Litseen

VIRTUAL EVENT: Aaron Carnes, In Defense of Ska
2021-05-10 19:00 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
VIRTUAL EVENT: Aaron Carnes, music editor at the Good Times, will be in conversation with Good Times editor Steve Palopoli about Carnes’ new book In Defense of Ska.
Register for this free Crowdcast event here!
Why doesn’t ska get its due as a rich, diverse genre the way punk, metal, hip-hop and electronic music does? Or more to the point, why are ska fans so embarrassed of this music they love? The era of ska shame is officially over. In Defense of Ska is the much-needed response to years of ska-mockery. No longer do ska fans need to hide in the basement, skanking alone in their sharp suits, slim ties and porkpie hats. Now the time to take to the streets and fight music snobbery, or at least crank up the ska without being teased ruthlessly.
In a mix of interviews, essays, personal stories, historical snapshots, obscure anecdotes, and think pieces, In Defense of Ska dissects, analyzes and celebrates ska in exactly the way fans have been craving for decades. This book will enlist ska-lovers as soldiers in the ska army, and challenge ska-haters’ prejudices to the core.
Aaron Carnes is a music journalist based out of Sacramento, California. His work has appeared in Playboy, Salon, Bandcamp Daily, Sierra Club, Noisey, Sun Magazine, and he’s the music editor at Good Times Santa Cruz weekly newspaper, where he tries to sneak in ska content whenever his boss isn’t looking. Aaron has been listening to ska since the early ’90s. He used to play drums in a ska band. Now he just plays ska on his car stereo. When he’s not defending ska, he enjoys backpacking with his wife Amy Bee, and talking about music from every existing genre. Ska will always be his favorite.
Carnes hosts the podcast In Defense of Ska and can be found on Twitter and Instagram @indefenseofska. His Substack newsletter is aaroncarnes.substack.com and Spotify playist, which consists of the songs and bands mentioned in the book, in order, can be found here.
Author photo credit: Amy Bee (Instagram: @_amy_bee)
Cover photo credit: Cam Evans (Instagram: @photofromcam)

Virtual Event: Eric Nguyen and Lydia Kiesling
2021-05-10 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Monday, May 10 at 6pm PT when Eric Nguyen joins us to discuss his debut novel, Things We Lost to the Water, with Lydia Kiesling on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88925265993

Praise for Things We Lost to the Water
“I was captivated. The writing is absolutely gorgeous…The voice is strong and this is a powerful novel…Well worth a read. Really enjoyed.”—Roxane Gay, via Goodreads

“This is an elemental book, of water, for sure, but also of other elements of life, including love and loss. Vietnamese people know all about these elements, coming from a country whose entire length is bordered by a sea, and from a history saturated with loss. Love is one element that has enabled their survival, but sometimes at a cost. Eric Nguyen’s powerful novel ripples and gleams with the unpredictable flow and surge of love, which, like water, can drown us or sustain us. From a war to a hurricane, from an ocean to a flood, Things We Lost to the Water proves itself to be a novel that sustains us.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer

“Exquisitely well-written, Things We Lost to the Water is a tender, haunting story of loss, love, family and survival. A moving and powerful debut.”—Charles Yu, National Book Award-winning author of Interior Chinatown

About Things We Lost to the Water
A stunning debut novel about an immigrant Vietnamese family who settles in New Orleans and struggles to remain connected to one another as their lives are inextricably reshaped.

When Huong arrives in New Orleans with her two young sons, she is jobless, homeless, and worried about her husband, Cong, who remains in Vietnam. As she and her boys begin to settle in to life in America, she continues to send letters and tapes back to Cong, hopeful that they will be reunited and her children will grow up with a father.

But with time, Huong realizes she will never see her husband again. While she attempts to come to terms with this loss, her sons, Tuan and Binh, grow up in their absent father’s shadow, haunted by a man and a country trapped in their memories and imaginations. As they push forward, the three adapt to life in America in different ways: Huong gets involved with a Vietnamese car salesman who is also new in town; Tuan tries to connect with his heritage by joining a local Vietnamese gang; and Binh, now going by Ben, embraces his adopted homeland and his burgeoning sexuality. Their search for identity—as individuals and as a family—threatens to tear them apart, until disaster strikes the city they now call home and they are suddenly forced to find a new way to come together and honor the ties that bind them.

Splitting the World Open: An International Roundtable of Dangerous Women Writers
2021-05-09 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
In 1968, poet Muriel Rukeyser famously wrote, “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life? The world would split open.” More than half a century later, women themselves feel split into a million pieces. This past year has been especially challenging for women, typically society’s primary caretakers. Indeed, mothers have been carrying an especially heavy load. Speaking one’s truth is hard when you’re totally exhausted.
So what better Mother’s Day gift for women (and all who love them) to spend an hour, free of charge, with three brilliant female authors, writing from and about multiple corners of the globe—India, the Middle East, North Africa, South America, the United States—with woman-focused stories? And these aren’t just any stories: the work of all three novelists was shortlisted for the Booker Prize or the Booker International Prize, the most prestigious literary awards in the world.
In Burnt Sugar, Dubai-based Indian author Avni Doshi explores the intimate dynamics of mother-daughter conflict and postpartum depression with an ambivalence and caustic wit that ruffled some feathers. It’s that fearless artistry that landed her on the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist with Ethiopian-American novelist Maaza Mengiste, whose novel The Shadow King (“a masterpiece,” said the Washington Post) features a female soldier fighting fascism during Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia. The story is inspired by the author’s great-grandmother, one of those women who, in Mengiste’s words, “stepped forward out of the shadows and made themselves known.” Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán, trained as a human rights lawyer before turning to literary work, wrote The Remainder, a finalist for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, to delve into the legacy of Chile’s military dictatorship. Her new novel, Las Homicidas, to appear in English translation in 2021, explores an arguably even more dangerous topic: how rage against injustice can be so profound that it drives some women to kill, and how that rage, as with the frustrated anger of any oppressed group, is often minimized and deflected.
This conversation offers a Mother’s Day like no other! The event is co-presented by Words Without Borders and moderated by Karen Phillips, its executive director. Words Without Borders expands cultural understanding through the translation, publication, and promotion of the finest contemporary international literature.
Register Here
Free of charge, but you must register to receive the viewing link.
This event is also part of the Festival’s Women Lit series

Love, Loss, and Meaning in Life: World-Renowned Therapist Irvin Yalom with Joyce Carol Oates
2021-05-09 13:00 - 14:00 | online, CA, United States
“Mourning is the price we pay for having the courage to love others,” opens the extraordinary memoir by renowned psychiatrist Irvin Yalom (Love’s Executioner) and his late wife, Marilyn Yalom, the esteemed feminist scholar and writer. Exploring universal questions of intimacy, love, and grief, A Matter of Death and Life recounts the final months of the couple’s 65-year marriage after Marilyn’s cancer diagnosis. The book is written in alternating sections until Marilyn’s death, after which Irv, the “therapists’ therapist,” revisits his decades’ worth of writings as a way to cope with his own grief.
There could be no better partner for this conversation than Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most honored authors in American letters, whose more than 100 books—fiction, memoir, essays, poetry and more—masterfully delve into love, loss, mortality, and other core human experiences. Her memoir A Widow’s Story (2011) depicts her own struggles after the loss of her husband of 47 years. Both of her latest books, the poetry collection American Melancholy and short story collection The (Other) You, explore how circumstances and choices indelibly shape how we live and find meaning.
We present this conversation on Mother’s Day, after a year that taught us all to cherish human connection more than ever. Today we pay tribute to the women we love, but also to the many people this year who have cared for us (since mothering comes in many forms).
If you’re a mom, a professional caretaker, or an essential worker—or if you’ve just now decided to tell your loved ones afresh how much they mean to you—we invite you to use the code CARE in checkout to get 50% off the ticket price for this event. Please also consider getting a ticket for a loved one and buying Irv’s and Joyce’s books—you’ll be glad you did!
Get your Ticket

Special opportunity
With a tax-deductible donation of $100 to the nonprofit Bay Area Book Festival, you can get a special invitation to a virtual afterparty with the author(s)! In an intimate, relaxed setting, you’ll have a chance to ask that crucial question there wasn’t enough time for in the live event Q&A; get a sense of what makes these original thinkers tick as people; or just let a writer whose work you love know, face to face, how much it’s meant to you.
Read more here

Mule Kick Blues Book Release with Anne Waldman and Eileen Myles
2021-05-08 15:00 - 17:00
Book Launch for
Mule Kick Blues: And Last Poems
published by City Lights
The last book by the late Beat Generation legend Michael McClure
with Anne Waldman and Eileen Myles
and featuring Garrett Caples
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(Click Here) to register.
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(Click Here) to pre-order/purchase book.
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This event is followed by a livestreamed tribute to the life of Michael McClure with a roster of special guests happening on Sunday, May 9th. Go here to register for that event too!

The final book of poems from a Beat Generation legend, Mule Kick Blues finds McClure restlessly innovating until the end.
Mule Kick Blues is the final book of poems by Beat Generation legend Michael McClure. A powerful collection of new work written during the last years of McClure’s life, Mule Kick Blues was readied for publication before the poet’s death in May 2020. Its opening section gives us a rare view into his thoughts about his own mortality, particularly in the moving sequence “Death Poems.” The book takes its title from an innovative series of homages to blues musicians like Leadbelly and Howlin’ Wolf, and evoking Kerouac’s concept of “blues” poems. Featuring shout-outs to lifelong friends like Philip Whalen, Diane di Prima, and Gary Snyder, the long poem “Fragments of Narcissus,” and the eco-logical and zen-infused themes for which he is known, Mule Kick Blues is a definitive statement by one of the most significant American poets of the last sixty years. Introduction by poet Garrett Caples, McClure’s editor at City Lights.
Eileen Myles is an acclaimed poet and writer who has published over twenty works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and libretto. Their prizes and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Warhol/Creative Capital grant, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Anne Waldman co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where she still teaches. Her poetry collections include Iovis I, Iovis II, Fast Speaking Woman, Helping the Dreamer, Kill or Cure, and Trickster Feminism. She is a recipient of the Shelley Memorial Award.

This event has been sponsored by the City Lights Foundation

David Mitchell in conversation with Pico Iyer
2021-05-08 14:00 - 15:00 | online
City Arts & Lectures presents: David Mitchell in conversation with Pico Iyer
Saturday, May 8, 2021
2:00pm Pacific Time
TICKETS

David Mitchell is the award-winning and bestselling author of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Black Swan Green, Cloud Atlas, Number9Dream, Ghostwritten and The Bone Clocks. Named one of the best books of the year by NPR, The Washington Post, The Guardian, his latest novel Utopia Avenue follows the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. Mitchell’s kaleidoscopic novel tells the story of Utopia Avenue’s turbulent life and times; of stardom’s wobbly ladder; of the families we choose and the ones we don’t; of voices in the head, and the truths and lies they whisper; of music, madness, and idealism.
Pico Iyer is a travel writer, essayist, and novelist, whose many books include Video Night in Kathmandu, The Lady and the Monk, The Man Within My Head, and The Art of Stillness, a beautiful and thoughtful investigation of the benefits of quiet contemplation and travel to “nowhere.”
NOTE: this is an afternoon event

Virtual Event: Stephanie Wildman and Emma Bland Smith
2021-05-08 12:00 - 13:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us for story time with Stephanie Wildman and Emma Bland Smith on Saturday, May 8 at 12pm PT to celebrate, Brave in the Water, on Zoom!

An event especially for young readers!
San Francisco children’s book authors Stephanie Wildman and Emma Bland Smith will each read a story,
followed by a special opportunity to ask them any questions you may have about being a children’s book author!
How do they come up with storybook ideas?
Do they make those drawings themselves?
What books do they like to read?
Join us to find out and ask your own question!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83364102484

About Brave in the Water
Are you afraid to put your face in the water? So is Diante. He would like to play in the pool with other children. He’s not afraid to hang upside down, though, and he’s surprised to learn his grandma is. Can Diante help Grandma and become brave in the water?

About Stephanie Wildman
Stephanie M. Wildman, author of the forthcoming Brave in the Water, became a Professor Emerita after serving as the John A. and Elizabeth H. Sutro Chair at Santa Clara Law. She directed the school’s Center for Social Justice and Public Service. In 2007 the Society of American Law Teachers, the largest national organization of law school faculty honored her with their Great Teacher Award. Her most recent books include: Race and Races: Cases and Resources for a Diverse America 3d (with Richard Delgado, Angela A. Harris, Juan F. Perea, and Jean Stefancic) (2015); Social Justice: Professionals Communities and Law (with Martha R. Mahoney and John O. Calmore) (2013) and Women and the Law Stories (with Elizabeth Schneider) (2011). Her book, Privilege Revealed: How Invisible Preference Undermines America, (with contributions by Margalynne Armstrong, Adrienne D. Davis, & Trina Grillo) won the 1997 Outstanding Book Award from the Gustavus Meyers Center for Human Rights. She has authored dozens of law review articles and journalistic pieces. She is a grandmother, mother, spouse, friend, good listener, and she is able to sit “criss-cross apple sauce” thanks to her yoga practice.

About Emma Bland Smith
Emma Bland Smith is the award-winning author of Journey: Based on the True Story of OR7, the Most Famous Wolf in the West, as well as other fiction and nonfiction books for children. Many of Emma’s books include animals—wolves, dogs, pigs, even alligators! Emma is a librarian and author and lives in San Francisco with her husband, two kids, dog, and cat—but no wolf, pig, or alligator. Visit her online at emmabsmith.com and on Twitter at @emmablandsmith.

Words out Loud Spoken Word Series
2021-05-07 19:30 - 21:30 | online, CA, United States
Featuring Angie Dribben and Ken Waldman reading from their poetry, plus literary trivia quiz, and open mic.
Angie Dribben’s debut collection, Everygirl, a finalist for the 2020 Broadkill Review Dogfish Head Prize, is out with Main Street Rag. She is Contributing Reviews Editor at Cider Press Review. Her poetry, essays, mixed media, and reviews can be found or are forthcoming in Cave Wall, EcoTheo, Crab Creek Review, Crack the Spine, and others. Her poetry is widely-anthologized.
Ken Waldman combines Appalachian-style fiddling, original poetry, and smart storytelling for a performance uniquely his. Eighteen books include fifteen full-length poetry collections, a memoir, a creative writing manual, and a children’s book. Nine CDs have received widespread radio airplay. Appearances include the Kennedy Center Millennium Stage, Dodge Poetry Festival, Woodford Folk Festival (Queensland, Australia), plus concert series and clubs across America. He’s had work in Poet Lore, Massachusetts Review, and hundreds more. www.kenwaldman.com and www.trumpsonnets.com.

Soul Sister Revue w/ Yona Harvey, Tarfia Faizullah, Dante Micheaux & More
2021-05-07 19:00 - 20:30 | online, CA, United States
Join Soul Sister Revue for its anniversary show as we turn 8 years strong and ask the question “What does Soul mean to you?” Readers include Yona Harvey (You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love), Tarfia Faizullah (Registers of Illuminated Villages), Dante Micheaux (Circus), CM Burroughs (Master Suffering), and Dimitri Reyes. The event is free, but registration is required. Show Time: 7:00 pm EST, 4pm PST, 5pm MST, or 6pm CST.

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #57
2021-05-07 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)
Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.
Weekly: https://us02web.zoom.us/…/tZcudeqoqjIiE9fnl7dxuB…/ics…
Join Zoom Meeting
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How to Dream the World You Want: Nnedi Okorafor and Jeff VanderMeer on Resistance and Transformation
2021-05-07 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Forget the new normal. What we need right now is literature that turns the whole concept of “normal” on its head, building worlds that put the status quo in the rearview mirror. Fantasy and sci-fi, once relegated to “niche” status in the book world, have become leading and widely-read literary genres that meet the historic moment we’re in, centering diversity and disrupting complacency in ways no other form can do. If you haven’t read much in this genre, there’s never been a better time to discover it.

At the helm of this brave new era is novelist and Marvel Comics scribe Nnedi Okorafor, whose groundbreaking Africanfuturism—including her latest novel, Remote Control—demands big-screen renderings (fittingly, two of her books are currently being adapted as series by HBO and Hulu). Nebula Award winner Jeff VanderMeer (Hummingbird Salamander), author of the bestselling Southern Reach trilogy that was adapted into the film Annihilation, also is no stranger to meeting (and even anticipating) the moment: Esquire called him “the prophet of climate fiction.” In this “Writer to Writer” conversation, you’ll meet two literary pioneers we need now: subversive, audaciously imaginative, and unafraid to steer us into uncharted territory.
Get your Ticket

Alison Bechdel in conversation with George McCalman
2021-05-07 18:00 - 19:00 | online
City Arts & Lectures presents: Alison Bechdel in conversation with George McCalman

Friday, May 7, 2021
6:00pm Pacific Time
TICKETS
Alison Bechdel‘s cult following for her early comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For grew wildly in response to her family memoirs, the best-selling graphic memoir Fun Home, adapted into a Tony Award-winning musical, and Are You My Mother? She has become a cultural household name for the concept of the Bechdel Test, a metric used when considering the representation of women in fiction. Bechdel has been named a MacArthur Fellow and Cartoonist Laureate of Vermont, among many other honors. Her new memoir, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, delivers a deeply layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the 60s (“Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!”) to the existential oddness of present-day spin class.
George McCalman is an artist and creative director based in San Francisco. His studio, McCalman.Co, designs brands for a range of cultural clientele. Additionally, he’s a visual columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, featured in the “Observed” and “First Person” columns. His first book, Illustrated Black History, is due to be published by Amistad/Harper Collins Fall 2021.
Ticket includes a hardcover copy of Bechdel’s new memoir The Secret to Superhuman Strength. Books will be mailed the week of the event.

Lager and Love Can’t Pay the Bills: 2020 Booker Prize Winner Douglas Stuart on his Masterpiece, Shuggie Bain
2021-05-06 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Douglas Stuart enraptured readers worldwide in 2020 when his heart-stopping debut novel, Shuggie Bain, took the world’s top literary award, the Booker Prize. While Stuart may have seemed like an overnight success, Shuggie Bain was a labor of love that drew from his own history of childhood poverty, hardship, and devotion to a mother whose addiction struggles were intensified by a broken system. This tender and wrenching story has been compared to Angela’s Ashes in its emotional power and mesmerizing writing style. Shuggie Bain may have been translated into over 20 languages, but it’s the author’s own Glasgowian dialect—immediate, accessible, hypnotic—that’ll take up residence in your mind forever.

Stuart is interviewed by Casey Gerald, who gained fame with a viral TED talk, “The Gospel of Doubt.” Like Stuart, Gerald grew up queer, shaped by poverty and parental addiction. He’s another “success story,” having made his way through Yale and Harvard Business School, but his memoir There Will Be No Miracles Here, praised by Marlon James as “the most urgently political, most deeply personal, and most engagingly spiritual statement of our time,” refuses to reduce his story to an “American dream” parable. This conversation between two rare souls will question myths, mine deep emotional territory, and examine how we break old cycles while still honoring where we came from.
Get your Ticket

Special opportunity
With a tax-deductible donation of $100 to the nonprofit Bay Area Book Festival, you can get a special invitation to a virtual afterparty with the author(s)! In an intimate, relaxed setting, you’ll have a chance to ask that crucial question there wasn’t enough time for in the live event Q&A; get a sense of what makes these original thinkers tick as people; or just let a writer whose work you love know, face to face, how much it’s meant to you.
Read more here
]

Kate Durbin and Alex Dimitrov
2021-05-06 18:00 - 20:00
Kate Durbin celebrates her new collection of poetry
HOARDERS
published by Wave Books
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(CLICK HERE) to register.
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(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. Link coming soon!
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In Hoarders, Durbin deftly traces the associations between hoarding and collective US traumas rooted in consumerism and the environment. Each poem is a prismatic portrait of a person and the beloved objects they hoard, from Barbies to snow globes to vintage Las Vegas memorabilia to rotting fruit to plants. Using reality television as a medium, Durbin conjures an uncanny space of attachments that reflects a cultural moment back to the reader in ways that are surreal and tender. In the absurdist tradition of Kafka and Beckett, Hoarders ultimately embraces with sympathy the difficulty and complexity of the human condition.
“Though the swift-moving spectacle of the television show invites viewers to cast easy judgment on these hoarders, Durbin employs poetry’s slower speed to show a more complicated picture. Instead of using [these stories] to make us feel better about ourselves for not being hoarders, she indicts aspects of American culture we all participate in—religion, capitalism—and reveals our complicity, all the while dropping a lot of sight gags in the process.” —Rich Smith, The Stranger
Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist. Her books of poetry include E! Entertainment, The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA, which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize. Durbin was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia in 2015. Her art and writing have been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, the Believer, BOMB, poets.org, the American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has shown her artwork nationally and internationally at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, The PULSE Art Fair in Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in Los Angeles, peer to space in Berlin, and more.
Alex Dimitrov is the author of three books of poems, including the upcoming Love and Other Poems, as well as the chapbook American Boys. His work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review, and Poetry. He was the former senior content editor at the Academy of American Poets, where he edited Poem-A-Day and American Poets. He has taught creative writing at Princeton University, Columbia University, and Barnard College, among other institutions. With Dorothea Lasky, he is the co-author of Astro Poets: Your Guides to the Zodiac. Dimitrov lives in New York.

Michelle Zauner & Bowen Yang
2021-05-06 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Michelle Zauner is best known as a singer and guitarist who creates dreamy indie pop under the name Japanese Breakfast. She has won acclaim from major music outlets around the world for releases like Psychopomp (2016) and Soft Sounds from Another Planet (2017). In a new memoir, Crying in H Mart, Zauner reflects on her experience being raised by a Korean immigrant in the Pacific Northwest, and particularly her memories related to food. When her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer and Zauner moved back to Oregon to care for her, she was forced to reckon with her identity and upbringing. Zauner writes about the process of beginning to chase down her mother’s history, culture, and the flavors of Korea to re-gain the feeling of home in the wake of her loss.
Bowen Yang is a featured player on Saturday Night Live, where he wrote for one season before moving on-screen. He can also be seen recurring on Comedy Central’s Awkwafina is Nora From Queens, as well as in the TV shows Broad City, High Maintenance, Jon Glaser Loves Gear, and the upcoming series Girls5eva. He is the co-host of the popular comedy podcast “Las Culturistas,” along with fellow comedian Matt Rogers. This past year, Yang was featured in TIME as one of “23 People Who Are Changing What’s Funny Right Now,”as well as one of their TIME 100 NEXT: Artists, and was featured in this year’s Out100 list.
Photo Credits:
Barbora Mrazkova
Mary Ellen Matthews/NBC

Seismic Salon: Natalie Baszile
2021-05-06 17:00 - 18:30 | online
Buy Tickets

Litquake is excited to welcome Natalie Baszile, author of the New York Times bestseller Queen Sugar (now a series on OWN network) to our Seismic Salon series! Natalie has made the leap from fiction to nonfiction in her newest book, We Are Each Other’s Harvest: Celebrating African American Farmers Land and Legacy, which is published April 6. This anthology of poetry, essays, and interviews examines Black people’s connection to the American land, from Emancipation to today. Natalie has a M.A. in Afro-American Studies from UCLA, and is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers. Queen Sugar was named one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of 2014, and nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Her nonfiction work has appeared in Lenny Letter, The Bitter Southerner, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Rumpus, and a number of anthologies.
Buy Natalie Baszile’s books at the Litquake Bookshop.
Seismic Salons are a series of fundraisers offering conversation time with A-list authors for 10 lucky participants. All proceeds benefit Litquake’s on-going programs.

Green Rabbits Glowing at the End of the World: Annalee Newitz and Nathaniel Rich on What Happens When Civilizations Fail
2021-05-05 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Annalee Newitz, Nathaniel Rich, Bonnie Tsui
More than 150 years ago, long before intimations of a warming planet had begun, Ralph Waldo Emerson made a prescient statement: “The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.” While some of us might not consider our current culture to be terribly civilized, one thing is clear: we’ve been propelling our own species, along with millions of other life forms, toward extinction as a result of human-generated climate change.
To probe our own “end times,” we’ve brought together two highly respected journalists who also happen to be speculative fiction writers. Annalee Newitz is an award-winning novelist (The Future of Another Timeline) and a science, technology and culture writer whose fascinating new book, Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age, explores the rise and fall of four urban-centered civilizations, from medieval Angkor in Cambodia to the indigenous metropolis Cahokia in present-day Missouri.
Fast forward from ancient times to 2018, when the New York Times Magazine devoted an entire issue to journalist Nathaniel Rich’s chronicle of the world’s failures to listen to scientists who began seriously sounding the alarm about climate change in 1979. That article became the book Losing Earth, which Rich has now followed up with the deeply reported, riveting Second Nature: Scenes from a World Remade. Where do we go from here? Scientists are no longer asking how we can return to the world we’ve lost—we’ve irrevocably changed every inch of our planet—but what we can create in its place in order to survive. Their answers rival the wildest science fiction.
Albert Camus (The Plague) wrote, “the purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” Moderated by Bonnie Tsui, author of Why We Swim, this conversation with two leading writers will give you a blast from the (long lost) past along with a staggering vision of the future.
Get your Ticket

VIRTUAL EVENT: Renée Watson, Ways to Grow Love
2021-05-05 18:00 - 20:00
VIRTUAL EVENT: Bookshop is thrilled to welcome award-winning author Renée Watson for an online event celebrating Ways to Grow Love, the newest title in her Ramona-esque series for young readers, starring Ryan Hart and her loveable family.
Register for this free event by clicking here!This is a free event. The featured book may be purchased below. You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!
Ryan Hart and her family are back in another installment of stories about a Black girl finding her way and her voice as she grows through change and challenges. In this book, Ryan finds herself wishing for lots of things—like for her new sister to be born healthy, for her new recipes to turn out right, for that camping trip to go better than she fears! And of course Ryan is facing these new challenges and new experiences in her classic style—with a bright outlook and plenty of spirit!
Inspired to write her own version of Ramona, Newbery Honor- and Coretta Scott King Award-winning author Renée Watson continues her delightful series.
Renée Watson is a New York Times bestselling author. Her novel, Piecing Me Together, received a Newbery Honor and Coretta Scott King Award. Her books include Ways to Make Sunshine, Some Places More Than Others, This Side of Home, What Momma Left Me, Betty Before X, co-written with Ilyasah Shabazz, and Watch Us Rise, co-written with Ellen Hagan, as well as two acclaimed picture books: A Place Where Hurricanes Happen and Harlem’s Little Blackbird, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. Renée lives in New York City. www.reneewatson.net; @harlemportland (Instagram); @reneewauthor (Twitter)

Imagine Us, the Swarm Book Launch
2021-05-05 18:00 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States
Wednesday May 5 | 6-7:30pm PST
via Zoom
no fee
KSW is partnering with the San Francisco Public Library for the launch of Muriel Leung’s Imagine Us, The Swarm (Nightboat Books). In this collection of essays in verse, Leung reconciles a familial history of violence and generational trauma across intersections of Asian American, queer and gendered experiences. Following the death of the poet’s father, Imagine Us, The Swarm contemplates vengeance, eschews forgiveness and cultivates a desire for healing beyond the reaches of this present life. Moving between the past and the present, Leung imbues memories with something new to alter time and design a different future.
This launch party will feature a reading from Leung’s new book in addition to readings by Truong Tran, Hari Alluri, Janice Lobo Sapigao, Angie Sijun Lou and Addie Tsai. There will also be a raffle, giveaways, and trivia games woven into the night.
Muriel Leung

Muriel Leung is the author of Imagine Us, The Swarm from Nightboat Books in 2021, and Bone Confetti, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer, her writing can be found in The Baffler, Cream City Review, Gulf Coast, The Collagist, Fairy Tale Review and others. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Gold Line Press and the Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. Leung co-hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour Podcast with Rachelle Cruz and MT Vallarta. She is a member of Miresa Collective, a feminist speakers bureau. Currently, Leung is an Andrew W. Mellon Humanities in a Digital World fellow at the University of Southern California where she is completing her PhD in Creative Writing and Literature.

Hari Alluri

Hari Alluri (he/him/siya) is the author of The Flayed City (Kaya). A winner of the 2020 Leonard A. Slade, Jr. Fellowship for Poets of Color and recipient of grants from the Canada Council of the Arts, his work appears recently or soon in the Watch Your Head (Coach House) and Pandemic Solidarity (Pluto) anthologies, as well as Apogee, Solstice, Tinderbox, Witness and elsewhere. Alluri’s collaborations lately are through BIPOC Writing Community, Community Building Art Works, The Cultch, The Digital Sala, Massy Books and Soft Cedar.

Janice Sapigao

Janice Lobo Sapigao (she/her) is a poet from San José, CA. She is the author of two books of poetry, microchips for millions (Philippine American Writers and Artists, Inc., 2016) and like a solid to a shadow (Nightboat Books, 2017). She is the 2020-2021 Santa Clara County Poet Laureate.

Addie Tsai

Addie Tsai (she/they) is a queer nonbinary artist and writer of color, and teaches courses in literature, creative writing, dance and humanities at Houston Community College. She also teaches in Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts and Regis University’s Mile High MFA in Creative Writing. They collaborated with Dominic Walsh Dance Theater on Victor Frankenstein and Camille Claudel, among others. Addie holds an MFA from Warren Wilson College and a PhD in Dance from Texas Woman’s University. She is the author of the queer Asian young adult novel Dear Twin, which made the 2021 Rainbow Book List, and received press in Autostraddle, Bustle, Lambda Literary Review and others. Addie’s writing has been published in Foglifter, VIDA Lit, the Texas Review and elsewhere. They are the Fiction Co-Editor at Anomaly, Staff Writer at Spectrum South and Founding Editor & Editor in Chief at just femme & dandy.

Truong Tran

Truong Tran is a poet ad visual artist. His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at California Institute of Integral Studies, The Telegraph Hill Gallery, SOMArts, Mina Dresden Gallery, and The Peninsula Museum of Art. His books include, Placing The Accents, The Book of Perceptions, Dust and Conscience, Within The Margin, Four Letter Words, 100 Words and the much anticipated Book of the Other (October 2021). He is currently The Adjunct Professor of Poetry at Mills College where he teaches graduate courses about poetics and the crossing of writing and visual art.

Angie Sijun Lou

Angie Sijun Lou is the daughter of Chinese immigrants. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, FENCE, Black Warrior Review, the Adroit Journal, the Asian American Literary Review, Hyphen, the Margins and others. She is a Kundiman Fellow, a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California Santa Cruz, and a calculus instructor at San Quentin State Prison. She has received fellowships and support from the Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony and the Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference. She lives in Oakland.

REGISTER

Thalia Field and Anakana Schofield
2021-05-05 17:00 - 19:00
Anakana Schofield joins Thalia Field for a conversation about her latest experimental work on animal rights, Personhood (New Directions).
This event is presented in conjunction with Community Bookstore in Park Slope.
This will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Personhood
A remarkable and moving cross-genre work about animal rights by one of America’s foremost experimental writers
Whether investigating refugee parrots, indentured elephants, the pathetic fallacy, or the revolving absurdity of the human role in the “invasive species crisis,” Personhood reveals how the unmistakable problem between humans and our nonhuman relatives is too often the derangement of our narratives and the resulting lack of situational awareness. Building on her previous collection, Bird Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field’s essayistic investigations invite us on a humorous, heartbroken journey into how people attempt to control the fragile complexities of a shared planet. The lived experiences of animals, and other historical actors, provide unique literary-ecological responses to the exigencies of injustice and to our delusions of special status.
About the writers
Thalia Field is Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University. Her most recent novel is Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction) from Solid Objects Press. Her three New Directions books are Point and Line (2000), Incarnate: Story Material (2004), and Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010).
Anakana Schofield is an award-winning Irish-Canadian writer of fiction, essays, and literary criticism. Her previous novels are Malarky (2012) and Martin John (2015). The UK edition of Bina was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize 2020. Schofield lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.

New Voice Series, featuring Dan Lau, with others tba
2021-05-05 16:00 - 17:00 | online
Remote access event, free and open to the public
Registration link pending, will be announced here
With emcee, Carlos Quinteros III
The Poetry Center is delighted to announce the New Voice series, initiated in Spring 2021 as an annual reading series that will pair a poet alum of SF State, a current SF State graduate student poet in Creative Writing, and a current undergraduate student poet at SF State (any major), to each read their work and engage in conversation. For the premier event, poet Dan Lau has been invited to appear along with student poets on Wednesday May 5, 4:00 pm Pacific Time.
Details tba

Event contact:

The Poetry Center

Event email:

poetry@sfsu.edu

Event sponsor:

The Poetry Center, New Voice Series

Spring Readings: Ismail Muhammad
2021-05-05 14:00 - 15:00 | online, CA, United States
Wednesday, May 5, 2021, 2:00pm via Zoom
Ismail Muhammad is the reviews editor for The Believer, a staff writer at the Millions, a contributing editor at ZYZZYVA, and a board member at the National Books Critics Circle. He’s been a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellowship, and a Simpson Family Literary Fellow. His work, which focuses on literature, art, identity, and black popular and visual culture, has appeared in publications like The New York Times, Slate, New Republic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Real Life, and Catapult.
In Spring 2021, Muhammad is teaching English 361: Contemporary Nonfiction

Book Launch for YOU LOOK TIRED: AN EXCRUCIATINGLY HONEST GUIDE TO NEW PARENTHOOD with Author Jenny True
2021-05-04 19:00 - 21:00
Please join us on Tuesday, May 4, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a discussion of YOU LOOK TIRED: AN EXCRUCIATINGLY HONEST GUIDE TO NEW PARENTHOOD with author Jenny True in conversation with Catherine Newman (author of HOW TO BE A PERSON: 65 HUGELY USEFUL, SUPER-IMPORTANT SKILLS TO LEARN BEFORE YOU’RE GROWN UP).
Our discussion will be webcast on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85795898890, and on Facebook Live at https://www.facebook.com/ggpbooks/live/.
Order your copy of YOU LOOK TIRED at http://bit.ly/ggpTired, or in audiobook from Libro.fm at http://bit.ly/TiredAB
Description

In the tradition of Ali Wong and Amy Schumer comes this whip-smart, spit-out-your-coffee funny guide for new parents—from popular blogger and columnist Jenny True. Plenty of “new parent” guides cover the basics of breastfeeding, bonding, sleep, and “getting back in shape.” But nowhere is a guide that tells you, WTF is this squeeze bottle thing from the hospital?
You Look Tired is a totally honest, tell-it-like-it-is guide for new moms who don’t want any more advice. Writing as Jenny True on her “Excruciatingly Personal Mommy Blog” and in the “Dear Jenny” column on Romper, Jenny has been called the “postpartum feelings doula,” as she doles out her unique mix of humor, rage, and encouragement (with a smidge of practical advice), including:

Birth Hurts: Prenatal yoga is a waste of time.
Jabba the Hutt Was Just Postpartum: It explains so much.
An Open Letter to People Who Say, “Looks like you have your hands full!”

And much more!
About the Author

Jenny Pritchett (alias Jenny True) is a nationally recognized columnist for Romper, where she publishes advice on pregnancy and parenting, as well as on her popular blog Jenny True: An Excruciatingly Personal Mommy Blog, which was a finalist for the Mom 2.0 2019 People’s Choice Awards. Her columns have been featured in Elle, Scary Mommy, and the Longest Shortest Time podcast. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
About Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman is the author of How to Be a Person (83,000 copies in print), and two parenting memoirs: Waiting for Birdy and Catastrophic Happiness. She’s also the co-author of Stitch Camp. Newman is the etiquette columnist for Real Simple magazine and the editor of the James Beard Award–winning kids’ cooking magazine ChopChop, and has contributed to publications including the New York Times, O the Oprah Magazine, and Parents. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her family. Visit her at catherinenewmanwriter.com.
Praise For YOU LOOK TIRED

“In You Look Tired, Jenny Pritchett dishes out hilarious, in-your-face advice to overwhelmed moms and moms-to-be. If you don’t have a trust fund, a live-in nanny, or the organizational skills to breastfeed elegantly while getting a pedicure, you need this book. In the voice of her popular alter ego Jenny True, Pritchett tells it like it really is, not the way it would be if you were floating through parenthood on a cloud of maternal fairy dust. There is no maternal fairly dust, people! Fortunately, there is Jenny True.”—Michelle Richmond, New York Times bestselling author of five novels and two award winning story collections, mother of one, and Jenny True fan.
“Completely hilarious, utterly frank, thoughtful, and wise—this book is a breath of fresh air.” —Meaghan O’Connell, author of And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready
“A must-have for moms-to-be.” —Bunmi Laditan, author of The Honest Toddler: A Child’s Guide to Parenting

Epicenter of Girlhood: Carol Edgarian and Vendela Vida on Coming of Age in San Francisco
2021-05-04 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Vendela Vida, Cherilyn Parsons, Carol Edgarian

From the Barbary Coast to the Summer of Love to the tech takeover, San Francisco has always been a city in flux, a writer’s dream, and a favorite setting for literature. Its boom-and-bust drama and breathtaking beauty also make it a perfect backdrop for coming-of-age stories: especially ones about girls who can’t be pigeonholed.
Who better to chronicle the city’s growing pains—and those of two unforgettable teenage women—than two leading ladies of the Bay Area literary scene? Carol Edgarian, publisher of Narrative Magazine, has delivered “that rare novel you’ll want to buy for loved ones” (Andre Dubus III) with Vera, a pulse-pounding, often hilarious saga of a fierce 15-year-old, the daughter of a bordello owner, amidst the 1906 earthquake and fires. (Nob Hill, Pacific Heights, Market Street, the longed-for “fire escape” ferry to Oakland—they’re all here.)
We wonder what Vera would have to say to Eulabee, the protagonist of Vendela Vida’s funny, poignant We Run the Tides, who comes of age during the pre-tech-boom days of the 1990s (Eulabee haunts “Sea Cliff,” China Beach, the Haight). Vida, co-founder of The Believer magazine, 826 Valencia, and other Bay Area literary institutions, puts Eulabee squarely in the middle of a web of lies instigated by her fabulously-named friend Maria Fabiola, a social climber (also very San Francisco).
Whether you know San Francisco or not, whether you long for its “good old days” or still find it magical, these stories and this conversation, part of the Festival’s “Writer to Writer” series, will hit home for anyone who has undergone the harrowing journey of growing up.
Register Here
Free of charge, but you must register to receive the viewing link.
This event is also part of the Festival’s Women Lit series

Virtual Event: Ian Manuel
2021-05-04 18:00 - 20:00
JOIN US ON TUESDAY, MAY 4 AT 6PM PT WHEN WE WELCOME IAN MANUEL FOR THE LAUNCH OF HIS BOOK, MY TIME WILL COME: A MEMOIR OF CRIME, PUNISHMENT, HOPE, AND REDEMPTION, ON ZOOM!
LIMITED SIGNED COPIES AVAILABLE.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH PRISONERS LITERATURE PROJECT
Green Apple will donate 10% of each copy sold to PLP
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88615146964
Or One tap mobile :
US: +16699009128,,88615146964# or +12532158782,,88615146964#
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbMq4Jxn3I
About My Time Will Come
At fourteen Ian Manuel was sentenced to life without parole. My Time Will Come is a paean to the capacity of the human will to transcend adversity through determination and art.
“Ian is magic. His story is difficult and heartbreaking, but he takes us places we need to go to understand why we must do better.” —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy
“My story has been told many times and by highly regarded experts in their fields—judges, prosecutors, juvenile probation officers, sociologists, journalists. But I would like to try to tell it to you myself. I have reason to believe the experts may be wrong about me. You see, today, thirty years later, I am neither in prison nor dead.” —from My Time Will Come
The United States is the only country in the world that sentences thirteen- and fourteen-year-old offenders, mostly youth of color, to life in prison without parole, regardless of the scientifically proven singularities of the developing adolescent brain—a heinous wrinkle in the scandal of mass incarceration. In 1991, Ian Manuel, then fourteen, was sentenced to life without parole for a non-homicide crime. In a botched mugging attempt with some older boys, he shot Debbie Baigrie, a young white mother of two, in the face. But as Bryan Stevenson, attorney and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has insisted, none of us should be judged by only the worst thing we have ever done.
Capturing the fullness of his humanity, here is Manuel’s powerful testimony of growing up homeless in Central Park Village in Tampa, Florida—a neighborhood riddled with poverty, gang violence, and drug abuse—and of his efforts to rise above his circumstances, only to find himself, partly through his own actions, imprisoned for two-thirds of his life, eighteen years of which were spent in solitary confinement. Here is the at once wrenching and inspiring story of how he endured the savagery of the United States prison system, and how his victim, an extraordinary woman, forgave him and bravely advocated for his freedom, which was achieved by a crusade on the part of the Equal Justice Initiative to address the barbarism of our judicial system and bring about “just mercy.”
Full of unexpected twists and turns as it describes a struggle to attain the glory of redemption, My Time Will Come is a paean to the capacity of the human will to transcend adversity through determination and art—in Ian Manuel’s case, through his dedication to writing poetry.
About Ian Manuel
Ian Manuel lives in New York City. He is a motivational speaker at schools and social organizations nationwide.

Erica Hunt and Michael Palmer
2021-05-04 18:00 - 20:00
This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform.

reading from new works
Jump The Clock by Erica Hunt – published by Nightboat
Little Elegies for Sister Satan by Michael Palmer – published by New Directions
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This is a virtual event that will be hosted by City Lights on the Zoom platform. You will need access to a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. If you have not used Zoom before, you may consider referencing Getting Started with Zoom.
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Event is free, but registration is required.
(CLICK HERE) to register – link coming soon!
(CLICK HERE) to purchase Jump The Clock by Erica Hunt – link coming soon!
(CLICK HERE) to purchase Little Elegies for Sister Satan by Michael Palmer – link coming soon!
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About Erika Hunt’s Jump The Clock
Erica Hunt writes at the intersection of poetry and emancipatory politics—racial and gender justice, feminist ethics, and participatory democracy—showing us that altering our reading strategies frames our experiences. Ultimately, she finds that words matter, savoring the small ones: articles, pronouns, collective, plural and singular. This collection brings together out of print works and journals of the same period, to speak across “crumpled” time, the past seen from then to now.
About Michael Plamer’s Little Elegies for Sister Satan
Little Elegies for Sister Satan presents searingly beautiful new poems by Michael Palmer, “the foremost experimental poet of his generation, and perhaps of the last several generations” (citation for The Poetry Society of America’s Wallace Stevens Award). Grappling with our dark times and our inability to stop destroying the planet or to end our endless wars, Palmer offers a counterlight of wit (poetry was dead again / they said again), as well as the glow of wonder. In polyphonic passages, voices speak from a decentered place, yet are rooted in the whole history of culture that has gone before: “When I think of ‘possible worlds,’ I think not of philosophy, but of elegy. And impossible worlds. Resistant worlds.”
Erica Hunt is a poet and essayist, author of Local History, Arcade, Piece Logic, Veronica: A Suite in X Parts, and Jump the Clock: New and Selected Poems, published by Nightboat Books in November 2020. Her poems and essays have appeared in BOMB, Boundary 2, Brooklyn Rail, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Poetics Journal, Tripwire, Recluse, In the American Tree, and Conjunctions. With Dawn Lundy Martin, Hunt is the editor of an anthology of new writing by Black women, Letters to the Future. Hunt has received awards from the Foundation for Contemporary Art, the Fund for Poetry, and the Djerassi Foundation and is a past fellow of Duke University/University of Capetown Program in Public Policy. She teaches at Brown University.
Michael Palmer is an American born in New York City in 1943 and long resident in San Francisco, nearly all of Palmer’s poetry is published by New Directions: At Passages (1995); The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972–1995 (1998); The Promises of Glass (2000); Codes Appearing: Poems 1979–1988 (2001); Company of Moths (2005); and most recently, Thread (2011). He is the translator of works by Emmanuel Hocquard, Vicente Huidobro, and Alexei Parshchikov, among others, and the editor of Code of Signals: Recent Writings in Poetics. For over thirty years he has collaborated with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company.

This event has been sponsored by the City Lights Foundation

VIRTUAL: Jonny Sun / Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations
2021-05-04 18:00 - 20:00
Booksmith and The Bindery are thrilled to host Jonny Sun again, for his new book Goodbye, Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations! We are also pleased to announce we have **signed copies** for the first 100 orders! You can order Goodbye, Again here – we’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay. Contact events@booksmith.com with any questions.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers.
About the book
The wonderfully original author of Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too gives us a collection of touching and hilarious personal essays, stories, poems—accompanied by his trademark illustrations—covering topics such as mental health, happiness, and what it means to belong.
Jonny Sun is back with a collection of essays and other writings in his unique, funny, and heartfelt style. The pieces range from long meditations on topics like loneliness and being an outsider, to short humor pieces, conversations, and memorable one-liners.
Jonny’s honest writings about his struggles with feeling productive, as well as his difficulties with anxiety and depression will connect deeply with his fans as well as anyone attempting to create in our chaotic world.
It also features a recipe for scrambled eggs that might make you cry.
About the author
Jonny Sun is the best-selling author and illustrator of everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too and the illustrator of Gmorning, Gnight! by Lin-Manuel Miranda. He was a writer for the Emmy-nominated sixth season of the Netflix Original Series BoJack Horseman, and is currently writing a movie, a new book, and multiple other projects. As a doctoral candidate at MIT and a creative researcher at the Harvard metaLAB, he studies social media, virtual place, and online community. He has a master’s degree in architecture from Yale and a bachelor’s degree in engineering from the University of Toronto. TIME Magazine named him one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Internet of 2017, and in 2019, he was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, and gave a TED Talk that has been viewed online over 3 million times.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Policies

Refund Policy:
No refunds or returns. Contact events@booksmith.com with any questions.
Cancellation Policy:
If we have to cancel an event, you will be refunded within 4 business days of the event date.

Virtual Event: Ian Manuel with Messiah Ramkissoon
2021-05-04 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Tuesday, May 4 at 6pm PT when we welcome Ian Manuel for the launch of his book, My Time Will Come: A Memoir of Crime, Punishment, Hope, and Redemption, with Messiah Ramkissoon on Zoom!

Limited signed bookplates available.
In partnership with Youth Justice Network
with proceeds benefitting the Prisoners Literature Project
Green Apple will donate 10% of each copy sold to PLP

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88615146964

About My Time Will Come
At fourteen Ian Manuel was sentenced to life without parole. My Time Will Come is a paean to the capacity of the human will to transcend adversity through determination and art.

“Ian is magic. His story is difficult and heartbreaking, but he takes us places we need to go to understand why we must do better.” —Bryan Stevenson, author of Just Mercy

“My story has been told many times and by highly regarded experts in their fields—judges, prosecutors, juvenile probation officers, sociologists, journalists. But I would like to try to tell it to you myself. I have reason to believe the experts may be wrong about me. You see, today, thirty years later, I am neither in prison nor dead.” —from My Time Will Come

The United States is the only country in the world that sentences thirteen- and fourteen-year-old offenders, mostly youth of color, to life in prison without parole, regardless of the scientifically proven singularities of the developing adolescent brain—a heinous wrinkle in the scandal of mass incarceration. In 1991, Ian Manuel, then fourteen, was sentenced to life without parole for a non-homicide crime. In a botched mugging attempt with some older boys, he shot Debbie Baigrie, a young white mother of two, in the face. But as Bryan Stevenson, attorney and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, has insisted, none of us should be judged by only the worst thing we have ever done.

Capturing the fullness of his humanity, here is Manuel’s powerful testimony of growing up homeless in Central Park Village in Tampa, Florida—a neighborhood riddled with poverty, gang violence, and drug abuse—and of his efforts to rise above his circumstances, only to find himself, partly through his own actions, imprisoned for two-thirds of his life, eighteen years of which were spent in solitary confinement. Here is the at once wrenching and inspiring story of how he endured the savagery of the United States prison system, and how his victim, an extraordinary woman, forgave him and bravely advocated for his freedom, which was achieved by a crusade on the part of the Equal Justice Initiative to address the barbarism of our judicial system and bring about “just mercy.”

Full of unexpected twists and turns as it describes a struggle to attain the glory of redemption, My Time Will Come is a paean to the capacity of the human will to transcend adversity through determination and art—in Ian Manuel’s case, through his dedication to writing poetry.

About Ian Manuel
Ian Manuel lives in New York City. He is a motivational speaker at schools and social organizations nationwide.

Stacey Lee with Stephanie Garber
2021-05-04 18:00 - 19:00
Fans of Stacey Lee’s wonderful historical fiction rejoice!

We are thrilled to announce we are launching Stacey Lee’s powerful and critically acclaimed new novel, Luck of the Titanic, the richly imagined story of Valora and Jamie Luck, twin British-Chinese acrobats traveling aboard the Titanic on its ill-fated maiden voyage. We couldn’t be more excited.
This is the Titanic story you need, a story bound to become your new favorite. Here’s what people are saying::
“Stacey Lee’s superpower is her ability to turn history’s forgotten into today’s unforgettable; and you’ll never forget the terror and joy of travelling with Valora Luck, whose unsinkable spirit gleams like a rescue flare through the icy murk of the past.” —Elizabeth Wein (Code Name Verity)
* “A gem from start to bittersweet finish.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“This is the kind of book I absolutely love. Heroism and heartbreaking tragedy, seen through the eyes of those who have been left off the pages of our history books.” —Jamie Ford (Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet)
“Hope, heroism, and heartache collide in an unforgettable story, suffused with love.” —Julie Berry (Lovely War)
“With a plot as tense as a walk on a tightrope and a wily heroine you’ll cheer on till the very end, Luck of the Titanic is historical fiction at its most thrilling.” Laura Ruby, (Bone Gap)
Stacey Lee is the author of Under a Painted Sky, Outrun the Moon, Secret of a Heart Note, and The Downstairs Girl , is the winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Young Adult Fiction and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. and is a founding member of We Need Diverse Books. She will be chatting with Stephanie Garber, author of Caraval, Legendary, and Finale.
Join us online to celebrate with two of our longtime favorite authors for one of the most anticipated books of the Spring. It doesn’t get better than this!

Sean Carroll: The Passage of Time and the Meaning of Life
2021-05-04 17:00 - 18:00 | online, CA, United States
Watch & share this talk on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and Long Now Live.
What is time? What is humankind’s role in the universe? What is the meaning of life? For much of human history, these questions have been the province of religion and philosophy. What answers can science provide?
In this talk, Sean Carroll will share what physicists know, and don’t yet know, about the nature of time. He’ll argue that while the universe might not have purpose, we can create meaning and purpose through how we approach reality, and how we live our lives.
Sean Carroll is a Research Professor of theoretical physics at the California Institute of Technology, and an External Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research has focused on fundamental physics and cosmology, especially issues of dark matter, dark energy, spacetime symmetries, and the origin of the universe.
Recently, Carroll has worked on the foundations of quantum mechanics, the emergence of spacetime, and the evolution of entropy and complexity. Carroll is the author of Something Deeply Hidden, The Big Picture, The Particle at the End of the Universe amongst other books and hosts the Mindscapes podcast.
