich account of a hobby and a collection of the lessons skateboarding has taught Beachy—and what it continues to teach him as he strugglesto find space for it as an adult, a professor, and a husband.
About Kyle Beachy
Kyle Beachy’s first novel, The Slide (Dial Press, 2009), won The Chicago Reader’s Best Book by a Chicago Author reader’s choice award for the year. His short fiction has appeared in journals including Fanzine, Pank, Hobart, Juked, The Collagist, 5 Chapters, and others.His writing on skateboarding has appeared in The Point, The American Reader, The Chicagoan, Free Skateboard Magazine (UK & Europe), The Skateboard Mag (US), Jenkem, Deadspin, and The Classical. He teaches at Roosevelt University in Chicago and is a co-host on the skateboarding podcast Vent City with pro skater Ryan Lay and others.

Virtual Get Lit #75
2021-08-17 19:00 - 21:00 | online, CA, United States
We’re in our 6th consecutive year as we continue to celebrate 12–15 writers taking risks and reading never-before-read work (rough drafts/debuts) within a 3-minute time limit + live music. All ages are welcome. Emceed by Abe Becker.
Nomadic Press’ Safe Space Statement and Process: https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess
Poster by Jevohn Tyler Newsome
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!
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;
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We have a short goal for the evening of $200.
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Monthly Get Lit
Time: Feb 16, 2021 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Every month on the Third Tue, until Dec 21, 2021, 11 occurrence(s)
Feb 16, 2021 07:00 PM
Mar 16, 2021 07:00 PM
Apr 20, 2021 07:00 PM
May 18, 2021 07:00 PM
Jun 15, 2021 07:00 PM
Jul 20, 2021 07:00 PM
Aug 17, 2021 07:00 PM
Sep 21, 2021 07:00 PM
Oct 19, 2021 07:00 PM
Nov 16, 2021 07:00 PM
Dec 21, 2021 07:00 PM
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WE ARE THE BRENNANS by Tracey Lange | GGP Online Book Club
2021-08-17 19:00 - 21:00
Please join us on Tuesday, August 17, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of WE ARE THE BRENNANS by Tracey Lange.
The Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87501755663.
You can preorder a print copy at http://bit.ly/ggpBrennans, or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at http://bit.ly/BrennansAB.
Staff Reviews
I ABSOLUTELY love this book! WE ARE THE BRENNAN’S is the debut novel by Tracey Lange and centers around the Brennan family and the secrets that threaten to destroy their wonderfully dysfunctional Irish Catholic family.— Kathleen
Description

In the vein of Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes and Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s The Nest, Tracey Lange’s We Are the Brennans explores the staying power of shame—and the redemptive power of love—in an Irish Catholic family torn apart by secrets.
When twenty-nine-year-old Sunday Brennan wakes up in a Los Angeles hospital, bruised and battered after a drunk driving accident she caused, she swallows her pride and goes home to her family in New York. But it’s not easy. She deserted them all—and her high school sweetheart—five years before with little explanation, and they’ve got questions.
Sunday is determined to rebuild her life back on the east coast, even if it does mean tiptoeing around resentful brothers and an ex-fiancé. The longer she stays, however, the more she realizes they need her just as much as she needs them. When a dangerous man from her past brings her family’s pub business to the brink of financial ruin, the only way to protect them is to upend all their secrets—secrets that have damaged the family for generations and will threaten everything they know about their lives. In the aftermath, the Brennan family is forced to confront painful mistakes—and ultimately find a way forward, together.

Lisa Wells + Joanna Manqueros: Believers: Making a Life at End World
2021-08-17 19:00 - 20:30 | Virtual
KPFA Radio 94.1 FM & presents:
Lisa Wells + Joanna Manqueros: A Zoom Event
Believers: Making a Life at the End of the World
In search of answers and action, award-winning poet and essayist Lisa Wells brings us Believers, introducing trailblazers and outliers from across the globe who have found radically new ways to live and reconnect to the Earth in the face of climate change.
We find ourselves at the end of the world; how then shall we live?
Like many of us, Lisa Wells has spent years overwhelmed by news of apocalyptic-scale climate change and a coming sixth extinction. She did not need to be convinced of the stakes. But what can be done? Wells embarked on a pilgrimage, seeking answers in dedicated communities-outcasts and visionaries-on the margins of society.
Wells meets Finisia Medrano, an itinerant planter and misanthrope leading a group of nomadic activists to rewild the American desert. She finds a group of environmentalist Christians practicing “watershed discipleship” in New Mexico; another group in Philadelphia turning the tools of violence into tools of farming-guns into plowshares. She watches the world’s greatest tracker teach how to read a trail, and visits botanists who are restoring land overrun by invasive species and destructive humans. She talks with survivors of catastrophic wildfires in California as they try to rebuild in new ways that acknowledge the fires will come again.
Blending reportage, memoir, history, and philosophy, Wells opens up seemingly intractable questions about the damage we have done and how we might reckon with our inheritance. “Brilliant in its quest. . . [and] an essential document of our time” (Charles D’Ambrosio), Believers demands transformation: If the Earth is our home, if our home is being destroyed-how then shall we live?
Lisa Wells is the author of The Grief Tower, Raising Up a Generation of Healthy Third Culture Kids, and The Simple Life.
Suggested Donation $5-$20.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/lisa-wells-joanna-manqueros-believers-making-a-life-at-the-end-of-world-tickets-159198058679

Charlie Jane Anders and Maggie Tokuda-Hall
2021-08-17 18:00 - 19:00 | Green Apple Books 9th Avenue, 1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94122, United States
JOIN US ON TUESDAY, AUGUST 17 AT 6PM PT WHEN CHARLIE JANE ANDERS JOINS US TO DISCUSS HER BOOK, NEVER SAY YOU CAN’T SURVIVE: HOW TO GET THROUGH HARD TIMES BY MAKING UP STORIES, WITH MAGGIE TOKUDA-HALL AT 9TH AVE!
Masks required for in-store attendance.
Join us virtually by registering at the link below
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_FlNv8KVLRaOaR5TQrw_R8w

About Never Say You Can’t Survive
From the internationally bestselling and critically-acclaimed writer Charlie Jane Anders comes a nonfiction manual about writing and life.
Charlie Jane Anders is writing Never Say You Can’t Survive, a nonfiction how-to book about the craft of storytelling. Full of memoir, personal anecdote, and insight about how to flourish during the present emergency, Never Say You Can’t Survive is the perfect manual for fostering creativity in unprecedented times.
About Charlie Jane Anders
CHARLIE JANE ANDERS is the former editor-in-chief of io9.com, the popular Gawker Media site devoted to science fiction and fantasy. She is the author of the highly acclaimed science fiction novel, City in the Middle of the Night. Her debut novel, All the Birds in the Sky, won the Nebula Award for Best Novel and was a Hugo Award finalist. Her story, “Six Months, Three Days,” won a Hugo Award. Her YA debut novel, Victories Greater Than Death, was published with Tor Teen in April 2021. She has also had fiction published by McSweeney’s, Lightspeed, and ZYZZYVA. Her journalism has appeared in Salon, The Wall Street Journal, Mother Jones, and many other outlets.

Jaime Cortez in conversation with Rebecca Solnit
2021-08-17 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
celebrating Jaime Cortez’s debut short fiction collection
Gordo
published by Grove Atlantic
Shedding profound natural light on the inner lives of migrant workers, Jaime Cortez’s debut collection ushers in a new era of American literature that gives voice to a marginalized generation of migrant workers in the West.
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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.
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(Click Here) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon)
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The first ever collection of short stories by Jaime Cortez, Gordo is set in a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California in the 1970s. A young, probably gay, boy named Gordo puts on a wrestler’s mask and throws fists with a boy in the neighborhood, fighting his own tears as he tries to grow into the idea of manhood so imposed on him by his father. As he comes of age, Gordo learns about sex, watches his father’s drunken fights, and discovers even his own documented Mexican-American parents are wary of illegal migrants. Fat Cookie, high schooler and resident artist, uses tiny library pencils to draw huge murals of graffiti flowers along the camp’s blank walls, the words “CHICANO POWER” boldly lettered across, until she runs away from home one day with her mother’s boyfriend, Manny, and steals her mother’s Panasonic radio for a final dance competition among the camp kids before she disappears. And then there are Los Tigres, the perfect pair of twins so dark they look like indios, Pepito and Manuel, who show up at Gyrich Farms every season without fail. Los Tigres, champion drinkers, end up assaulting each other in a drunken brawl, until one of them is rushed to the emergency room still slumped in an upholstered chair tied to the back of a pick-up truck.
These scenes from Steinbeck Country seen so intimately from within are full of humor, family drama, and a sweet frankness about serious matters – who belongs to America and how are they treated? How does one learn decency, when laborers, grown adults, must fear for their lives and livelihoods as they try to do everything to bring home a paycheck? Written with balance and poise, Cortez braids together elegant and inviting stories about life on a California camp, in essence redefining what all-American means.
Jaime Cortez is a graphic novelist, visual artist, writer, teacher, and occasional performer. Cortez has historically used art and humor to explore sexuality, social justice, HIV/AIDS, and Chicano identity.
Rebecca Solnit is a writer, historian, activist, and the author of more than twenty books on feminism, western and indigenous history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and disaster, these include Cinderella Liberator, Men Explain Things to Me, Hope in the Dark, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Wanderlust: A History of Walking, the Atlas Trilogy, and much much more. She received numerous honors for her work. These include a Guggenheim award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, and the Lannan Literary Award. Her memoir, Recollections of My Nonexistence, was released in March, 2020.

This event is sponsored by the City Lights Foundation

Nomadic Press Virtual Open Mic #71
2021-08-13 18:00 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States
90 minutes
30 readers
3 minutes each
On Zoom!
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!
Sign up to read here:
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If you enjoy spaces like this and can swing it in these tight times, please consider supporting us via:
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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)
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Omar El Akkad, What Strange Paradise
2021-08-12 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Writer and journalist Omar El Akkad, author of the acclaimed book American War, will be in conversation with Lauren Markham about his new book What Strange Paradise, a beautifully written and profoundly moving novel that brings the global refuge crisis down to the level of a child’s eyes. “It is one thing to put a human face on a migrant crisis and another to do so in so compelling a way that a reader simply cannot put your book down.” —Gish Jen, author of The Resisters
Register for this free Crowdcast event by clicking here!
More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives in their homelands. And only one has made the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who has the good fortune to fall into the hands not of the officials but of Vänna: a teenage girl, native to the island, who lives inside her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though she and the boy are complete strangers, though they don’t speak a common language, she determines to do whatever it takes to save him.
In alternating chapters, we learn the story of the boy’s life and of how he came to be on the boat; and we follow the girl and boy as they make their way toward a vision of safety. But as the novel unfurls we begin to understand that this is not merely the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world, it is the story of our collective moment in this time: of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair—and of the way each of those things can blind us to reality, or guide us to a better one.

OMAR EL AKKAD is an author and a journalist. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations around the world. His work earned Canada’s National Newspaper Award for Investigative Journalism and the Goff Penny Award for young journalists. His writing has appeared in The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica, GQ, and many other newspapers and magazines. His debut novel, American War, is an international bestseller and has been translated into thirteen languages. It won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award, the Oregon Book Award for fiction, and the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize, and has been nominated for more than ten other awards. It was listed as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, NPR, and Esquire, and was selected by the BBC as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World.
LAUREN MARKHAM is a writer based in California whose work has appeared in outlets such as Guernica, Harper’s, Lithub, Best American Travel Writing, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and VQR, where she is a contributing editor. Lauren is the author of The Far Away Brothers: Two Young Migrants and the Making of an American Life, which was awarded the Northern California Book Award, The California Book Award Silver Medal, and the Ridenhour Prize. In addition to writing, she works at a high school for newcomer youth in Oakland, California that she helped found in 2007.

Daniel Sherrell and Bill McKibben
2021-08-12 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Discusses his new book Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World. Co-sponsored by the Mesa Refuge.

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Thursday, August 12, 2021 – 7:00pm

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Sliding scale ($0-$100)

Daniel Sherrell discusses his new book Warmth: Coming of Age at the End of Our World (Penguin) with Bill McKibben. Co-sponsored by the Mesa Refuge.
“Beautifully rendered and bracingly honest, this book helped me do the impossible: live in the space between grief and hope.” —Jenny Odell, New York Times bestselling author of How to Do Nothing
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Warmth
Warmth is a new kind of book about climate change: not what it is or how we solve it, but how it feels to imagine a future–and a family–under its weight. In a fiercely personal account written from inside the climate movement, Sherrell lays bare how the crisis is transforming our relationships to time, to hope, and to each other. At once a memoir, a love letter, and an electric work of criticism, Warmth goes to the heart of the defining question of our time: how do we go on in a world that may not?
About the Participants
Daniel Sherrell is an organizer born in 1990. He helped lead the campaign to pass landmark climate justice legislation in New York and is the recipient of a Fulbright grant in creative nonfiction. Warmth is his first book.
Bill McKibben is founder and senior adviser emeritus of 350.org. His 1989 book The End of Nature is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has appeared in 24 languages. He’s gone on to write many more books, and his work appears regularly in periodicals from the New Yorker to Rolling Stone. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College, as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and he has won the Gandhi Peace Prize as well as honorary degrees from 19 colleges and universities. He was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the alternative Nobel, in the Swedish Parliament. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers.
McKibben helped found 350.org, the first global grassroots climate campaign, and has organized on every continent, including Antarctica, for climate action. He played a leading role in launching the opposition to big oil pipeline projects, and the fossil fuel divestment campaign, which has become the biggest anti-corporate campaign in history, with endowments worth more than $15 trillion stepping back from oil, gas and coal. He stepped down as board chair of 350 in 2015, and left the board and stepped down from his volunteer role as senior adviser in 2020, accepting emeritus status. He lives in the mountains above Lake Champlain with his wife, the writer Sue Halpern, where he spends as much time as possible outdoors. In 2014, biologists credited his career by naming a new species of woodland gnat—Megophthalmidia mckibbeni–in his honor.

We Are the Brennans — a discussion with Tracey Lange
2021-08-12 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Please join us on Thursday, August 12, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a discussion of WE ARE THE BRENNANS with author Tracey Lange in a GGP Online Chat.
Our discussion will be webcast on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83468349847, and on Facebook Live at https://www.facebook.com/ggpbooks/live/.
You can order a print copy at http://bit.ly/ggpBrennans, or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at http://bit.ly/BrennansAB.
Staff Reviews

I ABSOLUTELY love this book! WE ARE THE BRENNANS is the debut novel by Tracey Lange and centers around the Brennan family and the secrets that threaten to destroy their wonderfully dysfunctional Irish Catholic family.— Kathleen
Description

In the vein of Mary Beth Keane’s Ask Again, Yes and Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s The Nest, Tracey Lange’s We Are the Brennans explores the staying power of shame—and the redemptive power of love—in an Irish Catholic family torn apart by secrets.
When twenty-nine-year-old Sunday Brennan wakes up in a Los Angeles hospital, bruised and battered after a drunk driving accident she caused, she swallows her pride and goes home to her family in New York. But it’s not easy. She deserted them all—and her high school sweetheart—five years before with little explanation, and they’ve got questions.
Sunday is determined to rebuild her life back on the east coast, even if it does mean tiptoeing around resentful brothers and an ex-fiancé. The longer she stays, however, the more she realizes they need her just as much as she needs them. When a dangerous man from her past brings her family’s pub business to the brink of financial ruin, the only way to protect them is to upend all their secrets—secrets that have damaged the family for generations and will threaten everything they know about their lives. In the aftermath, the Brennan family is forced to confront painful mistakes—and ultimately find a way forward, together.

Voz Sin Tinta
2021-08-12 18:30 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Every 2nd Thursday of the month at Alley Cat Books in the heart of the Mission!Hosted and curated by Marguerite Munoz and René Vaz.Each reading we bring you three writers, an open mic, witty and thought provoking banter and a space that is accepting.

Alia Volz
2021-08-12 18:00 - 19:00 | Kerouac Alley, 255 Columbus Ave, San Francisco, CA 94133, San Francisco, California, 94133, United States
City Lights in conjunction with Vesuvio Cafe present
A celebration of the paperback edition of
Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco
by Alia Volz
published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Moderated by Alexis Madrigal with Alia Volz, Doug Volz, Meridy Volz
(This is a live event to take place in Kerouac Alley. Seating on a first-come, first-serve basis)

Sure, it’s unusual to throw a book launch 18 months after publication, but that’s the way the brownie crumbles during a pandemic…
Co-presented safely outdoors by City Lights Books and Vesuvio Café, this will be the first opportunity to celebrate the bestselling memoir, Home Baked, in person. Alexis Madrigal from NPR’s Forum will interview Alia alongside her parents Doug and Meridy Volz (co-owners of Sticky Fingers Brownies and stars of the book). We’ll have a short reading and book signing, plus more surprises and special guests TBD.
Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2020) was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award, winner of the 2020 Golden Poppy Nonfiction Book Award, and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller. It was the inaugural pick for the citywide Total SF Book Club, and an SFPL “On the Same Page” selection. This unique story has been featured of Snap Judgement, Criminal, and NPR’s Fresh Air.
Join us in Jack Kerouac Alley to meet the people behind the wild stories.
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About Home Baked:
A blazingly funny, heartfelt memoir from the daughter of the larger-than-life woman who ran Sticky Fingers Brownies, an underground bakery that distributed thousands of marijuana brownies per month and helped provide medical marijuana to AIDS patients in San Francisco.
During the ’70s in San Francisco, Alia’s mother ran the underground Sticky Fingers Brownies, delivering upwards of 10,000 illegal marijuana edibles per month throughout the circus-like atmosphere of a city in the throes of major change. She exchanged psychic readings with Alia’s future father, and thereafter had a partner in business and life.
Decades before cannabusiness went mainstream, when marijuana was as illicit as heroin, they ingeniously hid themselves in plain sight, parading through town—and through the scenes and upheavals of the day, from Gay Liberation to the tragedy of the Peoples Temple—in bright and elaborate outfits, the goods wrapped in hand-designed packaging and tucked into Alia’s stroller. But the stars were not aligned forever and, after leaving the city and a shoulda-seen-it-coming divorce, Alia and her mom returned to San Francisco in the mid-80s, this time using Sticky Fingers’ distribution channels to provide medical marijuana to friends and former customers now suffering the depredations of AIDS.
Exhilarating, laugh-out-loud funny, and heartbreaking, Home Baked celebrates an eccentric and remarkable extended family, taking us through love, loss, and finding home.

Alexis Madrigal is the co-host of KQED’s Forum and a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Alia Volz is a homegrown San Franciscan. Her bestselling memoir Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) was a finalist for the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the 2020 Golden Poppy Nonfiction Book Award. It was chosen as the inaugural pick for the San Francisco Chronicle’s citywide Total SF Book Club and was an SFPL “On the Same Page” selection. This unique San Francisco story has been featured on Snap Judgement, Criminal, Forum, and NPR’s Fresh Air.

Doug Volz is a professional Visionary Realist oil painter, living in Lake County, California. At 67, as a retired nurse, he devotes his time to producing works of art that inspire and elevate, assisting the viewer to leave behind the dark encumbrances of the physical, and to focus instead on a personal spirituality, and a Light which frees the Spirit and heals the Heart and Mind.

Meridy Volz is a working fine artist and art activist. She resides in Desert Hot Springs, CA, where she runs her art program, Art with Heart, mentoring incarcerated and at-risk teens. Her award-winning artwork is figurative, colorful, and Expressionistic.

Reviews:
Winner of the California Bookseller Association’s Golden Poppy Award for Nonfiction
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography
One of Entertainment Weekly’s “Books to Read in April”
One of Lambda Literary’s “Most Anticipated LGBTQ Books of April 2020”

“The subtitle, ‘My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco’ tells you much of what you need to know in terms of content. But as a portrait of a heroics, innovation, grit, and pot-baking in an epidemic (in this case, the AIDS crisis), it’s also strikingly relevant. And beautifully written, too.”
—Entertainment Weekly, “Books to Read in April”

“A beautiful evocation of the Bay Area in the years before tech bros and big money changed the city…Like Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday, this is a narrative about a time that is now gone: San Francisco as circus, where pot was both ubiquitous and as illegal as heroin. Under Volz’s careful attention, all of it—the era, the place, and her own parents—is rendered clear, bright, and beautiful.”
—Paris Review, Staff Pick

“An earnest yet comic memoir by the daughter of the owner of the Sticky Fingers bakery, purveyor of pot brownies and crusader for legalization.”
—New York Times, “New and Noteworthy Audiobooks”

“A raunchy and rollicking account of a vanished era told by someone who paid very close attention to her larger-than-life parents. I gobbled it up like an edible.”
—Armistead Maupin

“I devoured this book! Sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, a savvy business woman, a social and medicinal revolution: What’s not to love? This is a story Alia Volz was born to tell.”
—Rebecca Skloot, bestselling author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

“[A] nostalgic, thoroughly entertaining new romp of a memoir…[An] intensely personal portrait of an unconventional childhood, as well as a rigorously reported account of a kaleidoscopic time in San Francisco history, an era of exuberant highs and pitch-black lows.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“While a memoir, Home Baked is also an intensively researched book on San Francisco and the burgeoning cannabis culture surrounding Sticky Fingers Brownies, based on archival research and hundreds of hours of interviews with LGBT activists, cannabis advocates and, of course, Volz’s parents. Home Baked also provides a timely contrast with both modern San Francisco and the blossoming cannabis industry, which can now offer safe and legal access to the drug, although significant reforms to the war on drugs have not materialized.”
—Newsweek

“Ample, skillfully researched, and cleanly narrated, Volz’s debut is really five books in one . . . Alia in tow, Mer and her peers travel among San Francisco, Humboldt County and Marin, connecting an essentially agricultural project to an urban counterculture; they also weave together less and more responsible ways to raise a kid, almost as Volz herself weaves together her archives of the post-hippie-era Bay Area with her own vivid memories.”
—Literary Hub

Virtual Event: Nawaaz Ahmed and Nina McConigley
2021-08-12 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Thursday, August 12th at 6pm PT when Nawaaz Ahmed discusses his debut, Radiant Fugitives, with Nina McConigley on Zoom!
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/…/reg…/WN_bvWs1Xb1R5KoaIVf1tstCg
Praise for Radiant Fugitives
“Radiant Fugitives indeed glows. This is such a beautiful novel, full of light and luminous sentences. Reading it felt like basking in a generous and lucid intelligence. Ahmed writes his characters and their worlds with honesty and compassion. This is a writer to watch, a voice we need.” —Matthew Salesses, author of Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear
“I’ve never read a novel like Nawaaz Ahmed’s Radiant Fugitives, and, I kid you not, I’ve been waiting for this tremendous, complex, moving novel for years, but never expected to receive it…There is so much of life in this book.” —Anita Felicelli, Electric Literature
“Lyrical and deeply moving, Nawaaz Ahmed’s Radiant Fugitives is about the search for love, acceptance, and family, both chosen and received. The novel is big-hearted and clear-eyed, a stellar debut.” —Vanessa Hua, author of A River of Stars
About Radiant Fugitives
A dazzling, operatic debut novel following three generations of a Muslim Indian family confronted with a nation on the brink of change.
Working as a consultant for Kamala Harris’s attorney general campaign in Obama-era San Francisco, Seema has constructed a successful life for herself in the West, despite still struggling with her father’s long-ago decision to exile her from the family after she came out as lesbian. Now, nine months pregnant and estranged from the Black father of her unborn son, Seema seeks solace in the company of those she once thought lost to her: her ailing mother, Nafeesa, traveling alone to California from Chennai, and her devoutly religious sister, Tahera, a doctor living in Texas with her husband and children.
But instead of a joyful reconciliation anticipating the birth of a child, the events of this fateful week unearth years of betrayal, misunderstanding, and complicated layers of love—a tapestry of emotions as riveting and disparate as the era itself.
Told from the point of view of Seema’s child at the moment of his birth, and infused with the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats and verses from the Quran, Radiant Fugitives is a moving tale of a family and a country grappling with acceptance, forgiveness, and enduring love.
About Nawaaz Ahmed
Nawaaz Ahmed was born in Tamil Nadu, India. Before turning to writing, he was a computer scientist, researching search algorithms for Yahoo. He holds an MFA from University of Michigan–Ann Arbor and is the winner of several Hopwood Awards. He is the recipient of residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, Djerassi, and VCCA. He’s also a Kundiman and Lambda Literary Fellow. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

FUNDRAISER: Nomadic Press & BAMBDFEST 2021 Present: BlackLit: A Series of Poetic Conversations
2021-08-11 18:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
As part of BAMBDFEST 2021, BlackLit brings together 10 Nomadic Press writers and 2 musicians who have been paired up in poetic conversations weeks prior to the event. This is a fundraiser for the Nomadic Press Black Writers Fund (we have a short goal of raising $2,000 by the end of the evening).
Emceed by the one-and-only Dior J. Stephens!
Poet pairs:
Ayodele Nzinga + Juba Kalamka
Asantewaa Boykin + Dee Allen
Lauren Wheeler + Odelia Younge
Keith Donnell Jr. + Daniel B. Summerhill
Dazié Grego-Sykes + Nazelah Jamison
Music pair:
Blackberri + TBA
About the Nomadic Press Black Writers Fund (NPBWF):
At Nomadic Press we are proud of our recent work to support Black writers through our initiative, the Nomadic Press Black Writers Fund (NPBWF), and we’d like to thank those who have contributed to the fund. Our mission is to level the playing field for Black writers.
Our campaign and fundraiser last December enabled us to provide $3,500 to our roster of 24 Black writers, which allowed us to provide $143 to each writer. We’d like to continue this work. In 2021, our goal is to raise $8,000 to support 32 Black writers with $250 each. We hope that you consider donating to the fund. No donation is too small (or too big).
$8,000.00 would allow us to guarantee 32 writers $250.00 each. A donation of $250 supports one author; $750 supports three.
Below are four ways to give to NPBWF:
1) Make a one-time donation: https://www.nomadicpress.org/store/blackwritersfundonetime
2) Make a monthly recurring donation: https://www.nomadicpress.org/store/blackwritersfundrecurring
3) Donate via a “ticket” through Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.com/…/fundraiser-nomadic-press…
4) Donate via the Cash App to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress
Zoom Joining Info
Topic: FUNDRAISER: Nomadic Press & BAMBDFEST 2021 Present: BlackLit: A Series of Poetic Conversations
Time: Aug 11, 2021 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
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Benjamin Gucciardi with Eduardo C. Corral
2021-08-11 18:00 - 20:00
Launch Party for Benjamin Gucciardi’s new poetry collection
West Portal
published by University of Utah Press
Winner of the 2020 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize
———–
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. Link coming soon!
———–
(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. Link coming soon!
———–
West Portal is the name of the neighborhood in San Francisco, California, where poet Benjamin Gucciardi grew up. It is also one of the names of the Pillars of Heracles—the entryway to the afterworld. Drawing on William Carlos Williams’s assertion that “the local is the only thing that is universal,” West Portal investigates the Bay Area’s urban and rural landscapes along with the memories and people that reside there. Interweaving the narrative of the death of the poet’s sister with the environmental and socioeconomic realities of the current moment, the poems in West Portal illuminate the experience of loss, and the attempt to create meaning in the wake of devastation. Through poems that are prayerful, observant, elegiac, pained, dreamlike, philosophical, and compassionate, the book asks: What do we consider holy? What is virtue? What should any of us value about our relationship to place or our relationship with each other?
Benjamin Gucciardi is the author of the chapbook I Ask My Sister’s Ghost (DIAGRAM/New Michigan Press). His poems have appeared in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, Harvard Review, New Ohio Review, Orion Magazine, Southern Indiana Review, and other journals. He has received BOOTH’s Prize for Unexpected Literature, the Milton Kessler Memorial Prize from Harpur Palate, the Trifecta Poetry Prize from Iron Horse Literary Review and a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize, as well as awards and fellowships from the Sewanee Writer’s Conference, Jentel Foundation, PLAYA, and Artsmith. He also works with refugee and immigrant youth in Oakland, California, through Soccer Without Borders, an organization he founded in 2006.

Eduardo C. Corral’s debut collection of poetry, Slow Lightning (2012), won the Yale Younger Poets Prize, making him the first Latino recipient of the award. His second collection is Guillotine (2020). Praised for his seamless blending of English and Spanish, tender treatment of history, and careful exploration of sexuality, Corral has received numerous honors and awards, including the Discovery/The Nation Award, the J. Howard and Barbara M.J. Wood Prize, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Praise and Reviews for WEST PORTAL:
“The beautiful and the terrible live alongside each other in this work. And so often, they’re actually the same thing. Or they are happening all at once. There is such deep searching in this book and such formal precision. And the language is luminous, which makes the harrowing physical and psychic landscape even more profound. At the center of this world is the ghost of the poet’s sister who proves that ghosts are always the best teachers. They see us.”
—Gabrielle Calvocoressi, author of Rocket Fantastic
“In West Portal, ravishing beauty and ravenous grief braid into utterly lucid and breathtaking poems. The language—deftly scored on the page, rippling with tenderness—radiates with the hushed warmth of an intimate conversation. Ben Gucciardi’s first book has the lyrical depth of a second or third book. It’s an astonishing debut.”—Eduardo Corral
“Ben Gucciardi’s West Portal reverberates with compassionate intensity. Navigating the tragedy of his sister’s death, its aftermath, and what the living can learn from the dead, these poems spark with tender attention to detail: he reaches into his sister’s ashes expecting their consistency to be like masa and instead feels bone. He brings a thermos of soup to one of his students who has been kicked out of the house by his uncle, and they walk, exchanging stories, by the San Francisco Bay. West Portal asks us, in this great plastic patch of life, how does the poet ‘un-drown’ himself? One way is to dive right into the great scope of being in all of its dazzling, bewildering power.”—Sandra Simonds
“West Portal takes place ‘in the pause between death and tendril,’ where the ‘word for beauty sounds just like the word for camel, and the phrase I borrowed sometimes means I burned.’ In this in-between world, Benjamin Gucciardi shows us a landscape stricken by loss, but also painted with hints of joy some may call reincarnation or a goldfinch’s song. It’s this attention to emotion and image that makes this debut poignant and specifically brilliant like ‘the red blaze of ice-plants.'”—Javier Zamora
“I revere books of poems that accomplish three things: praying, singing, and storytelling. The poems in West Portal achieve all three. The poetic modes are mixed and at times hybridized. Deep intelligence and deep feeling seem to hold each other in a death-gripped balance. There’s something narrative at stake here, too. We’re taking an emotional journey that carries us from one place to another. Maybe that isn’t exactly narrative, but it borrows from narrative structure, and has something to do with a character evolving or changing over the course of a book. I love this about West Portal, a massively ambitious book.”
—David Roderick, author of The Americans and Blue Colonial
“West Portal is a stunning collection of death-haunted poems that not only interrogate the nature of existence but in formally various ways celebrate our brief time on earth. Ben Gucciardi shows how small details, observed or remembered and rendered in lines that sing and soar, make life worth living. Here is a primer on the movements of the soul, which will surprise, delight, and offer solace.”
—Christopher Merrill, author of Self-Portrait with Dogwood

Virtual Event: Da'Shaun L. Harrison and Kiese Laymon
2021-08-11 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Wednesday, August 11th at 6pm PT when Da’Shaun L. Harrison discusses their book, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, with Kiese Laymon on Zoom!
ASL Interpretation Provided
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/…/reg…/WN_IcplvrusQYe6T-3p_3sq9Q
Praise for Belly of the Beast
“Belly of the Beast is written with poise and lucidity. It pushes us to think past the pablum of telling fat folx all they gotta do is love themselves to enacting a movement that addresses the source and ramifications of societal anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Harrison forces us not to look away, reminding us that all too often ‘health’ and ‘desire’ are used to annul Blackness. In a ‘post bo-po’ world, desire and the sheer right to life can be rooted in something other than all the things named non-Black.” —Sabrina Strings, author of Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia
“Da’Shaun Harrison is an insightful visionary, world-builder, and ingenious writer who brings us into deeper understandings and frameworks of the intersections of anti-Blackness and anti-fatness. Belly of the Beast brings us closer to ourselves because it brings us closer to the truth—that anti-Blackness is the foundation to how violence shapes our relationships to our bodies and each other. Harrison not only intervenes in the terror of white supremacist paradigms but develops the tools to imagine and build a new world. Belly of the Beast eats, and it leaves no crumbs.”—Hunter Shackelford, author of You Might Die for This
“I am continually blown away by Da’Shaun’s ability as a writer to wrestle so deeply and expertly with questions many of us would never even think to ask—whether they be about our world, our politics, our selves, or our bodies. Every page challenges us to expand our imagination and reconstruct the ways we think, talk, and theorize about fatness, Blackness, gender, health, desire, abolition, and more. Belly of the Beast is a gift and a groundbreaker.” —Sherronda J. Brown, editor-in-chief of Wear Your Voice magazine
About Belly of the Beast
Exploring the intersections of Blackness, gender, fatness, health, and the violence of policing.
To live in a body both fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to sociopolitically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma.
In Belly of the Beast, Da’Shaun Harrison—a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer—offers an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. They foreground the state-sanctioned murders of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people in historical analysis. Policing, disenfranchisement, and invisibilizing of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people are pervasive, insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday life. Fat people can be legally fired in 49 states for being fat; they’re more likely to be houseless. Fat people die at higher rates from misdiagnosis or nontreatment; fat women are more likely to be sexually assaulted. And at the intersections of fatness, Blackness, disability, and gender, these abuses are exacerbated.
Taking on desirability politics, the limitations of gender, the connection between anti-fatness and carcerality, and the incongruity of “health” and “healthiness” for the Black fat, Harrison viscerally and vividly illustrates the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness. They offer strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that tells us “fat is bad,” and destroying the world as we know it, so the Black fat can inhabit a place not built on their subjugation.
About Da’Shaun L. Harrison
Da’Shaun L. Harrison is a nonbinary abolitionist and community organizer based out of Atlanta, GA. They once served as the Communications Director of #ATLisReady and Editor-in-Chief of Queer Black Millennial. Harrison now holds the honor of being the Associate Editor of Wear Your Voice Magazine and Lead Organizer of Solutions Not Punishment Collaborative (SNaPCo). Harrison has traveled throughout the United States and abroad to lecture at conferences and colleges and to lead workshops focused on race, sexuality, gender, class, religion, (dis)abilities, fatness, and the intersection at which they all meet. You can find them on Twitter and Instagram @DaShaunLH, or through their website, dashaunharrison.com.

Alta Live: The Future of Quarantine
2021-08-11 12:30 - 13:30 | online, CA, United States
Many years before “quarantine” entered quotidian language during the COVID-19 pandemic, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley were at work on a book about it, researching centuries of medical isolation. Released in July 2021, Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine covers the black death, Ebola, and coronaviruses as well as agricultural diseases, nuclear contamination, and technology that could alter the practice of isolation. The authors join Alta Journal books editor David L. Ulin for a conversation on their eerily predictive research and what quarantine might look like in our future.
REGISTER
ABOUT THE GUESTS:
Geoff Manaugh is the author of A Burglar’s Guide to the City and the creator of the architecture and technology website BLDGBLOG. He regularly writes for the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, the New Yorker, Wired, and many other publications.
Nicola Twilley is the cohost of the award-winning podcast Gastropod, which looks at food through the lenses of science and history, and is a frequent contributor to the New Yorker.
Manaugh and Twilley live in Los Angeles.
ABOUT THE BOOK:
Quarantine is our most powerful response to uncertainty: it means waiting to see whether something hidden inside us will be revealed. It is also one of our most dangerous, operating through an assumption of guilt. In quarantine, we are considered infectious until proven safe.
Until Proven Safe tracks the history and future of quarantine around the globe, chasing the story of emergency isolation through time and space—from crumbling Mediterranean lazzarettos built to contain the black death to an experimental Ebola unit in London, from the hallways of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to closed-door simulations where pharmaceutical execs and epidemiologists prepare for pandemics yet to come.
But the story of quarantine ranges far beyond the history of medical isolation. The authors tour a nuclear waste isolation facility beneath the New Mexican desert, see plants stricken with a disease that threatens the world’s wheat supply, and meet NASA’s planetary protection officer, tasked with saving Earth from extraterrestrial infections.
With Until Proven Safe, Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley bring us a book as compelling as it is definitive, an up-to-the-minute investigation of the interplay of forces—biological, political, technological—that shape our modern world. It is a thrillingly reported, thought-provoking exploration of the meaning of freedom, governance, and mutual responsibility.•

Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine by Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley
MCDbookshop.org
$25.76

BUY THE BOOK

Katherine E. Standefer, Kate Washington & Naomi Williams
2021-08-10 19:00 - 21:00
Katherine E. Standefer and Kate Washington discuss their new books, Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little, Brown Spark) and Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America (Beacon Press) with Naomi Williams.
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Already Toast
The story of one woman’s struggle to care for her seriously ill husband—and a revealing look at the role unpaid family caregivers play in a society that fails to provide them with structural support.
Already Toast shows how all-consuming caregiving can be, how difficult it is to find support, and how the social and literary narratives that have long locked women into providing emotional labor also keep them in unpaid caregiving roles. When Kate Washington and her husband, Brad, learned that he had cancer, they were a young couple: professionals with ascending careers, parents to two small children. Brad’s diagnosis stripped those identities away: he became a patient and she his caregiver.
Brad’s cancer quickly turned aggressive, necessitating a stem-cell transplant that triggered a massive infection, robbing him of his eyesight and nearly of his life. Kate acted as his full-time aide to keep him alive, coordinating his treatments, making doctors’ appointments, calling insurance companies, filling dozens of prescriptions, cleaning commodes, administering IV drugs. She became so burned out that, when she took an online quiz on caregiver self-care, her result cheerily declared: “You’re already toast!”
Through it all, she felt profoundly alone, but, as she later learned, she was in fact one of millions: an invisible army of family caregivers working every day in America, their unpaid labor keeping our troubled healthcare system afloat. Because our culture both romanticizes and erases the realities of care work, few caregivers have shared their stories publicly.
As the baby-boom generation ages, the number of family caregivers will continue to grow. Readable, relatable, timely, and often raw, Already Toast—with its clear call for paying and supporting family caregivers—is a crucial intervention in that conversation, bringing together personal experience with deep research to give voice to those tasked with the overlooked, vital work of caring for the seriously ill.
About Lightning Flowers
Lightning Flowers weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author’s life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible — “utterly spectacular.” (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises)
What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That’s the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator.
In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots.
From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated.
Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.
About the Authors
Kate Washington is the author of Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout In America and the dining critic for The Sacramento Bee. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, Eater, Catapult, and many other publications. She holds a Ph.D. in Victorian literature from Stanford University and lives in Sacramento with her husband and two daughters.
Katherine E. Standefer’s debut book Lightning Flowers was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Her writing appeared in Best American Essays 2016. In 2018, Standefer was a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good. She earned her MFA in Nonfiction at the University of Arizona and teaches for Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA. She writes from a juniper-studded mesa in New Mexico, where she lives with her chickens.
Naomi J. Williams is the author of Landfalls (FSG 2015), long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including A Public Space, LitHub, One Story, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Her distinctions include a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories Honorable Mention, Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, and residencies at Hedgebrook, Djerassi, and Willapa Bay AiR. Born and partly raised in Japan, Naomi currently lives in Sacramento, California, and teaches with the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University in Ohio. Find her on Twitter at @naomiwilliams or at her website at naomijwilliams.com.

Jeremy Lent & Joanna Manqueros: The Web of Meaning
2021-08-10 19:00 - 20:30 | Virtual
KPFA Radio 94.1 FM presents
Jeremy Lent & Joanna Manqueros
The Web of Meaning: Integrating Science and Traditional Wisdom to Find Our Place in the Universe
Rethinking values based on science and traditional wisdom Indigenous, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions have held for millennia that all life is interconnected. Modern science has now validated their insight. What does this mean for how we should live? This groundbreaking new book weaves together the latest scientific findings and age-old philosophical insights to show how some of our most ingrained beliefs about human nature and the world are mistaken-and offers a powerful alternative to help us heal a planet in peril.
THE WEB OF MEANING isn’t just a challenge to outmoded beliefs. It is an invitation to a new worldview that integrates insights from some of the world’s great wisdom traditions with modern science to offer a new way of thinking about ourselves and the world that is both intellectually sound and spiritually vibrant. In this far-reaching and boundary-defying book, Lent, described by Guardian columnist George Monbiot as “one of the greatest thinkers of our age,” weaves together the latest research in neuroscience and evolutionary biology with Buddhist, Taoist, and Indigenous wisdom, and shows how these seemingly disparate streams of thought are eminently compatible. He argues that, taken together, they are key to facing the existential problems of the 21st century and can lead to a flourishing future for all.
Jeremy Lent wrote The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity’s Search for Meaning.
Joanna Manqueros hosts every Tuesday on KPFA at 11 AM, a celebration of the global music which heals and revives us.
Suggested Donation $5-$20.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/jeremy-lent-joanna-manqueros-the-web-of-meaning-tickets-159477650947

Katherine E. Standefer, Kate Washington & Naomi Williams
2021-08-10 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Katherine E. Standefer and Kate Washington discuss their new books on healthcare with Naomi Williams

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Tuesday, August 10, 2021 – 7:00pm

Crowdcast
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Tickets:

Sliding scale ($0-$100)

Katherine E. Standefer and Kate Washington discuss their new books, Lightning Flowers: My Journey to Uncover the Cost of Saving a Life (Little, Brown Spark) and Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout in America (Beacon Press) with Naomi Williams.
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Already Toast
The story of one woman’s struggle to care for her seriously ill husband—and a revealing look at the role unpaid family caregivers play in a society that fails to provide them with structural support.
Already Toast shows how all-consuming caregiving can be, how difficult it is to find support, and how the social and literary narratives that have long locked women into providing emotional labor also keep them in unpaid caregiving roles. When Kate Washington and her husband, Brad, learned that he had cancer, they were a young couple: professionals with ascending careers, parents to two small children. Brad’s diagnosis stripped those identities away: he became a patient and she his caregiver.
Brad’s cancer quickly turned aggressive, necessitating a stem-cell transplant that triggered a massive infection, robbing him of his eyesight and nearly of his life. Kate acted as his full-time aide to keep him alive, coordinating his treatments, making doctors’ appointments, calling insurance companies, filling dozens of prescriptions, cleaning commodes, administering IV drugs. She became so burned out that, when she took an online quiz on caregiver self-care, her result cheerily declared: “You’re already toast!”
Through it all, she felt profoundly alone, but, as she later learned, she was in fact one of millions: an invisible army of family caregivers working every day in America, their unpaid labor keeping our troubled healthcare system afloat. Because our culture both romanticizes and erases the realities of care work, few caregivers have shared their stories publicly.
As the baby-boom generation ages, the number of family caregivers will continue to grow. Readable, relatable, timely, and often raw, Already Toast—with its clear call for paying and supporting family caregivers—is a crucial intervention in that conversation, bringing together personal experience with deep research to give voice to those tasked with the overlooked, vital work of caring for the seriously ill.
About Lightning Flowers
Lightning Flowers weighs the impact modern medical technology has had on the author’s life against the social and environmental costs inevitably incurred by the mining that makes such innovation possible — “utterly spectacular.” (Rachel Louise Snyder, author of No Visible Bruises)
What if a lifesaving medical device causes loss of life along its supply chain? That’s the question Katherine E. Standefer finds herself asking one night after being suddenly shocked by her implanted cardiac defibrillator.
In this gripping, intimate memoir about health, illness, and the invisible reverberating effects of our medical system, Standefer recounts the astonishing true story of the rare diagnosis that upended her rugged life in the mountains of Wyoming and sent her tumbling into a fraught maze of cardiology units, dramatic surgeries, and slow, painful recoveries. As her life increasingly comes to revolve around the internal defibrillator freshly wired into her heart, she becomes consumed with questions about the supply chain that allows such an ostensibly miraculous device to exist. So she sets out to trace its materials back to their roots.
From the sterile labs of a medical device manufacturer in southern California to the tantalum and tin mines seized by armed groups in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to a nickel and cobalt mine carved out of endemic Madagascar jungle, Lightning Flowers takes us on a global reckoning with the social and environmental costs of a technology that promises to be lifesaving but is, in fact, much more complicated.
Deeply personal and sharply reported, Lightning Flowers takes a hard look at technological mythos, healthcare, and our cultural relationship to medical technology, raising important questions about our obligations to one another, and the cost of saving one life.
About the Authors
Kate Washington is the author of Already Toast: Caregiving and Burnout In America and the dining critic for The Sacramento Bee. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, TIME, Eater, Catapult, and many other publications. She holds a Ph.D. in Victorian literature from Stanford University and lives in Sacramento with her husband and two daughters.
Katherine E. Standefer’s debut book Lightning Flowers was shortlisted for the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Prize from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and the Nieman Foundation at Harvard. Her writing appeared in Best American Essays 2016. In 2018, Standefer was a Logan Nonfiction Fellow at the Carey Institute for Global Good. She earned her MFA in Nonfiction at the University of Arizona and teaches for Ashland University’s Low-Residency MFA. She writes from a juniper-studded mesa in New Mexico, where she lives with her chickens.
Naomi J. Williams is the author of Landfalls (FSG 2015), long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including A Public Space, LitHub, One Story, and Zoetrope: All-Story. Her distinctions include a Pushcart Prize, Best American Short Stories Honorable Mention, Sustainable Arts Foundation grant, and residencies at Hedgebrook, Djerassi, and Willapa Bay AiR. Born and partly raised in Japan, Naomi currently lives in Sacramento, California, and teaches with the low-residency MFA program at Ashland University in Ohio. Find her on Twitter at @naomiwilliams or at her website at naomijwilliams.com.

Tao Lin with Tommy Orange / Leave Society
2021-08-10 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Booksmith is thrilled to host Tao Lin again for his new novel, Leave Society. He’ll be in conversation with Tommy Orange. Join us!
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order Leave Society here and we’ll ship it directly to you (or hold for pickup at our San Francisco shop).
We are happy to fulfill orders anywhere in the world – international postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to contact events@booksmith.com.
About the book
In 2014, a novelist named Li leaves Manhattan to visit his parents in Taipei for ten weeks. He doesn’t know it yet, but his life will begin to deepen and complexify on this trip. As he flies between these two worlds–year by year, over four years–he will flit in and out of optimism, despair, loneliness, sanity, bouts of chronic pain, and drafts of a new book. He will incite and temper arguments, uncover secrets about nature and history, and try to understand how to live a meaningful life as an artist and a son. But how to fit these pieces of his life together? Where to begin? Or should he leave society altogether?
Exploring everyday events and scenes–waiting rooms, dog walks, family meals–while investigatively venturing to the edges of society, where culture dissolves into mystery, Lin shows what it is to write a novel in real time. Illuminating and deeply felt, as it builds toward a stunning, if unexpected, romance, Leave Society is a masterly story about life and art at the end of history.
About the authors
Tao Lin is the author of the memoir Trip, the novels Taipei and Richard Yates and Eeeee Eee Eeee, the novella Shoplifting from American Apparel, the story collection Bed, and the poetry collections Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and you are a little bit happier than i am. He was born in Virginia, has taught in Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, and is the founder and editor of Muumuu House.
Tommy Orange is a graduate of the MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts. An enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, he was born and raised in Oakland, California.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Jessamyn Stanley, Yoke
2021-08-10 18:00 - 20:00
VIRTUAL EVENT: Bestselling author and staff favorite Jessamyn Stanley (Every Body Yoga) will join us online to discuss her new book, Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance.
Registration for this free Crowdcast event will begin soon.
Finding self-acceptance both on and off the mat.
In Sanskrit, yoga means to “yoke.” To yoke mind and body, movement and breath, light and dark, the good and the bad. This larger idea of “yoke” is what Jessamyn Stanley calls the yoga of the everyday–a yoga that is not just about perfecting your downward dog but about applying the hard lessons learned on the mat to the even harder daily project of living.
In a series of deeply honest, funny autobiographical essays, Jessamyn explores everything from imposter syndrome to cannabis to why it’s a full-time job loving yourself, all through the lens of yoke. She calls out an American yoga complex that prefers debating the merits of cotton versus polyblend leggings rather than owning up to its overwhelming Whiteness. She questions why the Western take on yoga so often misses–or misuses–the tradition’s spiritual dimension. And reveals what she calls her own “whole-ass problematic” Growing up Baháí, loving astrology, learning to meditate, finding prana in music.
And in the end, Jessamyn invites every reader to find the authentic spirit of yoke–linking that good and that bad, that light and that dark.
Jessamyn Stanley is the author of Every Body Yoga and Yoke and an internationally acclaimed voice in wellness, highly sought after for her insights on 21st-century yoga and intersectional identity. She is the founder of The Underbelly, an inclusive wellness community and streaming app, cohost of the podcast Dear Jessamyn, and cofounder of We Go High, a North Carolina based cannabis justice initiative. She is a regular contributor to SELF magazine and has been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, and Sports Illustrated.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh
2021-08-10 18:00 - 20:00
reading from
American Estrangement
published by W.W. Norton
One of Literary Hub‘s Most Anticipated Books of 2021
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. Link coming soon!
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(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. Link coming soon!
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Saïd Sayrafiezadeh has been hailed by Philip Gourevitch as “a masterful storyteller working from deep in the American grain.” His new collection of stories—some of which have appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, and the Best American Short Stories—is set in a contemporary America full of the kind of emotionally bruised characters familiar to readers of Denis Johnson and George Saunders. These are people contending with internal struggles—a son’s fractured relationship with his father, the death of a mother, the loss of a job, drug addiction—even as they are battered by larger, often invisible, economic, political, and racial forces of American society.
Searing, intimate, often slyly funny, and always marked by a deep imaginative sympathy, American Estrangement is a testament to our addled times. It will cement Sayrafiezadeh’s reputation as one of the essential twenty-first-century American writers.

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh was born in Brooklyn and raised in Pittsburgh. He is the author of a memoir, When Skateboards Will Be Free, and a story collection, Brief Encounters with the Enemy. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and a Cullman Center Fellowship. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, the Paris Review, Granta, the New York Times Magazine, and McSweeney’s. He teaches at New York University and Hunter College and lives in New York City.

https://www.sayrafiezadeh.com

What has been said about the work of Saïd Sayrafiezadeh

Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is a first-rate short story writer. Every sentence is a delight, and his work has a captivating, immersive quality that leaves the reader shaken and moved. American Estrangement is a superb book with a strange and subtle power sure to haunt readers long after they’ve closed the cover.
Phil Klay, author of Missionaries
Sad, mordant, and utterly beguiling, this pitch-perfect volume of stories broke my heart. American Estrangement’s characters are endlessly unsettled: stalked by unresolved pasts, trapped in the unbridgeable gulfs of the present moment. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh works like a miniaturist, impeccably tracing invisible negotiations between human beings—and these stories accumulate with a disquieting, invisible power.

David Adjmi, author of Lot Six
A haunting book, and filled with longing.

Hilton Als, author of White Girls
The stories in this moving and powerful collection are honest, unaffected, yet full of imagination. Whether set in the recent past or a speculative near future, they explore moments where personal and societal dysfunction converge, in prose that punches through the page. This book’s tough poetry tells us who we are and where we are headed, with equal parts sadness, humor, and hope.

Rajesh Parameswaran, author of I Am an Executioner
These stories combine the intensity of theater, the humor of your smartest friend, and the emotional insight of the imaginary and gentle god you might wish for and fear as a witness. Saïd Sayrafiezadeh is an extraordinary talent, and these stories merit reading and rereading and rereading.

Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch
Sayrafiezadeh, entertaining and political without being heavy-handed, is a force to be reckoned with.

Booklist

Jessamyn Stanley, Yoke
2021-08-10 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
VIRTUAL EVENT: Bestselling author and staff favorite Jessamyn Stanley (Every Body Yoga) will join us online to discuss her new book, Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance, available to order below. Stanley will be in conversation with the amazing Nicole Steward of Love Ethic Yoga.
“Beloved body-positive yogi Jessamyn Stanley speaks on the everyday trials of self-love and spiritual upkeep in Yoke, her follow-up to Every Body Yoga, which gained her a huge Internet following of those who resonate with her wellness-based practice. In this collection of uplifting, honest, wise, and often funny essays, Stanley navigates the spiritual, sexual, and racial intersections of her yoga-filled life.” —Juj, Bookshop bookseller
Register for this free Crowdcast event here!
Finding self-acceptance both on and off the mat.
In Sanskrit, yoga means to “yoke.” To yoke mind and body, movement and breath, light and dark, the good and the bad. This larger idea of “yoke” is what Jessamyn Stanley calls the yoga of the everyday–a yoga that is not just about perfecting your downward dog but about applying the hard lessons learned on the mat to the even harder daily project of living.
In a series of deeply honest, funny autobiographical essays, Jessamyn explores everything from imposter syndrome to cannabis to why it’s a full-time job loving yourself, all through the lens of yoke. She calls out an American yoga complex that prefers debating the merits of cotton versus polyblend leggings rather than owning up to its overwhelming Whiteness. She questions why the Western take on yoga so often misses–or misuses–the tradition’s spiritual dimension. And reveals what she calls her own “whole-ass problematic” Growing up Baháí, loving astrology, learning to meditate, finding prana in music.
And in the end, Jessamyn invites every reader to find the authentic spirit of yoke–linking that good and that bad, that light and that dark.
Jessamyn Stanley is the author of Every Body Yoga and Yoke and an internationally acclaimed voice in wellness, highly sought after for her insights on 21st-century yoga and intersectional identity. She is the founder of The Underbelly, an inclusive wellness community and streaming app, cohost of the podcast Dear Jessamyn, and cofounder of We Go High, a North Carolina based cannabis justice initiative. She is a regular contributor to SELF magazine and has been featured in the New York Times, Vogue, and Sports Illustrated.

Odd Mondays Reading "Poetry & Poetic Prose"
2021-08-09 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
August 9 at 7pm Pacific, the Odd Mondays reading series brings you an hour of poetry and poetic prose on Zoom. Paul Corman-Roberts reads from his new poetry collection BONE MOON PALACE, Penny Mickelbury from her historical novel TWO WINGS TO FLY AWAY, and Tamsin Spencer Smith from her political thriller XISLE. Get the Zoom link from oddmondaysnoevalley@gmail.com. Buy all three books at www.foliosf.com/odd-mondays.

Virtual Event: Claire Luchette and Helen Ellis
2021-08-09 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Monday, August 9th at 6pm PT when Claire Luchette joins us to discuss her debut novel, Agatha of Little Neon, with Helen Ellis on Zoom!
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/…/reg…/WN_a1ZP3ZfGTBO12osWiJnR7Q
Praise for Agatha of Little Neon
“Full of small devotions, pith and vigor, and a bounty of tender feeling for a world that is not quite as full of grace as it could be, this bold debut shines with a light all its own.” —Alexandra Kleeman
“Claire Luchette is so wildly talented that I would follow her anywhere . . . A novel that’s blazingly original, wry, and perfectly attuned to the oddness—and the profundity—of life.” —Cristina Henriquez
About Agatha of Little Neon
Claire Luchette’s debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don’t), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self.
Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life.
But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. They take over the care of a halfway house, where they live alongside their charges, such as the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill. Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she has to reckon all on her own with what she sees and feels. Who will she be if she isn’t with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home. Or has she just been hiding?
Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette’s Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make. It is a novel about sisterhood, friendship, and devotion, about figuring out how we fit in (or don’t), and about the unexpected friends who help us find our truest selves.
About Claire Luchette
Claire Luchette has published work in the Virginia Quarterly Review, the Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, and Granta. A 2020 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, Luchette graduated from the University of Oregon MFA program and has received grants and scholarships from MacDowell, Yaddo, the Millay Colony for the Arts, Lighthouse Works, the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the James Merrill House. Agatha of Little Neon is Luchette’s first novel.
About Helen Ellis
Helen Ellis is the author of Bring Your Baggage and Don’t Pack Light,Southern Lady Code, American Housewife and Eating the Cheshire Cat. Raised in Alabama, she lives with her husband in New York City. You can find her on Twitter @WhatIDoAllDay and Instagram @HelenEllisAuthor.

Reimagine Candlelight Vigil with Author Armistead Maupin
2021-08-09 12:00 - 13:30 | online, CA, United States
Monday, August 9
12:00pm-1:30pm PDT

At this month’s Reimagine Candlelight Vigil, our special guest is “Tales of the City” author Armistead Maupin. Let’s honor our loved ones and celebrate the transformation of loss into creativity.
Reimagine has been hosting candlelight vigils throughout the pandemic in order to break down taboos and hold space for all that we’ve lost. At this special gathering, “Tales of the City” author Armistead Maupin will discuss living through two pandemics (AIDS in the 1980s and COVID-19 today), LGBTQ+ aging, legacy, and the power of writing and creativity. Our additional guest is Wilfred Labiosa, the CEO of Waves Ahead Corp, a non-profit organization in Puerto Rico focusing on the elder and LGBT+ community.
Armistead Maupin
Launched in 1976 as a groundbreaking serial in the San Francisco Chronicle, Armistead Maupin’s iconic Tales of the City series has since blazed its own trail through popular culture – from a sequence of globally best-selling novels, to a Peabody Award-winning television miniseries starring Olympia Dukakis and Laura Linney, to an ambitious new musical that had its world premiere at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater in 2011. The series now encompasses nine hugely popular novels: Tales of the City, More Tales of the City, Further Tales of the City, Babycakes, Significant Others, Sure of You, Michael Tolliver Lives, and Mary Ann in Autumn. The final Tales novel, The Days of Anna Madrigal, was released in January 2014. It premiered at #3 on the Independent Bestseller list and #7 on the New York Times Bestseller list. In 2019 Netflix will be airing a new series based on the novels titled Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City.
Maupin’s 1992 novel, Maybe the Moon, which followed the serio-comic adventures of a dwarf actress working in Hollywood, was named one of the ten best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly. The Night Listener (2000), a psychological suspense novel inspired by an eerie episode in Maupin’s own life, became a 2006 feature film starring Robin Williams and Toni Collette. In 2017 he wrote a memoir titled Logical Family which grew out of his critically acclaimed one-man show of the same name. Neil Gaiman said this about Logical Family; “Maupin is one of America’s finest storytellers, and the story of his life is a story as fascinating, as delightful and as compulsive as any of the tales he has made up for us.”
In 1997 Maupin received the Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Publishing Triangle of New York. In 2002 he was honored with the Trevor Project’s Life Award “for his efforts in saving young lives.” Maupin was the first recipient of Litquake’s Barbary Coast Award for his literary contribution to San Francisco. In 2012 he was awarded Lambda’s Pioneer Award which is bestowed on individuals who have broken new ground in the field of LGBT literature and publishing. In 2014 he received an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. He also received the Visionary Award from the 2014 Outfest Legacy Awards for his collected novels and their “…diverse, interconnected community of San Francisco bohemians — which shaped our collective fantasy of what LGBT life is and could be….” Maupin is the subject of a new documentary titled Untold Tales of Armistead Maupin. He lives in London with his husband Christopher Turner, a photographer.
Wilfred Labiosa
Wilfred Labiosa, PhD, (he/him/él) has been a community leader for more than thirty years. He has been working in the public health field for more than 25 years with marginalized communities such as the Latino and LGBT communities in the United States and Puerto Rico. He has published extensively his research with the dually-diagnosed Latino community, mental health and a substance abuse diagnosis; works as a consultant and/ or supervisor on state, national and international projects that focus on mental health, HIV/AIDS prevention, homeless, youth, Latinos, LGBTQ+, people with dual diagnosis or evidence-based treatment modalities. He has worked with LGBT and HIV organizations locally, nationally and internationally for many years, as a mentor, mental health provider or evaluator. Born and raised in Puerto Rico; He graduated with a doctorate degree from Simmons University, School of Social Work, and Master’s Degree from Northeastern University’s Department of Counseling Psychology, and a graduate certificate from Suffolk University’s management of non-profits. His Bachelor’s degree is from Boston University. He is currently the CEO of Waves Ahead Corp, a non-profit organization in Puerto Rico focusing on the elder and LGBT+ community.
SAGE
SAGE is the country’s largest and oldest organization dedicated to improving the lives of LGBT older people. Founded in 1978 and headquartered in New York City, SAGE is a national organization that offers supportive services and consumer resources to LGBT older people and their caregivers.
TYPE:
RITUAL & CEREMONYTALK, PANEL, & CONVERSATIONWRITING & LITERATURECOMMUNITY GATHERINGCELEBRATION & REMEMBRANCE
TRACK:
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENTCOVID-19

This is a digital event. You should receive information in your ticket or from the host about how to join online.

Free
RSVP

San Jose Poetry Slam Zoom Slam feat Deonte Osayande!
2021-08-08 18:30 - 22:00 | online, CA, United States
Poetry Center San Jose presents The San Jose Poetry Slam Zoom Edition featuring Deonte Osayande
Come join us for Poetry from the comfort of your own home.
Sunday August 8
Room opens at 6:30 pm (California time)
Sign up list will be open from 6:30 to 7pm
Slam starts at 7
We are on Pacific Standard time, that is 3 hours earlier than east coast time and 3 hours ahead of Hawaii.
This is a free event.
Hosted by Scorpiana Xlent
Cash prizes for 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place.
Register through Eventbrite:
https://www.eventbrite.com/…/san-jose-poetry-slam-zoom…
If you have never been to a Poetry Slam before, a poetry slam is a competition, imagine spoken word poetry as an olympic sport. The rules are simple:1) Poets must use their own poems. 2) poet must use only one poem per round. 3) no musical accompianment. 4)no props. 5) there is a time limit of 3 minutes and 10 seconds. going over that will result in a time penalty.
This is a two round slam, poets with the highest scores will move up to round two.
You can sign up to compete via the chatbox in the zoom room.
If you’re not competing, we could use judges.
Our feature will be Deonte Osayande!
Deonte Osayande is a writer from Detroit, Mi. His nonfiction and poetry have been nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology, the Pushcart Prize and he’s had a book nominated for a Digital Book Award. He has represented Detroit at four National Poetry Slam competitions. He’s currently a professor of English at Wayne County Community College. His books include Class (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2017), Circus (Brick Mantle Books, 2018) and Civilian (Urban Farmhouse Press, 2019). He also managed the Rustbelt Midwest Regional Poetry Slam and Festival for 2014 and 2018.

To order a copy of Deonte’s newest chapbook “Recipe For The Poet” https://www.finishinglinepress.com/…/recipe-for-the…/…
