Litseen

Michelle Cruz Gonzales
2018-04-10 17:30 - 19:00 UTC | Mills Hall Living Room, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland , CA, 94613, United States
Michelle Cruz Gonzales is the author of The Spitboy Rule: Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band. Before attending Mills College, Gonzales played drums in and wrote lyrics for the groundbreaking 90s femme punk band Spitboy— the subject of the 2017 documentary, Turn it Around: Story of East Bay Punk. Gonzales holds a BA and MFA in English and creative writing from Mills and is an English instructor at Las Positas College.

Steve Zolno: The Future of Democracy
2018-04-10 18:30 - 20:00 UTC | Rockridge Branch, 5366 College Avenue, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
What is democracy and where did it come from? Is it a new development or was it always present in human society? And perhaps the most important question: what can we do to preserve and strengthen democracy among the forces that oppose it?
In this book we explore trends throughout history that have brought democratic – and undemocratic – government to people wherever civilization exists. We discuss where democracy has been most, and least, successful and why. But our most important task is to clarify what each of us can do, as politicians or ordinary citizens, to bring the benefits of democracy more fully into the personal and political lives of those who cherish it.

Odd Salon: Scandal
2018-04-10 18:30 - 22:00 UTC | Public Works, 161 Erie Street, San Francisco , CA, 94103, United States
Tales of tawdry misadventure and outrageous revelations, secret sins, shocking sensations, and closets overbrimming with skeletons

Curated by Tamar Baskind
Artwork by Imogen Speer
Tuesday, April 10
Public Works SF: 161 Erie St, San Francisco
Doors at 6:30 for pre-salon cocktails
Talks begin at 7:30
Reserved seats available through ticket link
Ages 21+
GET TICKETS>

Perfectly Queer: National Poetry Month
2018-04-10 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | Dog Eared Books Castro, 489 Castro Street, San Francisco , CA, 94114, United States
Join us in celebrating National Poetry Month with San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck, Aja Couchois Duncan, Luna Merbruja, and Lourdes Figueroa

Weekday Wanderlust
2018-04-10 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | Weekday Wanderlust, 562 Sutter Street, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Hello Wanderlusters. Mark your calendars for TUESDAY APRIL 10. We have a superb line-up waiting just for you with Julia Scott, John Ellis, and Amanda Jones reading. Woot! Check out their bios on the FB page as we get closer to the event.
A reminder: We are at the Mystic Hotel —417 Stockton Street.
Readings start at 7 p.m. but a group of thirsty travelers and writers can always be found in the Burritt Room (upstairs) at 6 p.m.
Drop in and say hi, and come give a warm Weekday Wanderlust welcome to Julia, John and Amanda.
See you on Tuesday, April 10.

The Spooky, Strange, and Magical History of San Francisco, Volume 3
2018-04-10 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | Tenderloin Museum, 398 Eddy St, San Francisco , CA, United States
The magician and raconteur Christian Cagigal returns to the Tenderloin Museum to share a freshly unearthed set of bizarre tales about San Francisco’s fantastic and forgotten past. A charismatic performer, Cagigal channels an old-fashioned showmanship to transport audiences into the uncanny dimension of his stranger-than-fiction characters and lost lore.
At this third edition of the Spooky, Strange, and Magical History of San Fancisco, attendees will be regaled with stories of Charles Carter, the famous Vaudeville magician whose show stopped traffic on the Golden Gate Bridge, as well as Gertrude Atherton, the feminist novelist whose husband returned from sea dead in a barrel of rum. Add to that a haunting at the nearby Curran Theatre and a few cemeteries full of exhumed corpses, and one is guaranteed a dazzling evening of storytelling.
Cagigal’s previous story hours at the Museum were immensely popular amongst both history buffs and acolytes of the obscure. Don’t miss this opportunity to explore the underbelly of Bay Area history with a most charming, dramatic guide. Join us on Tuesday, April 10th for a reading at 7pm.
Purchase Tickets
RSVP on Facebook

About Christian Cagigal:
Christian Cagigal has been performing his trademark blend of theatre, storytelling, and magic as an Artist in Residence at EXIT Theatre since 2006. He’s a regular speaker at Odd Salon as well as a regular performer at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. He’s been named a Finalist for the Theatre Bay Area Award for Best Solo Performer, two years in a row; recipient of a Mastermind Award by the SF Weekly; and three time winner of the Best Magician of the Bay Award by the San Francisco Bay Guardian.
Christian has consulted for A.C.T.’s MFA program, Shotgun Players, Crowded Fire Theatre Company, Marin Shakespeare Company, EXIT Theatre, Wilderness, and Tilted Frame. He’s the Co-Founder of the new Fog City Magic Fest (EXIT Theatre January 2018), and the new owner of the San Francisco Ghost Hunt Walking Tour, 19 year tradition in the City by the Bay.

Maw Shein Win
2018-04-10 19:00 - 20:30 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Maw Shein Win

celebrating the release of her new collection of poetry
Invisible Gifts: Poems
published by Manic D Press
Themes of vulnerability and power emerge through reflections on family, art, and loss from an award-winning poet.
In her full-length collection of poems, Win depicts a colorful world imbued with unexpected paradoxes: nature is both comforting and savagely unnerving; love is permanent and fleeting; and the accuracy and flaws of memory abound. Her experiences with illness and recovery intertwine with her identity as a Burmese American daughter of immigrant doctors. For instance, in poems like “Hands”: My father’s hands, frail birds, shaking wings. / In Burmese, “win” means bright. / Hands that stitched skin together and brought back life. Win’s unique perspective and artful language offer readers insight into how the heart can bend and mend without breaking.
Maw Shein Win is a Burmese American poet, editor, and educator who lives and works in the Bay Area. Her writing has appeared in many journals and several anthologies, including Cimarron Review, Fanzine, The Fabulist, and others. She was an Artist in Residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. She often collaborates with visual artists, musicians, and other writers. Along with composer and musician, Amanda Chaudhary, she is part of musical duo Pitta of the Mind that combines poetry with abstract electronic music. A collaborative book with paintings by Los Angeles artist Mark Dutcher, Ruins of a glittering palace, was published by SPA/Commonwealth Projects. Her most recent poetry chapbook is Score and Bone on Nomadic Press, and her poetry was featured in artist Megan Wilson’s mural, Flower Interruption, a public artwork in the exhibition Flower Power at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum. She is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito. http://www.el-cerrito.org/poets

Literary Cafe Presents: SEAN PENN
2018-04-10 19:30 - 20:30 UTC | The Osher Marin JCC, 200 North San Pedro Road, San Rafael, 94903
Actor, filmmaker, and political activist Sean Penn, discusses his most recent endeavor and first novel. Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff is a scorching, darkly funny novel about Bob Honey-a modern American man, entrepreneur, and part-time assassin.

Rachel Levin
2018-04-10 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Rachel Levin celebrates the release of her new book Look Big: And Other Tips for Surviving Animal Encounters of All Kinds.

About Look Big

A humorous and helpful illustrated field guide to avoiding interactions–both dangerous and annoying–with 50 wild animals, including survival techniques, wildlife etiquette, and other essential advice.
As humans encroach on wild places, encounters with animals–from bears, bison, mountain lions, and mice to turkeys, ticks, rats, and raccoons–have become increasingly commonplace. But, wait, what are the rules for facing a moose up close? Do you run from a coyote or stand your ground? How deadly, really, are black widow spiders, rattlesnakes, and sharks? Packed with expert tips, fascinating animal facts, and harrowing true tales, Look Big is a must-have survival guide for outdoor, urban, and suburban adventurers alike. If you have ever feared the approach of a grizzly, the spray of a skunk, or an army of cockroaches in the kitchen, this book is for you.

Emerging Writers Festival
2018-04-10 19:45 - 21:00 UTC | Fromm Hall – FR 120 – Xavier Auditorium, USF, 2130 Fulton St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
TUESDAY, APRIL 10 7:45 – 9:30 p.m.
Fromm Hall – FR 125 – Maraschi Room

Elizabeth Greenwood is the author of the nonfiction book Playing Dead: A Journey through the World of Death Fraud (Simon & Schuster). Her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, O, the Oprah Magazine, Glamour, Longreads, The Believer, Poets & Writers, Al Jazeera America, and Dissent, among others. She has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, Hedgebrook, the Ucross Foundation, the Norman Mailer Center and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. She holds a BA in history from the University of San Francisco and an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University, where she teaches.
Phillip B. Williams is a Chicago, IL native and author of Thief in the Interior, winner of the 2017 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and a 2017 Lambda Literary award. He received a 2017 Whiting Award and 2013 Ruth Lilly Fellowship. Phillip is the co-editor in chief of the online journal Vinyl. He is currently visiting professor in English at Bennington College.

A Talk with The Black Aesthetic
2018-04-11 12:00 - 13:30 UTC | Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center St., Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
A Talk with The Black Aesthetic
Wednesday / 4.11.18 / 12:00
Free, no ticket needed.
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
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The Black Aesthetic is an Oakland-based artist collective of artists, writers, filmmakers and designers who curate film screenings and publish a journal of essays about black film and culture.
Jamal Batts
Ryanaustin Dennis
Malika “Ra” Imhotep
Zoé Samudzi
Leila Weefur
The Black Aesthetic is a creative organization, whose mission is to curate and assemble both a collective and distinct understanding of Black visual culture. We post the question: What is the Black aesthetic sensibility and what does it look like to you?
By working with artists, writers, filmmakers and designers, we cultivate work that asks our audience to consider their relationship to Black art. Based in Oakland, we are invested in developing a community who will participate and engage with our mission. When you support The Black Aesthetic, you are actively supporting a network of Black Artists. Through film screenings, publications and product development, we want to add to a growing collection of artistic visions that are grounded in place, body, lived-experience and are responsive to its respective environment.
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Arts + Design Wednesdays @ BAMPFA is a public lecture series embedded inside our Creative Gateway undergraduate course.
Berkeley Arts + Design features, fortifies, and mobilizes existing excellence in the arts and design at Berkeley, while fostering dynamic collaboration, innovation, and public access across all arts and design fields, on campus and in public life.
Learn more at: http://artsdesign.berkeley.edu/wednesdays
—
Arts + Design Wednesdays @ BAMPFA is organized and sponsored by UC Berkeley’s Arts + Design Initiative in partnership with Big Ideas courses. The series is co curated by the Arts Research Center; Art, Technology, and Culture Colloquium; Berkeley Center for New Media; Graduate School of Journalism; Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation; Regents’ Lectureship Program; Department of Art Practice; Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities; and Department of English, all at UC Berkeley.
The spring 2018 series of Arts + Design Wednesdays is made possible thanks to a generous donation from Jan and Buzz Wiesenfeld. In-kind support is provided by BAMPFA.

This is Now with Angie Coiro Presents: Leslie Jamison on Alcoholism
2018-04-11 19:30 - 20:30 UTC | Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park , CA, 94025, United States
Leslie Jamison is the author of the essay collection The Empathy Exams, a New York Times bestseller. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, among others, and she is a columnist for the New York Times Book Review.
With comparisons to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, Jamison has turned the traditional addiction narrative on its head in this deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and journalistic reportage. Join us for an evening on addiction and learn more about the writers whose work was shaped by alcohlism and substance dependence, including Raymond Carver, David Foster Wallace, and others.
“Leslie Jamison has written an honest and important book. It will be important to recovering alcoholics who wonder if there really is life after booze, and I think it will be important to writers and critics, because she weaves her story of recovery into those of other artists”… “The most important thematic thread may be its insistence that the talented artist who needs booze or drugs to support his work and withstand his own vision does not, in fact, exist. All in all, vivid writing and required reading.” ―Stephen King

Caspar Henderson
2018-04-11 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Caspar Henderson, author of The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, discusses his new book A New Map of Wonders: A Journey in Search of Modern Marvels.

Praise for A New Map of Wonders

“This book does exactly what it says on the cover, and shows us where wonder is to be found. His account of familiar phenomena shows how unfamiliar and extraordinary they really are.” Philip Pullman, author of the His Dark Materials trilogy

“A wondrous brew of science, history, and sheer exhilaration. Read it and marvel.” Sarah Bakewell, author of At the Existentialist Café

“For Henderson, the universe is constantly birthing wonders. A book that tries to give articulate voice to the gasps of astonishment at each birth is almost bound to fail. Yet this is a glorious success: breathless but musical; humble but confident; smart, kind, and glittering. It will turn the most jaded reductionist into a delighted child.” Charles Foster, author of Being a Beast

About A New Map of Wonders

We live in a world that is known, every corner thoroughly explored. But has this knowledge cost us the ability to wonder? Wonder, Caspar Henderson argues, is at its most supremely valuable in just such a world because it reaffirms our humanity and gives us hope for the future. That’s the power of wonder, and that’s what we should aim to cultivate in our lives. But what are the wonders of the modern world?
Henderson’s brilliant exploration borrows from the form of one of the oldest and most widely known sources of wonder: maps. Large, detailed mappae mundi invited people in medieval Europe to vividly imagine places and possibilities they had never seen before: manticores with the head of a man, the body of a lion, and the stinging tail of a scorpion; tribes of one-eyed men who fought griffins for diamonds; and fearsome Scythian warriors who drank the blood of their enemies from their skulls. As outlandish as these maps and the stories that went with them sound to us today, Henderson argues that our views of the world today are sometimes no less incomplete or misleading. Scientists are only beginning to map the human brain, for example, revealing it as vastly more complex than any computer we can conceive. Our current understanding of physical reality is woefully incomplete. A New Map of Wonders explores these and other realms of the wonderful, in different times and cultures and in the present day, taking readers from Aboriginal Australian landscapes to sacred sites in Great Britain, all the while keeping sight questions such as the cognitive basis of wonder and the relationship between wonder and science.
Beautifully illustrated and written with wit and moral complexity, this sequel to The Book of Barely Imagined Beings is a fascinating account of the power of wonder and an unforgettable meditation on its importance to our future.

Meg Wolitzer / The Female Persuasion
2018-04-11 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
To be admired by someone we admire—we all yearn for this: the private, electrifying pleasure of being singled out by someone of esteem. But sometimes it can also mean entry to a new kind of life, a bigger world.
Greer Kadetsky is a shy college freshman when she meets the woman she hopes will change her life. Faith Frank, dazzlingly persuasive and elegant at sixty-three, has been a central pillar of the women’s movement for decades, a figure who inspires others to influence the world. Upon hearing Faith speak for the first time, Greer—madly in love with her boyfriend, Cory, but still full of longing for an ambition that she can’t quite place—feels her inner world light up. And then, astonishingly, Faith invites Greer to make something out of that sense of purpose, leading Greer down the most exciting path of her life as it winds toward and away from her meant-to-be love story with Cory and the future she’d always imagined.
Charming and wise, knowing and witty, Meg Wolitzer delivers a novel about power and influence, ego and loyalty, womanhood and ambition. At its heart, The Female Persuasion is about the flame we all believe is flickering inside of us, waiting to be seen and fanned by the right person at the right time. It’s a story about the people who guide and the people who follow (and how those roles evolve over time), and the desire within all of us to be pulled into the light.
—
Meg Wolitzer is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Interestings, The Uncoupling,The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, The Wife, and Sleepwalking. She is also the author of the young adult novel Belzhar. Wolitzer lives in New York City.

Emerging Writers Festival
2018-04-11 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | Fromm Hall – FR 120 – Xavier Auditorium, USF, 2130 Fulton St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
WEDNESDAY, APRIL 11 7:30 – 9 p.m.
Fromm Hall – FR 125 – Maraschi Room

Patricia Horvath is the author of the memoir All the Difference (Etruscan Press). Her stories and essays have been published widely in literary journals including Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, New Ohio Review, The Los Angeles Review, and Confrontation. She is the recipient of New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in both fiction and literary nonfiction and the Goldenberg Prize for Fiction at Bellevue Literary Review, and has held residency fellowships at Hedgebrook, The Millay Colony for the Arts, and The Blue Mountain Center. She teaches creative writing at Framingham State University in Massachusetts.
Christopher Kempf is the author of Late in Empire of Men, which won the 2015 Levis Prize from Four Way Books. Recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, his work has appeared in Gettysburg Review, Kenyon Review, The New Republic, PEN America, and Ploughshares, among other places. He is currently a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Chicago.
Jung Yun is the author of Shelter, published by Picador in 2016. Her work has appeared in Tin House (the “Emerging Voices” issue); The Best of Tin House: Stories; The Massachusetts Review; The Atlantic Monthly, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. She is the recipient of two Artist Fellowships in fiction from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and an honorable mention for the Pushcart Prize. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor of English at the George Washington University.

Voz Sin Tinta: Our monthly bilingual poetry series and open mic.
2018-04-12 18:30 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Sponsored by Alejandro Murguia, curated by Marguerite Munoz and Rene Vaz.
This month’s readers TBD.

Lewandowski Poet: Peter Balakian
2018-04-12 19:00 - 20:30 UTC | Hammer Theater Center, 101 Paseo De San Antonio Walk, San Jose, CA, 95113, United States
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Ozone Journal, Peter Balakian shares a reading and conversation with San José State University President Mary Papazian. This event is in conjunction with Legacy of Poetry Day! VIP Reception to follow.

Marcel Schwob: Chris Clarke and Kit Schluter
2018-04-12 19:00 - 20:30 UTC | THE LAUNDRY, 3359 26th Street, San Francisco, 94110
Join translators Chris Clarke and Kit Schluter in an overdue celebration of the beguiling French writer Marcel Schwob, a cult phenomenon who secretly influenced a generation of writers from Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges to Roberto Bolaño.

Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives, translated by Chris Clarke, remains, over 120 years since its original publication in French, one of the secret keys to modern literature: under-recognized, yet a decisive influence on such writers as Guillaume Apollinaire, Jorge Luis Borges, Alfred Jarry, and Antonin Artaud, and more contemporary authors such as Roberto Bolaño and Jean Echenoz. Drawing from historical influences such as Plutarch and Diogenes Laërtius, and authors more contemporary to him such as Thomas de Quincy and Walter Pater, Schwob established the genre of fictional biography with this collection: a form of narrative that championed the specificity of the individual over the generality of history, and the memorable detail of a vice over the forgettable banality of a virtue.
These twenty-two portraits present figures drawn from the margins of history, from Empedocles the “Supposed God” and Clodia the “Licentious Matron” to the pirate Captain Kidd and the Scottish murderers Messrs. Burke and Hare. In his quest for unique existences, Schwob also formulated an early conception of the anti-hero, and discarded historical figures in favor of their shadows, be they divine, mediocre, or criminal. These “imaginary lives” thus acquaint us with the “Hateful Poet” Cecco Angiolieri instead of his lifelong rival, Dante Alighieri; the would-be romantic pirate Major Stede Bonnet instead of the infamous Blackbeard who would lead him to the gallows; the false confessor Nicolas Loyseleur rather than Joan of Arc, whom he cruelly deceived; or the actor Gabriel Spenser in place of the better-remembered Ben Jonson who ran a sword through his lung.
Marcel Schwob’s 1896 novella The Children’s Crusade, translated by Kit Schluter, retells the medieval legend of the exodus of some 30,000 children from all countries to the Holy Land, who traveled to the shores of the sea, which instead of parting to allow them to march on to Jerusalem, instead delivered them to merchants who sold them into slavery in Tunisia or to a watery death. It is a cruel and sorrowful story mingling history and legend, which Schwob recounts through the voices of eight different protagonists: a goliard, a leper, Pope Innocent III, a cleric, a qalandar, and Pope Gregory IX, as well as two of the marching children, whose naïve faith eventually turns into growing fear and anguish.
Though it is a tale drawn from the early thirteenth century, Schwob presents it through a modern framework of shifting subjectivity and fragmented coherency, and its subject matter and its succession of different narrative perspectives has been seen as an influence on and precursor to such diverse works as Alfred Jarry’s The Other Alcestis, Ryūnosuke Akutagawa’s “In a Grove,” William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, and Jerzy Andrzejewski’s The Gates of Paradise. It is a tale told by many yet understood by few, a mosaic surrounding a void, describing a world in which innocence must perish.

Peter Balakian
2018-04-12 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Hammer Theater Center, 101 Paseo De San Antonio Walk, San Jose, CA, 95113, United States
Peter Balakian is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Ozone Journal, which recounts the speaker’s memory of excavating the bones of Armenian genocide victims in the Syrian desert with a crew of television journalists. He is the author of five other poetry collections and the memoir Black Dog of Fate, winner of the PEN/Albrand Prize for memoir, and The Burning Tigris: The Armenian Genocide and America’s Response. Balakian has published essays on poetry, culture, art, and social thought, and he’s appeared widely on national television and radio: ABC World News Tonight, The Charlie Rose Show, Terry Gross’s “Fresh Air”; NPR’s “Weekend Edition,” and CNN. He teaches at Colgate University.

Get Lit Spring Reading!
2018-04-12 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Aqus Petaluma, 101 H St, Petaluma, CA, 94952, United States
Come join us April 12 as we celebrate spring reads with a fun night of literary storytelling with featured readers Christine No, Patty Somlo and Paul Corman-Roberts (and YOU on the open mic)!
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+ Christine No is a writer/organizer with work shown work at the Sundance Film Festival, in publications including: The Rumpus, sPARKLE+bLINK, Columbia Journal, Atlas And Alice, Apogee, The Brooklyn Quarterly & various anthologies. She is a VONA/Voices Fellow, a Pushcart Prize & Best of The Net 2017 Nominee. She believes in radical kindness, that magic exists, and that “the only way out is through”. (She’s also a total dork and looks way better on paper.) She lives in Oakland with her dog, Brandeh.www.christineno.com
+ Patty Somlo’s most recent book, Hairway to Heaven Stories, a linked short story collection set in a gentrifying African American neighborhood, was just published by Cherry Castle Publishing. Her previous books have beenFinalists in the International Book Awards, the Best Book Awards, the National Indie Excellence Awards, and the Reader Views Literary Awards. She won Honorable Mention for Fiction in the Women’s National Book Associat ion Contest, was a Finalist in the Adelaide Voices Literary Award for Short Story, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and the storySouth Million Writers Award, and had an essay selected as Notable for Best American Essays 2014.
+ Paul Corman-Roberts is the author of the Nomadic Press chapbook “We Shoot Typewriters” which was nominated for a Northern California Book award. He is also a core-founder of the Beast Crawl Literary Festival in Oakland CA where he lives. He serves as fiction editor for the online zine Full of Crow as well as timekeeper for several East Bay rock bands. His work has appeared in The Rumpus, Sparkle and Blink, Red Fez, Cherry Bleeds, Buddy and many others.
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Get Lit is a FREE quarterly literary event hosted by Dani Burlison and Kara Vernor at Aqus Café in Petaluma. All ages are welcome but DISCLAIMER: our readers may share adult content and we don’t provide ear muffs.

Why There Are Words Presents: "Search"
2018-04-12 19:00 - 22:00 UTC | Studio 333, 333 Caledonia Street, Sausalito , CA, 94965, United States
Join Why There Are Words on April 12th, 2018, at Studio 333 in Sausalito as six acclaimed authors read on the theme of “Search.”
Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:15. $10 entry fee at the door. Cash bar. For more details, including the authors’ full bios, see the website, www.whytherearewords.com. For more details about WTAW Press, of which the reading series is a program, visit www.wtawpress.org.

Jan Beatty’s fifth book, Jackknife: New and Collected Poems, was published in 2017 by the University of Pittsburgh Press. Her previous book, The Switching/Yard (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013), was named by Library Journal as one of …30 New Books That Will Help You Rediscover Poetry, and The Huffington Post named her as one of ten women writers for “required reading.” www.janbeatty.com

Jasmin Darznik is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Good Daughter: A Memoir of My Mother’s Hidden Life. Her brand new debut novel Song of a Captive Bird (Ballantine Books, 2018) is a fictional account of Iran’s trailblazing woman poet, Forugh Farrokhzad. jasmine-darznik.com

Allison Landa is a Berkeley-based writer of fiction and memoir whose work has been featured in The Guardian US, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, The Rumpus, and Salon Magazine, among other venues. www.allisonlanda.com.

Scott Nadelson’s latest book is the story collection, The Fourth Corner of the World (Engine Books, February 2018). He is the author of three story collections, a memoir, and the novel Between You and Me (Engine Books, 2015). www.scottnadelson.com

David Rutschman is the author of the story collection Into Terrible Light (Forklift Books, 2017.) His work has appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review; Forklift, Ohio; Kenyon Review Online; The Massachusetts Review; The Sun; Waxwing; Witness, and many other journals. www.daverutschman.com

Hilary Zaid’s short fiction has appeared in print and online venues including Lilith Magazine, The Southwest Review, The Utne Reader, CALYX, The Santa Monica Review, and The Tahoma Literary Review and has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her brand new book Paper is White was just published by Bywater Books (February 2018). www.paperiswhite.com

Why There Are Words (WTAW) is an award-winning national reading series founded in Sausalito in 2010 by Peg Alford Pursell, now expanded to six additional major cities in the U.S. with more planned in the future. The series draws a full house of Bay Area residents every second Thursday to Studio 333, located at 333 Caledonia Street, Sausalito, CA 94965. The series is part of the 501(c)3 non-profit WTAW Press. For more information see the website www.whytherearewords.com or email whytherearewords@gmail.com. Phone: Studio 333 at (415) 331-8272.

Leslie Jamison
2018-04-12 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Leslie Jamison discusses her new book, The Recovering: Intoxication And Its Aftermath.

Praise for The Recovering

“Leslie Jamison has written an honest and important book. It will be important to recovering alcoholics who wonder if there really is life after booze, and I think it will be important to writers and critics, because she weaves her story of recovery into those of other artists (mostly writers, but also Billie Holiday and Amy Winehouse) who also made the jump from soused to sober. And some who didn’t. The most important thematic thread may be its insistence that the talented artist who needs booze or drugs to support his work and withstand his own vision does not, in fact, exist. It’s important to debunk what Todd Rundgren called ‘the ever popular tortured artist effect.’ All in all, vivid writing and required reading.”―Stephen King

“Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering is a definitive investigation of both the romance of intoxication and the possibilities for recovery. Whether interviewing veterans of a communal rehab house, digging through the archives of alcoholic writers, or examining her own motives and thoughts, Jamison shows ways of living alongside contradictions without diminishing their confusion and pain. Graceful, forensic, and intimate, The Recovering sets a new bar in addiction studies. It is a courageous and brilliant example of what nonfiction writing can do.”―Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

“You don’t need to be an addict to be enthralled by The Recovering. This book is for anyone interested in a dazzlingly brilliant, uncommonly compassionate, and often hilarious study of human nature. Leslie Jamison’s work will definitely make you feel smarter–I’d like to borrow her brain to pick a fight with a couple of people–but The Recovering also reads like a gripping mystery as written by a subversive and deeply passionate philosopher. Her writing is unexpected, profound, and perverse–in short, a thrill to read. Best of all, for a writer so gifted at locating the excruciating commonalities of isolation, Jamison manages this greatest feat of magic: when I read her words, I come away feeling less alone.”―Mary-Louise Parker, author of New York Times bestseller Dear Mr. You

About The Recovering

With its deeply personal and seamless blend of memoir, cultural history, literary criticism, and journalistic reportage, The Recovering turns our understanding of the traditional addiction narrative on its head, demonstrating that the story of recovery can be every bit as electrifying as the train wreck itself. Leslie Jamison deftly excavates the stories we tell about addiction–both her own and others’–and examines what we want these stories to do, and what happens when they fail us.
All the while, she offers a fascinating look at the larger history of the recovery movement, and at the literary and artistic geniuses whose lives and works were shaped by alcoholism and substance dependence, including John Berryman, Jean Rhys, Raymond Carver, Billie Holiday, David Foster Wallace, and Denis Johnson, as well as brilliant figures lost to obscurity but newly illuminated here.
For the power of her striking language and the sharpness of her piercing observations, Jamison has been compared to such iconic writers as Joan Didion and Susan Sontag. Yet her utterly singular voice also offers something new. With enormous empathy and wisdom, Jamison has given us nothing less than the story of addiction and recovery in America writ large, a definitive and revelatory account that will resonate for years to come.

Kathleen Belew
2018-04-12 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Kathleen Belew

discussing the subject of her new book
Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America
from Harvard University Press

The white power movement in America wants a revolution. It has declared all-out war against the federal government and its agents, and has carried out—with military precision—an escalating campaign of terror against the American public. Its soldiers are not lone wolves but are highly organized cadres motivated by a coherent and deeply troubling worldview of white supremacy, anticommunism, and apocalypse. In Bring the War Home, Kathleen Belew gives us the first full history of the movement that consolidated in the 1970s and 1980s around a potent sense of betrayal in the Vietnam War and made tragic headlines in the 1995 bombing of Oklahoma City.
Returning to an America ripped apart by a war which, in their view, they were not allowed to win, a small but driven group of veterans, active-duty personnel, and civilian supporters concluded that waging war on their own country was justified. They unified people from a variety of militant groups, including Klansmen, neo-Nazis, skinheads, radical tax protestors, and white separatists. The white power movement operated with discipline and clarity, undertaking assassinations, mercenary soldiering, armed robbery, counterfeiting, and weapons trafficking. Its command structure gave women a prominent place in brokering intergroup alliances and bearing future recruits.
Belew’s disturbing history reveals how war cannot be contained in time and space. In its wake, grievances intensify and violence becomes a logical course of action for some. Bring the War Home argues for awareness of the heightened potential for paramilitarism in a present defined by ongoing war.
Kathleen Belew is Assistant Professor in the Department of History and the College at the University of Chicago.
Kathleen Belew on This American Life and The New York Times

Jami Attenberg & Friends / All Grown Up
2018-04-12 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
Join us as we celebrate the paperback launch of Jami Attenberg’sAll Grown Up, with local superheroes Charlie Jane Anders, Rachel Khong, and Esmé Weijun Wang all talking on the themes of adulthood and what it means to be a grown up.
“I’m alone. I’m a drinker. I’m a former artist. I’m a shrieker in bed. I’m the captain of the sinking ship that is my flesh.”
Andrea Bern is a whip-smart woman in NYC “who is doing what she wants with her life, right or wrong, and not apologizing for it… at times she is a wise sage, and at other times, a selfish mess. It makes her so achingly human” (Liberty Hardy, Book Riot). Andrea’s single, she’s childfree, she’s successful and yet not entirely devoted to her career. Everyone around her seems to have an entirely different idea of what it means to be an adult: marriage, babies, ambition. But what if those things aren’t what you want? What does it actually mean to be a woman and a grown up, in this day and age?
Andrea’s brother seems unscathed by their shared tumultuous childhood, but when he and her sister-in-law have a baby born with a heartbreaking ailment, Andrea and her family have to confront everything they haven’t wanted to face, and reexamine what really matters. In a world that still expects women to gravitate toward partnership and motherhood, Jami Attenberg gives us a pithy and sharp novel of living life on your own terms, and a character who is witty, winning, sexy and complicated.
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“I read it twice, laughing, cringing, and even tearing up.” — Judy Blume, New York Times
“Jami Attenberg’s sharply drawn protagonist, Andrea, has such a riveting, propulsive voice that All Grown Up is hard to put down, but I urge you to resist reading it in one sitting. Both the prose and the author’s knowing excavation of one woman’s desires, compromises, strengths, and fears deserve closer attention. Like Andrea herself, this novel is beautiful and brutal, intelligent and funny, frank and sexy.” — Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times best-selling author of The Nest
“Hilarious, courageous, and mesmerizing from page one, All Grown Up is a little gem that packs a devastating wallop. It’s that rare book I’m dying to give all my friends so we can discuss it deep into the night. I’m in awe of Jami Attenberg.” — Maria Semple, author of Where’d You Go, Bernadette
“Jami Attenberg’s Andrea is the most addicting female protagonist voice I have read in years, with her cutting observations on human relationships. This witty journey through a mess of men, female friendships, family, and boozy urban existence positions the single girl not as object to be fixed but as contemporary sage and seer: the ultimate witness of truth in love today.” — Melissa Broder, author of So Sad Today
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Jami Attenberg is the New York Times best-selling author of five novels, including The Middlesteins and Saint Mazie. She has contributed essays about sex, urban life, and food to theNew York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, and Lenny Letter, among other publications.
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, out now. She’s the organizer of the Writers With Drinks reading series, and she was a founding editor of io9, a website about science fiction, science and futurism. Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction,The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Tor.com, Lightspeed, Tin House, ZYZZYVA, and several anthologies. Her novelette Six Months, Three Days won a Hugo award.
Rachel Khong grew up in Southern California, and holds degrees from Yale University and the University of Florida. From 2011 to 2016, she was the managing editor then executive editor of Lucky Peach magazine. Her fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Joyland,American Short Fiction, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Believer, and California Sunday. She lives in San Francisco. Goodbye, Vitamin is her first novel.
Esmé Weijun Wang is a novelist and essayist. Her debut novel, The Border of Paradise, was called a Best Book of 2016 by NPR and one of the 25 Best Novels of 2016 by Electric Literature. She was named by Granta as one of the “Best of Young American Novelists” in 2017, and is the recipient of the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize for her forthcoming essay collection, The Collected Schizophrenias. Born in the Midwest to Taiwanese parents, she lives in San Francisco, and can be found at esmewang.com and on Twitter @esmewang.

Angel Dominguez and Kit Schluter
2018-04-13 18:00 - 20:00 UTC | Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, 2155 Center St., Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Two renowned poets, Dominguez and Schluter read their work.

Half Past the Unlucky: A Friday the 13th Reading
2018-04-13 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
& DRAWING FOR POEMS UNDER THE DOME
FRI. APRIL 13TH, 7PM
On Friday the 13th, join us for an auspicious evening of poetry in celebration of National Poetry Month.
This event will also include the only drawing for a guaranteed spot to read at the13th Annual Poems Under the Dome at City Hall!

DAPHNE GOTTLIEB

Daphne Gottlieb

Daphne Gottlieb stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the award-winning author of 10 books including Pretty Much Dead, short stories about the people hanging on to the edge of the world in San Francisco. Previous works include Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in her Own Words, letters from Death Row by the “first female serial killer”. She has won a bunch of awards, and recently finished her first novel, which is sort of about anonymous sex.

THE POET I

the poet i

A lyrical powerhouse, “-i-” has the ability to transform any room into a sanctuary. Voted Sacramento, California’s Best Female Spoken Word artist and often called “The Storyteller” this award winning poet can take you on an emotional journey and back again in minutes. Though an Oakland, CA native, the mother of 8 currently resides in Carmichael, CA.

KIMBERLY DARK

Kimberly Dark

Kimberly Dark is a writer, professor and raconteur, working to reveal the hidden architecture of everyday life one clever essay, poem, and story at a time. She uses humor, surprise and intimacy to help audiences discover their influences, and reclaim their power as social creators. Kimberly teaches in Sociology and Women’s Studies at CSU San Marcos, and writing and theatre courses for Cal State Summer Arts. Kimberly Dark has written award-winning plays, taught and performed for a wide range of audiences in various countries over the past two decades. She is the author of Love and Errors, a book of poetry and co-editor of the anthology Ways of Being in Teaching. Her essays appear in popular online publications such as Everyday Feminism and Ravishly.

…PLUS SPECIAL GUEST
E.K. KEITH

E.K. Keith

E.K. Keith shouts her poems on the street corner and takes the mic at bars, coffee shops, and radio stations. For the love of poetry, she organizes and hosts Poems Under the Dome, San Francisco’s annual open mic celebration of National Poetry Month inside City Hall. Print & online journals publish her poetry on all three coasts and places beyond. E.K. is currently turning internal cartwheels about Nomadic Press releasing Ordinary Villains in September 2018.

CHARLIE GETTER

Charlie Getter

Charlie Getter’s work was described in the San Francisco Chronicle (8/25/2011) “as beguiling as Dr. Seuss.” He’s performed for the past fourteen years at the corner of 16th & Mission every Thursday night, and holds an MFA in Poetics from the New College of California. His latest collection is titled How to Arrange Physics and Geography to Your Advantage(seventh tangent, 2016).

Cliterary Salon: Unlucky in Love
2018-04-13 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | SOMA
Cliterary Salon is a show of ribald and rowdy stories about the clitoris, bringing a spirit of fun sexuality to a literary scene that’s traditionally been focused on cis male experience. (Note: Not all women have clits, not all clits belong to women.)
It’s Friday the 13th and Cliterary Salon’s theme will be Unlucky in Love. Bring your ex, your diary, all those old love letters, and prepare to dump them in the trash as our lineup of writers pour out their hearts, souls, and sexy bits for a night of entertainment.
Enjoy an evening of readings by Bay Area Cliterary Types in a secret Speakeasy in Soma (location and passwords will be emailed out a week prior to the event! Doors open at 6pm.)
Readers: Lauren Parker, Maggie Tokuda-Hall, Louis Evans, Meg Elison and MORE!
Assistance is available upon request, however, the venue is patently inaccessible for most chair-users.

POETRY EVENT! Perversions / Perversións / Perverseco
2018-04-14 18:00 - 19:30 UTC | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States

Jan Steckel & Julia Vinograd at Works in Progress Women's Open Mic
2018-04-14 18:30 - 22:30 UTC | Plymouth Jazz and Justice Church, 424 Monte Vista, Oakland, 94611
a WOMEN-ONLY event
Featuring poets Jan Steckel and Julia Vinograd
Hosted by Feminist Author & Poet Linda Zeiser
Plymouth Jazz and Justice Church
424 Monte Vista/Oakland, CA
$7 – $10 Admission includes a raffle ticket for one of 10 fabulous prizes
6:30 – 7:30 Pot Luck –– Bring your favorite dish to share.
7:30 – 10:15 Performance
Produced by Linda Zeiser & Carolyn Stull Zeiser. To reserve your open mic slot, contact Linda at (510) 701-1022, ZeiserpoetMC@aol.com, in advance.
Featuring poets Julia Vinograd and Jan Steckel
Other wonderful artists will thrill and delight you!!
Works In Progress is a creative space for women’s art: Poets, Musicians, Comediennes, and Performance Artists. All are encouraged to share their works, completed or evolving.
WIP is scent free and wheelchair accessible (bathroom unfortunately is not completely accessible).
Julia Vinograd is a Berkeley street poet. She has published 63 books of poetry, and won the American Book Award of The Before Columbus Foundation. She has three poetry CD collections: Bubbles and Bones, Eye of the Hand, and The Book of Jerusalem. She received a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. She has a Poetry Lifetime Achievement Award from the City of Berkeley. She won a Pushcart Prize for her poem “The Young Men Who Died of AIDS”. She was one of the four editors of the anthology New American Underground Poetry Vol. 1: The Babarians of San Francisco— Poets from Hell.
Jan Steckel is a former pediatrician who stopped practicing medicine because of chronic pain. Her poetry book The Horizontal Poet (Zeitgeist Press, 2011) won a 2012 Lambda Literary Award. Her fiction chapbook Mixing Tracks (Gertrude Press, 2009) and poetry chapbook The Underwater Hospital (Zeitgeist Press, 2006) also won awards. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Scholastic Magazine, Yale Medicine, Bellevue Literary Review, and elsewhere. Her work was nominated three times each for the Pushcart and Sundress Best of the Net anthologies, won the Goodreads Poetry Contest twice, and won various other awards. She lives in Oakland, California.

Neruda: The Poet's Calling
2018-04-14 19:00 - 21:30 UTC | Red Poppy Art House, 2698 Folsom St, San Francisco , CA, 94110, United States
Neruda: The Poet’s Calling

Book release party for the new definitive biography of Pablo Neruda, Neruda: The Poet’s Calling by Mark Eisner, published by Ecco Press.
Featuring Adrian Arias, Jennifer Barone, Mark Eisner, Cristina García, Ingrid Keir, William O’Daly, Carolina de Robertis, and Michael Warr. Plus clips from the film Pablo Neruda: The People’s Calling.
Presented by City Lights and Ecco Press at the Red Poppy Art House, 2698 Folsom St. in the Mission District of San Francisco.
7:00-9:30PM, doors at 6:30PM
$10-20 suggested donation
Get advanced tickets at redpoppyarthouse.org.

Mark Eisner conceived, edited, and was one of the principal translators for The Essential Neruda: Selected Poems (City Lights, 2004). For Neruda’s centennial that year, Eisner was interviewed on NPR’s Morning Edition. Eisner has also written what the bestselling novelist Cristina García called a “definitive” biography on Neruda, Neruda: The Poet’s Calling, one that “reads like a beautifully written novel,” released from Ecco in March 2018. Finally, he is currently producing a documentary on Neruda, to be completed in 2018, with support from Latino Public Broadcasting. An initial, short version of the documentary, narrated by Isabel Allende, won the Latin American Studies Association Award of Merit.
The Red Poppy Art House (“The Poppy”) was founded in 2003 to serve as an intercultural and multidisciplinary “space of encounter,” a hubwhere multiple social-cultural groups could interconnect to experience one another and therefore potentiate one another’s endeavors while weaving a more solid and tolerant social fabric. After seven years since its founding, the organization’s role within the arts ecology has become highly recognized and valued among its local community and the broader Bay Area. As an artist-centered organization, it has managed to maintain an internal culture of creativity, that is, a feeli
