Matthew Zapruder
2017-09-26 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
in conversation with Oscar Villalon (executive editor Zyzzyva Magazine)
celebrating the release of
Why Poetry
from Ecco Press

An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetry’s accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder
In Why Poetry, award-winning poet Matthew Zapruder takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. In lively, lilting prose, he shows us how that misunderstanding interferes with our direct experience of poetry and creates the sense of confusion or inadequacy that many of us feel when faced with it.
Zapruder explores what poems are, and how we can read them, so that we can, as Whitman wrote, “possess the origin of all poems,” without the aid of any teacher or expert. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose.
Anchored in poetic analysis and steered through Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging and conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. While he provides a simple reading method for approaching poems and illuminates concepts like associative movement, metaphor, and negative capability, Zapruder explicitly confronts the obstacles that readers face when they encounter poetry to show us that poetry can be read, and enjoyed, by anyone.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of three collections of poetry, American Linden, The Pajamaist, and Come On All You Ghosts. The Pajamaist was selected as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, and was chosen by Library Journal as one of the top ten poetry volumes of 2006. Come On All You Ghosts was a New York Times Notable Book of the year, and was also selected as the 2010 BooklistEditors’ Choice for poetry, as well as the Northern California Independent Booksellers poetry book of the year. Zapruder has been a Lannan Literary Fellow in Marfa, Texas, and a recipient of a May Sarton Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The recipient of a 2011 Guggenheim Fellowship, Zapruder lives in San Francisco, where he is an editor at Wave Books.
Visit: http://matthewzapruder.wordpress.com/

Santiago Gamboa
2017-09-27 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Santiago Gamboa to the store to read and sign, Return to the Dark Valley, on Wednesday, September 27th at 7:00 pm.
Santiago Gamboa is one of Colombia’s most exciting young writers. In the manner of Roberto Bolaño, Gamboa infuses his kaleidoscopic, cosmopolitan stories with a dose of inky dark noir that makes his novels intensely readable, his characters unforgettable, and his style influential.
Manuela Beltrán, a woman haunted by a troubled childhood she tries to escape through books and poetry; Tertuliano, an Argentine preacher who claims to be the Pope’s son, ready to resort to extreme methods to create a harmonious society; Ferdinand Palacios, a Colombian priest with a dark paramilitary past now confronted with his guilt; Rimbaud, the precocious, brilliant poet whose life was incessant exploration; and, Juana and the consul, central characters in Gamboa’s Night Prayers, who are united in a relationship based equally on hurt and need. These characters animate Gamboa’s richly imagined portrait of a hostile, turbulent world where liberation is found in perpetual movement and determined exploration.

Santiago Gamboa was born in Bogotá, Colombia. His debut novel, Páginas de vuelta (1995), established him as one of the most innovative voices in Colombian literature. He has since published seven novels and two collections of short stories. His journalism appears regularly in El Tiempo (Colombia) and Cromos, and he is a regular contributor to Radio France International. Previously Colombia’s cultural attaché in New Delhi, he has lived in Rome and Paris, and currently lives in Calí, Colombia.

Perfectly Queer-East Bay: Queer Realities
2017-09-27 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | Nomadic Press: Uptown, 2301 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
Guest curator Richard Loranger presents local LGBTQ authors Tim Donnelly, Nazelah Jamison, and Julian Mithra

Josh Weil
2017-09-27 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from his new novel
The Age of Perpetual Light
from Grove Press
A dazzling new work that spans a century and eight tales of light, human progress, and the search for a better life from Josh Weil, one of “the most gifted writers of his generation” (Colum McCann), winner of the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters
Following his debut Dayton Literary Peace Prize-winning novel, The Great Glass Sea, Josh Weil brings together stories selected from a decade of work in a stellar new collection. Beginning at the dawn of the past century, in the early days of electrification, and moving into an imagined future in which the world is lit day and night, The Age of Perpetual Light follows deeply-felt characters through different eras in American history: from a Jewish dry goods peddler who falls in love with an Amish woman while showing her the wonders of an Edison Lamp, to a 1940 farmers’ uprising against the unfair practices of a power company; a Serbian immigrant teenage boy in 1990’s Vermont desperate to catch a glimpse of an experimental satellite, to a back-to-the-land couple forced to grapple with their daughter’s autism during winter’s longest night.
Brilliantly hewn and piercingly observant, these are tales that speak to the all-too-human desire for advancement and the struggle of wounded hearts to find a salve, no matter what the cost. This is a breathtaking book from one of our brightest literary lights.
Josh Weil was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novella collection, The New Valley. A National Book Award “Five Under Thirty-Five” author, he has received fellowships from the Fulbright Foundation, Columbia University, the MacDowell Colony, Bread Loaf, and Sewanee. His fiction has appeared in Granta, Esquire, One Story, and Tin House.
Praise for The Age of Perpetual Light
“A rich, often dazzling collection of short stories linked by themes while ranging widely in style from Babel-like fables to gritty noir and sci-fi . . . engrossing, persuasively detailed and written with a deep affection for the way language can, in masterful hands, convey us to marvelous new worlds.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

InsideStoryTime Frazzle
2017-09-27 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Farley’s East, 33 Grand Avenue, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Readings from Janice Shapiro (Bummer), Ho Lin (China Girl), Norman Antonio Zelaya (Orlando), Caroline Smadja, and Amanda Coggin.

Words: Readings in Two Languages
2017-09-27 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
A bicycle:
there is no poetry
in stopping.
So writes Ahmed Al Mulla, the groundbreaking Saudi poet whose vivid, free-flowing prose has gained him critical acclaim across the Arab World. Diverging from the strict, metered-style of Arabic poetry, Al Mulla chooses to embrace free verse in his poems. Al Mulla will share a number of his poems in both the original Arabic and English translation alongside poet Mohammad Salama and musical accompaniment by Hafez Modirzadeh.

Bone: An Evening w/ Yrsa Daley-Ward
2017-09-27 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Pegasus Books Downtown, 2349 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94704, United States
Celebrated poet Yrsa Daley-Ward presents bone, a poignant collection of autobiographical poems about the heart, life, and the inner self.
ABOUT BONE
Bone. Visceral. Close to. Stark.
The poems in Yrsa Daley-Ward’s collection bone are exactly that: reflections on a particular life honed to their essence—so clear and pared-down, they become universal.
From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society’s expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward’s bone resonate to the core of what it means to be human.
“You will come away bruised.
You will come away bruised
but this will give you poetry.”

Camille T. Dungy + Javier Zamora
2017-09-28 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
Camille T. Dungy is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Trophic Cascade. Her recent collection of essays is Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood and History. She has also edited anthologies including Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry. Her poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, 100 Best African American Poems and many other print and online venues. Her honors include an American Book Award, two Northern California Book Awards, a California Book Award silver medal, two NAACP Image Award nominations, fellowships from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Formerly a professor at San Francisco State University, she is a professor at Colorado State University.
Javier Zamora was born in El Salvador and migrated to the U.S. when he was 9. He is a 2016 – 2018 Wallace Stegner Fellow and holds fellowships from CantoMundo, Colgate University, MacDowell, the National Endowment for the Arts and Yaddo. The recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly/Dorothy Sargent Fellowship and the 2016 Barnes and Noble Writer for Writers Award, he will publish his first poetry collection Unaccompanied (Copper Canyon Press) in September.

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton
2017-09-28 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Books Inc. Berkeley, 1491 Shattuck Ave, Berkeley , CA, 94710, United States
Pushcart Prize-nominated writer Margaret Wilkerson Sexton shares her much-buzzed debut novel, A Kind of Freedom. Evelyn is a Creole woman who comes of age in New Orleans at the height of World War II. Her family inhabits the upper echelon of Black society, and when she falls for no-account Renard, she is forced to choose between her life of privilege and the man she loves.
In 1982, Evelyn’s daughter, Jackie, is a frazzled single mother grappling with her absent husband’s drug addiction. Just as she comes to terms with his abandoning the family, he returns, ready to resume their old life.
Jackie’s son, T.C., loves the creative process of growing marijuana more than the weed itself. He was a square before Hurricane Katrina, but the New Orleans he knew didn’t survive the storm. Fresh out of a four-month stint for drug charges, T.C. decides to start over–until an old friend convinces him to stake his new beginning on one last deal.
For Evelyn, Jim Crow is an ongoing reality, and in its wake new threats spring up to haunt her descendants. A Kind of Freedom is an urgent novel that explores the legacy of racial disparity in the South through a poignant and redemptive family history.

Nathan Englander
2017-09-28 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
A political thriller that unfolds in the highly charged territory of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and pivots on the complex relationship between a secret prisoner and his guard.
A prisoner in a secret cell. The guard who has watched over him a dozen years. An American waitress in Paris. A young Palestinian man in Berlin who strikes up an odd friendship with a wealthy Canadian businessman. And The General, Israel’s most controversial leader, who lies dying in a hospital, the only man who knows of the prisoner’s existence.
From these vastly different lives Nathan Englander has woven a powerful, intensely suspenseful portrait of a nation riven by insoluble conflict, even as the lives of its citizens become fatefully and inextricably entwined–a political thriller of the highest order that interrogates the anguished, violent division between Israelis and Palestinians, and dramatizes the immense moral ambiguities haunting both sides. Who is right, who is wrong – who is the guard, who is truly the prisoner?

MPC Anthology Launch Party & Read-Around
2017-09-28 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Falkirk Cultural Center, 1408 Mission Ave, San Rafael , CA, 94901, United States
Come out and eat cake and hear our anthology contributors read their poems. The public is very welcome to attend this always lively and lovely event!

Marin Poetry Center Anthology Launch Party & Read-Around
2017-09-28 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Falkirk Cultural Center, 1408 Mission Ave, San Rafael , CA, 94901, United States

You're Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes...
2017-09-29 08:00 - 17:00 UTC | The Lost Church, 65 Capp Street, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
Thursday, October 5, 2017
7:30pm 10:30pm
The Lost Church (map)

Doors at 7:30pm
Show at 8pm
GET YOUR TICKETS HERE: http://www.ticketfly.com/event/1566858
$10 online or $10 at the door.
Contact ned@yg2d.com if cost is an issue.
YOU’RE GOING TO DIE: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes
is a total open mic event, with no set or featured performers,
but only the communal offering for us to explore the conversation of death & dying, to embrace our losses & mortality,
to grieve, bereave & honor those we’ve lost & love…
while all the while making room for simply being ALIVE.
Sign-ups will be the night of & the list fills up quickly, so if you want to perform, you’d better get there early…
If you’re going to perform, keep it under 5 MINUTES. That’s right: 5 MINUTES. WE WILL TIME YOU. And we will hug you when we have to stop you [just to make it easier on you (or harder – depending on your propensity for intimacy)].
Poetry, prose, music, dancing, comedy, drama, happy, sad, & on & on & on… Remember: EVERYTHING GOES… so do whatever you want.
You don’t have to perform anything; the audience is as essential as the performers.
Please don’t perform anything with a setup that takes much more time than the time it takes for you to walk onstage. Honestly, plugging things in is endlessly boring. If you need to borrow an instrument, figure it out before you’re called to the stage.
IMPORTANT ::: DON’T TAKE YOURSELF SO SERIOUSLY. Come and have fun. The end. Remember. Someday, we won’t exist and neither will the English language. If you choose to take yourself seriously, then take yourself so seriously that it’s stupid. Ridiculousness is encouraged.
You’re Going to Die. No. Really. You are.

Charif Shanahan + Airea D. Matthews
2017-09-29 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Charif Shanahan and Airea D. Matthews read from their latest poetry collections.

About Into Each Room We Enter Without Knowing
In this affecting poetry debut, Charif Shanahan explores what it means to be fully human in our wounded and divided world. In poised yet unrelenting lyric poems, Shanahan–queer and mixed-race–confronts the challenges of a complex cultural inheritance, informed by colonialism and his mother’s immigration to the United States from Morocco, navigating racial constructs, sexuality, family, and the globe in search of “who we are to each other . . . who we are to ourselves.”With poems that weave from Marrakesh to Zurich to London, through history to the present day, this book is, on its surface, an uncompromising exploration of identity in personal and collective terms. Yet the collection is, most deeply, about intimacy and love, the inevitability of human separation and the challenge of human connection. Urging us to reexamine our own place in the broader human tapestry, Into Each Room We Enter without Knowing announces the arrival of a powerful and necessary new voice.

About Simulacra
Winner of the 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize
A fresh and rebellious poetic voice, Airea D. Matthews debuts in the acclaimed series that showcases the work of exciting and innovative young American poets. Matthews’s superb collection explores the topic of want and desire with power, insight, and intense emotion. Her poems cross historical boundaries and speak emphatically from a racialized America, where the trajectories of joy and exploitation, striving and thwarting, violence and celebration are constrained by differentials of privilege and contemporary modes of communication. In his foreword, series judge Carl Phillips calls this book “rollicking, destabilizing, at once intellectually sly and piercing and finally poignant.” This is poetry that breaks new literary ground, inspiring readers to think differently about what poems can and should do in a new media society where imaginations are laid bare and there is no thought too provocative to send out into the world.

100 Thousand Poets for Change
2017-09-30 15:00 - 19:00 UTC | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Hosted by Karen Melander Magoon & Philip Hackett
Join us for an open mic, featuring the following readers, under the banner of “100 Thousand Poets for Change.”
Featured readers:

Dee Allen
Dan Brady
Mahnaz Badihian
Pauline Craig
John Curl
Diego De Leo
Ana Elsner
Agneta Falk
Nahid Fattahi
David Giesen
Q R Hand
Najia Karim
Richard Loranger
Karen Melander-Magoon
Barbara Paschke
Richard Sanderell
David Volpendesta

and others…
Poets and artists all over the world are currently organizing events to promote environmental, social, and political change.
Poets, writers, artists, and humanitarians will create, perform, educate and demonstrate, in their individual communities, and decide their own specific area of focus for change within the overall framework of peace and sustainability, which co-founder Michael Rothenberg stated, “…is a major concern worldwide and the guiding principle for this global event.”
All those involved are hoping, through their actions and events, to seize and redirect the political and social dialogue of the day and turn the narrative of civilization towards peace and sustainability.

Bay Area Poetry Marathon: One Hundred Thousand Poets for Change
2017-09-30 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Saturday, September 30 is 2017’s global 100 Thousand Poets for Change Day (http:/www.100TPC.org)!
Come to the Bay Area Poetry Marathon’s 100TPC event, and join other poets, musicians, artists, dancers, photographers, performing artists, around the US and across the planet, in a demonstration and celebration of poetry to promote social, environmental, and political change.
This year’s superb line-up:
* May-lee Chai * Rachelle Linda Escamilla *
* Edward Foster * Caroline Goodwin * Daphne Gottlieb *
* Julie Lythcott-Haims * Melissa Ramos *
Doors open at 7pm.
Reading begins at 7:30pm *SHARP*
For more info, contact series curator Donna de la Perrière

Saturday Night Special, An "Impermanent" Open Mic
2017-09-30 19:00 - 21:30 UTC | Nick’s Lounge, 3218 Adeline St., Berkeley, CA, 94703, United States
This month at Saturday Night Special, an East Bay open mic, we are exploring the fragililty of everything—the fleating nature of life, love, and rent control, of sunsets, egg shells, and dandelion fluff. Join us! Take to the page and embrace “impermanence.” Then bring us your creation.
As always, we’d love to hear your (three-minute) poems, stories, comedic sketches, songs, or dances, on our optional theme (or any topic).
Our September features are: Vanessa Rochelle Lewis and Zephir O’Meara
—
First come first served. Sign-up starts at 7pm and closes when it fills up or when the reading starts, so get there early if you want to read! (Note: Sometimes the list is full by 7:03pm)
Each reader will have 3 minutes maximum. For prose writers this is about one and a half double-spaced pages.
PLEASE NOTE: We are strict about the 3 minute max. When you reach your time limit at SNS, we turn on the disco lights! So, please plan ahead. Practice your piece out loud. Time yourself!
After the reading, stick around for karaoke starting at 10pm
Saturday, September 30th, 2017
7 – 9:30 pm
Nick’s Lounge (21+)
3218 Adeline Street, Berkeley, CA
1 block south of Ashby BART
Between Fairview St & Martin Luther King Jr Way
FREE!
But bring CASH if you want to buy drinks (which you sort of have to, because there’s a 1-drink minimum!)
Hosted by Hollie Hardy
Please help out by liking our FB page, where you can also find more details and photos from past events:
https://www.facebook.com/Saturday-Night-Special-an-East-Bay-open-mic-112174188880786/
BIOS
VANESSA ROCHELLE LEWIS is a queer, lush-bodied, Black, femme performance artist, writer, actress, filmmaker, educator, facilitator, orator and Faerie Princess Mermaid Gangsta for The Revolution. She loves to flirt, laugh, perform, crack corny jokes, and insert Octavia Butler references into every conversation. She is the former Senior Editor for Everyday Feminism and Black Girl Dangerous, has taught at California Community Colleges for over 7 years, and has performed in a wide variety of theatre projects, cabarets, and literary events all over the West Coast. She uses a combination of memoir, poetry, theatre, and feminist storytelling to advance her politix of radical love, socioeconomic justice, anti-racism, community accountability, critical reflection, love, healing, and liberation. She loves romantic songs, romantic films, romantic books, romantic conversations, romantic friendships, and writing long, vulnerable, passionate Facebook statuses about romance.
ZEPHIR O’MEARA, a Bay Area native, has writing in Transfer, Oakland Review, Be About it, Naked Bulb Anthology, sPARKLE+bLINK, and East Bay Review. Is he working on a secret project or two? Maybe. And yes, I’m sorry to say, he is just the type to subvert a perfectly good bio blurb whenever the opportunity arises. He thought he’d just joke around and hide behind a few words but then he realized something: This is him (me). This is more me, these frivolous words on this screen, then you’ll get out of the real me (him) in person. Or maybe not. But will you even try? The ball’s in your court.

Kevin Craft + Troy Jollimore: an Afternoon of Poetry
2017-10-01 13:00 - 15:30 UTC | Mill Valley Public Library, 375 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley , CA, 94941, United States
Craft Talk: “A Red Hot Half-Brick in an Old Sock: Tradition, Subversion, and the Sonnet” (1:00-2:00)
Why would anyone today choose to write a sonnet? In fact, some of our best contemporary poets have taken a stab at the venerable form, in order to explore (and, at times, explode) the limits of the form, and to place the sonnet in the service of surprising, at times radical ends. In this joint talk, poets Kevin Craft and Troy Jollimore discuss the sonnet form, its history, its poetic nature, its particular capabilities and possibilities, and talk about their own experiences reading and writing sonnets. (The craft talk will be followed by a break with wine and savory treats.)
Reading: “Burn After Reading: The Poetry of Kevin Craft and Troy Jollimore.” (2:30 pm) Come for one or both events! This is a unique chance to hear and learn from two illustrious out-of-town poets.
This event is a collaboration of the Mill Valley Library and Marin Poetry Center.
MILL VALLEY LIBRARY
375 Throckmorton Avenue
Mill Valley, CA

Kevin Craft directs the Written Arts Program at Everett Community College. His first book, Solar Prominence, won the Gorsline Prize. His new collection is Vagrants & Accidentals. His work has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, and The Stranger. He has received fellowships and awards from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, MacDowell Colony, the Bogliasco Foundation (Italy),the Camargo Foundation and many others. He is executive editor of Poetry NW Editions, and a director of the UW Writers in Rome program.

Troy Jollimore is the author of three books of poetry and three of philosophy, as well as numerous articles. His awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, and Fellowships from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Stanford Humanities Center. Tom Thomson in Purgatory won the National Book Critics Circle award in poetry. Syllabus of Errors, appeared on the New York Times‘ list of the best books of poetry in 2015. His reviews appear in the Chicago Tribune, and the Washington Post. He is currently a Professor in the Philosophy Department at California State University, Chico.

Julie Lythcott-Haims
2017-10-01 16:30 - 17:30 UTC | Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park , CA, 94025, United States
Are we who we are through what we’ve accomplished or what we’ve endured?
New York Times bestselling author Julie Lythcott-Haims is one of Kepler’s Literary Foundation’s favorite speakers. Known across the country for her probing, no-nonsense insights into parenting today, Lythcott-Haims has served as the dean of freshmen and undergraduate advising at Stanford and raised her family, right here in the Bay Area.
But there’s more to her story. In stirring, poetic detail, Lythcott-Haims reveals the aggressions small and large of growing up Black and biracial in America. From the thousands of small slights to the blunt force insults, from schools in white, rural Wisconsin to the grand lawns of Stanford and Ivy League campuses to the backyards of Palo Alto race has followed her everywhere. In a stunning new memoir, Real American, Lythcott-Haims shares the events that made her the brave and strong-willed voice she is today.

New Poetry From Rob Halpern
2017-10-01 18:00 - 19:30 UTC | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Rob Halpern will read from his new book of poetry Touching Voids in Sense which

“enters regions of the self that existing regimes of sense, visible, tactile, and verbal
keep hidden. What’s at stake is love, care and the human body, an abyss at which

loving care of another’s body is the most explosive of concerns. The requirement

is radical critique of the logics of meaning. Touching holes in sense is a reflection
on the deeper sources of Halpern’s previous books and an investigation of how

an end to mourning requires nothing less than a different ontology of life and death.”

– William Rowe Rob Halpern’s books include Common Place (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2015) and Music for Porn (Nightboat Books, 2012). His chapbook called Touching Voids in Sense was just published by Veer Books in London. He lives between San Francisco and Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he teaches at Eastern Michigan University and Huron Valley Women’s Prison.

Bazaar Writers Salon
2017-10-01 18:00 - 20:00 UTC | Bazaar Cafe, 5927 California St, San Francisco, CA, 94121, United States
Bazaar Writers Salon returns! Join us for the first reading of the 2017-2018 season.
Readings by William Brewer, Benjamin Gucciardi, Dominic Russ-Combs, Cintia Santana, and Glori Simmons
Hosted by Peter Kline
William Brewer is the author of I Know Your Kind (Milkweed Editions, 2017), a winner of the National Poetry Series, and Oxyana, which was selected for a 2016 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Boston Review, The Iowa Review, Narrative (where it was awarded the 30 Below Prize), New England Review, A Public Space, and other journals. He lives in Oakland.
Benjamin Gucciardi was born and raised in San Francisco. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Orion Magazine, Forklift Ohio, Radar Poetry, upstreet, Poetry East, The California Journal of Poetics and other journals. A Best New Poets nominee, he is a winner of a Dorothy Rosenberg Memorial Prize and contests from The Maine Review and The Santa Ana River Review. He works with refugee and immigrant youth in Oakland.
A native of Louisville, Kentucky, Dominic Russ-Combs welded industrial models in Durham, North Carolina, before publishing his first stories and being awarded both a Stegner Fellowship and an Emerging Artist Award from the Kentucky Arts Council. His fiction has appeared in the Chicago Tribune, Kenyon Review, Carolina Quarterly, among others. He’s currently at work on a novel and a collection of stories.
Cintia Santana’s poems and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Beloit Poetry Journal, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Narrative, Pleiades, RHINO, Spillway, The Threepenny Review, and other journals. Her work was selected for inclusion in the Best New Poets 2016 anthology, edited by Mary Szybist. She is the recipient of Djerrassi, CantoMundo and Hambidge Fellowships. Currently, she teaches poetry and fiction workshops in Spanish, as well as literary translation courses at Stanford University. She is at work on her first poetry manuscript.
Glori Simmons is the author of Suffering Fools, recipient of the Spokane Prize from Willow Springs Editions (Eastern Washington University, 2017) and Graft, poems (Truman State University Press, 2002). A former Stegner Fellow, she currently lives in Oakland and is the director of the Thacher Gallery at the University of San Francisco.

JB Frame & Dee Allen - POETS! - featured readers to be announced followed by an open mic
2017-10-02 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | CA

Daniel Handler
2017-10-02 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Nourse Theatre, 275 Hayes Street, San Francisco, CA, 94117, United States
Daniel Handler is the author of the novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, Adverbs, and, with Maira Kalman, Why We Broke Up. As Lemony Snicket, he has written the best-selling series All The Wrong Questions as well as A Series of Unfortunate Events which was the basis of a feature film starring Jim Carrey and Meryl Streep, with Jude Law as Lemony Snicket. Netflix has produced an original series based on A Series of Unfortunate Events which premiered January 2017.Handler’s newest novel, All The Dirty Parts, looks honestly at the erotic impulses of an all-too-typical young man. Cole is a boy in high school. He runs cross country, he sketches, he jokes around with friends. But none of this quite matters next to the allure of sex. “Let me put it this way,” he says. “Draw a number line, with zero is you never think about sex and ten is, it’s all you think about, and while you are drawing the line, I am thinking about sex.”All The Dirty Parts is an unblinking take on teenage desire in a culture of unrelenting explicitness and shunted communication, where sex feels like love, but no one knows what love feels like. With short chapters in the style of Jenny Offill or Mary Robison, Daniel Handler gives us a tender, brutal, funny, intoxicating portrait of an age when the lens of sex tilts the world. “There are love stories galore,” Cole tells us, “This isn’t that. The story I’m typing is all the dirty parts.”

Lillian Howan
2017-10-03 17:30 - 19:30 UTC | Mills Hall Living Room, Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd, Oakland , CA, 94613, United States
Join us to celebrate the release of Lillian Howan’s novel The Charm Buyers, a novel about Tahiti during the last years of French nuclear testing. Howan’s writings have been published in the Asian American Literary Review, Café Irreal, Calyx, New England Review, and the anthology Under Western Eyes. She is the editor of legendary playwright Wakako Yamauchi’s collection, Rosebud and Other Stories.

Pandemonium Press: Poetry of Witness
2017-10-04 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Octopus Literary Salon, 2101 Webster St #170, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Featured readers: Amos White, Jan Steckel, Fred Dodsworth, and Peggy Morrison. On guitar: Barry Ebner. Curated by Leila Rae. An open mic follows the featured readers. Book & Broadside Giveaway. Free, 7-9 pm. The Octopus Literary Salon, 2021 Webster St., Oakland.

Celeste Ng w/ Bich Minh Nguyen
2017-10-04 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith is thrilled to welcome Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You) to the store for her new novel Little Fires Everywhere. With her in conversation will be Bich Minh Nguyen. Please join us!
In Shaker Heights, a placid, progressive suburb of Cleveland, everything is planned – from the layout of the winding roads, to the colors of the houses, to the successful lives its residents will go on to lead. And no one embodies this spirit more than Elena Richardson, whose guiding principle is playing by the rules.
Enter Mia Warren – an enigmatic artist and single mother – who arrives in this idyllic bubble with her teenaged daughter Pearl, and rents a house from the Richardsons. Soon Mia and Pearl become more than tenants: all four Richardson children are drawn to the mother-daughter pair. But Mia carries with her a mysterious past and a disregard for the status quo that threatens to upend this carefully ordered community.
When old family friends of the Richardsons attempt to adopt a Chinese-American baby, a custody battle erupts that dramatically divides the town–and puts Mia and Elena on opposing sides. Suspicious of Mia and her motives, Elena is determined to uncover the secrets in Mia’s past. But her obsession will come at unexpected and devastating costs.
Little Fires Everywhere explores the weight of secrets, the nature of art and identity, and the ferocious pull of motherhood – and the danger of believing that following the rules can avert disaster.
Celeste Ng grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Shaker Heights, Ohio. She attended Harvard University and earned an MFA from the University of Michigan. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with her husband and son.
Bich Minh Nguyen, who also goes by Beth, is the author of three books, all with Viking Penguin: the memoir Stealing Buddha’s Dinner, which received the PEN/Jerard Award, the novel Short Girls, which received an American Book Award, and most recently the novel Pioneer Girl. She teaches in and directs the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

Irish Writers' Festival Los Gatos
2017-10-05 11:00 - 2017-10-08 21:30 UTC | Los Gatos CA, Los Gatos, California, CA, 95030
Join Irish and local authors for 4 days of poetry and fiction readings, writing workshops, panel discussions, exhibitions and performances at various venues in Los Gatos California.

Layli Long Soldier
2017-10-05 12:10 - 12:50 UTC | Morrison Library, UC Berkeley, 2000 Carleston Street, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
Layli Long Soldier received a 2015 Lannan Fellowship for Poetry, a 2015 National Artist Fellowship from the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and a 2016 Whiting Writers’ Award. She is the author of Chromosomory and WHEREAS and has served as contributing editor of Drunken Boat. “I am,” she writes, “a citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, meaning I am a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation—and in this dual citizenship I must work, I must eat, I must art, I must mother, I must friend, I must listen, I must observe, constantly I must live.” She teaches at Diné College and lives in Santa Fe, NM.

Seamus Heaney: The Berkeley Years
2017-10-05 13:00 - 15:00 UTC | Carriage House Theater, Montalvo Arts Center, 15400 Montalvo Rd, Saratoga, CA, 95071, United States
Seamus Heaney’s son, Michael, joins us for a discussion with UC Berkeley Professor Emeritus, Robert Tracy, who worked alongside Heaney during his Berkeley years. Visiting poets offer tributes, and we share stories and insights into Heaney’s work and influences during his time in the Bay Area. Music by Fintan Vallely, Irish traditional flute player, researcher and writer.

Tongo Eisen-Martin, Mazza Writer in Residence
2017-10-05 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Poetry Center, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94132, United States
Tongo Eisen-Martin reads from his poetry, as part of his weeklong stint as Mazza Writer in Residence at The Poetry Center. “I don’t know that there is a living writer whose work loves black people as much as Tongo Eisen-Martin’s work loves us.” — Kiese Laymon, author of Long Division and How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America.
Eisen-Martin is a revolutionary poet who uses his craft to create liberated territory wherever he performs and teaches. His first full-length book of poems, Someone’s Dead Already (Bootstrap Press), was nominated for a California Book Award. He recently lived and organized around issues of human rights and self-determination in Jackson, Mississippi. His second book, Heaven Is All Goodbyes, will be out soon from City Lights Books’ venerable Pocket Poets series.
Originally from San Francisco, Tongo Eisen-Martin is a movement worker and educator who has organized against mass incarceration and extra-judicial killing of black people throughout the U.S. He has taught in detention centers from New York’s Rikers Island to California county jails. He has been a faculty member at Columbia University’s Institute for Research in African-American Studies and designed curricula for oppressed people’s education projects from San Francisco to South Africa. His latest curriculum, “We Charge Genocide Again,” has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country.
The Poetry Center’s Mazza Writer in Residence program allows Eisen-Martin to work with students of poetry, drama and other studies, and present performances both on and off the SF State campus, with intensive student and community involvement. The residency pairs classroom workshop situations aimed at students, with performances open to the general public.
The Mazza Writer in Residence is made possible by a generous grant from the Sam Mazza Foundation.
