An Evening with Judith Ayn Bernhard and silvi alcivar
2021-08-25 19:30 - 20:30 (America/Los_Angeles) | Bird & Beckett Books and Records, 653 Chenery St, San Francisco , CA, 94131, United States
Judith Ayn Bernhard will read selections from her new book of stories, Marriages (Andover Street Archives Press, 2021), followed by an interview with poet silvi alcivar.

Michelle Ruiz Keil / Summer in the City of Roses
2021-08-26 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Booksmith is thrilled to host Michelle Ruiz Keil again for her second novel, Summer in the City of Roses. More to be announced soon, but save the date and join us!
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
You can order Summer in the City of Roses here and we’ll ship it directly to you (or hold for pickup at our San Francisco shop).
We are happy to fulfill orders anywhere in the world – international postage will be invoiced separately. If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to contact events@booksmith.com.
About the book
Inspired by the Greek myth of Iphigenia and the Grimm fairy tale “Brother and Sister,” Michelle Ruiz Keil’s second novel follows two siblings torn apart and struggling to find each other in early ’90s Portland.
All her life, seventeen-year-old Iph has protected her sensitive younger brother, Orr. But this summer, with their mother gone at an artist residency, their father decides it’s time for fifteen-year-old Orr to toughen up at a wilderness boot camp. When their father brings Iph to a work gala in downtown Portland and breaks the news, Orr has already been sent away against his will. Furious at her father’s betrayal, Iph storms off and gets lost in the maze of Old Town. Enter George, a queer Robin Hood who swoops in on a bicycle, bow and arrow at the ready, offering Iph a place to hide out while she tracks down Orr.
Orr, in the meantime, has escaped the camp and fallen in with The Furies, an all-girl punk band, and moves into the coat closet of their ramshackle pink house. In their first summer apart, Iph and Orr must learn to navigate their respective new spaces of music, romance, and sex-work activism—and find each other before a fantastical transformation fractures their family forever.
Told through a lens of magical realism and steeped in myth, Summer in the City of Roses is a dazzling tale about the pain and beauty of growing up.

About the author
Michelle Ruiz Keil is a Latinx writer and tarot reader with an eye for the enchanted and a way with animals. Her critically acclaimed debut novel, All of Us With Wings, was called “a transcendent journey” by The New York Times. A San Francisco Bay Area native, Michelle has lived in Portland, Oregon, for many years. She curates the fairytale reading series All Kinds of Fur and lives with her family in a cottage where the forest meets the city.

On Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration
2021-08-26 19:00 - 20:30 | Virtual
With the second renaissance and re-emergence of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, the general public and therapists alike are confronted with new areas of exploration, but with few systematic frameworks available. Questions surrounding legal access to care, ongoing criminalization, and medical restrictions to care limiting the therapies available, the immediate future of psychedelic-assisted therapy remains shrouded in uncertainty, even in the face of expanding interest. On the cusp of this new era-one of excitement but also uncertainty-one of many ways to explore this emerging landscape is through the lens of the psychospiritual and the therapeutic uses of psychedelics.
Join clinical psychologist, founder of the Center for Existential Exploration, and author Dr. Kile Ortigo and licensed clinical social worker, psychotherapist, and social justice advocate Mary Sanders for a conversation on the psychospiritual and therapeutic use of psychedelics, which includes the process of psychedelic integration. Sharing insights from his latest book, Beyond the Narrow Life, Dr. Ortigo discusses the shared elements of intersecting complexities and possibilities surrounding questions regarding legal access to care, ongoing criminalization, and medical restrictions to care which limit the therapies available. Dr. Ortigo examines themes elicited by the psychospiritual and therapeutic use of psychedelics through several frameworks, from third-wave cognitive-behavioral therapy to Jungian depth psychology, existentialism to scientific understandings of the cosmos, and mindfulness and compassion focused traditions to popular and secular culture.
Dr. Ortigo offers deepened wisdom into psychedelic-assisted therapy and integration through his unique approach of connecting to the greater mysteries and concerns of the human experience.
Free, suggested donation of $20.
https://www.ciis.edu/public-programs/event-calendar/ortigo-kile-august-26-2021 publicprograms@ciis.edu 415-575-6175

Nomadic Press Virtual Open Mic #73
2021-08-27 18:00 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States
90 minutes
30 readers
3 minutes each
On Zoom!
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!
Sign up to read here:
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If you enjoy spaces like this and can swing it in these tight times, please consider supporting us via:
1) the Cash App to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress;
2) donating via the “ticket” option here:
https://www.eventbrite.com/…/nomadic-press-weekly…; OR
3) donating through the website at www.nomadicpress.org/donate
We have a short goal for the evening of $150.
Pandemic times continue in 2021 and we continue to gather our community virtually across state and country lines. Join us to read, join us to listen. All are welcome.
Hosted by Nazelah Jamison (with Tula Biederman on tech). It’s a continuing experiment, and we hope you can join us!
Our safe space process still applies to our collective virtual space, so please read this by visiting https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess.
Zoom Joining Info
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Weekly Virtual Open Mic
Time: Jan 1, 2021 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Every week on Fri, until Dec 10, 2021, 50 occurrence(s)
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Weekly: https://us02web.zoom.us/…/tZcudeqoqjIiE9fnl7dxuB…/ics…
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Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Kim Shuck
2021-08-28 15:00 - 16:00 | online, CA, United States
JOIN US ON SATURDAY, AUGUST 28 AT 3PM PT WHEN ROXANNE DUNBAR-ORTIZ IS JOINED BY KIM SHUCK TO DISCUSS HER LATEST BOOK, NOT A NATION OF IMMIGRANTS: SETTLER COLONIALIS, WHITE SUPREMACY, AND A HISTORY OF ERASURE AND EXCLUSION, ON ZOOM!
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_cl7qzn9tT12C-s5NKUouog
Praise for Not a Nation of Immigrants
“In this book, a precious gift drawn from an amazingly rich life and a prodigious life of learning, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz urges us to disavow the violence of the US settler nation-state, its discursive erasures of native peoples and its material relations of dispossession. The struggle for workers’ rights and working-class solidarity, she reminds us, involves the fight against capitalism, imperialism, and colonialism for the liberation of all peoples.”
—Gary Y. Okihiro, author of Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation
“What do the Iroquois or Navajo think of the Statue of Liberty? With characteristic grit and brio, Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrates how profoundly the settler colonial history of the United States and the ideology of ‘white nativism’ have shaped both immigration policy and immigrant identity.”
—Mike Davis, author of Prisoners of the American Dream
“Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a one-woman wrecking ball against the tower of lies erected by generations of official and television historians—people who make a living glorifying slave traders and exterminators of Native Americans.”
—Ishmael Reed
About Not a Nation of Immigrants
Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today.
She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity—founded and built by immigrants—was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good‑-but inaccurate—story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception.
While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States.
About Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenant farming family. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than 4 decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. Dunbar-Ortiz is the winner of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize, and is the author or editor of many books, including An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award. She lives in San Francisco.

Book Release: The Move by Keith Donnell Jr.
2021-08-28 18:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us to celebrate the release of The Move, Keith Donnell Jr.’s first full-length collection of poetry!
Lineup of readers and musician to be announced soon.
Preorder your copy of The Move here: https://www.nomadicpress.org/store/themove
About the book: Keith Donnell Jr. taps a cultural archive of voices, forms, and intergenerational absence. His poems, so connected by difference, speak across time, place, and persona, always reaching toward song and the dream of a fluid, indestructible beating Black heart. The Move puts the cold out and keeps it there.
Zoom Joining Info
Topic: Book Release: The Move by Keith Donnell Jr.
Time: Aug 28, 2021 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
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Pussypedia: Zoe Mendelson and Maria Conejo with Carol Queen
2021-08-30 18:00 - 19:00 | Green Apple Books 9th Avenue, 1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94122, United States
JOIN US ON MONDAY, AUGUST 30 AT 6PM PT WHEN ZOE MENDELSON AND MARIA CONEJO JOIN US TO DISCUSS THEIR BOOK, PUSSYPEDIA: A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE, ON ZOOM!
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_4hyhD6DYRHiEfUP_YY3ogw
Praise for Pussypedia
“Not since the 1973 publication of Our Bodies, Ourselves has there been a book about our sexual selves that is so incisive, so inclusive, so frank—and so funny. Pussypedia is more than just a book about pussies, it is a brilliant manifesto about living with one. Zoe Mendelson and Maria Conejo have created a multi-faceted masterpiece that should be read—and memorized—by every body.”—Debbie Millman, author of Brand Thinking and Other Noble Pursuits
“Pussypedia is a hilarious, ridiculously informative and absolutely necessary atlas for people with pussies. From pussy anatomy to sex and masturbation and all things in between, Mendelson takes an inclusive and intersectional approach to demystifying all things pussy. This book is a joyful, frank, and comprehensive corrective to the cultural ignorance surrounding people with pussies. If pussy is the promised land,
this book is the compass that will guide you there.”—Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist and Hunger
“A thorough and empowering guide to women’s health…. [Mendelson] kicks body shame to the curb and, in delightfully sassy prose, keeps things realistic….Conejo’s bright illustrations, peppered throughout, add flair. [Those] looking to ditch the shame will find this smart, inclusive, and practical guide the perfect resource.”—Publishers Weekly (starred)
About Pussypedia
Written by the creators of the popular website, this rigorously fact-checked, accessible, and fully illustrated guide is essential for anyone with a pussy.
If the clitoris and penis are the same size on average, why is the word “small” in the definition of clitoris but strangely missing from the definition of penis? Sex probably doesn’t cause yeast infections? But racism probably does cause BV? Why is masturbating so awesome? How hairy are butt cracks . . . generally? Why is labiaplasty on a global astronomical rise? Does egg freezing really work? Should I stick an egg-shaped rock up there or nah?
There is still a shocking lack of accurate, accessible information about pussies and many esteemed medical sources seem to contradict each other. Pussypedia solves that with extensive reviews of peer-reviewed science that address old myths, confusing inconsistencies, and the influence of gender narratives on scientific research––always in simple, joyful language.
Through over 30 chapters, Pussypedia not only gives the reader information, but teaches them how to read science, how to consider information in its context, and how to accept what we don’t know rather than search for conclusions. It also weaves in personal anecdotes from the authors and their friends––sometimes funny, sometimes sad, often cringe-worthy, and always extremely personal––to do away with shame and encourage curiosity, exploration, and agency.
A gift for your shy niece, your angsty teenager, your confused boyfriend, or yourself. Our generation’s Our Bodies, Ourselves, with a healthy dose of fun.
About the Authors
Zoe Mendelson: Journalist, information designer, content strategist. Her writing has appeared in Fast Company, WIRED, Hyperallergic, Slate, Next City, the LA Times. Her projects have been covered by The New York Times en Espanol, New York Magazine, CityLab, PBS, Univision, and Buzzfeed. Previous projects include official emojis for Mexico City, a data narrative about drones, and a civic-engagement platform for nihilist millennials. Mendelson studied at Barnard College in New York City.
Maria Conejo: Visual Artist from Fine Arts School in Mexico. Her main media is drawing, her work revolves around female bodies representation. She has been awarded with the national grant FONCA twice in the program JOVENES CREADORES. She was finalist in the first Biennial of Illustration in Mexico, organized by Pictoline and The New York Times. Her work has been shown at SWAB Art Fair Barcelona, De Kooning Studio in NYC in 2019, at Juxtapoz Club House in Art Basel Miami and Salon Acme 6 Art Fair in Mexico City in 2018.

Virtual event: Angela Chen and Sherronda J. Brown on Asexuality Possibilities
2021-09-01 18:00 - 19:00 | San Francisco Public Library – Virtual Library
Register for the Zoom event https://bit.ly/Asexuality09-01-21 or watch on live on YouTube.

Presented by the San Francisco Public Library and The Booksmith: Angela Chen, author of Ace, and Sherronda J. Brown discuss asexuality, the little-known sexual orientation, and what all of us can learn–about desire, identity, culture, and relationships–when we use an asexual lens to see the world.
Angela Chen is the author of Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society, and the Meaning of Sex, which was selected as one of the Best Books of 2020 by NPR. Her reporting and essays have also appeared in publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Guardian, Paris Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, and more.
Sherronda J. Brown (she/they) is a Southern-grown essayist, editor, and storyteller with a focus on media analysis and cultural critique, currently serving as the Editor-in-Chief of Wear Your Voice Magazine. In addition to writing and thinking about asexuality, their special interests include Blackness and queerness in horror narratives.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz and Ishmael Reed
2021-09-02 17:00 - 18:00 | online, CA, United States
Discusses her latest book, Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion

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Thursday, September 2, 2021 – 5:00pm

Crowdcast

Tickets:

Sliding scale ($0-$100)

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author of the modern classic An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, joins us to discuss her latest book of historical reckoning, Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Beacon Press). Roxanne will be joined in conversation by legendary writer Ishmael Reed,
“Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is a one-woman wrecking ball against the tower of lies erected by generations of official and television historians—people who make a living glorifying slave traders and exterminators of Native Americans.”—Ishmael Reed
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Not “A Nation of Immigrants”
Whether in political debates or discussions about immigration around the kitchen table, many Americans, regardless of party affiliation, will say proudly that we are a nation of immigrants. In this bold new book, historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz asserts this ideology is harmful and dishonest because it serves to mask and diminish the US’s history of settler colonialism, genocide, white supremacy, slavery, and structural inequality, all of which we still grapple with today.
She explains that the idea that we are living in a land of opportunity—founded and built by immigrants—was a convenient response by the ruling class and its brain trust to the 1960s demands for decolonialization, justice, reparations, and social equality. Moreover, Dunbar-Ortiz charges that this feel good‑-but inaccurate–story promotes a benign narrative of progress, obscuring that the country was founded in violence as a settler state, and imperialist since its inception.
While some of us are immigrants or descendants of immigrants, others are descendants of white settlers who arrived as colonizers to displace those who were here since time immemorial, and still others are descendants of those who were kidnapped and forced here against their will. This paradigm shifting new book from the highly acclaimed author of An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States charges that we need to stop believing and perpetuating this simplistic and a historical idea and embrace the real (and often horrific) history of the United States.
About Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz grew up in rural Oklahoma in a tenant farming family. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than 4 decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues. Dunbar-Ortiz is the winner of the 2017 Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize, and is the author or editor of many books, including An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, a recipient of the 2015 American Book Award. She lives in San Francisco. Connect with her at reddirtsite.com or on Twitter @rdunbaro.
Ishmael Reed is the author of over twenty-five books including Mumbo Jumbo, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down, Conjugating Hindi, Why No Confederate Statues in Mexico and most recently Why the Black Hole Sings the Blues and The Haunting of Lin-Manuel Miranda. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic: the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism. A regular contributor to CounterPunch and founder of the Before Columbus Foundation, he taught at the University of California, Berkeley for over thirty years, retiring in 2005. Reed is the only person to be nominated for the National Book Award in two categories in the same year.

Nomadic Press Virtual Open Mic #74
2021-09-03 18:00 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States

9th Ave: Shruti Swamy with Meng Jin
2021-09-07 18:00 - 19:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Join us on Tuesday, September 7th at 6pm PT when Shruti Swamy joins us to discuss her debut novel, The Archer, with Meng Jin at 9th Ave!

Masks Required for In-Person Attendance
Register at the link below to join us online
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/…/reg…/WN_yBzAFdhjR2aJms0xtt-VkQ

Can’t join us in person but want a personalized copy?
Order your copy of The Archer here by September 7, write who you would like the book made out to in your order comment, and we will handle the rest!
Your order will ship after the event date.

Praise for The Archer
“This novel swallowed me whole. The Archer is the kind of book you always hope for: lush and sensual, tasted and felt, with striking images that play out like film behind the eyes. Swamy evokes an India that resists flat stereotype and teems with exuberance, beauty, and life. The Archer is timeless yet utterly modern as it asks what it means for a woman to make a life of art.”
—C Pam Zhang, author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold
“Shruti Swamy is a writer to celebrate. Her fiction is provocative, precise, and gorgeously inventive.”
—Megha Majumdar, author of A Burning
“This is a singular work, a story of a dancer, and of a hungry self seated at the table of womanness and desire and art, told with unparalleled originality and elegance. Swamy writes with a thrilling clarity of vision that wakes the sleepwalker right into joyful consciousness. Every word is intimate, honest, ecstatic—utterly alive.”
—Meng Jin, author of Little Gods
About The Archer
Kiese Laymon called Shruti Swamy’s debut book of stories, A House Is a Body, “one of the greatest short story collections of the 2020s.” Now, Swamy brings us an accomplished and immersive coming-of-age novel set in the Bombay of the 1960s and 1970s.

As a child, Vidya exists to serve her family, watch over her younger brother, and make sense of a motherless world. One day she catches sight of a class where the students are learning Kathak, a precise, dazzling form of dance that requires the utmost discipline and focus. Kathak quickly becomes the organizing principle of Vidya’s life, even as she leaves home for college, falls in love with her best friend, and battles demands on her time, her future, and her body. Can Vidya give herself over to her art and also be a wife in Bombay’s carefully delineated society? Can she shed the legacy of her own imperfect, unknowable mother? Must she, herself, also become a mother?

Intensely lyrical and deeply sensual, with writing as rhythmically mesmerizing as Kathak itself, The Archer is about the transformative power of art and the possibilities that love can open when we’re ready.

About Shruti Swamy
Shruti Swamy is the author of the story collection, A House Is a Body, which was a finalist for the Pen/Robert Bingham Prize, the L.A. Times Book Prize for First Fiction, and longlisted for the Story Prize. Her work has been published by the Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and anthologized in the O. Henry Prize Stories. Her debut novel, The Archer, will be published by Algonquin Books in September 2021. She lives in San Francisco.

Sandra Cisneros, Martita, I Remember You
2021-09-08 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz is delighted to welcome acclaimed and bestselling author Sandra Cisneros for a ticketed online event celebrating her new book, Martita, I Remember You / Martita, te recuerdo.
Tickets for this special event will go on sale soon.
A long-forgotten letter sets off a charged encounter with the past in this poignant and gorgeously told tale masterfully told by Sandra Cisneros, the celebrated bestselling author of The House on Mango Street, in a beautiful dual-language edition.
As a young woman, Corina leaves her Mexican family in Chicago to pursue her dream of becoming a writer in the cafes of Paris. Instead, she spends her brief time in the City of Light running out of money and lining up with other immigrants to call home from a broken pay phone. But her months of befriending panhandling artists in the subway, sleeping on crowded attic floors, and dancing the tango at underground parties are given a lasting glow by her intense friendships with Martita and Paola. Over the years the three women disperse to three continents, falling out of touch and out of mind—until a letter unearthed in a closet brings Corina’s days in Paris back with breathtaking immediacy.
Told with intimacy and searing tenderness, this tribute to the life-changing power of youthful friendship is Cisneros at her vintage best, in a beautiful dual-language edition.
Sandra Cisneros is a poet, short story writer, novelist, essayist, performer, and artist whose work explores the lives of the working-class. Her numerous awards include NEA fellowships in both poetry and fiction, a MacArthur Fellowship, several honorary doctorates, and national and international book awards, including Chicago’s Fifth Star Award, the PEN America Literary Award, and the National Medal of Arts. Most recently, she received the Ford Foundation’s Art of Change Fellowship, was recognized among the Frederick Douglass 200, and won the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. In addition to her writing, Cisneros has fostered the careers of many aspiring and emerging writers through two nonprofits she founded: the Macondo Foundation and the Alfredo Cisneros del Moral Foundation. She is also the organizer of Los MacArturos, Latino MacArthur fellows who are community activists.

Reimagine Candlelight Vigil with Poet Victoria Chang
2021-09-09 17:00 - 18:30 | online, CA, United States
Thursday, September 9
8:00pm–9:30pm EDT

This is a digital event. You should receive information in your ticket or from the host about how to join online.

Free
RSVP

At this month’s Reimagine Candlelight Vigil, our special guest is award-winning poet Victoria Chang. Let’s honor our loved ones and celebrate the transformation of loss into creativity.

Reimagine has been hosting candlelight vigils throughout the pandemic in order to break down taboos and hold space for all that we’ve lost. At this special gathering, poet and writer Victoria Chang will read her work, revisit themes explored in Reimagine’s Asian American Table Talk series, and discuss the power of writing to discover meaning amidst grief and trauma.
Victoria Chang
Victoria Chang is the author of the forthcoming Dear Memory (Milkweed Editions, 2021), a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations. Her poetry books include OBIT, Barbie Chang, The Boss, Salvinia Molesta, and Circle. OBIT received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and the PEN Voeckler Award; it was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Prize and the Griffin Poetry Prize, and was long-listed for the National Book Award. She is also the author of a children’s picture book, Is Mommy?, illustrated by Marla Frazee and named a New York Times Notable Book, and a middle grade novel, Love, Love. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, a Pushcart Prize, a Lannan Residency Fellowship, and a Katherine Min MacDowell Colony Fellowship. She lives in Los Angeles and is the program chair of Antioch University’s low-residency MFA program.

TYPE:
RITUAL & CEREMONYTALK, PANEL, & CONVERSATIONWRITING & LITERATURECOMMUNITY GATHERINGCELEBRATION & REMEMBRANCE

TRACK:
ARTS & ENTERTAINMENTCOVID-19GRIEF

Maggie Nelson
2021-09-09 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
In conversation about her new book, On Freedom

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Thursday, September 9, 2021 – 7:00pm

Crowdcast

Tickets:

Sliding scale ($0-$100)

Award-winning poet, critic, and author Maggie Nelson joins us to discuss her latest book, On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint (Graywolf Press). Conversation partner TBD.
“[Maggie Nelson] traces the limits of liberty and the call to care in this expansive and sharp-eyed study. . . . Nelson turns each thought until it is finely honed and avoids binaries and bromides. While the literary theorizing is rich, this account soars in its ability to find nuance in considering questions of enormous importance. . . . Once again, Nelson proves herself a masterful thinker and an unparalleled prose stylist.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About On Freedom
An expansive, exhilarating work of criticism by one of the most significant writers of our day
So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our autonomy, justice, and well-being, or is freedom’s long star turn coming to a close? Does a continued obsession with the term enliven and emancipate, or reflect a deepening nihilism (or both)? On Freedom examines such questions by tracing the concept’s complexities in four distinct realms: art, sex, drugs, and climate.
Drawing on a vast range of material, from critical theory to pop culture to the intimacies and plain exchanges of daily life, Maggie Nelson explores how we might think, experience, or talk about freedom in ways responsive to the conditions of our day. Her abiding interest lies in ongoing “practices of freedom” by which we negotiate our interrelation with—indeed, our inseparability from—others, with all the care and constraint that entails, while accepting difference and conflict as integral to our communion.
For Nelson, thinking publicly through the knots in our culture—from recent art-world debates to the turbulent legacies of sexual liberation, from the painful paradoxes of addiction to the lure of despair in the face of the climate crisis—is itself a practice of freedom, a means of forging fortitude, courage, and company. On Freedom is an invigorating, essential book for challenging times.
About Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson is a poet, critic, and award-winning author of The Argonauts, Bluets, The Art of Cruelty, Jane: A Murder and The Red Parts. She lives in Los Angeles, California.

Offsite: Tinder Live! with Lane Moore at Rickshaw Stop
2021-09-09 20:00 - 22:00 | Rickshaw Stop, 155 Fell St., San Francisco, 94102
Join us on Thursday, September 9 at 8pm PT when author and comedian Lane Moore brings her hilarious Tinder Live! show to San Francisco’s beloved Rickshaw Stop!
Book sales provided by Green Apple Books
$20 standing adv / $25 limited seated adv (SOLD OUT) / $30 doors
This is an All Ages show
All attendees must be fully vaccinated and be able to show proof (card, phone, or QR code). Let’s keep everyone safe and sound during this return to live shows!*
About Tinder Live!
Tinder Live has been named one of the best comedy shows in NYC for good reason. Produced and hosted by NYC based comedian, Lane Moore (The Onion, Brooklyn Magazine’s “50 Funniest People In Brooklyn,” former Cosmopolitan Magazine sex & relationships editor, and author of #1 bestseller, How To Be Alone: If You Want To And Even If You Don’t, praised as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, New York Magazine, NPR, Fast Company, Marie Claire, and many others), Tinder Live is a totally improvised, anything-can-happen interactive comedy showstopper with helpful and oftentimes ridiculous Tinder tips, tricks, real-time swiping, and messaging (and sometimes even real-time phone calls with Tinder matches)! You’ll relate to Moore’s live-swiping and laugh at her reactions and find inspiration in her ridiculous, random emoji-filled messages (and sometimes even phone calls!) to would-be suitors. It’s also a great show to attend with a date, Tinder or otherwise.
But don’t expect cheap shots…this show has a huge heart. In between laughs, Lane reminds us how challenging it can be to find a match in the digital age. Even if you’ve never been on an online dating site, you will love this show.
“Tinder LIVE! is truly addictive entertainment…[it’s] ingenious. Moore transforms the banter on a dating app into compelling long-form improvisation. Ms. Moore, a cagey and humane performer, has developed an instinct for turning the raw materials of sexually charged chat with ordinary strangers into honed and generous jokes. “TinderLive” has a comic momentum and energy that is unusual. The way she manipulates tone and pace reveals an artist supremely confident in her form, not to mention a flirt par excellence.” –The New York Times.

Nomadic Press Virtual Open Mic #75
2021-09-10 18:00 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States

Erin Gordon with Michael Krasny - Peeps
2021-09-11 13:00 - 14:00 | Book Passage Corte Madera, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd., Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
Book Passage Presents
Sat., September 11, 2021 • 1:00pm PT • Corte Madera Store
In conversation with Michael Krasny
BUY THE BOOK

This event will be hosted in-person at Book Passage’s Corte Madera location

A coming-of-middle-age novel, Peeps tells the story of Meg, a 51-year-old podcaster who has spent her life afraid of “what ifs.” After an unexpected divorce, Meg might finally have the chance to obtain what she calls a Big Life, but isn’t sure she can pull it off. After her mother’s death, Meg gathers the courage to seek answers from her uncle about her disinterested and cruel mother. To get to him, she moves out of her Santa Monica home and drives across the country in a new RV she nicknames Irv.
Along her journey, Meg conducts interviews for her podcast called Peeps, in which she asks everyday people the same seven questions to “peep” into their lives and uncover shared humanity. Meg’s narrative is peppered with lively transcripts of her interviews with the ordinary yet fascinating people she meets. The podcast enables Meg to process the complicated grief and relief related to her mother’s death, her divorce, and her only child leaving home for college.
Peeps is evocative of The Wizard of Oz and Wild; like Dorothy and Cheryl—and many middle-aged women—Meg seeks to find her place in the world. Discerning readers will enjoy spotting the subtle references and symbols from both iconic stories.
The author of smart and moving book club fiction, Erin Gordon is a former lawyer and legal affairs journalist. A Bay Area native with degrees from both UC Berkeley and Stanford, Gordon’s novels explore themes of friendship, parenthood and self-discovery.
Michael Krasny is the former host of the award winning KQED Forum, a program discussing news and public affairs, current events, culture, health, business and technology.

Babylon Salon presents Anna North, Vince Granata, Tonya M. Foster, Mia P. Manansala and Zoe FitzGerald Carter
2021-09-11 17:00 - 18:00 | online, CA, United States
Booksmith is thrilled to partner with Babylon Salon for their Fall event, featuring readings by Anna North, Vince Granata, Tonya M. Foster and Mia P. Manansala, with music by Zoe Fitzgerald Carter!
Please note: this is a free, virtual event. Zoom information will soon be announced here.

About the authors
Anna North is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the author of two previous novels, America Pacifica and The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, which received a Lambda Literary Award in 2016. She has been a writer and editor at Jezebel, BuzzFeed, Salon, and the New York Times, and she is now a senior reporter at Vox. She grew up in Los Angeles and lives in Brooklyn. Order her books: Outlawed and The Life and Death of Sophie Stark.
Vince Granata received his BA in history from Yale University and his MFA in creative writing from American University. He has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Brush Creek Foundation for the Arts, the I-Park Foundation, and the Ucross Foundation, and residencies from PLAYA and the MacDowell Colony. His work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Chattahoochee Review, and Fourth Genre, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and listed as Notable in Best American Essays 2018. Order his book: Everything is Fine.
Tonya M. Foster is the author of A Swarm of Bees in High Court, and the bilingual chapbook La Grammaire des Os; and coeditor of Third Mind: Creative Writing through Visual Art. Her writing and research focus on ideas of place and emplacement, and on intersections between the visual and the written. She is an editor at Fence Magazine, and at The African-American Review. Her poetry, prose, and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Callaloo, Tripwire, boundary2, MiPOESIAS, NYFA Arts Quarterly, the Poetry Project Newsletter, and elsewhere. Tonya is a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Ford and the Mellon Foundations, from NYFA; and has been an Artist-in-Residence at the Headlands Center for the Arts and at the Macdowell colony. Her next collections are a cross-genre collection on New Orleans—A Mathematics of Chaos::Thingification (forthcoming from Ugly Presse 2021), and Monkey Talk, a cross-genre series about race, paranoia, aesthestics, and surveillance. She is an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts. Order her book, A Swarm of Bees in High Court
Mia P. Manansala (MAH-nahn-sah-lah) (she/her) is a writer and book coach from Chicago who loves books, baking, and bad-ass women. She uses humor (and murder) to explore aspects of the Filipino diaspora, queerness, and her millennial love for pop culture. She is the winner of the 2018 Hugh Holton Award, the 2018 Eleanor Taylor Bland Crime Fiction Writers of Color Award, the 2017 William F. Deeck – Malice Domestic Grant for Unpublished Writers, and the 2016 Mystery Writers of America/Helen McCloy Scholarship. She’s also a 2017 Pitch Wars alum and 2018-2020 mentor. A lover of all things geeky, Mia spends her days procrastibaking, playing JRPGs and dating sims, reading cozy mysteries, and cuddling her dogs Gumiho, Max Power, and Bayley Banks (bonus points if you get all the references). Her debut novel, Arsenic and Adobo, came out May 4, 2021 with Berkley/Penguin Random House and is the first in the Tita Rosie’s Kitchen Mystery series. Order her book, Arsenic and Adobo.
Zoe FitzGerald Carter is a graduate of Columbia Journalism School and has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Salon and Vogue. Imperfect Endings won first place in the Pacific Northwest Writer’s Association’s literary contest, was excerpted in O magazine and chosen as a finalist for the National MS Society’s Books for a Better Life Awards in the “Inspirational Memoir” category. It was also a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. Zoe is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, where she teaches memoir. She has also taught (and run) writing workshops from Hawaii to Vermont, and currently teaches memoir and songwriting at Left Margin Lit in Berkeley, CA. In the last couple of years, she’s been focusing on her career as a musician. Her first CD, Waiting for the Earthquake came out in 2017 and can be found on all the streaming platforms. Her new album, Waterlines, was released in 2021. Order her book, Imperfect Endings.

Please note: this is a free, virtual event. Zoom information will soon be announced here.

Virtual: Susan Nguyen, Felicia Zamora, Mai Der Vang
2021-09-13 18:00 - 19:00 | Green Apple Books 9th Avenue, 1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94122, United States
Join us on Monday, September 13th at 6pm PT when Susan Nguyen is joined by Mai Der Vang and Felicia Zamora for a reading celebrating her debut collection, Dear Diaspora, on Zoom!
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/…/reg…/WN_QylrXyjITH2FjW2LW5ZmHg
Praise for Dear Diaspora
“Dear Diaspora is a capacious and wholly felt account of a speaker’s contending with place and memory. Susan Nguyen’s gorgeous book maps out the longing of a particular Vietnamese immigrant experience—in its main character, the adolescent Suzi—and also captures, through its documentary research, a collection of voices of Vietnam War refugees in the aftermath. Against a backdrop of love and desire is the search to knit together a place of belonging and origin, rooted both in the sensual world and in the realm of the imagination. Dear Diaspora is a heartbreaking and breathtaking debut.”—Cathy Linh Che, author of Split
“Susan Nguyen, in Dear Diaspora, asks: ‘At the center of your calamity, what grows?’ Nguyen’s gorgeously rendered poems answer that question with language and imagination. There’s devastation in this book—an absent father figure, displacement of the speaker, a fragmented Vietnamese diaspora, but out of this devastation emerges beauty. The speaker in this book collects broken things such as cicada wings that become whole in her rich internal world. Nguyen’s talent is palpable from the first line, and what a gift this book is. In her poem ‘Grief as a Question,’ Nguyen writes: ‘no one told me grief could be so ordinary.’ But out of grief and woundedness emerges a voice that is anything but ordinary.”—Victoria Chang, author of Obit
“‘Last night I had the American dream,’ Nguyen writes, puncturing the dream bubble in which ‘America’ exists as the only and inevitable state of success and belonging. In this collection, diaspora, specifically Vietnamese diaspora, is verdant and lush—suffused with green light, mustard greens, grass and trees—blooming through the drought of American love for Nguyen’s speakers. The poems in Dear Diaspora offer us a lexicon we’ve needed to imagine how we might arrive at and receive one another better in land and language, in memory and touch.”—Natalie Diaz, author of Postcolonial Love Poem
About Dear Diaspora
Dear Diaspora is an unapologetic reckoning with history, memory, and grief. Parting the weeds on a small American town, this collection sheds light on the intersections of girlhood and diaspora. The poems introduce us to Suzi: ripping her leg hairs out with duct tape, praying for ecstasy during Sunday mass, dreaming up a language for buried familial trauma and discovering that such a language may not exist. Through a collage of lyric, documentary, and epistolary poems, we follow Suzi as she untangles intergenerational grief and her father’s disappearance while climbing trees to stare at the color green and wishing that she wore Lucy Liu’s freckles.
Winner of the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Dear Diaspora scrutinizes our turning away from the trauma of our past and our complicity in its erasure. Suzi, caught between enjoying a rundown American adolescence and living with the inheritances of war, attempts to unravel her own inherited grief as she explores the multiplicities of identity and selfhood against the backdrop of the Vietnamese diaspora. In its deliberate interweaving of voices, Dear Diaspora explores Suzi’s journey while bringing to light other incarnations of the refugee experience.
About Susan Nguyen
Susan Nguyen hails from Virginia but currently lives and writes in the desert. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Arizona State University, where she won the Aleida Rodriguez Memorial Prize and fellowships from the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing. In 2018, PBS NewsHour named her one of “three women poets to watch.” Her work appears in diagram, Tin House, and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Dear Diaspora, won the 2020 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Visit her at www.susanpoet.com.
About Felicia Zamora
Felicia Zamora is a poet, educator, and editor currently living in OH. She is the author of six books of poetry including: I Always Carry My Bones, winner of the 2020 Iowa Poetry Prize released from the University of Iowa Press in April 2021, Quotient forthcoming from Tinderbox Editions in 2021, Body of Render, winner of the 2018 Benjamin Saltman Award from Red Hen Press (2020), Instrument of Gaps (Slope Editions, 2018), & in Open, Marvel (Parlor Press, 2018), and Of Form & Gather, winner of the 2016 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize (University of Notre Dame Press). She’s received fellowships and residencies from CantoMundo, Ragdale Foundation, PLAYA, Moth Magazine, and Noepe Center at Martha’s Vineyard, authored two chapbooks, won the 2019 Wabash Prize for Poetry and the 2015 Tomaž Šalamun Prize, and was the 2017 Poet Laureate of Fort Collins, CO. Her poems and essays are found or forthcoming in AGNI, Alaska Quarterly Review, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, American Poetry Review, Boston Review online, Georgia Review, Guernica, Literary Hub, Missouri Review Poem-of-the-Week, Orion, POETRY, Poetry Daily, Poetry International, Prairie Schooner, The Nation, and others. She is an assistant professor of poetry at the University of Cincinnati and is the associate poetry editor for the Colorado Review.
About Mai Der Vang
Mai Der Vang is the author of Yellow Rain (Graywolf Press, 2021), and Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017), winner of the 2016 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets, longlisted for the 2017 National Book Award in Poetry, and a finalist for the 2018 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. The recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship, she served as a Visiting Writer at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Tin House, the American Poetry Review, among other journals and anthologies. Her essays have been published in the New York Times, the Washington Post, espnW, and elsewhere. Mai Der also co-edited How Do I Begin: A Hmong American Literary Anthology with the Hmong American Writers’ Circle. A Kundiman fellow, Mai Der has completed residencies at Civitella Ranieri and Hedgebrook. Born and raised in Fresno, California, she earned degrees from the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Fresno State.

Berkeley Arts & Letters presents Mary Roach with Zach Weinersmith / Launch for Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
2021-09-14 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Booksmith and Berkeley Arts & Letters are thrilled to host the virtual launch for the inimitable Mary Roach and her new book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law. She’ll be in conversation with Zach Weinersmith, creator of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal and author of the NYT bestselling popular science book, Soonish.
Please note:

This is a ticketed event. Each ticket includes admission to the event, a **signed** hardcover copy of the book and complimentary postage anywhere in the US.
Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to contact us: events@booksmith.com.
You can order additional copies of Fuzz here; Mary’s other books here.
Order copies of Soonish here.

About the book
Join “America’s funniest science writer” (Peter Carlson, Washington Post), Mary Roach, on an irresistible investigation into the unpredictable world where wildlife and humans meet.
What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discipline at the crossroads of human behavior and wildlife biology.
Roach tags along with animal-attack forensics investigators, human-elephant conflict specialists, bear managers, and “danger tree” faller blasters. Intrepid as ever, she travels from leopard-terrorized hamlets in the Indian Himalaya to St. Peter’s Square in the early hours before the pope arrives for Easter Mass, when vandal gulls swoop in to destroy the elaborate floral display. She taste-tests rat bait, learns how to install a vulture effigy, and gets mugged by a macaque.
Combining little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, langur impersonators, and trespassing squirrels, Roach reveals as much about humanity as about nature’s lawbreakers. When it comes to “problem” wildlife, she finds, humans are more often the problem—and the solution. Fascinating, witty, and humane, Fuzz offers hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat.
About the authors
Mary Roach is the author of six best-selling works of nonfiction, including Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, and, most recently, Grunt: The Curious Science of Humans at War. Her writing has appeared in Outside, National Geographic, and the New York Times Magazine, among other publications.
Zach Weinersmith is the creator of the popular webcomic SMBC, the creator of the nerd comedy show BAHFest, and the co-author of the New York Times bestselling popular science book, Soonish.
Please note: This is a ticketed, all-ages event. Each ticket includes a copy of Fuzz – no exceptions. If you already have a copy, remember that books make great gifts! If you’ve already gifted this title to all of your friends, please write events@booksmith.com and we’ll work things out.

On Radical Friendship
2021-09-15 17:30 - 19:00 | Virtual
The divides we experience within us and between us are not only a threat to our physical and emotional health-they are also the weapons and the outcomes of structural oppression. Meditation teacher and author Kate Johnson believes that through wise relationships it is possible to transform the barriers created by societal injustice. Drawing on her experiences as a leading meditation teacher and personal stories of growing up multiracial in a racist world, Kate brings a fresh take on time-honored wisdom to help us connect more authentically with ourselves, with our friends and family, and within our communities.
In Kate’s latest book, Radical Friendship, she illuminates seven strategies to help us embody our deepest values in our relationships. Kate shares meditation and reflection practices to help everyone cultivate vibrant, harmonious, revolutionary friendships. Grounded in the Buddha’s teachings on spiritual friendship, Kate offers us a path of depth and hope and shows us the importance of working toward collective wellbeing, one relationship at a time.
Join licensed psychologist and CIIS faculty Elizabeth Markle for a conversation with Kate as they lead us on a journey to becoming better friends by offering ways to show up for each other’s liberation at every stage of a relationship.
Free, suggested donation of $10.
https://www.ciis.edu/public-programs/event-calendar/johnson-kate-september-15-2021 publicprograms@ciis.edu 415-575-6175

Berkeley Arts & Letters presents Martin Ford / Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything
2021-09-16 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Booksmith and Berkeley Arts & Letters are thrilled to host Martin Ford for his new book Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything. More to be announced – save the date and join us!
Please note:

This event is free and all ages, but registration is required.
You can order copies of Rule of the Robots here; Martin’s other books here.
Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to contact us: events@booksmith.com.

About the book
Imagine it’s 2030. You call a bank to discuss your loan application, but you don’t get to talk to a person. The bank’s AI has spoken: you are denied. At home, feeling stressed, you take pills both invented and prescribed by AI to keep your blood pressure in check. You stream a video starring “actors” generated by machine. And before you turn in, you wonder if collaboration between Big Tech and China means you should choose a new AI provider for your home.
As Martin Ford shows in Rule of the Robots, AI will soon flow through our lives like electricity does today, remaking every sphere of human activity. Yet even as Ford maps out AI’s disquieting future, he shows how we can prepare for it, advocating for policies such as universal basic income and educational reform. It’s crucial that we take his words to heart.
About the author
Martin Ford is a futurist and the author of New York Times bestseller Rise of the Robots, a prescient look at AI and work. It won the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award. His TED Talk on the impact of artificial intelligence on society has been viewed over 3 million times. Author photo by Xiaoxiao Zhao.
Please note:

This event is free and all ages, but registration is required.
You can order copies of Rule of the Robots here; Martin’s other books here.
Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
If you have any questions at all, don’t hesitate to contact us: events@booksmith.com.

Meg Lowman
2021-09-16 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Celebrating the release of The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us

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Thursday, September 16, 2021 – 6:00pm

Crowdcast
CA 94956

Tickets:

Sliding Scale ($0 -$100)

Meg Lowman discusses The Arbornaut: A Life Discovering the Eighth Continent in the Trees Above Us (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
“The Arbornaut is about a shy girl who loved to play outdoors and became a scientist who educated the world about the abundant life in the treetops. I loved it.”
—Temple Grandin, author of Animals Make Us Human, Animals in Translation, and Thinking in Pictures
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About The Arbonaut
Nicknamed the “Real-Life Lorax” by National Geographic, the biologist, botanist, and conservationist Meg Lowman—aka “CanopyMeg”—takes us on an adventure into the “eighth continent” of the world’s treetops, along her journey as a tree scientist, and into climate action
Welcome to the eighth continent!
As a graduate student exploring the rain forests of Australia, Meg Lowman realized that she couldn’t monitor her beloved leaves using any of the usual methods. So she put together a climbing kit: she sewed a harness from an old seat belt, gathered hundreds of feet of rope, and found a tool belt for her pencils and rulers. Up she went, into the trees.
Forty years later, Lowman remains one of the world’s foremost arbornauts, known as the “real-life Lorax.” She planned one of the first treetop walkways and helps create more of these bridges through the eighth continent all over the world.
With a voice as infectious in its enthusiasm as it is practical in its optimism, The Arbornaut chronicles Lowman’s irresistible story. From climbing solo hundreds of feet into the air in Australia’s rainforests to measuring tree growth in the northeastern United States, from searching the redwoods of the Pacific coast for new life to studying leaf eaters in Scotland’s Highlands, from conducting a BioBlitz in Malaysia to conservation planning in India and collaborating with priests to save Ethiopia’s last forests, Lowman launches us into the life and work of a field scientist, ecologist, and conservationist. She offers hope, specific plans, and recommendations for action; despite devastation across the world, through trees, we can still make an immediate and lasting impact against climate change.
A blend of memoir and fieldwork account, The Arbornaut gives us the chance to live among scientists and travel the world—even in a hot-air balloon! It is the engrossing, uplifting story of a nerdy tree climber—the only girl at the science fair—who becomes a giant inspiration, a groundbreaking, ground-defying field biologist, and a hero for trees everywhere.
About Meg Lowman
Meg Lowman, PhD, aka “CanopyMeg,” is an American biologist, educator, ecologist, writer, editor, and public speaker. She is the executive director of the TREE Foundation and a professor at the National University of Singapore, Arizona State University, and Universiti Sains Malaysia. Nicknamed the “real-life Lorax” by National Geographic and “Einstein of the treetops” by The Wall Street Journal, Lowman pioneered the science of canopy ecology. Her motto is “no child left indoors.” She travels extensively for research, outreach, and speaking engagements for audiences large and small.

The Last Thing He Told Me: A Discussion With Author Laura Dave
2021-09-16 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Please join us on Thursday, September 16, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a discussion of THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME with author Laura Dave.
Our discussion will be webcast on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84095518061 and on Facebook Live at https://www.facebook.com/ggpbooks/live/.
You can order a print copy of THE LAST THING HE TOLD ME at https://bit.ly/ggpLastThing, or in audiobook from Libro.fm, GGP’s audiobook partner, at https://bit.ly/LastThingAB.
Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
SELECTION OF THE REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB
A HIGHLY ANTICIPATED, BEST BOOK OF SUMMER SELECTED BY * VOGUE * USA TODAY * ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY * CNN * TOWN & COUNTRY * PARADE * BUSTLE * AND MORE!
A “gripping” (Entertainment Weekly) mystery about a woman who thinks she’s found the love of her life—until he disappears.
Before Owen Michaels disappears, he smuggles a note to his beloved wife of one year: Protect her. Despite her confusion and fear, Hannah Hall knows exactly to whom the note refers—Owen’s sixteen-year-old daughter, Bailey. Bailey, who lost her mother tragically as a child. Bailey, who wants absolutely nothing to do with her new stepmother.
As Hannah’s increasingly desperate calls to Owen go unanswered, as the FBI arrests Owen’s boss, as a US marshal and federal agents arrive at her Sausalito home unannounced, Hannah quickly realizes her husband isn’t who he said he was. And that Bailey just may hold the key to figuring out Owen’s true identity—and why he really disappeared.
Hannah and Bailey set out to discover the truth. But as they start putting together the pieces of Owen’s past, they soon realize they’re also building a new future—one neither of them could have anticipated.
With its breakneck pacing, dizzying plot twists, and evocative family drama, The Last Thing He Told Me is a riveting mystery, certain to shock you with its final, heartbreaking turn.
About the Author

Laura Dave is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Last Thing He Told Me, as well as The First Husband, The Divorce Party, Eight Hundred Grapes, and Hello, Sunshine. She resides in Los Angeles with her family.

Virtual Speaking Axolotl Reading and Open Mic #39
2021-09-16 20:00 - 22:00 | online, CA, United States
A Latinx poetry reading series y open mic entering into our 3rd consecutive year that happens every third Thursday of the month en el Zoom mundo. Curated y hosted by Josiahluis Alderete.
Sign up for the 10-slot virtual open mic by filling out this form:
https://forms.gle/aHgoJxdUFXZXHjgQA
This month’s features: TBA
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Grant Faulkner and Melanie Abrams
2021-09-17 18:00 - 19:00 | Green Apple Books 9th Avenue, 1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94122, United States
JOIN US ON FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 17 AT 6PM PT WHEN GRANT FAULKNER DISCUSSES HIS BOOK ALL THE COMFORT SIN CAN PROVIDE WITH MELANIE ABRAMS AT 9TH AVE!
Masks Required for In-Person
Join us online by registering at the link below
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_GyfaQ2hGRuifzatEVoJfeg
Praise for All the Comfort Sin Can Provide
“Somewhere between sinister and gleeful the characters in Grant Faulkner’s story collection All the Comfort Sin Can Provide blow open pleasure—guilty pleasure, unapologetic pleasure, accidental pleasure, repressed pleasure. Really, at the heart of all identity is the reach for pleasure, and then what actually comes, all those moments of slippage where we do the wrong thing, take a ridiculous risk, double down on failure, land in a forsaken place, slip the mainstream of things enough to change and become. These characters exude beauty from their flaws. These stories are lit.”–Lidia Yuknavitch
“Full of bad behavior and a ferocious desire for escape, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide is a catalog of longing. Faulkner’s arresting characters broadcast their worst decisions from grimy motel rooms, greasy kitchens, and sprawling American highways, each of them hellbent on the promise of something better.”–Kimberly King Parsons
“All the Comfort Sin Can Provide delivers on the promise of Grant Faulkner’s daring debut with a follow-up collection of stories that excavates possibility, salvation, and the deceptive comforts one finds in so many pleasures.”–Adam Johnson
About All the Comfort Sin Can Provide
With raw, lyrical ferocity, All the Comfort Sin Can Provide delves into the beguiling salve that sin can promise—tracing those hidden places most of us are afraid to acknowledge. In this collection of brutally unsentimental short stories, Grant Faulkner chronicles dreamers, addicts, and lost souls who have trusted too much in wayward love, the perilous balm of substances, or the unchecked hungers of others, but who are determined to find salvation in their odd definitions of transcendence.
Taking us from hot Arizona highways to cold Iowa hotel rooms, from the freedoms of the backwoods of New Mexico to the damnations of slick New York City law firms, Faulkner creates a shard-sharp mosaic of desire that careens off the page—honest, cutting, and wise.
About Grant Faulkner
Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He recently published the short story collection All the Comfort Sin Can Provide, and he’s also the author of Fissures, a collection of 100-word stories. His essays on creativity have been published in The New York Times, Poets & Writers, LitHub, Writer’s Digest, and The Writer, and his book, The Art of Brevity, is forthcoming in 2022. He also co-hosts Write-minded, a weekly podcast on writing and publishing.
About Melanie Abrams
Melanie Abrams is the author of the novels Playing and Meadowlark and the forthcoming The Joy of Cannabis: 75 Ways to Amplify Your Life through the Science and Magic of Cannabis. She is a developmental editor and photographer and teaches writing at the University of California, Berkeley.

Nomadic Press Virtual Open Mic #76
2021-09-17 18:00 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States

Colson Whitehead
2021-09-17 19:30 - 20:30 | Sydney Goldstein Theater, 275 Hayes St, San Francisco, CA, 94102, United States
Friday, September 17, 2021
7:30pm Pacific Time
Venue: Sydney Goldstein Theater
TICKETS

Colson Whitehead is the author of ten works of fiction and nonfiction, and is a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, for Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad, which also won the National Book Award. His new novel, Harlem Shuffle, is a gloriously entertaining novel of heists, shakedowns, and rip-offs set in Harlem in 1960s.
A limited number of tickets include a copy of Harlem Shuffle.
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.

Alix Ohlin - We Want What We Want
2021-09-18 13:00 - 14:00 | online, CA, United States
Book Passage Presents
Sat., September 18, 2021 • 1:00pm PT • Live • Online
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This event will be broadcast live and does not require registration to attend. To view, please click the “Watch Here” button at the time of the event, or subscribe to our e-newsletter to receive a ten-minute reminder.
A collection of glittering, surprising, darkly funny stories of people testing the boundaries of their lives from Alix Ohlin, award-winning author of Dual Citizens.
In the mordantly funny “Money, Geography, Youth,” Vanessa arrives home from a gap year volunteering in Ghana to find that her father is engaged to her childhood best friend. Unable to reconcile the girl she went to dances with in the eighth grade and the woman in her father’s bed, Vanessa turns to a different old friendship for her own, unique diversion.
In the subversive “The Brooks Brothers Guru,” Amanda drives to upstate New York to rescue her gawky cousin from a cult, only to discover clean-cut, well-dressed men living in a beautiful home, discussing the classics, and drinking sophisticated cocktails, moving her to wonder what freedoms she might willingly trade away for a life of such elegant comfort.
And in “The Universal Particular,” Tamar welcomes her husband’s young stepcousin into their home, imagining they are saving this young woman from Somalia by way of Stockholm, only to find their cool suburban life of potlucks and air-conditioning knocked askew in ways they cannot quite understand.
Populated with imperfect families, burned potential, and inescapable old flames, the thirteen stories in We Want What We Want are, each one, diamond-sharp—sparkling with pain, humor, and beauty.
Alix Ohlin is the author of six books, including the novel Dual Citizens, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Best American Short Stories, and many other places. She lives in Vancouver, where she is the Director of the UBC School of Creative Writing.

Book Release: Second Edition of Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory by James Cagney
2021-09-18 18:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us to celebrate the release of the second edition of Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory by James Cagney!
Lineup of readers and musician to be announced soon.
Preorders will go live soon.
About the book: The poems in Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory interrogate identity, family, loneliness, and the expectations of masculinity. Using dreams, blues, and a chorus of voices, this collection of poems examines the complexities of intimacy for an adopted person trying to find balance between two families—one rattled by age and illness; the other, holding space for a son that doesn’t exist. Second edition includes a foreword by Aya De Leon, introduction by James Cagney, and a reading guide at the back.
Zoom Joining Info
Topic: Book Release: Second Edition of Black Steel Magnolias in the Hour of Chaos Theory by James Cagney
Time: Sep 18, 2021 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
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