Brenda Hillman and giovanni singleton
2018-05-12 16:00 - 18:00 UTC | Pt. Reyes Books, 11315 CA-1, Pt. Reyes Station, CA, 94956, United States
Brenda Hillman and Giovanni Singleton discuss recent work and the role poets can play as activists.
About the poets:
Brenda Hillman is an activist, writer, editor, and teacher. She has published nine collections of poetry, all from Wesleyan University Press, including Practical Water, for which she won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. Hillman serves on the faculty of Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California, as the Olivia Filippi professor of poetry.
giovanni singleton is a poet, teacher, and founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to the work of artists and writers of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces.

5th Annual Ecopoetry Festival at the John Muir House
2018-05-12 17:00 - 20:00 | John Muir House, 4202 Alhambra Avenue, Martinez, CA, CA, 94553, United States
The Fifth Annual Ecopoetry Festival will feature two poet laureates of Central Valley
cities, along with special guests. Indigo Moor, current laureate of Sacramento, and
Gillian Wegener, former laureate of Modesto, will read along with Alhambra students,
and other poets who have a long personal association with Martinez. The theme will be
the evolution of ecological stewardship and poetry’s contribution to it. To root that
evolution, we will also express the essence of place, specifically Martinez, where John
Muir settled as an adult.
WHERE: The John Muir National Historic Site, 4202 Alhambra Avenue, Martinez, CA
WHEN: Saturday, May 12th, 5-8 PM
COST: Free, but reservations required
Contact: Eliot Schain or James McDonald
Phone: 925-228- 8860, ext. 6431 (the John Muir House)
Email: eschain@martinez.k12.ca.us (Alhambra High School)

Book Release II: The Edge of Fruitvale by Rohan DaCosta
2018-05-12 18:00 - 20:00 | The Rite Spot Cafe, 2099 Folsom Street, San Francisco, 94110, United States
Join us at The Rite Spot, a cozy Mission District dive in San Francisco that has been around for 60 years, as we celebrate the release of Rohan DaCosta‘s The Edge of Fruitvale.
With readings by Tongo Eisen-Martin, Josiahluis Alderete, Daniel Riddle Rodriguez, TBD, and the star of the evening, Rohan DaCosta, and music by Azuah, it’ll be a night in the City to remember. Art work by TBD (for sale) will adorn the walls, and the artist will speak to their work briefly at the outset of the event.
Donations will be collected for the performers and the press (suggested $10-20 with no one turned away for lack of funds), and books will be available for sale and signature at the end of the event.
Hope to see you there!

StageWrite presents: Drama, Trauma, Dance-O-Rama - Short Plays by Short People
2018-05-12 18:30 - 20:30 | Brava Theater Center, 2781 24th Street, San Francisco , CA, 94110, United States
Come see original plays written by fifth graders from SFUSD, inspired by works of visual art at the de Young Museum, and performed as staged readings by professional actors with music by The Write-Ons.
Enter a world where…
Superheroes speak secret languages
Flowers fight nukes
Silly string is not a plaything
Chimps are chumps
Bedtime meltdowns explode
& Old guys take a dirt nap.

Wine reception before and after the show on Saturday to celebrate StageWrite’s 15th anniversary

Writers With Drinks
2018-05-12 19:30 - 21:00 | Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (The Fact of a Body)
Allegra Huston (Say My Name)
Cyrus Farivar (Habeas Data)
Maw Shein Win (Invisible Gifts: New and Selected Poems)
C.B. Lee (Not Your Villain)
Irene Tu (Man Haters comedy show)
Cost: $5 to $20, no-one turned away
All proceeds benefit the Center for Sex and Culture.
At The Make Out Room 3225 22nd St., San Francisco CA, from 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM, doors open at 6:30 PM.

Poetry Event: GEARS TURNING w/ Kim Shuck
2018-05-13 16:00 - 18:00 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Join us for an afternoon of wonderful poetry by SF Bay Area based poets, artists, and musicians with your host Kim Shuck.
To participate in the open mic sessions, please arrive by 4 and plan to listen to all of the featured poets. Seating/space is limited.

Virginia Eubanks talks about her book: Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor
2018-05-14 19:00 - 21:00 | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Virginia Eubanks is an Associate Professor of Political Science at the University at Albany, SUNY. She is also the author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age. Her writing about technology and social justice has appeared in The American Prospect, The Nation, Harper’s and Wired. For two decades, Eubanks has worked in community technology and economic justice movements.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich / The Fact of a Body
2018-05-14 19:30 - 21:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich for her murder-memoir ten years in the making, The Fact of a Body. Please join us!

When she applied to Harvard Law School, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich wrote her admissions essay about her staunch opposition to the death penalty. The child of two lawyers, her position had always been clear in her mind. So when she finds herself at her first summer internship at a New Orleans law firm that is working on the re-trial of death-row convicted murderer and child molester Ricky Langley, she feels ready to begin her life’s work.
But when she watches the tape of Ricky’s confession, she is overcome by one thought: she wants him to die. Shocked by her reaction, Alexandria digs deeper and deeper into the case and realizes that something about this story, so seemingly distant from her own suburban upbringing in New Jersey, is uncannily familiar. As she pores over the details of the trial and the complicated narrative of Ricky’s childhood, she is forced to face her own story, to unearth long-buried family secrets, and to reckon with how her own past colors her view of Ricky’s crime.
Through Alexandria’s meticulously researched and vividly reconstructed telling of Ricky’s story and her deeply personal investigation into her own past, it becomes clear that she isn’t the only one using her own memories to understand the case. Everyone—from the judge to the jury foreman to the defense attorney to Ricky’s own mother—sees what happened through the lens of their own experience.

“The balancing act here performed between autobiography and journalism, documentary and imagination, witnessing and reckoning, the tender and the terrible, is shrewd and graceful…Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich has given us an exquisite and exquisitely difficult work of art that makes a fierce claim on our attention, conscience, and heart.” — Maggie Nelson, NBCC award-winning author of The Argonauts

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich was awarded numerous fellowships to write this book, including a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, and fellowships to the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Her essays and short fiction have appeared in The New York Times, Oxford American, Salon, and the anthology True Crime. She has a JD from Harvard, an MFA from Emerson and a BA from Columbia University. Alexandria currently lives in Boston, Massachusetts, where she teaches memoir writing at Grub Street and graduate public policy students at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

The WordParty Poetry & Jazz Night Featuring Alan Harris
2018-05-15 06:30 - 21:00 | PianoFight, 144 Taylor St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Hosted by Jennifer Barone, Ingrid Keir, live jazz with Daniel Heffez, Geordie Van Der Bosch and friends.
Open Mic sign-up for poetry only starts at 6:45pm – 3min time limit, pick your best poem to read with live jazz accompaniment, a few open slots to read without music mid-set. FREE admission. Full menu and bar available.

Hippie Food: How Back-to-the-Landers, Longhairs, and Revolutionaries Changed the Way We Eat by Jonathan Kauffman
2018-05-15 12:00 - 14:00 | Mechanics Institute, 57 Post St 4th Floor Boardroom, San Francisco, CA, 94104, United States
This enlightening narrative history—an entertaining fusion of Tom Wolfe and Michael Pollan— traces the colorful origins of once unconventional foods and the diverse fringe movements, charismatic gurus, and counterculture elements that brought them to the mainstream and created a distinctly American cuisine.
“An outstanding food and cultural history…In this informative, briskly paced first book…Kauffman is equally thorough in tracing how these early innovators inspired the food co-ops and whole food stores that exist today.” Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Perfectly Queer Plus Book Reading "Murderous Fiction: 3 Novels About Death"
2018-05-15 19:00 - 20:00 | Dog Eared Books Castro, 489 Castro Street, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
Visiting author James Han Mattson joins local authors Andrew Demcak and Tim Floreen at a Perfectly Queer Plus San Francisco book reading, “Murderous Fiction: 3 Novels About Death,” on Tuesday, May 15 from 7pm to 8pm at Dog Eared Books Castro, 489 Castro St., San Francisco. Author signing follows the readings. Free admission, free refreshments. Door prizes at 7pm!
ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
James Han Mattson was born in Seoul, Korea and raised in North Dakota. A Michener-Copernicus Fellowship recipient and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Cape Town, the University of Maryland, the George Washington University, and the University of California – Berkeley. His first novel The Lost Prayers of Ricky Graves was an Amazon Literature and Fiction Pick, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, a Publishers Lunch Bookseller Pick, a Kindle First Pick, a New York Post Required Reading, and was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition with Scott Simon. He currently lives in Maryland.
Andrew Demcak is an American poet and novelist, the author of four poetry collections and five young adult novels. His books have been featured by the American Library Association, Verse Daily, Lambda Literary Foundation, The Best American Poetry, and Poets & Writers. His new book Lazarus was a finalist for the prestigious 2018 Dorset Prize for Poetry.
Tim Floreen writes young adult science fiction. The New York Public Library named his first novel, Willful Machines, one of the best teen books of 2015 and, in a starred review, Kirkus described it as “gothic, gadgety, and gay,” which is an accurate assessment. Booklist called his second novel, Anatomy of a Murderer, “incisive, startling, and intense.” Tim lives in San Francisco with his partner, their two cat-obsessed daughters, and two very patient cats. To find out more about Tim and his secret obsession with Wonder Woman, visit him online at timfloreen.com.

Carmen Giménez Smith
2018-05-15 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Carmen Giménez Smith
Tuesday, May 15, 2018, 7:00 p.m., City Lights Booksellers, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco

celebrating the release of
Cruel Futures
City Lights Spotlight Series No. 17

A Latina feminist State of the Union address at the intersection of pop culture and interiority.
Cruel Futures, the fifth collection from Latinx feminista Carmen Giménez Smith, is a witchy confessional and wildly imagistic volume that examines subjects as divergent as Alzheimers, Medusa, mumblecore, and mental illness in sharp-witted, taut poems dense with song. Chronicling life on an endangered planet, in a country on the precipice of profound change compelled by a media machine that produces our realities, the book is a high-energy analysis of popular culture, as well as an exploration of the many social roles that women occupy as mother, daughter, lover, and the resulting struggle to maintain personhood—all in a late capitalist America. Like Joanne Kyger, Giménez Smith deploys humor while depicting the quotidian and its function as sacrament.
Praise for Cruel Futures:
“Carmen Giménez Smith’s beautiful book, Cruel Futures is one of those rare books, rare pieces of art, that manages to be extremely intimate, vulnerable and close while also doing a kind of searing cultural critique. The poems can be tender or ironic, and sometimes a blending of the two, which is not easy, but occasionally yields lines like these, from the amazing and amazingly titled poem ‘Ravers Having Babies’: ‘So much to do so little skin / left for transformation . . .’ Somehow those lines for me get at the remarkable humanity in this book, the remarkable wisdom, which is ravenous, sorrowful, and dreaming. Like, probably, you are. Like me.”––Ross Gay
“In the body, through the lyric, and twitching with every sense of the word ‘nerve,’ this book sings a mongrel nation into and across its cruel futures. Like Neruda in his Plenos Poderes/Full Powers, Giménez Smith has all the mastery she needs to cast a cold eye on her positioning, and ours. In this way Cruel Futures is an autobiography that won’t stay in its genre or premise, caring less to author a self than to follow turns of magic in words that might soothe our ‘collisions with the living.’ Inheritor and conduit of an Latinx artistic tradition, this primer on how to ‘feed the yearning’ Anzaldúa wrote of leaves us broken and stronger, ‘Slick with lip gloss, with legend.'”––Farid Matuk
“Declamatory anthems to no nation, these songs stride as they deal and wheel with skin and kin: history, catastrophe, the body, love. ‘Upturned and defiant, all types of shade, no outskirt, / vital like a saint,’ the poems in Cruel Futures shimmer with Giménez Smith’s lyric attention: full of grit, sharp and knowing.”––Hoa Nguyen

GET LIT #36 (MUSIC BY MICHAEL ALSO)
2018-05-15 19:00 - 21:00 | Ale Industries, 3096 E 10th Street, Oakland, CA, 94601, United States
IT’S OUR 3-YEAR ANNIVERSARY!
Come celebrate 36 continuous months of Nomadic Press‘ Get Lit show! Started by J. K. Fowler and Annelyse Gelman three years ago, we have been graced with the brand-new words of over 450 writers, the tunes of over 30 different musicians, and some phenomenal hosts, including Annelyse Gelman, Joshua Merchant, Claudette Dráca-Luna Davis, Wonder Dave, Isobel O’Hare, Christine No, Abe Becker, Paul Corman-Roberts, and Zephir O’Meara.
Doors open at 7:00 PM; show starts at 7:30 PM SHARP! An amazing gathering of 12-15 writers will read NEVER-BEFORE-READ material (rough drafts / debuts) within a three-minute time limit. Hosted by Abe Becker with music by Michael Also.
Featured lineup of writers so far includes: Soma Mei Sheng Frazier, Audrey T. Williams, Zach Goldberg, Zack Hanson, Paul Corman-Roberts, Gwen Schulte, Chris “L7” Cuadrado, Marguerite Munoz, Fred Dodsworth, Andrew Heald, Danee Black-Queen D, and others TBA.
Suggested donations of $10-25 will be kindly requested at the door, though no one will be turned away for lack of funds (NOTAFLOF).
Beer made by Ale Industries on site and wonderful food by Guadalajara Restaurant & Tequila Bar just down the block. All ages are welcome, though profanity will be present.
Get beer. Get lit. Then Get Tacos.

Genny Lim, Kitty Tsui and Nellie Wong w/Bill Crossman on piano
2018-05-15 19:00 - 21:00 | Bird & Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery St, San Francisco , CA, 94131, United States
Nellie Wong was born and raised in Oakland. A long-time activist for radical social change and a retired office worker, Nellie was honored by Oakland High School with a building in her name. She is the author of four poetry books: Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park, The Death of Long Steam Lady, Stolen Moments and Breakfast Lunch Dinner. She is co-featured in the documentary film, “Mitsuye and Nellie Asian American Poets,” by Allie Light and Irving Sarah. Genny Lim is San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate. She has been featured at Jazz Festivals and World Poetry Festivals in the U.S. and around the world. Her award-winning play “Paper Angels,” was the first Asian American play to be aired on PBS’s American. Lim’s performance piece, “Don’t Shoot! A Requiem in Black,” dedicated to Black Lives Matter, recently premiered at Safe House. She is author of five poetry collections and co-author of the seminal, Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island. Kitty Tsui’s WORDS OF A WOMAN WHO BREATHES FIRE was the first book by a Chinese American lesbian; her second BREATHLESS – EROTICA won the Firecracker Alternative Book Award. WORDS OF A WOMAN WHO BREATHES FIRE will be out as a Sapphic Classic along with new poems from NICE CHINESE GIRLS DON’T in July, 2019. Bill Crossman is a pianist, composer, human rights activist, philosopher/educator, poet, playwright, and author. As a pianist, Crossman’s specialty is free jazz/free improvisation. His musically improvised “John Brown’s Truth” musical premiered at the 2009 International Society of Improvised Music Festival at UC Santa Cruz, and has since been performed throughout northern California and in New York City.

Rahna Reiko Rizzuto / Shadow Child
2018-05-15 19:30 - 21:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts Rahna Reiko Rizzuto (Hiroshima in the Morning and Why She Left Us) for her new novel, Shadow Child. Please join us!
Shadow Child is a gorgeous novel about three strong women, the dangerous ties of family and identity, and the long shadow our histories can cast. Twin sisters Hana and Kei grew up in a tiny Hawaiian town in the 1950s and ‘60s, so close they shared the same nickname. Mixed-race and fatherless, they were raised in dreamlike isolation by their loving yet unstable mother. But when their cherished threesome with Mama is broken, and then further shattered by a violent betrayal that neither young woman can forgive, it seems their bond may be severed forever—until, six years later, Kei arrives on Hana’s lonely New York City doorstep with a secret that will change everything. Flashing back to 1942, readers meet Lillie, a young Japanese woman orphaned as a baby on the steps of a rural church in California. After she falls in love with Donald, the only other Japanese person Lillie has known, the young couple weds and moves in with his parents in Los Angeles, only to find that in that time of war, Japanese Americans were viewed with distrust and hostility. From the internment camps in World War II America, to the exotic beaches and caves of Hawaii, to the bustling metropolis of New York City, Shadow Child follows these extraordinary women as they search for acceptance, family, and a truer sense of identity and happiness than what they’d known.
Rahna Reiko Rizzuto is the author of the memoir Hiroshima in the Morning, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle. Her debut novel, Why She Left Us, won an American Book Award. The first woman to graduate from Columbia College with a BA in Astrophysics, she was raised in Hawaii and lives in Brooklyn.

Julia Dixon Evans
2018-05-15 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Julia Dixon Evans discusses her new novel, How to Set Yourself on Fire.

PRAISE FOR HOW TO SET YOURSELF ON FIRE

“How to Set Yourself on Fire is a family mystery that slowly reveals itself, illuminating a poignant emptiness in its lovable but complicated main character. Sheila is funny, depressed, searching, and unpredictable. Her story will move you long after its lovely final scene.”—Lindsay Hunter, author of Eat Only When You’re Hungry

“This book had me glued. I came for the intrigue buried in the treasure hunt of letters, but I stayed for the unlikely friendship of thirty-five-year-old Sheila and twelve-year-old Torrey. I would read a whole series of these two having adventures together, but I’ll have to relish this singularly heartbreaking and hilarious story of lost and found love, in all its guises.”—Jac Jemc, author of The Grip of It

“This book features my favorite type of protagonist: the creepy, socially awkward woman who you can’t help but fall in love with. It’s also the best kind of reading experience: a book that is funny and difficult to put down, and builds to something that is disarmingly touching.”—Juliet Escoria, author of Witch Hunt

ABOUT HOW TO SET YOURSELF ON FIRE

Sheila’s life is built of little thievings. Adrift in her mid-thirties, she sleeps in fragments, ditches her temp jobs, eavesdrops on her neighbor’s Skype calls, and keeps a stolen letter in her nightstand, penned by a UPS driver she barely knows. Her mother is stifling and her father is a bad memory. Her only friends are her mysterious, slovenly neighbor Vinnie and his daughter Torrey, a quirky twelve-year-old coping with a recent tragedy.
When her grandmother Rosamond dies, Sheila inherits a box of secret love letters from Harold C. Carr—a man who is not her grandfather. In spite of herself, Sheila gets caught up in the legacy of the affair, piecing together her grandmother’s past and forging bonds with Torrey and Vinnie as intense and fragile as the crumbling pages in Rosamond’s shoebox.
As they get closer to unraveling the truth, Sheila grows almost as obsessed with the letters as the man who wrote them. Somewhere, there’s an answering stack of letters—written in Rosamond’s hand—and Sheila can’t stop until she uncovers the rest of the story. Threaded with wry humor and the ache of love lost or left behind, How to Set Yourself on Fire establishes Julia Dixon Evans as a rising talent in the vein of Shirley Jackson and Lindsay Hunter.

Mark Greenside
2018-05-15 19:30 - 21:30 | Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
Mark Greenside

Reads from (not quite) Mastering the Art of French Living, a sequel of sorts to I’ll Never Be French (no matter what I do), about which the San Francisco Chronicle wrote: “Imagine Larry David . . . spending a summer in a French village–against his will, of course–and you get some sense of what Mark Greenside goes through.”
To reserve a seat, purchase a copy of (not quite) Mastering the Art of French Living by speaking to a bookseller or ordering from our website.

Tuesday, May 15, 2018 – 7:30pm

Every year upon arriving in Plobien, the small Breton town where he spends his summers, Mark Greenside picks back up where he left off with his faux-pas-filled Francophile life. Mellowed and humbled, but not daunted (OK, slightly daunted), he faces imminent concerns: What does he cook for a French person? Who has the right-of-way when entering or exiting a roundabout? Where does he pay for a parking ticket? And most dauntingly of all, when can he touch the tomatoes?
Despite the two decades that have passed since Greenside’s snap decision to buy a house in Brittany and begin a bi-continental life, the quirks of French living still manage to confound him. Continuing the journey begun in his 2009 memoir about beginning life in France, (not quite) Mastering the Art of French Living details Greenside’s daily adventures in his adopted French home, where the simplest tasks are never straightforward but always end in a great story. Through some hits and lots of misses, he learns the rules of engagement, how he gets what he needs–which is not necessarily what he thinks he wants–and how to be grateful and thankful when (especially when) he fails, which is more often than he can believe.
Mark Greenside has been a civil rights activist, Vietnam War protestor, anti-draft counselor, Vista Volunteer, union leader, and college professor. His short stories have appeared in numerous journals and he is the author of a collection, I Saw a Man Hit His Wife. Greenside resides in Alameda and Brittany.

Wild Geese Sorrow: The Chinese Wall Inscriptions at Angel Island
2018-05-16 18:00 - 19:30 | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
Wild Geese Sorrow is based upon new translations of the mostly anonymous poems carved into the men’s barracks walls at the Angel Island Immigration Station. The first new translation of this wall poetry in 40 years takes readers through the deep anger, sorrow, and loneliness felt by Chinese immigrants detained at the Angel Island Immigration Station between 1910-1940. Sequenced to narrate their experiences, these poems tell of arrival, long detentions, medical exams, political outrage, and for some, eventual deportation.Readers will also learn the nuances of literary translation and about a critical period of American immigrant history, information essential to our contemporary policy debates. These poems are a powerful testament to human resiliency and perseverance everywhere.
Jeffrey Thomas Leong is a poet and writer raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. While earning his MFA at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, he began to translate anew the Chinese wall poems found at Angel Island. For over two decades, he worked as a public health administrator and attorney for San Francisco. He earned his MFA in Writing at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. His writing has focused on the Asian American experience including adoption, multiracial families, and student activism during the 1960s. His poetry and prose have appeared in many publications including Bamboo Ridge, Crab Orchard, Hyphen, Spillway, and other publications. In past lives he has been a singer-songwriter, disc jockey, high school teacher, and open mic host. He lives with his wife and daughter in the East Bay.

Keep Begin Detach: Yoko Ono
2018-05-16 18:00 - 20:00 | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Keep Begin Detach: Multimedia Essays
Come to EM Wolfman for an exploration of text and image, music and silence, meditation and performance. Inspired by Yoko Ono, Katarina Countiss and friends will bring engaging elements to classics and original work.
There’s time for you to read or perform something if you want to (read: open mic)
Hope to see you there and tune in to the event streaming on fb!

Source:: https://www.facebook.com/events/1699189570134160/

Fundraiser for STREET SHEET SF
2018-05-16 18:30 - 20:30 | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Street Sheet, a local newspaper produced and distributed by homeless and/or low-income people. Adobe Bookstore is honored to host a fundraiser that will showcase the talents of the musicians, poets, and performers who contribute to the paper while bringing in funds for the project. Open mic session, space is limited.
More details soon!

radical poesies: Steven Seidenberg + A’aron Heard + Tongo Eisen-Martin
2018-05-16 18:30 - 20:30 | Institute Of advanced Uncertainty [I.O.U.], 296 Ivy Street, btwn. Gough and Franklin, San Francisco, 94102
radical poesies
Steven Seidenberg + A’aron Heard + Tongo Eisen-Martin
Curated by Tongo Eisen-Martin
Wednesday! May 16th
Doors 6:30PM
Program7PM
FREE

Michelle Tea
2018-05-16 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Michelle Tea celebrating the release of her new book

Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms
from Feminist Press

The razor-sharp but damaged Valerie Solanas, a doomed lesbian biker gang, recovering alcoholics, and teenagers barely surviving at an ice creamery: these are some of the larger-than-life,yet all-too-human figures, populating America’s fringes. Rife with never-ending fights and failures, theirs are the stories we too often try to forget. But in the process of excavating and documenting these lives, Michelle Tea also reveals herself in unexpected and heartbreaking ways.
Delivered with her signature honesty and dark humor, Tea blurs the line between telling other people’s stories and her own. She turns an investigative eye to the genre that’s nurtured her entire career—memoir—and considers the extent to which art preys on life.
Michelle Tea is the author of numerous books, including Rent Girl, Valencia, and How to Grow Up. She is the creator of the Sister Spit all-girl open mic and 1997-1999 national tour. In 2003, Michelle founded RADAR Productions, a literary non-profit that oversees queer-centric projects.
On the work of Michelle Tea:
“These essays blow my mind with their algebraic rhythms by which Michelle Tea manages pain and bliss. They take turns erupting in a pulpy and marvelous parade: landscape, passion, morality, family, cigarettes—each cited frankly and exquisitely like a smart kid with a dirty crayon explaining to us all how she sees god.” —Eileen Myles, author of Chelsea Girls
“I gobbled up these essays. Michelle Tea is riotously, wickedly funny, with an uncommon knack for naming the more hideous and complex parts of being human. Her particular genius makes the hardest truths and sorrows an irresistible joy to read.”—Melissa Febos, author of Abandon Me

Claudia Rankine at Stanford Live
2018-05-16 19:30 - 21:00 | Bing Concert Hall, 327 Lasuen St., Stanford, CA, 94305, United States
African American poet Claudia Rankine speaks to the human condition in all its many manifestations. A winner of the 2016 MacArthur Fellowship and author of five poetry collections, Rankine candidly and critcally uses poetry and prose to explore what it means to be an American citizen in a “post-racial” society.

Townsend Walker / 3 Women, 4 Towns, 5 Bodies
2018-05-16 19:30 - 21:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts Townsend Walker in conversation withMartha Conway about his new short story collection, 3 Women, 4 Towns, 5 Bodies. Townsend will read a story from the collection and Martha will read a section from her recent novel, The Underground River. Please join us!
The twelve stories are rooted in foreign places, cemeteries, violence and strong women. The worlds the characters construct are unforgiving. Their paths cross in twisted and sometimes deadly ways. In the title novella, three women use seduction, wit, and weapons to master the men they meet. In Super Secrets two women are neighbors and lovers, until one is betrayed and extracts revenge. The ribald reverend in The Second Coming meets his match in 19 year-old Charity. On a darker note, a crazed horse and a storm at sea shatter a fragile love in Slashing at the Nets. Then, in Storm Painter an artist moves in with a writer, but their past destroys his third novel. Place is important. None other than an Italian detective would find a clue in a singular tortellini. The New York sniper would only be trained by the Israeli Defense Force.
—
Townsend Walker’s novella La Ronde was published in 2015. His short stories have appeared in over seventy-five literary journals. “A Little Love, A Little Shove” and “Holding Tight” were nominated for PEN/O.Henry Awards. During a career in finance he wrote A Guide for Using the Foreign Exchange Market, Managing Risk with Derivatives, and Managing Lease Portfolios. Education: Stanford (economics and creative writing), New York University (economics and anthropology), Georgetown (political science).He lives in San Francisco and conducts a creative writing workshop at San Quentin Prison. His website is www.townsendwalker.com.
Martha Conway‘s most recent novel, The Underground River, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, and her first novel was nominated for an Edgar Award. She has won numerous awards for her historical fiction, including an Independent Publishers Award and the North American Book Award. Her short fiction has been published in the Iowa Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Missouri Review, The Quarterly, and other journals, and she received a California Arts Council fellowship for Creative Writing. Martha teaches creative writing for Stanford University’s Continuing Studies Program and UC Berkeley Extension. She lives in San Francisco with her family.

Poets giovanni singleton and Carmen Gimenez Smith
2018-05-16 19:30 - 21:00 | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Born in New York, poet Carmen Giménez Smith earned a BA in English from San Jose State University and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Iowa. She writes lyric essays as well as poetry, and is the author of the poetry chapbook Casanova Variations (2009); the memoir Bring Down the Little Birds: On Mothering, Art, Work, and Everything Else (2010); and the full-length collections Odalisque in Pieces (2009), Milk and Filth (2013), finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Cruel Futures: City Lights Spotlight No. 17 (City Lights Publishers, 2018).
Giménez Smith’s work explores issues affecting the lives of females, including Latina identity, and frequently references myth and memory. With the publication of Odalisque in Pieces, Giménez Smith was featured as a New American Poet on the Poetry Society of America’s website. Her poems have been included in the anthologies Floricanto Si! U.S. Latina Poets(1998) and Contextos: Poemas (1994).
Giménez Smith is the editor-in-chief of Puerto del Sol and publisher of Noemi Press. She was appointed as poetry co-editor (along with Steph Burt) at The Nation in 2017 and teaches at Virginia Tech University.
giovanni singleton’s debut collection Ascension, informed by the music and life of Alice Coltrane, received the California Book Award Gold Medal. Her writing has also been exhibited in the Smithsonian Institute’s American Jazz Museum, San Francisco’s first Visual Poetry and Performance Festival, and on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a journal dedicated to experimental work of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. Canarium Books recently published a collection of her visual work entitled AMERICAN LETTERS: works on paper. She was the 2017-18 Holloway Lecturer in Poetry at University of California-Berkeley.

May Day, May Day--Lyrics & Dirges
2018-05-16 19:30 - 21:00 | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
Jump from spring to summer with a literary reading that will leave you giddy and bubbly with. . .
DeMareon Gipson
Liz Green
Barbara Jane Reyes
Greer Nakadegawa-Lee
Anne F. Walker
hosted by Sharon Coleman
Free with free refreshments and bookstore cats–thank you Pegasus!!!!

DeMareon Gipson is a polymathic wordsmith from Vallejo, California, whose penned the book Looking Forward and composed a short film, The Plan, ” which was selected by East Bay Express as a Pick of The Week. The Plan combines visual art with Gipson’s poetry to broaden the definition of institutional violence imposed upon Black people. His poetry won the acclaim of the Academy of American Poets. In 2017, he was awarded with the Piri Thomas Poetry Prize. A political and cultural activist, Demareon created Heartspace, an open mic for poets, musicians and dancers that also provided local small businesses with vending and networking opportunities. In 2015, Gipson the founded the annual event “With Love,” which is a safe space for Black people to talk about love that is led by poetry. He recently started a small business, the Forward Publishing House.
Liz Green is a writer, performer, and educator based in Oakland, California. She was on two national slam teams. As a playwright and writer/performer, she has had her work produced at multiple local and national theater festivals. She received her BA from Vassar and her MFA from Mills in Creative Writing. She was a 2010 Lambda Literary Foundation Emerging Voices Fellow in Fiction. She attended the Tin House Writers’ Workshop in 2012 and was a Catwalk Artist in Residence in 2013. She is waitlisted at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop in 2018. She has been published in several journals and anthologies, including Sinister Wisdom, Foglifter, Sparkle and Blink, and The Body is Not an Apology. She is in conversation with North Atlantic Books about publishing an anthology she is co-editing with Kelechi Ubozoh. She is Assistant Professor of English at Los Medanos College in Pittsburg, California.
Greer Nakadegawa-Lee is 14 years old and attends Claremont Middle School. She was a featured reader at the Berkeley Poetry Festival, and has performed at Bay Area Generations and the Watershed Environmental Poetry Festival. Besides writing, she likes to draw in her spare time. If you asked her what she explores in her poetry, she might not be able to tell you exactly, but she tries to write every day. She hopes to publish a collection of her own work someday.
Barbara Jane Reyes is the author of Invocation to Daughters (City Lights Publishers). She was born in Manila, Philippines, raised in the SF Bay Area, and is the author of four previous poetry collections, Gravities of Center, Poeta en San Francisco, Diwata, and To Love as Aswang. http://www.barbarajanereyes.com/
Anne F. Walker’s poetry has won Eisner Prizes at UC Berkeley and Canada Council Arts Grants among other honors. Her full-length published poetry books include Six Months’ Rent, Pregnant Poems, Into the Peculiar Dark, and The Exit Show. Her recent poetry chapbook is when the light of any action ceases. She completed doctoral work at UC Berkeley and is an Assistant Professor at Holy Names University in Oakland, California. Recently she has been working on 100-word prose poems concentrate attention on precision of image, narrative, and language. They are part of a collection, Ink and Ink and Flesh and Length, that reflect on landscapes, bodies and rooted memories.

Between Love and Obsession: Behind the Scenes of Israeli Mythology
2018-05-17 18:30 - 20:00 | Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
Israeli novelist Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, author of Waking Lions, talks about her debut novel, One Night, Markovitch.
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is the author of Waking Lions, a bestselling novel in Europe and Israel and released in 2017 in the United States to outstanding reviews. The book was included in The New York Times List of 100 Notable Books in 2017. Gundar-Goshen won the prestigious Sapir Prize for Debut Fiction in 2012 for One Night, Markovitch, winner of Adei Vizo Prize in both France and Italy and translated to 15 languages. Her film and TV screenplays have also won international recognition. She is teaching this semester at the University of California, San Francisco, as part of the national Schusterman Visiting Israeli Artist Program.

William Middleton
2018-05-17 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
William Middleton

discussing the subject of his new book
Double Vision: The Unerring Eye of Art World Avatars Dominique and John de Menil
published by Alfred Knopf
City Lights celebrates the first and definitive biography of the celebrated collectors Dominique and John de Menil, who became one of the greatest cultural forces of the twentieth century through groundbreaking exhibits of art, artistic scholarship, the creation of innovative galleries and museums, and work with civil rights.
Dominique and John de Menil created an oasis of culture in their Philip Johnson-designed house with everyone from Marlene Dietrich and René Magritte to Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. In Houston, they built the Menil Collection, the Rothko Chapel, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, the Cy Twombly Gallery, and underwrote the Contemporary Arts Museum.
Now, with unprecedented access to family archives, William Middleton has written a sweeping biography of this unique couple. From their ancestors in Normandy and Alsace, to their own early years in France, and their travels in South America before settling in Houston. We see them introduced to the artists in Europe and America whose works they would collect, and we see how, by the 1960s, their collection had grown to include 17,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, rare books, and decorative objects.
And here is, as well, a vivid behind-the-scenes look at the art world of the twentieth century and the enormous influence the de Menils wielded through what they collected and built and through the causes they believed in.
William Middleton is a journalist and editor who has worked in New York and Paris. He has been the Fashion Features Director for Harper’s Bazaar and the Paris Bureau Chief for Fairchild Publications, overseeing W Magazine and Women’s Wear Daily. He has written for The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Vogue, House & Garden, Esquire, Texas Monthly, Travel & Leisure, Departures, and the International Herald Tribune.
Praise for Double Vision:
“Middleton spares no details in this history of the French couple who made Houston their home and converted it to a center of the arts… A well-written, highly informative book for devotees of the modern art world.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An authoritative account of the lives and patronage of 20th-century art-world power-couple Dominique and John de Menil…As Middleton dutifully shows, the couple’s commitment to art and philanthropy defined their lives…. This exhaustively researched, satisfying slab of a book offers a thorough look into the lives and influence of an extraordinary couple.”
—Publisher’s Weekly
In “Double Vision,” William Middleston gives visionary art collectors Dominique and John de Menil the joint biography they richly deserve–a sweeping, superbly researched, behind-the-scenes account of a family deeply involved in the story of 20th-century American art.”
—Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, authors of de Kooning: An American Master

Tao Lin / Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change
2018-05-17 19:00 - 20:30 | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith hosts Tao Lin for his new book Trip: Psychedelics, Alienation, and Change. With Tao in conversation is The Believer‘s Ross Simonini — please join us!
Please note: this event begins at 7pm. Seating is limited, and is first come, first served. If you would like to reserve a seat, please purchase a copy of Trip below and put your request in the notes field. Remember, 1 seat = 1 book
Part memoir, part history, part journalistic exposé, Trip is a look at psychedelic drugs, literature, and alienation from one of the twenty-first century’s most innovative novelists — The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test for a new generation.
While reeling from one of the most creative — but at times self-destructive — outpourings of his life, Tao Lin discovered the strange and exciting work of Terence McKenna. McKenna, the leading advocate of psychedelic drugs since Timothy Leary, became for Lin both an obsession and a revitalizing force. In Trip, Lin’s first book-length work of nonfiction, he charts his recovery from pharmaceutical drugs, his surprising and positive change in worldview, and his four-year engagement with some of the hardest questions: Why do we make art? Is the world made of language? What happens when we die? And is the imagination more real than the universe?
In exploring these ideas and detailing his experiences with psilocybin, DMT, salvia, and cannabis, Lin takes readers on a trip through nature, his own past, psychedelic culture, and the unknown.

“Trip is not only a book about drugs–it’s about the condition of humans at this point in history, troublingly divorced from our natural capacity for awe by our chemically depleted bodies and minds. This book has changed how I understand myself on a cellular level. It’s a superbly researched, moving, and formally inventive quest for re-enchantment, and Tao Lin’s most compelling and profound book yet.” — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?
“Similar to the psychedelic drugs Tao Lin writes about here, this book introduces new ways to consider language, perception, and recovery. It’s a joy to watch Lin interrogate his obsessions so earnestly and thoroughly in an attempt to understand more about the world as he knows it. Trip is a book for anyone interested in learning about what the human mind is capable of seeing and believing.” — Chelsea Hodson, author of Tonight I’m Someone Else
“Tao Lin took all the drugs so that we wouldn’t have to, and the result is astonishing, mind-expanding, beautiful, and profound. The whole of humanity seems contained in this one book.”— Kristen Iskandrian, author of Motherest
“Tao Lin’s writing reliably restores my sense of the inexhaustible strangeness of even one minute of human thought and feeling.” — Michael W. Clune, author of White Out

Tao Lin is the author of the novels Taipei, 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 is the founder and editor of the literary press Muumuu House. His work has been translated into twelve languages and he lives in Manhattan. Author photo by Noah Kalina.

Ross Simonini is writer, artist, and musician. He lives in Northern California and New York. His debut novel, The Book of Formation, was released by Melville House in late 2017. He is the interviews editor at The Believer magazine and teaches experimental seminars at Columbia University.

RSVP is appreciated, but not required. If you cannot attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of Trip, and/or any of the authors’ books, order below and put your request in the comments field.

InsideStoryTime: Persist
2018-05-17 19:00 - 21:00 | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Coming up: InsideStorytime SWAY at Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St, Oakland, on Thursday May 17th, 7-9 pm, will feature, Kaitlin Solimine (Empire of Glass), Townsend Walker (3 Women 4 Towns 5 Bodies), Colette Phair (In Your Shadow), and Juba Kalamka.
