Litseen

New releases from Pelekinesis Press
2017-06-10 18:00 - 20:00 UTC | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Join us for a special evening of sharing from three Pelekinesis authors reading from their latest books!
PETER CHERCHES: Autobiography Without Words
DON SKILES: Rain After Midnight
PETER WORTSMAN: Footprints in Wet Cement
Called “one of the innovators of the short short story” by Publishers Weekly, Peter Cherches is a writer, singer and lyricist. Over the past 40 years his writing, both fiction and nonfiction, has appeared in dozens of magazines, anthologies and websites. His first recording as a jazz vocalist, “Mercerized! Songs of Johnny Mercer,” was released in 2016. He is the author of three previous prose collections, most recently “Lift Your Right Arm,” which Pelekinesis published in 2013. Cherches is a native of Brooklyn, New York.
Dubbed “a 20th-century Brother Grimm” (Bloomsbury Review) and “a delinquent Hans Christian Andersen” (by playwright Mark O’Donnell), Peter Wortsman is the author of work in multiple modes, including a previous book of short prose fiction, “A Modern Way To Die” (1991); a travel memoir, “Ghost Dance in Berlin, A Rhapsody in Gray” (2013); and a novel, “Cold Earth Wanderers” (2014). He collaborated with artist Harold Wortsman on an artists’ book, “it-t=i” (2004) and with photographer Jean-Luc Dubin on a photo essay “New York, NY 1978” (2016). He is also the author of two stage plays. His travel writing has been included five years in a row in The Best Travel Writing, 2008-2012, and again in 2016. He is also a critically acclaimed translator from German into English.
Don Skiles is the author of “Miss America and Other Stories”, “The James Dean Jacket Story”, and “Football”. His work has appeared in “Quaartsiluni,” “Snowmonkey,” “Silenced Press,” “Over the Transom,” “MungBeing,” and “Chicago Quarterly Review.” His poetry appears in three books from Viking Dog Press/Conehenge Studios (with the work of painter Claribel Cone): “18 Views of San Francisco,” “Sono Choushi!” and “Blue Rhapsody.” Skiles lives in San Francisco.

Paseo Artistico: Tender Buttons
2017-06-10 15:30 - 17:30 UTC | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
An afternoon of bay area poetry <3

Adeline Nip
2017-06-10 10:00 - 12:00 UTC | SF Public Library, 100 Larkin Street, San Francisco, 94102, United States
Book talk and signing by author Adeline Nip.
Writers Carol Liang and Tymo Lin will also participate in signing their new books.

Bridging: A One-Day Writing Retreat
2017-06-10 08:00 - 21:00 UTC | Saint Mary’s College of California, 1928 Saint Mary's Road, Moraga, CA, 94575, United States
Hedgebrook and SMC MFA in Creative Writing are collaborating to present a one-day writing retreat for women, trans women, genderqueer women, and non-binary people.
Keynote speaker:
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of seven novels and three short story collections. Her most recent novel We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves was short listed for the Man Booker Prize, winner of the 2014 PEN/Faulkner Award and The California Book Award for Fiction. The Jane Austen Book Club spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list and was a New York Times Notable Book. Fowler’s previous novel, Sister Noon, was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Faulkner Award for fiction. Her debut novel, Sarah Canary, was a New York Times Notable Book, as was her second novel, The Sweetheart Season. In addition, Sarah Canary won the Commonwealth medal for best first novel by a Californian, and was listed for the Irish Times International Fiction Prize as well as the Bay Area Book Reviewers Prize. Fowler’s short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award in 1999, and her collection What I Didn’t See won the World Fantasy Award in 2011. Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children and seven grandchildren, live in Santa Cruz, California. She is the co-founder of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and has served as president of the Clarion Foundation (also known as Clarion San Diego).
Workshops
From Artist Statement to Press Kit: A Po-Biz* Workshop
Raina J. León has been published in numerous journals as a writer of poetry, fiction and nonfiction. She is a Cave Canem graduate fellow (2006), CantoMundo fellow, Macondo fellow, and member of the Carolina African American Writers Collective, She is the author of three collections of poetry, Canticle of Idols, Boogeyman Dawn, and sombra: (dis)locate (2016) and the chapbook, profeta without refuge (2016). She has received fellowships and residencies with the Montana Artists Refuge, the Macdowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, the Tyrone Guthrie Center in Annamaghkerrig, Ireland and Ragdale. She also is a founding editor of The Acentos Review, an online quarterly, international journal devoted to the promotion and publication of Latinx arts. She is an associate professor of education at Saint Mary’s College of California. www.rainaleon.com
*Poetry Business

Story Development: Plot, Character and 7 Steps to Authentic Storytelling
Angie Powers has an M.F.A. in English and Creative Writing from Mills College, where she won the Amanda Davis Thesis Award for her novel, The Blessed. She also has a Certificate in Screenwriting from the Professional Programs at UCLA. She is the co-director and co-writer of the short Little Mutinies (distributed by Frameline and an official selection of the Palm Springs International Short Fest) andwas a quarter-finalist for the Nicholl Fellowship and at Blue Cat Screenplay Competition for the full-length screenplay of Little Mutinies. She is currently in development on a feature-length comedy Lost in the Middle. She is a teacher and cofounder at bookwritingworld.com. Angiepowers.com

Flash Nonfiction: Sharpening Your Story for the Short and Long Haul
Jill Kolongowski is the author of Life Lessons Harry Potter Taught Me, forthcoming from Ulysses Press. She is also the managing editor at YesYes Books. Her essays have won Sundog Lit’s First Annual Contest series and the Diana Woods Memorial Prize in Creative Nonfiction at Lunch Ticket magazine. Other essays are published in Profane, Sweet: A Literary Confection, Forklift, Ohio, Southern Indiana Review, Fugue, and elsewhere. Jill was born in Michigan, but now lives near San Francisco, where she teaches writing, hikes, and watches Chopped marathons.

Applying for Fellowships and Residencies: Writing Personal Statements and Project Proposals
Rashaan Alexis Meneses has received fellowships from The MacDowell Colony, The International Retreat for Writers at Hawthornden Castle, UK, and the Jacob K. Javits Program. Her fiction and non-fiction is published in various journals and anthologies, including Kartika Review, Puerto Del Sol, New Letters, BorderSenses, Kurungabaa, The Coachella Review, Pembroke Magazine, Doveglion Press, and the anthology Growing Up Filipino II: More Stories for Young Adults. You can find her at rashaanalexismeneses.com

Cost
$115 until May 6
$130 after May 6
Limited partial scholarships available. Email Joanne Furio for an application.
Special accommodations available. Email Joanne Furio.
Cost includes:

Food (three meals, happy hour, and evening cake and coffee)
Vegan and gluten-free options available
Networking opportunities with Bay Area women writers’ groups
An evening keynote by Karen Joy Fowler, author of We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Sister Noon and Black Glass and Hedgebrook alumna
Your choice of one of four afternoon workshops

Funds raised from the retreat benefit both programs and the newly established Hedgebrook scholarship for a St. Mary’s MFA student.
ONLINE PAYMENT AND REGISTRATION
If you have questions please email Joanne Furio or Amy Wheeler.

Lunada Literary Lounge
2017-06-09 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Galería de la Raza, 2857 24th Street, San Francisco , CA, 94110, United States
Lunada’s Spring 2017 Season Closer features Saint-Hills, DJ Glo, and 10 spots on our Open Mic.
Open Mic sign-up at 7:15pm: 10 spots on the list, 5 min. each, inviting poets, emcees, singer/ songwriters, storytellers, laureates, and first-timers to share their voices under the lunar spotlight.
Lunada closes a phenomenal 2017 Spring season with much pride, featuring Brazilian emerging artist, singer producer Saint-Hills, and Nuyorican DJ Glo – spinning tribal, caribbean, latinx, and afro beats. With deep love for our pueblo, we enter the summer on our feet, dancing under the full moon at Galeria de la Raza.
Hosted by Sandra García Rivera

LUNADA is the Bay Area’s only full moon bilingual literary ritual & performance gathering devoted to spoken word, música, song, and story. Located in the heart of the Mission District at Galería de la Raza, and guest curated by some of the Bay Area’s most dynamic word slingers and artists, each LUNADA features community poets, local legends, visiting mystics, and other mero meros of the stage. Voted Best Literary Night of 2016 by the SF Bay Guardian.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Saint-Hills is a 20-year-old Brazilian producer and singer, known for his unique electro-pop sound, which contains strong influences of Brazilian music and culture. In 2015 Saint-Hills moved from his hometown Brasilia, Brazil to San Francisco, USA, where both his career and personal life took flight. In San Francisco, Saint-Hills produced and released his first single, the bilingual song “(Geo)graphy.” Saint-Hills is also the first transgender/gender non-conforming singer to come out of Brazil.
DJ Glo, a Nuyorican, is passionate about the art of DJing and a student learning everyday. Influenced by the salsa, bachata, merengue, and freestlyle music they heard growing up, you can expect to hear (and feel) tribal, caribbean, latinx, and/or afro beats while listening to their set.

Annie Hartnett
2017-06-09 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Annie Hartnett discusses her new novel, Rabbit Cake, with Ellen O’Connell Whittet.
About Rabbit Cake
Fans of Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go Bernadette and and Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You will delight in Annie Hartnett’s debut, a darkly comic novel about a young girl named Elvis trying to figure out her place in a world without her mother.
Twelve-year-old Elvis Babbitt has a head for the facts: she knows science proves yellow is the happiest color, she knows a healthy male giraffe weighs about 3,000 pounds, and she knows that the naked mole rat is the longest living rodent. She knows she should plan to grieve her mother, who has recently drowned while sleepwalking, for exactly eighteen months. But there are things Elvis doesn’t yet know―like how to keep her sister Lizzie from poisoning herself while sleep-eating or why her father has started wearing her mother’s silk bathrobe around the house. Elvis investigates the strange circumstances of her mother’s death and finds comfort, if not answers, in the people (and animals) of Freedom, Alabama. As hilarious a storyteller as she is heartbreakingly honest, Elvis is a truly original voice in this exploration of grief, family, and the endurance of humor after loss

Cleave + Liminal
2017-06-09 19:00 - 21:30 UTC | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
This is a special book release/collaboration between Cleave: Bay Area Women Writers and The Liminal Center. 9 women writers, represented in anthology Cleave/Liminal, will read from their work. Issues of the anthology will be available for purchase with all profits going to the Liminal Center for women writing in a shared working environment in Oakland.

Glen David Gold
2017-06-09 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Local luminary Paul Madonna will be in conversation with acclaimed novelist Glen David Gold re: his new book “On To The Next Dream.”

Danielle Krysa
2017-06-09 18:00 - 20:00 UTC | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
This book is duct tape for the mouth of every artist’s inner critic. Silencing that stifling voice once and for all, this salve for creatives introduces ten truths they must face in order to defeat self-doubt. Each encouraging chapter deconstructs a pivotal moment on the path to success—fear of the blank page, the dangers of jealousy, sharing work with others—and explains how to navigate roadblock. Your Inner Critic is a Big Jerk is packed with helpful anecdotes, thoughts from successful creatives, and practical exercises gleaned from Danielle Krysa’s years of working with professional and aspiring artists—plus riotously apt illustrations from art world darling Martha Rich—this book arms readers with the most essential tool for their toolbox: the confidence they need to get down to business and make good work.

Have a Poet for Lunch w/ Daphne Gottlieb
2017-06-09 12:30 - 13:00 UTC | CA
Enjoy a lunchtime poetic performance in the gallery with Daphne Gottlieb in conjunction with Pride Month and the exhibition Cary Leibowitz: Museum Show.
Daphne Gottlieb stitches together the ivory tower and the gutter just using her tongue. She is the award-winning author of ten books including the new Pretty Much Dead, short stories on homelessness and mental illness. Previous works include Dear Dawn: Aileen Wuornos in her Own Words, letters from death row by the “first female serial killer.” She is also the author of five books of poetry, editor of two anthologies, and, with artist Diane DiMassa, a graphic novel.

Thad Carhart
2017-06-08 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
Thad Carhart reads from his delightful memoir, Finding Fontainebleau: An American Boy in France, just out in paperback.

“While bringing alive this redolent Gallic chapter of his boyhood (baguettes from the boulangerie; inkwells and laborious handwriting exercises at school), Mr. Carhart also resurrects the mood and mores of a particular window in time: the 1950s of Ike and Elvis’s America, and postwar France. . . . Like the castle, his memoir imaginatively and smoothly integrates multiple influences, styles and whims.”–The New York Times

For a young American boy in the 1950s, Fontainebleau was a sight both strange and majestic, home to a continual series of adventures: a different language to learn, weekend visits to nearby Paris, family road trips to Spain and Italy. Then there was the chateau itself: a sprawling palace once the residence of kings, its grounds the perfect place to play hide-and-seek. The curiosities of the small town and the time with his family as expats left such an impression on him that thirty years later Carhart returned to France with his wife to raise their two children. Touring Fontainebleau again as an adult, he began to appreciate its influence on French style, taste, art, and architecture. Each trip to Fontainebleau introduces him to entirely new aspects of the chateau’s history, enriching his memories and leading him to Patrick Ponsot, the head of the chateau’s restoration, who becomes Carhart’s guide to the hidden Fontainebleau.
What emerges is an intimate chronicle of a time and place few have experienced. In warm, precise prose, Carhart reconstructs the wonders of his childhood as an American in postwar France, attending French schools with his brothers and sisters. His firsthand account brings to life nothing less than France in the 1950s, from the parks and museums of Paris to the rigors of French schooling to the vast chateau of Fontainebleau and its village, built, piece by piece, over many centuries. Finding Fontainebleau is for those captivated by the French way of life, for armchair travelers, and for anyone who has ever fallen in love with a place they want to visit over and over again.
The son of an air force officer, Thad Carhart grew up in a variety of places, including Washington, D.C.; Fontainebleau, France; Minneapolis; Amherst, Massachusetts; and Tokyo. After graduating from Yale, he worked for the State Department as an interpreter. He is also the author of The Piano Shop on the Left Bank and Across the Endless River, a historical novel. He lives in Paris.

Jenny Forrester + Ariel Gore
2017-06-08 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Jenny Forrester in conversation with Ariel Gore about her memoir, Narrow River, Wide Sky

Praise for Jenny Forester

Narrow River, Wide Sky unwrites the story of family and America through the flutter of hearts beating or beaten up, through a skull on the piano, through the desert of our longings into the river of our sorrow—or is it hope, or maybe love, that keeps us alive in spite of ourselves. Jenny Forrester has hit the mother lode. –-Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water and The Small Backs of Children

Forrester’s debut memoir is a lyrical account of coming of age as a woman in the West. Amid urgent geography, aching choices, and uncertain faith, Forrester explores the moments and forces that hold us together and shape our lives. This family flickers on the page like a constellation; Forrester is both a star unto herself and an inextricable part of the glowing whole. — Megan Kruse, author of Call Me Home

A taut memoir about coming of age in the middle of nowhere where there are no minor decisions. Narrow River, Wide Sky is a haunting, intimate visit to the unforgiving landscape of life. –-Mark Russell, author of God Is Disappointed in You and Apocrypha Now

About Narrow River, Wide Sky

On the Colorado Plateau between slot canyons and rattlesnakes, Jenny Forrester grew up with her mother and brother in a single-wide trailer proudly displaying an American flag. Forrester’s powerfully eloquent story reveals a rural small town comprising God-fearing Republicans, ranchers, Mormons, and Native Americans. With sensitivity and resilience, Forrester navigates feelings of isolation, an abusive boyfriend, sexual assault, and a failed college attempt to forge a separate identity. As young adults, after their mother’s accidental death, Forrester and her brother are left with an increasingly strained relationship that becomes a microcosm of America’s political landscape. Narrow River, Wide Sky is a breathtaking, determinedly truthful story about one woman’s search for identity within the mythology of family and America itself.

Why There Are Words: Arrivals
2017-06-08 19:15 - 21:15 UTC | Studio 333, 333 Caledonia Street, Sausalito , CA, 94965, United States
Join Why There Are Words (WTAW) on June 8th, 2017, at Studio 333 in Sausalito as seven acclaimed authors explore the theme Arrivals. Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:15. Entry fee is $10 at the door, though donations to WTAW, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, are always welcome.
Readers: Elaine Fletcher Chapman, Barbara Edelman, Rachel Hall, Toni Mirosevich, Lisa Rizzo, Andrew Roe, and Renate Stendhal.

Andrew Shvarts
2017-06-08 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park , CA, 94025, United States
Join us to celebrate the launch of Royal Bastards by local author Andrew Shvarts whose action-packed debut champions diversity, counsels perseverance, and highlights the human cost of war. Think Game of Thrones meets The Breakfast Club. Andrew will be in conversation with Tara Sim, author of Timekeeper

Laleh Khadivi
2017-06-08 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
in conversation with Micheline Aharonian Marcom
celebrating the release of
A Good Country
By Laleh Khadivi
from Bloomsbury Publishing
A timely novel about the radicalization of a Muslim teen in California–about where identity truly lies, and how we find it.
Laguna Beach, California, 2010. Alireza Courdee, a fourteen-year-old straight-A student and chemistry whiz, takes his first hit of pot. In as long as it takes to inhale and exhale, he is transformed from the high-achieving son of Iranian immigrants into a happy-go-lucky stoner. He loses his virginity, takes up surfing, and sneaks away to all-night raves. For the first time, Reza–now Rez–feels like an American teen. Life is smooth; even lying to his strict parents comes easily.
But then he changes again, falling out with the bad boy surfers and in with a group of kids more awake to the world around them, who share his background, and whose ideas fill him with a very different sense of purpose. Within a year, Reza and his girlfriend are making their way to Syria to be part of a Muslim nation rising from the ashes of the civil war.
Timely, nuanced, and emotionally forceful, A Good Country is a gorgeous meditation on modern life, religious radicalization, and a young man caught among vastly different worlds. What we are left with at the dramatic end is not an assessment of good or evil, east versus west, but a lingering question that applies to all modern souls: Do we decide how to live, or is our life decided for us?
Laleh Khadivi was born in Esfahan, Iran, in 1977. In the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution her family fled, finally settling in Canada and then the United States. Khadivi received her MFA from Mills College and was a Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction at Emory University. In 2008 she received The Whiting Writers’ Award. In 2009 she published her first novel The Age of Orphans. Laleh Khadivi lives in California.
Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the author of five books including the critically acclaimed trilogy of novels: Three Apples Fell from Heaven (2001), The Daydreaming Boy (2004) which earned her the 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship as well as the 2005 PEN/USA Award for Fiction, and Draining the Sea (2008). She currently teaches Creative Writing at Mills College and is also on the faculty of the Goddard College MFA in Creative Writing Program.

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi: Kintu
2017-06-08 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi to the store to discuss and sign Kintu, on Thursday, June 8th at 7:00 pm. She will be in conversation with DIESEL bookseller Aaron Bady, who also wrote the introduction.
First published in Kenya in 2014 to critical and popular acclaim, Kintu is a modern classic, a multilayered narrative that reimagines the history of Uganda through the cursed bloodline of the Kintu clan. Divided into six sections, the novel begins in 1750, when Kintu Kidda sets out for the capital to pledge allegiance to the new leader of the Buganda Kingdom. Along the way, he unleashes a curse that will plague his family for generations. In an ambitious tale of a clan and a nation, Makumbi weaves together the stories of Kintu’s descendants as they seek to break from the burden of their shared past and reconcile the inheritance of tradition and the modern world that is their future.

Voz Sin Tinta: Our monthly bilingual poetry series and open mic.
2017-06-08 18:30 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA
Sponsored by Alejandro Murguia, curated by Marguerite Munoz and Rene Vaz.
This month’s readers TBD.

Kevin Kwan: Rich People Problems
2017-06-08 12:30 - 14:30 UTC | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
Kevin Kwan, bestselling author of Crazy Rich Asians and China Rich Girlfriend, is back with an uproarious new novel of a family riven by fortune, an ex-wife driven psychotic with jealousy, a battle royal fought through couture gown sabotage, and the heir to one of Asia’s greatest fortunes locked out of his inheritance.
When Nicholas Young hears that his grandmother, Su Yi, is on her deathbed, he rushes to be by her bedside—but he’s not alone. The entire Shang-Young clan has convened from all corners of the globe to stake claim on their matriarch’s massive fortune. With each family member vying to inherit Tyersall Park—a trophy estate on 64 prime acres in the heart of Singapore—Nicholas’s childhood home turns into a hotbed of speculation and sabotage. As her relatives fight over heirlooms, Astrid Leong is at the center of her own storm, desperately in love with her old sweetheart Charlie Wu, but tormented by her ex-husband—a man hell bent on destroying Astrid’s reputation and relationship. Meanwhile Kitty Pong, married to China’s second richest man, billionaire Jack Bing, still feels second best next to her new step-daughter, famous fashionista Colette Bing.
Rich People Problems is a sweeping novel that takes us from the elegantly appointed mansions of Manila to the secluded private islands in the Sulu Sea, from a kidnapping at Hong Kong’s most elite private school to a surprise marriage proposal at an Indian palace, caught on camera by the telephoto lenses of paparazzi. Kevin Kwan’s hilarious, gloriously wicked new novel reveals the long-buried secrets of Asia’s most privileged families and their rich people problems.
Kevin Kwan is the author of the international bestsellers Crazy Rich Asians, soon to be a major motion picture, and China Rich Girlfriend. Born in Singapore, he has called New York’s West Village home since 1995.

Trina Robbins + Artists
2017-06-07 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith is excited to host author Trina Robbins for her new graphic novel, A Minyen Yidn! Also in attendence will be a few of the artists that contributed to the work: Steve Leialoha, Caryn Leschen, and Robert Triptow. Please join us!
A Minyen Yidn is based on the 1938 memoir of Trina Robbin’s father, Muttel (Mutye) Perechudnik, and was originally published in Yiddish. This memoir features a collection of 13 stories drawn from Muttel’s (later Max Perlson’s) life growing up in a shtetl in Belarus and immigrating to Brooklyn in the late 1910s at the age of 16. Here he became a journalist, contributing short stories in Yiddish to Jewish newspapers. The memoir has been translated to English and adapted to graphic novel format by his daughter, Trina Robbins, who says of the stories within: “They are slyly humorous portraits of his little village in Belarus, and of life in Brooklyn after he came to America. It’s a snapshot of a way of life that would end with the coming of the Nazis and WW2, although none of them knew it yet.”
The cover was drawn by famed underground comic artist Barbara Mendes and each of the 13 stories was recreated visually by the following artists: Shary Flenniken, Eve Furchgott, Miriam Katin, Miriam Libicki, Michael Netzer, Anne Timmons, Robert Triptow, Jen Vaughn, Steve Leialoha, Elizabeth Watasin, Caryn Leschen, Joan Steacy, Ken Steacy, and Terry Laban.

Moon Drop presents Prince
2017-06-07 19:00 - 21:30 UTC | Nomadic Press: Uptown, 2301 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
Moon Drop is a quarterly reading series first Wednesdays.
Each reading will have a theme, June 7th being The Beautiful One’s Birthday will be a tribute to Prince.
With readings about or inspired by Prince’s life and music, featured readers will include Cassandra Dallett, Jenee Darden, Ingrid Keir, Joel Landmine, Natasha Dennerstein, Tomas Moniz, Airial Clark, James Cagney and Amber Flame. There willl also be seven open mic spots. Show up early and get your name on the list!!!!!!!!!!
We will feature purple everything!!
Let’s Work!!!
Cassandra Dallett and Kelechi Ubozoh

Jess Arndt
2017-06-07 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Reading from her short fiction debut, Large Animals.
Jess Arndt’s striking debut collection confronts what it means to have a body. Boldly straddling the line between the imagined and the real, the masculine and the feminine, the knowable and the impossible, these fourteen stories are an exhilarating expression of voice and deliver a profoundly original punch to the gut. In “Jeff,” Lily Tomlin confuses Jess for Jeff, instigating a dark and hilarious identity crisis. In “Together,” a couple battles a mysterious and unnamed STD that slowly undoes their relationship, while outside a ferocious weed colonizes their urban garden. And in “Contrails,” a character on the precipice of a seismic change goes on a tour of past lovers, confronting their own reluctance to move on.
Arndt’s subjects are canny noticers even while they remain dangerously blind to their own truest impulses. Often unnamed, these narrators challenge the limits of language—collectively, their voices create a transgressive new formal space that makes room for the undefined, the nonconforming, the queer. And yet, while they crave connection, love, and understanding, they are constantly at risk of destroying themselves. Large Animals pitches toward the heart, pushing at all our most tender parts—our sex organs, our geography, our words, and the tendons and nerves of our culture.
Jess Arndt received her MFA at Bard and was a 2013 Graywolf SLS Fellow and 2010 Fiction Fellow at the New York Foundation of the Arts. She has written for Fence, BOMB, Aufgabe, and the art journal Parkett, among others. She is a co-founder of New Herring Press, and lives in Los Angeles.

An evening of poetry w/ Hass, Manuel, + Hood
2017-06-07 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Robert Hass, Douglas Manuel, and Charles Hood to the store to discuss and sign their latest works on Wednesday, June 7th at 7:00 pm.
In addition to his magisterial poetry, Robert Hass is beloved for his incisive, meditative criticism. A Little Book on Form takes up the central contradiction between poetry as genre and the poetics of the imagination. A wealth of vocabulary exists with which to talk about, map, and explain poetry in rigorous formal terms, but the more intuitive, creative aspects of a poet’s work and processes are more elusive: if the most interesting parts of form are those expressive, essential gestures inside it, how can we come to a better understanding of form as passion, as art?
A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass’s formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic. In suggestive, informal notes, Hass breaks the idea of a poem down to its barest building blocks, from the one line haiku to the villanelle and sonnet. His approach singularly employs postmodern perspectives on shape, thought, feeling, content, and movement, calling on Catullus and Allen Ginsberg, Issa and Czeslaw Milosz. Begun as a project for students of poetry, Hass investigates the ancient roots of the poetic impulse, taking a wide-ranging look at the most intense experience of human thought and feeling in language.
A Little Book on Form is a rousing reexamination of our most enduring mode of literature from one of our greatest living poets, who writes prose every bit as zestful, penetrating, and sure-footed as his poetry.
Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials, Sun Under Wood, Human Wishes, Praise, and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Transtromer’s Selected Poems and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
A brave, brilliant debut about the African-American experience in the American Midwest. A contemplation of race, masculinity, religion, and class, Testify, in a very personal way, confronts some of the most critical issues in today’s society.
A book of elegiac ambivalence, Testify’s speaker often finds himself trapped between received binaries: black and white, ghetto and suburban, atheism and Catholicism. In many ways, this work is a bildungsroman detailing the maturation of a black man raised in the crack-laden 1980s, with hip-hop, jazz, and blues as its soundtrack. Rendered with keen attention to the economic decline of the Midwest due to the departure of the automotive industry, this book portrays the speaker wrestling with his city’s demise, family relationships, interracial love, and notions of black masculinity. Never letting anyone, including the speaker, off the hook, Testify refuses sentimentality and didacticism and dwells in a space of uncertainty, where meaning and identity are messy, complicated, and multivalent.
Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and a MFA from Butler University where he was the Managing Editor of Booth a Journal. He is currently a Middleton and Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California where he is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. He was a recipient of the Chris McCarthy Scholarship for the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and has been Poetry Editor for Gold Line Press as well as one of the Managing Editors of Ricochet Editions. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rhino, North American Review, The Chattahoochee Review, New Orleans Review, Crab Creek Review, Many Mountains Moving, and elsewhere.
Brimming with natural history and bright flashes of language, the poems in Partially Excited States take us from Paleolithic caves to modern movie theaters, and along the way we fix time machines with Tom Hanks, enter a Rousseau painting, and collect diamonds from the moons of Neptune.
Charles Hood is a writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, a photographer, and an artist. His many books include Mouth, South x South, Rio de Dios: 13 Histories of the Los Angeles River, The Half-Life of Salt: Voices of the Enola Gay, and Red Sky, Red Water: Powell on the Colorado. A longtime animal spotter, he has seen more than six hundred mammal species and more than five thousand species of wild birds. In his global travels, he has trekked to the South Pole, been lost in a Tibetan whiteout, and recovered from bubonic plague. He lives in Palmdale, California.

Beat Poetry: The Revolutionary Letters of Diane DiPrima
2017-06-07 18:00 - 19:00 UTC | Mad Monk Center for Anachronistic Media, 2454 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Twice a month Mel Ash (http://www.melash.com/about_mel_ash.php) leads visitors in a very authentic Beat Poetry experience with a featured writer of the Beat Generation.

Diana Aehegma, Claudia Cortese, + Steffi Drewes
2017-06-06 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Diana Aehegma grew up on the Big Island of Hawaii, and lives in Oakland, CA. She earned her MA and MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where she won the Ann Fields Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Monday Night, the Tinfish Press anthology Jack London is Dead, The Press at CSU Fresno anthology Shadowed: Unheard Voices, the Featherboard Writing Series / Aggregate Space Gallery chapbook Crossing Paths, and at Bang Out SF, among other venues.
Claudia Cortese’s first book, Wasp Queen (Black Lawrence Press, 2016) explores the privilege and pathology, trauma and brattiness of suburban girlhood. Cortese’s poems and stories have appeared in Blackbird, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, and The Offing, among others, and she writes reviews for Muzzle Magazine. The daughter of Neapolitan immigrants, Cortese grew up in Ohio and lives in New Jersey. She also lives at claudia-cortese.com
Steffi Drewes is the author of Tell Me Every Anchor Every Arrow (Kelsey Street Press, 2016) and the poetry chapbooks Magnetic Forest, Cartography Askew, and History of Drawing Circles. Her poems have appeared in various journals and in the anthology It’s night in San Francisco but it’s sunny in Oakland (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2014). She has attended writing and art residencies at Vermont Studio Center and The Wassaic Project in New York. Currently, she works as a freelance writer and editor in the Bay Area.

Lisa Locascio/Golden State 2017: New Writing from California
2017-06-06 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith is thrilled to host writer and editorLisa Locascio for the launch of Golden State 2017: New Writing from California.
Please join us, along with contributorsSusanna Kwan, Rebecca Baumann, Alia Volz, Lyndsey Ellis, Olga Zilberbourg,Jasper Henderson, Kara Vernor, andMicah Perkins, in celebrating the publication of the fourth installment of this terrific annual collection. You can read Lisa’s introduction to the book here.
Lisa Locascio, this year’s Golden State anthology editor, is publisher of Joyland Magazine and editor of the ekphrastic collaboration magazine 7×7. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Bookforum, Santa Monica Review, n+1, Western American Literature, Tin House online, and many other magazines. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University.

Shut Up + Share
2017-06-06 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Have you wondered what your fellow Shut Up & Write writers are up to? Have you wanted to share your own work in a no-pressure environment? Join us at Adobe Books to read your own work and support your fellow SU&W writers. Here’s how it works:
1) Readings are first come, first serve and will last for up to seven minutes.
2) You can read an excerpt from a story, a poem, blog post, article you’re writing, etc. We expect that you’ll use your best judgment about the type of material to read.
3) Sign-ups are first come, first serve on the night of the meetup at the bookstore.
Open to all! More info: i.magdaleno@gmail.com

Lisa Ko
2017-06-06 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her.
With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. They rename him Daniel Wilkinson in their efforts to make him over into their version of an “all-American boy.” But far away from all he’s ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his new life with his mother’s disappearance and the memories of the family and community he left behind.
Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid and moving examination of borders and belonging. It’s the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he’s loved has been taken away–and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past.
This powerful debut is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice.
Lisa Ko’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Narrative, Copper Nickel, the Asian Pacific American Journal, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Writers OMI at Ledig House, the Jerome Foundation, and Blue Mountain Center, among others. A founding coeditor of Hyphen and a fiction editor at Drunken Boat, Ko was born in Queens and lives in Brooklyn.

Quiet Lightning
2017-06-05 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Clarion Music Performing Arts Center, 816 Sacramento St., San Francisco, CA, 94108, United States
Now accepting submissions: 6/5 @ Clarion Music Performing Arts Center
All forms of writing are accepted. This will be a free show, and the first 100 people will receive a book featuring all of the selected writing and cover art by a local artist. Thanks to a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission all authors will be paid, and will read/perform as a literary mixtape, with no introductions or banter.
The deadline is End of Day 5/17. SUBMIT NOW!

Bazaar Writers Salon Reading
2017-06-04 18:00 - 20:00 UTC | Bazaar Cafe, 5927 California St, San Francisco, CA, 94121, United States
Readings by Aamina Ahmad, Peg Alford Pursell, Michael Shewmaker, and Shelley Wong
Hosted by Peter Kline
Aamina Ahmad grew up in London. She completed her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. Her full length play, The Dishonored, toured the UK in 2016. Her short fiction has appeared in The Normal School, The Missouri Review, Ecotone and the anthology, And the World Changed.

Peg Alford Pursell is the author of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow (ELJ Editions, March 2017), a collection of hybrid prose and micro-fictions with praise from Peter Orner, Joan Silber, Antonya Nelson and others. Her stories and poems have appeared in Permafrost, the Los Angeles Review, Forklift Ohio, Joyland Magazine, RHINO, VOLT, and many other journals and anthologies. She is the founder and director of the national reading series Why There Are Words and founder and director of WTAW Press. Visit her at www.pegalfordpursell.com
Michael Shewmaker is the winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and author of Penumbra (Ohio UP, 2017). Born in Texarkana, Texas, he earned an MFA from McNeese State University and a PhD in creative writing from Texas Tech University. His poems have recently appeared in Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Sewanee Review, Poetry Daily, Parnassus, Oxford American, Narrative, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University.
Shelley Wong is the author of RARE BIRDS, a winner of the 2016 Diode Editions chapbook award. Her poems have recently appeared in Crazyhorse, The Volta, Sixth Finch, and Southern Humanities Review. A Kundiman fellow and a Pushcart Prize recipient, she holds an MFA from Ohio State University and lives in Oakland.

Courtney Maum
2017-06-04 15:00 - 16:00 UTC | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Courtney Maum to the store to discuss and sign her new novel, Touch, on Sunday, June 4th at 3:00 pm.
Sloane Jacobsen is one of the world’s most powerful trend forecasters (she was the foreseer of “the swipe”), and global fashion, lifestyle, and tech companies pay to hear her opinions about the future. Her recent forecasts on the family are unwavering: the world is over-populated, and with unemployment, college costs, and food prices all on the rise, having children is an extravagant indulgence.
So it’s no surprise when the tech giant Mammoth hires Sloane to lead their groundbreaking annual conference, celebrating the voluntarily childless. Not far into her contract, Sloane begins to sense the undeniable signs of a movement against electronics that will see people embracing compassion, empathy, and “in-personism” again. She’s struggling with the fact that her predictions are hopelessly out of sync with her employer’s mission and that her closest personal relationship is with her self-driving car when her partner, the French “neo-sensualist” Roman Bellard, reveals that he is about to publish an op-ed on the death of penetrative sex–a post-sexual treatise that instantly goes viral. Despite the risks to her professional reputation, Sloane is nevertheless convinced that her instincts are the right ones, and goes on a quest to defend real life human interaction, while finally allowing in the love and connectedness she’s long been denying herself.
A poignant and amusing call to arms that showcases her signature biting wit and keen eye, celebrated novelist Courtney Maum’s new book is a moving investigation into what it means to be an individual in a globalized world.
Courtney Maum is the author of the novel I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You and the chapbook Notes from Mexico. Her short fiction, book reviews, and essays on the writing life have been widely published in outlets such as The New York Times, Tin House, Electric Literature, and Buzzfeed, and she has co-written films that have debuted at Sundance and won awards at Cannes. At various points in her life, she has been a trend forecaster, a fashion publicist, and a party promoter for Corona Extra. She currently works as a product namer for M-A-C cosmetics from her home in Litchfield County, CT.
