Virtual Event: Tiphanie Yanique and Edwidge Danticat
2021-10-21 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Green Apple Books 9th Avenue, 1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94122, United States
Join us on Thursday, October 21st at 6pm PT when Tiphanie Yanique discusses her novel, Monster in the Middle, with Edwidge Danticat on Zoom!
Zoom Registration
Praise for Monster in the Middle
“Monster in the Middle is as boundless as it is affecting. Yanique’s prose leaps with possibility, as her characters live and laugh and fight and love. Yanique captures romance from its peaks to its craters, deftly weaving whole worlds from everything in between.”—Bryan Washington, author of Memorial
“A total wonder. Utterly original and structurally thrilling. I am in awe of this novel and Tiphanie Yanique’s masterful storytelling. This feels like a modern fable, a contemporary folk ballad full of unforgettable characters who, by the end, felt as familiar to me as family. What a gorgeous ode to love and its power.” —Brandon Taylor, author of Filthy Animals and Real Life
“Tiphanie Yanique is one of our very best writers. This book is another marvel, expertly mixing voices and styles, even structures and traditions, to capture the way lives naturally flow together and apart over time…Monster in the Middle is a book to study and savor.” —Matthew Salesses, author of Craft in the Real World
About Monster in the Middle
From the award-winning author of Land of Love and Drowning, an electric new novel that maps the emotional inheritance of one couple newly in love.
When Fly and Stela meet in 21st Century New York City, it seems like fate. He’s a Black American musician from a mixed-religious background who knows all about heartbreak. She’s a Catholic science teacher from the Caribbean, looking for lasting love. But are they meant to be? The answer goes back decades—all the way to their parents’ earliest loves.
Vibrant and emotionally riveting, Monster in the Middle moves across decades, from the U.S. to the Virgin Islands to Ghana and back again, to show how one couple’s romance is intrinsically influenced by the family lore and love stories that preceded their own pairing. What challenges and traumas must this new couple inherit, what hopes and ambitions will keep them moving forward? Exploring desire and identity, religion and class, passion and obligation, the novel posits that in order to answer the question “who are we meant to be with?” we must first understand who we are and how we came to be.
About Tiphanie Yanique
Tiphanie Yanique is the author of the award-winning novel Land of Love and Drowning, as well as the poetry collection, Wife. Winner of the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel award, and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35 honoree, she has also received a Rona Jaffe Award and a Fulbright scholarship. Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker and anthologized in Best American Short Stories 2020. Originally from the Virgin Islands, she now lives in Atlanta, where she is a professor at Emory University.

Rev. Al Sharpton: Rise Up: Confronting a Country at a Crossroads
2021-10-21 19:00 - 20:30 | Virtual
KPFA Radio 94.1 FM with Marcus Books presents:
Reverend Al Sharpton + Greg Bridges
Rise Up: Confronting a Country at a Crossroads
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“Reverend Sharpton addresses our nation’s original sin, explains why we can’t afford to be satisfied with creature comforts while others still suffer, and offers solutions in the non-violent tradition of my father and others regarding where we go from here.”
-MARTIN LUTHER KING III
“Rev. has been about Black Lives Matter from the jump, also at a time when it was not the most popular or hip thing to be about. I look forward, standing next to him, to see, to witness this new energy, this new day that is about to be in these United States of America.” -SPIKE LEE
“This man is a gift from God to the world. This book is a gift from Al Sharpton to us. Let’s appreciate them both.” -MICHAEL ERIC DYSON
In what will be his seminal call to action, RISE UP: Confronting a Country at the Crossroads, the Reverend Al Sharpton draws on his decades of unique experience as a civil rights leader, a politician, and a television and radio host to encourage voters to stand up for what they believe and enact change in their country.
Rev. Al Sharpton is the host of MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation” and the founder and President of the National Action Network (NAN), one of the leading civil rights organization in the world. With over 40 years of experience as a community leader, politician, minister and advocate, the Rev. Al Sharpton is one of America’s most-renowned civil rights leaders.
Greg Bridges is a radio dj who can be heard over KCSM and KPFA, where he has a weekly show and is a contributor to KPFA’s Hip Hop and social affairs show HardKnock Radio. Greg has written for various publications including Jazz Now Magazine and Bayshore Magazine.
Suggested Donation $5-$20.
https://www.eventbrite.com/erev-al-sharpton-greg-bridges-rise-up-confronting-a-country-at-crossroads-tickets-164239814707

Chef Bryant Terry
2021-10-21 19:00 - 20:30 | The Commons, KQED Headquarters, 2601 Mariposa Street, San Francisco, 94110
Chef Bryant Terry joins “Check Please! Bay Area” Producer Cecilia Phillips to discuss his new book, Black Food, which explores Black foodways around the U.S. He’ll serve up small bites for the audience as well, teaching us about what goes into some of his favorite dishes.
Bryant Terry is a James Beard & NAACP Image Award-winning chef, educator, and author renowned for his activism to create a healthy, just, and sustainable food system. Since 2015 he has been the Chef-in-Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco where he creates public programming at the intersection of food, farming, health, activism, art, culture, and the African Diaspora. In regard to his work, Bryant’s mentor Alice Waters says, “Bryant Terry knows that good food should be an everyday right and not a privilege.”
$15 – In Person, Free – Livestream.
https://www.kqed.org/events/167828149513 live@kqed.org

9th Ave: Teresa K. Miller with Roxane Beth Johnson and Jenny Qi
2021-10-22 19:00 - 20:00 | Green Apple Books 9th Avenue, 1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94122, United States
Join us on Friday, October 22nd at 7pm PT when Teresa K. Miller is joined by fellow poets Roxane Beth Johnson and Jenny Qi to celebrate her collection, Borderline Fortune, at 9th Ave!
Masks Required for In-Store Event
Join us virtually by registering here
Praise for Borderline Fortune
“The poems in Teresa K. Miller’s Borderline Fortune emphasize the greater context of our existence as individuals, as family members, and as cultures. Miller mines family as a construct, whether naturally related or collected. She interrogates relationships with the lens of a geologist, exploring the physical, chemical, and biological properties of the gravitational fields that pull us together and the elements that erode us. Several ages are explored by the poems, acknowledging the violence that must be present for eloquent transition and rebirth. The poems in Borderline Fortune are so sharply crafted, they serve as the pick and axe that dig deep into the granite of the past. Miller questions specific characters, many ghosts from the past that hold secrets to a history she is rebirthing. The poems shape a world created from the knowledge and the mythology Miller has extracted.” —Elmaz Abinader, author of This House, My Bones and cofounder of VONA
“Borderline Fortune feels like a book that was written to save oneself, to enact through poetry a means of salvation. Teresa K. Miller weaves together transcendent astonishments, precise images of the natural world, histories of horrors still present in the land, & personal revelations as intimate as bruises, weaving them into a single, entangled whole. Borderline Fortune is not a book that solves a problem, but a book that creates a net, a thing made of both solidity & gaps, open enough to be pulled through the dangers, strong enough to haul a body up to the air. This salvation happens in the reading, how the reader creates the net along with the poem, hand-in-hand, each one pulling the other to the surface, ceaselessly, with every memory of beauty & of grief. The book is a reminder that salvation is an ongoing work, for, as Miller writes, ‘In the end, there was no end.’” —Mathias Svalina, creator of the Dream Delivery Service and author of The Wine-Dark Sea
“In the sweeping expanses of Borderline Fortune, Teresa K. Miller grapples with the complexity of inheritance, the complicated legacies of family, history, and place. What created us, and what do we in turn create? How closely twined are belonging and betrayal? Here, history, identity, and the natural world meet and merge: ‘a riven nausea in the cambium, / some needle-leafed private anguish.’ Geography itself is sentient and responsive: ‘lies twine into granite, brine / into mineral creatures made of lace.’ In the end, the poems form a landscape we must immerse ourselves in, their movement as dark and unpredictable as the ocean or tectonic plates, and their story one we don’t navigate as much as survive: ‘Haul / yourself out, / one frozen leg at a time.’” —Laura Walker, author of swarm lure and psalmbook
About Borderline Fortune
A collection that explores inherited trauma on an individual and communal level, from a National Poetry Series–winning poet who “refus[es] the mind’s limits” (Carol Muske-Dukes)
Borderline Fortune is a meditation on intangible family inheritance—of unresolved intergenerational conflicts and traumas in particular—set against the backdrop of our planetary inheritance as humans. As species go extinct and glaciers melt, Teresa K. Miller asks what we owe one another and what it means to echo one’s ancestors’ grief and fear. Drawing on her family history, from her great-grandfather’s experience as a schoolteacher on an island in the Bering Strait to her father’s untimely death, as well as her pursuit of regenerative horticulture, Miller seeks through these beautifully crafted poems to awaken from the intergenerational trance and bear witness to our current moment with clarity and attention.
About Teresa K. Miller
A graduate of Barnard College and the Mills College MFA program, Teresa K. Miller is the author of sped (Sidebrow) and Forever No Lo (Tarpaulin Sky) as well as co-editor of Food First: Selected Writings from 40 Years of Movement Building (Food First Books). Her poems and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, AlterNet, Entropy, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. Originally from Seattle, she tends a mini orchard near Portland, Oregon.
About Roxane Beth Johnson
Roxane Beth Johnson is the author of the poetry collections Jubilee (Anhinga Press, chosen by Philip Levine) and Black Crow Dress (Alice James Books). A California Book Award finalist, Cave Canem poet, and Pushcart Prize winner, she has published poems in The Georgia Review, Harvard Review, ZYZZYVA, and elsewhere.
About Jenny Qi
Jenny Qi is the author of the debut poetry collection Focal Point, winner of the 2020 Steel Toe Books Poetry Award. Her essays and poems have been published widely in outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, Tin House, Rattle, and ZYZZYVA, and she has received fellowships from Tin House, Omnidawn, Kearny Street Workshop, and the San Francisco Writers Grotto. Born in Pennsylvania to Chinese immigrants, she grew up mostly in Las Vegas and Nashville and now lives in San Francisco, where she completed her Ph.D. in cancer biology. At the end of graduate school, she co-founded and produced the science storytelling podcast Bone Lab Radio; she currently works in oncology competitive intelligence. She is working on more essays and poems and translating her late mother’s memoirs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution and immigration to the U.S.

Virtual Event: Warren Ellis on Nina Simone's Gum with Joe Cardamone
2021-10-23 12:00 - 13:00 | Green Apple Books 9th Avenue, 1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94122, United States
Join us on Saturday, October 23rd at 12pm PT when Warren Ellis joins us to discuss his book, Nina Simone’s Gum, with Joe Cardamone on Zoom!
THIS IS A TICKETED EVENT
Tickets are available here, and include a copy of Nina Simone’s Gum with signed bookplate and access to the virtual event.
Praise for Nina Simone’s Gum
“In praise of meaning-rich relics and magical things. Totally heartwarming project.” — Max Porter
“A unique study of a fan’s devotion, of transcendence and of the artistic vocation – it’s got depth and great warmth. It’s a beautiful piece of work.” — Kevin Barry
“A moving, inspirational insight into a beautiful mind.” — Jim Jarmusch
“A warm homage and affecting memoir.” — Kirkus
About Nina Simone’s Gum
From award-winning musician and composer Warren Ellis comes the unexpected and inspiring story of a piece of chewing gum. Featuring an introduction from Nick Cave.
“Warren has turned this memento, snatched from his idol’s piano in a moment of rapture, into a genuine religious artefact.” —Nick Cave
On Thursday July 1st, 1999, Dr. Nina Simone gave a rare performance as part of Nick Cave’s Meltdown Festival. After the show, in a state of awe, Warren Ellis crept onto the stage, took Dr. Simone’s piece of chewed gum from the piano, wrapped it in her stage towel and put it in a Tower Records bag. The gum remained with him for twenty years; a sacred totem, his creative muse, growing in significance with every passing year.
In 2019, Cave – his collaborator and great friend – asked Warren if there was anything he could contribute to display in his Stranger Than Kindness exhibition. Warren realized the time had come to release the gum. Together they agreed it should be housed in a glass case like a holy relic. Worrying the gum would be damaged or lost, Warren decided to first have it cast in silver and gold, sparking a chain of events that no one could have predicted, one that would take him back to his childhood and his relationship to found objects.
Nina Simone’s Gum is about how something so small can form beautiful connections between people. It is a story about the meaning we place on things, on experiences, and how they become imbued with spirituality. It is a celebration of artistic process, friendship, understanding and love.
About Warren Ellis
Warren Ellis is an Australian multi-instrumentalist and composer, most famous for his work as collaborator and bandmate of Nick Cave, in both the Bad Seeds and Grinderman. Both solo and alongside Nick he is also a multi-award winning film composer whose soundtracks include The Proposition, The Road, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Mustang and most recently This Train I Ride. His own band Dirty Three have released eight studio albums since 1994 and he is an in-demand producer and writer, working with artists including Marianne Faithful, Jupiter and Okwess and Tinariwen.

Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels
2021-10-23 13:00 - 14:30 | virtual
Lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched, Remembering Shanghai: A Memoir of Socialites, Scholars and Scoundrels follows five generations from a hardscrabble village to the bright lights of Hong Kong. With turns harrowing and heartwarming, this vivid memoir explores identity, loss, and redemption against an epic backdrop.
Join CHSA and the authors of Remembering Shanghai for an online book discussion about the true stories of glamour, drama, and tragedy told from the last days of imperial rule to the Cultural Revolution.
Author Claire Chao spent much of her youth seeking connections to her parents’ homeland. After 30 years in management with companies such as Tiffany & Co., Harry Winston, and Hill & Knowlton, she spent a decade creating Remembering Shanghai, uncovering an uncanny link with the grandfather she never met. She has been designated one of Avenue magazine’s “500 Most Influential Asian Americans” and Tatler Hong Kong’s “Who’s Who in Hong Kong.” She graduated with the highest honors from Princeton University and lives in Honolulu with her husband and two dogs.

Lessons on Moving Through Change, Loss, and Disruption
2021-10-28 17:30 - 19:00 | Virtual
We all go through times when it feels like the ground is being pulled out from underneath us and what we relied on as steady and solid may change or even appear to vanish. Not only are loss and separation painful, but even positive changes can cause great stress. Yet life is full of change: birth, death, marriage, divorce, a new relationship, losing or starting a job, beginning a new phase in life or ending one. Change is stressful, even when it is much desired or anticipated. The unknown can feel scary and threatening.
Experienced mindfulness teacher Kaira Jewel Lingo provides accessible advice on navigating difficult times of transition by drawing on Buddhist teachings on impermanence to help us establish equanimity and resilience. Her latest book, We Were Made for These Times, dives into her work, providing essential teaching and meditation, unfolding a step-by-step process to nurture deeper freedom and stability in daily life.
In this era of global disruption-where threats to our individual, social, and planetary safety abound-life can feel overwhelming. Kaira Jewel’s work provides us with powerful ways to meet life’s challenges with wisdom, resilience, and ease. The time-honored teachings that Kaira shares help us develop presence and compassion, supporting us to release the fear, doubt, and resistance that hold us back.
Join CIIS Integrative Health Studies professor Megan Lipsett for a conversation with Kaira Jewel about her teaching and her latest book, and learn how to move through change, loss, and disruption to find both freedom and stability.
Free, suggested donation of $10.

https://www.ciis.edu/public-programs/event-calendar/lingo-jewel-kaira-october-28-2021 publicprograms@ciis.edu 415-575-6175

Nikki Giovanni: Make Me Rain
2021-10-28 19:00 - 20:30 | Virtual
Presented by KPFA Radio 94.1 FM with Marcus Books
Hosted by Nina Serrano
Nikki Giovanni’s poetry has inspired, enlightened, and captivated generations of readers. She is cherished by the nation and revered in the African-American community as a potent and affirming siren of culture, tradition, and the issues of our time. In MAKE ME RAIN Giovanni is as sharp and outspoken as ever, bringing profound and timely poems that call attention to injustice and give readers an unfiltered look into the more guarded regions of her heart.
In MAKE ME RAIN Giovanni celebrates her loved ones and unapologetically declares her pride in her Black heritage, while exploring the enduring impact of the twin sins of racism and white nationalism. With this compendium she reaffirms her place as a uniquely vibrant and relevant American voice with poems such as, “I Come from Athletes,” and “Rainy Days,” which call out segregation and Donald Trump; “Unloved (for Aunt Cleota),” and “When I Could No Longer,” a personal elegy for the relatives who saved her from an abusive childhood home.
The poet recently trended on Twitter after thousands logged on to hear her chat virtually with activist Angela Davis. From the records she released in the 1970’s, to her devout tribute of a “thug life” tattoo to honor rapper Tupac Shakur, Giovanni is recognized by younger generations for her insight, connectedness, and the comforting familiarity of her voice. She is the admired elder stateswoman of African American letters, and final representative of an extraordinary cohort that once included her dear friends, writers Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison.
With MAKE ME RAIN, a beloved American poet challenges us with a powerful and deeply personal collection of verse that speaks to the injustices of society while illuminating the depths of her own heart. Stirring, provocative, and poignant, these poems pierce the heart and nourish the soul.
Suggested Donation $5-$20.
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/nikki-giovanni-make-me-rain-tickets-170040590985

Reza Azlan and Jessica Jackley
2021-10-29 19:30 - 20:30 | Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Friday, October 29, 2021
7:30pm Pacific Time
Venue: Sydney Goldstein Theater
TICKETS

Join Reza Aslan and Jessica Jackley for a conversation on empathy and community. The two are partners in an interfaith marriage, and their work engages with service, spirituality, and connection.
Reza Aslan is the author of God: A Human History, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, and Beyond Fundamentalism. He is the host and Executive Producer of Rough Draft with Reza Aslan.
Jessica Jackley is an entrepreneur, investor, and speaker whose work focuses on financial inclusion, the sharing economy, and social justice. She is the founder of Alltruists, which offers at-home volunteer projects for families, and was co-founder of Kiva, the world’s first crowdfunding site for microenterprises.
You and your guests must be fully vaccinated to attend this event; proof of vaccination is required upon arrival. Full vaccination is defined as completion of the two-dose regimen of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or one dose of Johnson & Johnson vaccine administered two weeks or more in advance of the event.

Rebecca Solnit and Jenny Odell
2021-10-30 18:00 - 19:00 | Dance Palace, 503 B St, Point Reyes Station, CA, 94956, United States
An in-person event to celebrate the release of Orwell’s Roses

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Saturday, October 30, 2021 – 6:00pm

Dance Palace

503 B St

Point Reyes Station, CA 94956

Tickets:

$28 + tax (each ticket includes a copy of the book)

Join us for our first in-person event in a year and a half as we welcome Rebecca Solnit to Point Reyes to celebrate the publication of Solnit’s latest book, Orwell’s Roses (Viking). Rebecca will be joined in conversation by artist and writer Jenny Odell, author of the bestselling How to Do Nothing.
We require proof of vaccination for all attendees. Please reserve your spot early, as we expect tickets to go quickly. We will also provide a streaming option for those unable to make it in-person.
REGISTRATION INFO COMING SOON.
“A kaleidoscopic view of a man we thought we knew, by a woman who keeps surprising us with her dazzling mind. Solnit has written an exquisitely layered book soaring in its reach, subversive in its scope, and joyous in its pleasure to read. Her exploration into how and why cultivating beauty matters, alongside fighting injustices as Orwell’s garden supported his fierce critique of fascism, reminds us of the singular fact: life is both flower and thorn. This profound and graceful book not only redefines what is ‘Orwellian,’ it reimagines how we might live a life of greater intention by opening our hearts to what is beautiful, brave, and of Earth.” —Terry Tempest Williams, author of Erosion
About Orwell’s Roses
“In the year 1936 a writer planted roses.” So begins Rebecca Solnit’s new book, a reflection on George Orwell’s passionate gardening and the way that his involvement with plants, particularly flowers, and the natural world illuminates his other commitments as a writer and antifascist, and the intertwined politics of nature and power.
Sparked by her unexpected encounter with the surviving roses he planted in 1936, Solnit’s account of this understudied aspect of Orwell’s life explores his writing and his actions—from going deep into the coal mines of England, fighting in the Spanish Civil War, critiquing Stalin when much of the international left still supported him (and then critiquing that left), to his analysis of the relationship between lies and authoritarianism. Through Solnit’s celebrated ability to draw unexpected connections, readers encounter the photographer Tina Modotti’s roses and her Stalinism, Stalin’s obsession with forcing lemons to grow in impossibly cold conditions, Orwell’s slave-owning ancestors in Jamaica, Jamaica Kincaid’s critique of colonialism and imperialism in the flower garden, and the brutal rose industry in Colombia that supplies the American market. The book draws to a close with a rereading of Nineteen Eighty-Four that completes her portrait of a more hopeful Orwell, as well as a reflection on pleasure, beauty, and joy as acts of resistance.
About Rebecca Solnit and Jenny Odell
Rebecca Solnit is the author of more than twenty books, including Recollections of My Nonexistence, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, A Paradise Built in Hell, River of Shadows, and Wanderlust. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and many essays on feminism, activism and social change, hope, and the climate crisis. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a regular contributor to The Guardian and other publications.
Jenny Odell is an artist and writer who teaches at Stanford and has been an artist-in-residence at places like the San Francisco dump, Facebook, the Internet Archive, and the San Francisco Planning Department. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, The Atlantic, The Believer, The Paris Review, and McSweeney’s, among others. She lives in Oakland.

Lauren Groff
2021-11-03 19:30 - 20:30 | Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Wednesday, November 3, 2021
7:30pm Pacific Time
Venue: Sydney Goldstein Theater
TICKETS

Lauren Groff is the author of six books of fiction, the most recent the novel MATRIX (September 2021). Her novel Fates and Furies is a dazzling examination of marriage. A finalist for the National Book Award, it was named Best Book of the Year by The Washington Post, NPR, TIME, and many more. Her work has been featured in The New Yorker, along with several Best American Short Stories anthologies, and she was named one of Granta’s 2017 Best Young American Novelists.

You and your guests must be fully vaccinated to attend this event; proof of vaccination is required upon arrival. Full vaccination is defined as completion of the two-dose regimen of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or one dose of Johnson & Johnson vaccine administered two weeks or more in advance of the event.

Jelani Cobb
2021-11-05 19:30 - 20:30 | Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Friday, November 5, 2021
7:30pm Pacific Time
Venue: Sydney Goldstein Theater
TICKETS

Jelani Cobb is a historian, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, and has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He writes frequently about race, politics, history, and culture. He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress, The Devil and Dave Chappelle: And Other Essays, To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic, and he is the co-editor of a new anthology, The Matter of Black Lives. This new book compiles New Yorker essays on race in America through time, by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Hilton Als, Zadie Smith, and more—with a foreword by Cobb. The anthology provides a bold and complex portrait of Black life in America, told through stories of private triumphs and national tragedies, political vision and artistic inspiration.
You and your guests must be fully vaccinated to attend this event; proof of vaccination is required upon arrival. Full vaccination is defined as completion of the two-dose regimen of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or one dose of Johnson & Johnson vaccine administered two weeks or more in advance of the event.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz with Steve Wasserman: Not a Nation of Immigrants
2021-11-09 19:00 - 20:00 | Virtual
KPFA Radio 94.1 FM presents
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz with Steve Wasserman: A KPFA Zoom Event
Not a Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion
“Her thought-work and writing are both full-force with courage and wisdom. In the age of telling truth, she says, the US has yet to correct its narrative to acknowledge its settler-colonialist and imperialist past and present. This book should be taught in classrooms; readers will finish it changed.”
-Booklist, Starred Review
“Dunbar-Ortiz’s message is clear: uplifting narratives about the United States as a ‘nation of immigrants’ allow the country to hide from its history of colonialism, genocide, slavery, and racism . . . . [T]his thought-provoking account will prove insightful for all.”
-Library Journal
Many Americans will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, acclaimed historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts that this self-congratulatory myth is harmful because it masks the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today. This myth, she claims, is a convenient response by the ruling class to the demands for decolonialization, reparations, and social justice. This paradigm-shifting new work from the author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States insists that we need to stop perpetuating this simplistic and inaccurate ideal and embrace the real history of the United States.
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma, the daughter of a tenant farmer. Dunbar-Ortiz has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades. She is the author of eight books.
Steve Wasserman is currently publisher of the award-winning Heyday Books.
Suggested Donation $5-$20.

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/roxanne-dunbar-ortiz-not-a-nation-of-immigrants-tickets-170048201749

Black Nature, Poetry, and Coexistence: Camille T. Dungy & Ross Gay
2021-11-17 17:00 - 18:30
Please join us in welcoming two extraordinary poets to ARC’s virtual stage for readings and conversation: Camille T. Dungy and Ross Gay. In addition to four collections of poetry, Camille Dungy edited Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets. By using social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry, Dungy challenged and changed that framework to include poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements. Ross Gay is interested in studying joy. His four books of poetry include the National Book Award winning Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015), and his latest, Be Holding (2020), is the winner of the PEN /Jean Stein Book Award. Gay is also the author of the NYT bestselling collection of essays, The Book of Delights, and co-author, with Aimee Nezhukumatathil, of the chapbook Lace and Pyrite: Letters from Two Gardens. A long time gardener and advocate for cultivating community, Gay is a founding member of the food justice and joy project the Bloomington Community Orchard.

Natashia Deón & Rebecca Solnit
2021-11-19 19:30 - 20:30 | Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Friday, November 19, 2021
7:30pm Pacific Time
Venue: Sydney Goldstein Theater
TICKETS
Natashia Deón is a 2017 NAACP Image Award Nominee and author of the critically-acclaimed novel, Grace and The Perishing, forthcoming in 2021. A practicing attorney, mother, and law professor, Deón is the recipient of a PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellowship and served as a 2017 U.S. Delegate to Armenia in partnership with the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, for a reconciliation project involving Armenian and Turkish writers.
Rebecca Solnit is an incisive voice on topics ranging from feminism to the environment, western history to literary criticism, and from hope and disaster to popular power and social change. She has published more than twenty books, including Hope in the Dark, Men Explain Things to Me, The Mother of All Questions, and Recollections of My Nonexistence. Her new book, Orwell’s Roses, is a lush exploration of roses, pleasure, and politics, and a fresh take on George Orwell as an avid gardener whose political writing was grounded in his passion for the natural world.
You and your guests must be fully vaccinated to attend this event; proof of vaccination is required upon arrival. Full vaccination is defined as completion of the two-dose regimen of Pfizer or Moderna vaccines or one dose of Johnson & Johnson vaccine administered two weeks or more in advance of the event.

Poetry & the Senses Fall 2021 Fellows Reading
2021-12-08 17:00 - 18:30
The Arts Research Center will celebrate the 2021 Fall Poetry Fellows with a reading of work created during their fellowship semester. This event will feature undergrad fellows Anastasia Le and Gisselle Medina; graduate fellows Lindsay Choi and Vincente Perez; faculty fellows Ahmad Diab and Jesse Nathan; and community fellows Maurya Kerr and D’mani Thomas, and be followed by a short conversation and Q&A with Chiyuma Elliott.
During fall 2021, these amazing poetry fellows will explore and push against the theme coexistence. The word coexistence has a spatial component, and implies the sharing of space or cohabitation within overlapping territories; it also has a temporal dimension, suggesting simultaneous presence with others in the same moment in time. These fellows engage capaciously with issues of mutuality, synchronicity, interdependence, and care – from enlivening exchanges between beings, to the porous line between animate and inanimate, to the challenges of living together on our planet, to the uncanny shivers of coincidence.
Please read more about these fellows here.

Tongo Eisen-Martin
2021-12-15 19:30 - 20:30 | Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Wednesday, December 15, 2021
7:30pm Pacific Time
Venue: Sydney Goldstein Theater

TICKETS

Tongo Eisen-Martin is the current poet laureate of San Francisco. He is the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes, published as part of City Lights’ Pocket Poet series, and someone’s dead already. Heaven Is All Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, received the California Book Award for Poetry, an American Book Award, and a PEN Oakland Book Award. Eisen-Martin is also an educator and organizer whose work centers on issues of mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings of Black people, and human rights. He has taught at detention centers around the country and at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, and is the founder of Black Freighter Press. His second book in the City Lights Pocket Poet series, Blood on the Fog, will be released in the fall of 2021.

Quincy Troupe in Conversation with Danny Glover & Terry McMillan
2022-02-10 14:00 - 15:30 | Virtual
Quincy Troupe, “Poet of the Deep Song,” is joined in conversation by two lifelong friends, actor Danny Glover and bestselling author Terry McMillan. Dr. Kim McMillon moderates this virtual program, which celebrates the release of Troupe’s new collected poems, DUENDE: Poems, 1966-Now, a gathering of more than 50 years of lyrical, evocative writing. The program also honors Troupe’s years of collaboration with visual artists and musicians and features guest cameos and videos by Mildred Howard, Will Calhoun and J.D. Parran.
Free
https://sfpl.org/events/2022/02/10/author-quincy-troupe-conversation-danny-glover-terry-mcmillan sfplcpp@sfpl.org 415-557-4400

On Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science
2022-02-10 19:00 - 20:30 | Virtual
Despite the undeniable fact that Indigenous communities are among the most affected by climate devastation, Indigenous science is very rarely found in mainstream environmental policy or discourse. While holistic land, water, and forest management practices born from a millennia of Indigenous knowledge systems have much to teach all of us, Indigenous science has long been ignored, otherized, or perceived as “soft”-the product of a systematic, centuries-long campaign of racism, colonialism, extractive capitalism, and delegitimization.
Jessica Hernandez (Maya Ch’orti’ and Zapotec), environmental scientist and founder of environmental agency Pina Soul, introduces and contextualizes Indigenous environmental knowledge and proposes a vision of land stewardship that heals rather than displaces and generates rather than destroys. She breaks down the failures of western-defined conservatism and shares alternatives-citing the restoration work of urban Indigenous people in Seattle, her family’s fight against ecoterrorism in Latin America, and holistic land management approaches of Indigenous groups across the continent.
In Dr. Hernandez’s latest book, Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes through Indigenous Science, she breaks down why western conservationism isn’t working and offers Indigenous models informed by case studies, personal stories, and family histories that center the voices of Latin American women and land protectors.
Join Dr. Hernandez in a conversation about her life and work and explore how to stop the eco-colonialism ravaging Indigenous lands to restore our relationship with Earth to one of harmony and respect.
Free, suggested donation of $10.
https://www.ciis.edu/public-programs
publicprograms@ciis.edu 415-575-6175

The 54th California International Antiquarian Book Fair
2022-02-11 - 2022-02-13 | The Oakland Marriott City Center, 1001 Broadway, Oakland, CA, 94607
One of the world’s largest antiquarian book fairs with over 100 booksellers from the United States and around the globe. The annual Book Fair features a rich selection of books, manuscripts, maps, and other printed materials, including incunabula; literature from all centuries and nationalities; fine bindings; children’s and illustrated books; ephemera; and antiquarian books on dozens of topics.
ALSO JOIN US FOR:
Virtual Book Fair: California Edition
February 12-14: 9:00 am – 5:00 pm
abaa.org/vbf

9th Ave: Brian Tierney with William Brewer, Randall Mann, and Noah Warren
2022-02-11 19:00 - 20:00 | Green Apple Books 9th Avenue, 1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94122, United States
Join us on Friday, February 11th at 7pm PT when Brian Tierney celebrates his collection, Rise and Float, at 9th Ave!
Featuring fellow poets William Brewer, Randall Mann, and Noah Warren
Masks and Proof of Vaccination Required for In-Person Attendance
Or watch online by registering at the link here
Praise for Rise and Float
“In these poems of turnpikes, water, and migraine light, filled with grief and life, the poet tells us it’s all right that ‘we don’t love / living.’ Here, precision is a form of metaphor, language a facet of experience; the poet writes with a kind of allusive purity and vulnerability—‘each thought a texture’—that I find moving. Rise and Float is that rare thing, a book of one striking poem after another. If I could write something as tender and nearly perfect as ‘You’re the One I Wanna Watch the Last Ships Go Down With’—a lightning strike, Randall Jarrell might have called it—then I’d consider giving up writing.”—Randall Mann
“If the job of the poet is to make our interiority knowable and known, then this book by Brian Tierney triumphs. In this magnificent debut, a poet arrives to us fully formed, and Tierney has found ways to transform the mundane into the mysterious, and the mysterious into the transcendent. Readers will be swept away by the rigors of syntax, the sparse and charged diction, and the voice of these worldly, humane, sophisticated poems.”—Mark Wunderlich
“Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float is resonant with the desire for rapture and the never-easing reality of loss. How do we go on living, these poems seem to ask, bearing what we must bear? And in lines by turns dolorous and defiant, they answer: We watch, we remember, and we sing.”—Tracy K. Smith
About Rise and Float
Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working—remarkably, miraculously—to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page.
With the “corpse of Frost” under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide—all of these compound to “month after / month” and “dream / after dream” of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry’s cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like “wrist skin when a grater slips,” a “laugh as good as a scream,” pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release.
The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to “trying, these days, to believe again / in people,” another concedes that “defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose.” Look: the chair is just a chair.” But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy “torn open” by dogs and a suicide, “two beautiful teenagers are kissing.” Between screams, something intimate—hope, however difficult it may be.

Black Joy Books and Resources for Youth
2022-02-16 15:00 - 15:30 | Virtual
San Francisco Public Library and the San Francisco Unified School District youth librarians team up to talk about Black Joy. Join BIPOC librarians Rachel Fiege (SFPL), Jason Hill (SFPL) and Ayana Thompson (SFUSD), for a virtual conversation about Black Joy in librarianship, schools, youth literature and beyond. They discuss how Black youth should have access to positive stories about their heritage that aren’t rooted in stereotypes or sidekick roles by sharing their personal insights about working with Black youth and how they spread Black Joy to their young patrons, students and families. They share booklists, online resources and their own personal favorites including Coretta Scott King award titles and more.
Free
https://sfpl.org/events/2022/02/16/dialogue-black-joy-books-and-resources-youth sfplcpp@sfpl.org 415-557-4400

9th Ave: Tobey Hiller with Thaisa Frank
2022-02-16 19:00 - 20:00 | Green Apple Books 9th Avenue, 1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94122, United States
Join us on Wednesday, February 16th at 7pm PT when Tobey Hiller is joined by Thaisa Frank to celebrate her latest book, Flight Advice: a fabulary, at 9th Ave!
Mask and Proof of Vaccination Required for In-Person Attendance
Or watch online by registering here
Praise for Flight Advice
“A delicious and dreamlike collection of stories, filled with the best surprises. Hiller creates a witty, pungent world, in which words fly and change, and stories swirl and go missing, to arrive again in new forms, with fresh power to enchant. A tour de force, concocted of mischief, insight and pure delight.”—Harriet Scott Chessman, author of Someone Not Really Her Mother
“In Flight Advice: A Fabulary, fairy tales and myths of passion come alive in the modern world: Men with cigarettes that look like stars make love to mermaids, a genie appears in a woman’s laundry room, and a writer is transformed by mysterious words. Told by a narrator with a remarkable voice that ranges from vernacular clarity to dazzling lyricism, Flight Advice is the best of contemporary magic realism.”—Thaisa Frank, author of Heidegger’s Glasses and Enchantment
“In Tobey Hiller’s magnificent collection of fables, Flight Advice: A Fabulary, these captivating short stories traverse otherworldly landscapes. An accomplished poet, Hiller’s prose shines with mesmeric intensity and imagery. Singing mermaids, a bejeweled dog, one philosophical genie, and Lillith and her bald children transport the reader on surrealist excursions through worlds of humor and invention. Flight Advice: A Fabulary crackles with energy and wildness and seduces with dreamscape narratives.”—Maw Shein Win, author of Storage Unit for the Spirit House
About Flight Advice
Unlikely Books celebrates the release of Flight Advice: a fabulary by Tobey Hiller! Flight Advice is 130 pages of mythological, weird, and fabulist stories exploring the possibility of magic in our past and present. It wanders through creation myths, relates naïve humans to animals wild and sophisticated, considers the horrors of archetypical demagogues, and spends time with the inexplicable in ordinary, modern life. The art on the cover, “Ghost Dogs,” is a 2007 painting by Elizabeth Ennis.
About Tobey Hiller
Tobey Hiller writes fiction, flash and poetry. She’s the author of 4 books of poetry and one novel, CHARLIE’S EXIT (Edgework Books, 2002). Her stories and poems have appeared in many journals, such as Ambush Review, Askew, Canary, The Fabulist: Words & Art, Shotglass Journal (MusePie Press), Here Comes Everyone, 5 Fingers Review, Mediterranean Poetry, Milkweed Chronicle, Sisyphus, Sin Fronteras/Writers without Borders, Spillway, Unlikely Stories Mark V, and in five anthologies, most recently FIRE AND RAIN: ECOPOETRY OF CALIFORNIA (Scarlet Tanager Press, October 2018), THE WILD (Marin Poetry Center, 2019, & TRANSFORMATION, 2020). She writes both realist and fabulist fiction; one of her stories, Splinter, won First Prize in CRAFT’s 2020 Short Story Elements Contest for Conflict; two of her other stories have been short-listed for prizes. Her fiction collection PARTICLE TO WAVE: A FABULARY (now called FLIGHT ADVICE: A FABULARY) was recently named one of five finalists for Omnidawn’s Fabulist Collection Contest and will be published this winter by Unlikely Books. Her most recent book of poetry, CROW MIND (Finishing Line Press, 2020 is reviewed in The Los Angeles Review at http://losangelesreview.org/review-crow-mind-tobey-
hiller/. She may be found at http://thiller.ag-sites.net
About Thaisa Frank
The fiction of Enchantment is Thaisa Frank’s third collection of short fiction and includes two semi-autobiographical novellas as well as thirty-three stories. Her most recent novel, Heidegger’s Glasses, takes place in the mythical haven of an underground mine during WWII, the safety of which is threatened forever. It was published in 2010, reissued in paperback in 2011 and sold to ten foreign countries before publication. She is also the author of Sleeping in Velvet and A Brief History of Camouflage, both on the Bestseller List of the San Francisco Chronicle. Thaisa has received two PEN awards and her stories have been widely-anthologized. She has published critical essays on writing and art and is the author of the Afterward to Viking/Penguin’s most recent edition of Voltaire. Her poetry, which she writes secretly, appears in small publications. Thaisa has also co-authored Finding Your Writers Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction, translated into Portuguese and Spanish, and used in numerous writing programs. Thaisa has taught writing in the graduate departments of San Francisco State, the University of San Francisco and the University of California as Visiting Associate Professor of Creative Writing.

On the Intersection of Queerness and Neurodivergence
2022-02-16 19:00 - 20:30 | Virtual
Over the past 17 years, Nick Walker has played a key role in the emergence of the neurodiversity paradigm–a framework for scholarship, practice, and social justice work where treating human neurocognitive variations such as autism, dyslexia, and ADHD as medical pathologies or “disorders” is understood to be a form of systemic oppression along the same lines as the pathologizing of homosexuality in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Join queer autistic author and educator Dr. Walker for an uplifting conversation exploring the edges and intersections of neurodiversity, gender, Queer Theory, embodiment, creativity, somatic psychology, and the human capacity for transformation. Dr. Walker shares insights from her latest book, Neuroqueer Heresies, a decade’s worth of her most influential writings on the neurodiversity paradigm and autistic empowerment along with her radical conceptualization of Neuroqueer Theory–which applies a Queer Theory lens to neurodiversity.
Discover how queerness and neurodivergence intersect, and how we can liberate ourselves from the strictures of both heteronormativity and neuronormativity.
Free, suggested donation of $10.

https://www.ciis.edu/public-programs publicprograms@ciis.edu 415-575-6175

100 Years of Stand-Up Comedy in San Francisco's North Beach
2022-02-17 19:00 - 20:30 | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
“100 Years of Stand-Up Comedy in North Beach:
How San Francisco Changed Comedy Forever!”
San Francisco, and North Beach in particular, holds a special place in the history of the performing arts-and comedy in particular. From the early days of Beat poetry readings, gatherings which themselves were frequently underground, clandestine activities, to the days of drag shows and the topless revolution, perhaps it’s San Francisco’s “anything goes” reputation that’s motivated several generations of comedians to give it a go here.
In Bay Area Stand-up Comedy: A Humorous History, authors (and comedians themselves) Nina G and OJ Patterson examine the rich, hilarious tradition of stand-up, highlighting some of its most noteworthy and notorious figures, past and present.
“The comedians of the San Francisco Bay Area changed comedy forever. From visiting acts like Richard Pryor, Steve Martin and Whoopi Goldberg to local favorites who still maintain their following and legacy, the Bay Area has long been a place for comedians to develop their voice and hone their stand-up skills. Popular spots included Cobb’s, The Punch Line, hungry i, the Purple Onion, Tommy T’s, Brainwash and the holy grail of San Francisco comedy during the 1980s boom, the Holy City Zoo. For more than seventy years, these iconic venues and others fostered talents like Mort Sahl, Phyllis Diller, Smothers Brothers, Kevin Meaney, Paula Poundstone, Dana Carvey, W. Kamau Bell, Margaret Cho, Chelsea Peretti, Andy Samberg, Ali Wong, Moshe Kasher and (of course) Robin Williams, introducing them to local crowds and the world beyond. Join comedians Nina G and OJ Patterson on a hilarious and thoughtful tour through the history of Bay Area comedy.”
Nina G is a comedian, professional speaker, comedy historical consultant and author of Stutterer Interrupted: The Comedian Who Almost Didn’t Happen and Bay Area Stand-Up Comedy: A Humorous History.
Free
100 Years of Stand-Up Comedy with Nina G

Virtual Event: Sheila Heti with Elif Batuman
2022-02-18 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Friday, February 18th at 6pm PT when Sheila Heti is joined virtually by Elif Batuman to celebrate the release of her latest novel, Pure Colour!
Presented in proud partnership with our friends at Elliott Bay Books, Skylight Books, A Room of One’s Own, and Seminary Co-op.
Tickets include access to the virtual event with Heti and a soon to be selected interlocutor, as well as a copy of Pure Colour with signed bookplate. Audience Q+A to follow.
Please note this is a ticketed event
Tickets can be purchased here
About Pure Colour
The world is failing to remain a world. It is coming apart. The ice cubes are melting. Species are dying. People, too—of different things. But what if this world is just a first draft, made by some great artist in order to be destroyed?
In this first draft of the world, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira’s chest like a portal—to what, she doesn’t know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring, and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she’s left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.
Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.
About Sheila Heti
Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including Motherhood and How Should a Person Be?, which New York magazine called one of the “New Classics of the 21st Century.” She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by the book critics of The New York Times, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages.
About Elif Batuman
Elif Batuman’s first novel, The Idiot, was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in the UK. She is also the author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them, which was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2010 and holds a PhD in comparative literature from Stanford University. Her second novel, Either/Or, will publish in May.
FAQs
Copies of the book will be shipped on or as close to publication date (2.15.22) as possible. Ticket holders will receive tracking via email.
Ticket holders will receive a login link closer to event start date with Crowdcast password.
This is a ticketed live-stream event, and a recording will be available for one week after event date for those unable to watch live.
To attend the event, you must purchase a ticket through the Eventbrite page linked above. Purchase of Pure Colour made through the bookstore website does not grant entry to the event.
We cannot ship books outside of the U.S. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Bay Area Stand Up Comedy: A Humorous History-Book Release Party
2022-02-19 16:00 - 17:30 | Alameda Comedy Club, 2431 Central Ave., Alameda, 94501
The comedians of the San Francisco Bay Area changed comedy forever. The Bay Area has long been a place for comedians to develop their voice and hone their stand-up skills. Popular spots included Cobb’s, The Punch Line, hungry i, the Purple Onion, Tommy T’s, Brainwash and the holy grail of San Francisco comedy during the 1980s boom, the Holy City Zoo. Join comedians Nina G and OJ Patterson on a hilarious and thoughtful tour through the history of Bay Area comedy. Will include book talk and signing.
Bring proof of vaccination or recent negative Covid test (less than 72 hours) and your ID. We will have your name on the guest list at the host stand when we greet you.
About the authors
Nina G is a stand-up comedian, author and disability advocate. She performs and gives keynote speeches at colleges, companies and conferences across the world. Nina is the author of Stutterer Interrupted: The Comedian Who Almost Didn’t Happen and the children’s book Once Upon an Accommodation: A Book About Learning Disabilities. She is a Bay Area native spanning five generations. Additionally, she has contributed to books, blogs and articles and is a favorite among podcasters and comedy audiences all over. For more on Nina, go to www.NinaGcomedian.com.
OJ Patterson is a writer, comedian and homebrew historian born and raised in Pittsburg, California. A “retired stand-up,” he’s contributed to numerous online and print publications, including his award-winning blog Courting Comedy and as an entertainment copywriter. OJ Patterson currently resides in the greater Los Angeles area and unofficially has the best laugh in the room.
Free
https://www.alamedacomedy.com/shows/163219?fbclid=IwAR21ylmthM8mH7wl3O-HhpYg-eaWR0g3oS-VvLKLNr5kq9-d0nFkQV4eE18

Virtual Event: Emily Maloney with Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
2022-02-21 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Monday, February 21st at 6pm PT when Emily Maloney celebrates her book, Cost of Living, with Alex Marzano-Lesnevich on Zoom!
Zoom Registration
Praise for Cost of Living
“In Cost of Living, Emily Maloney explores from many perspectives, and with deep empathy, intelligence, and humor the real suffering caused by medical debt and the underpayment of healthcare workers. Like Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed and Atul Gawande’s Complications, Maloney’s memoir is at once illuminating and alarming. It will leave readers asking: why has no one ever written a book like this before?”
—Suzanne Koven, MD, author of Letter to a Young Female Physician
“Emily Maloney’s Cost of Living is a brilliant book, a staggering indictment of a brutal and arbitrary healthcare system that shapes our days in ways so small it often goes right over our heads. On top of that, it’s gorgeously written–clear, exacting, rigorous, compassionate–in sentences that lift off the page like song.”
—Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
“I’ve never read anything like Emily Maloney’s Cost of Living, a devastatingly precise, thoughtful accounting of what it costs to stay alive in capitalist America. In essays rife with vivid characters in unforgettable scenes and stitched through with vulnerability, Maloney offers a clear-eyed assessment of our disastrous medical system. From the years-long medical debt of surviving a suicide attempt to the deadly fate facing untreated pain patients, Maloney’s writing indicts the system while honoring the humanity of those caught in it. Everyone with a mortal body should read this book. I hope it creates change.”
—Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, author of The Fact of a Body
About Cost of Living
The searing intimacy of Girl, Interrupted combined with the uncomfortable truths of The Empathy Exams in a collection of essays chronicling one woman’s experiences as both patient and caregiver, giving a unique perspective from both sides of the hospital bed.
What does it cost to live?
When we fall ill, our lives are itemized on a spreadsheet. A thousand dollars for a broken leg, a few hundred for a nasty cut while cooking dinner. Then there are the greater costs for even greater misfortunes. The car accidents, breast cancers, blood diseases, and dark depressions.
When Emily Maloney was nineteen she tried to kill herself. An act that would not only cost a great deal personally, but also financially, sending her down a dark spiral of misdiagnoses, years spent in and out of hospitals and doctor’s offices, and tens of thousands owed in medical debt. To work to pay off this crippling burden, Emily becomes an emergency room technician. Doing the grunt work in a hospital, and taking care of patients at their most vulnerable moments, chronicling these interactions in searingly beautiful, surprising ways.
Shocking and often slyly humorous, Cost of Living is a brilliant examination of just what exactly our troubled healthcare system asks us to pay, as well as a look at what goes on behind the scenes at our hospitals and in the minds of caregivers.
About Emily Maloney
Emily Maloney’s work has appeared in Glamour, Virginia Quarterly Review, Best American Essays, and the American Journal of Nursing, among others. She has worked as a dog groomer, pastry chef, general contractor, tile setter, and catalog model and has sold her ceramics at art fairs. Maloney has twice been awarded a MacDowell Fellowship. She lives in Evanston, Illinois.

9th Ave: Isaac Fellman with Charlie Jane Anders
2022-02-22 19:00 - 20:00 | Green Apple Books 9th Avenue, 1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94122, United States
Join us on Tuesday, February 22nd at 7pm PT when Isaac Fellman celebrates the launch of his new novel, Dead Collections, with Charlie Jane Anders at 9th Ave!
This event is free to attend, but registration is required for those attending in person.
Register on Eventbrite for in-person here
Masks and Proof of Vaccination are Required for In-Person Attendance.
Or watch online by registering here
(No need to register via Eventbrite for online attendance)
Praise for Dead Collections
“This book kept delighting and astonishing me with little insights and conversations that felt like I was eavesdropping on people I desperately wanted to be friends with. Utterly refreshing and thrilling. Dead Collections is a marvel that left me feeling as if miracles might lurk behind every doorway and inside every old box of papers.” –Charlie Jane Anders, author of Victories Greater Than Death
“There’s something of the feeling that comes from hanging out at your friend’s work after-hours – a little fuzzy, a little surreal, a sense of getting away with something without a commensurate sense of what, if any, rules one is breaking. A remarkably efficient book about untidyness.” –Daniel M. Lavery, author of Something That May Shock and Discredit You
About Dead Collections
A whirlwind romance between an eccentric archivist and a grieving widow explores what it means to be at home in your own body in this clever, humorous, and heartfelt novel.
When archivist Sol meets Elsie, the larger than life widow of a moderately famous television writer who’s come to donate her wife’s papers, there’s an instant spark. But Sol has a secret: he suffers from an illness called vampirism, and hides from the sun by living in his basement office. On their way to falling in love, the two traverse grief, delve into the Internet fandom they once unknowingly shared, and navigate the realities of transphobia and the stigmas of carrying the “vampire disease.”
Then, when strange things start happening at the collection, Sol must embrace even more of the unknown to save himself and his job. DEAD COLLECTIONS is a wry novel full of heart and empathy, that celebrates the journey, the difficulties and joys, in finding love and comfort within our own bodies.
About Isaac Fellman
Isaac Fellman is the author of The Breath of the Sun (published under his pre-transition first name), which won the 2019 Lambda Literary Award for LGBT Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror. He is an archivist at a queer historical society in San Francisco.
About Charlie Jane Anders
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy, along with the forthcoming short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. She’s also the author of Never Say You Can’t Survive (August 2021), a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week.With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

Afternoon Craft Conversations with Ingrid Rojas Contreras
2022-02-23 14:30 - 15:30 | De La Salle Hall: Hagerty Lounge, 928 St. Marys Road, Moraga, CA, 94575, United States
DATE & TIME:

Wednesday, February 23, 2022 – 2:30 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.

LOCATION:
De La Salle Hall: Hagerty Lounge, 1928 St. Marys Road, Moraga, CA 94575
View a map and get directions.

DESCRIPTION:
Ingrid Rojas Contreras was born and raised in Bogotá, Columbia. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree won the Silver Medal in First Fiction from the California Book Awards. She is now working on a family memoir about her grandfather, a curandero from Columbia who was said to have the power to move the clouds.

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