Litseen

Pussypedia: Zoe Mendelson and Maria Conejo with Carol Queen
2021-08-30 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | 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.

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.
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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.

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!
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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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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

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.

An Evening with Judith Ayn Bernhard and silvi alcivar
2021-08-25 19:30 - 20:30 | 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.

Virtual Event: Marc Anthony Richardson and Carolina de Robertis
2021-08-25 18:00 - 19:00 | online
Join us on Wednesday, August 25th at 6pm PT when Marc Anthony Richardson joins us to discuss his novel, Messiahs, with Carolina de Robertis on Zoom!
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/…/reg…/WN_cqwbFFuBQIS0qvGhukkbow
Praise for Messiahs
“Messiahs is a fever dream of storytelling. It explores racism and interracial conflict, the deadly prison industrial complex, climate emergency, social death, and more in prose that unfurls like waves of sound. Bleak, though not without hope, challenging, though with numerous rewards along the way, innovative from start to finish, Messiahs is a marvel.”
—John Keene, MacArthur Fellow and author of Annotations and Counternarratives
“In Messiahs, Marc Anthony Richardson gives us an innovative, intelligent, and insightful take on several American obsessions, including punishment, incarceration, and the death penalty. As much as this layered narrative presents a warning about things to come, it also offers a profound examination of rebirth, redemption, second-acts. All in all an unnerving, uncanny, and challenging read on many levels, but well worth the effort.”
—Jeffery Renard Allen, Guggenheim Fellow and author of Rails Under My Back and Song of the Shank
About Messiahs
A fiercely ecstatic tale of betrayal and self-sacrifice.
Messiahs centers on two nameless lovers, a woman of east Asian descent and a former state prisoner, a black man who volunteered incarceration on behalf of his falsely convicted nephew, yet was “exonerated” after more than two years on death row. In this dystopian America, one can assume a relative’s capital sentence as an act of holy reform-“the proxy initiative,” patterned after the Passion. The lovers begin their affair by exchanging letters, and after his release, they withdraw to a remote cabin during a torrential winter, haunted by their respective past tragedies. Savagely ostracized by her family for years, the woman is asked by her mother to take the proxy initiative for her brother-creating a conflict she cannot bear to share with her lover. Comprised of ten poetic paragraphs, Messiahs’ rigorous style and sustained intensity equals agony and ecstasy.
About Marc Anthony Richardson
Marc Anthony Richardson is author of Year of the Rat, winner of an American Book Award, and is the recipient of a Creative Capital Award, a PEN America grant, and a Hurston/Wright fellowship. He teaches creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Iván Argüelles and Solomon Rino
2021-08-25 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Iván Argüelles and Solomon Rino celebrate their new book of poetry
Field Hollers
published by Luna Bisonte Prods
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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.
———-
Event is free, but registration is required
(Click Here) to register.
———–
(Click Here) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon!)
—————
FIELD HOLLERS is the collaboration of pre-dawn poets Solomon Rino and Iván Argüelles. It represents the call-and-response of two disembodied voices from opposite sides of the Bay, voices that demand a scrupulous account of the raison d’etre of existence. Though supposedly separate the twin/voices become seamless and one.
Innovative Mexican-American poet Iván Argüelles is the author of numerous works, notably “That” Goddess, Hapax Legomenon, Madonna Septet, and Comedy , Divine , The . Among recently published works are Fragments from a Gone World, Tamazunchale, and Diario di un ottogenario. The long arc of his life has taken him from Mexico DF to Minnesota Chicago Italy Brooklyn and finally Berkeley. A retired librarian, he worked at the New York Public Library and the Library UC Berkeley. Usually associated with the surrealists, his work has deep roots in the classics as well as modernists such as Pound and Joyce. A bilingual edition of the translation of some of his poems is in preparation.
Solomon Rino is a playwright, poet, book artist and publisher. His first book was an ethnography of Tibetan ritual tradition, Deity Men, Reb gong Tibetan Trance Mediums in Transition. He translated from the Hungarian Miklos Radnoti’s Bor Notebook as A Wiser, More Beautiful Death. He edited and designed the book, Like an eye in the hand of a beggar by Leopoldo Maria Panero, translated by Arturo Mantecón. He edits the annual journal Second Stutter representing significant voices in contemporary poetry.

Lucas Bessire and William DeBuys
2021-08-24 18:00 - 20:00
Anthropologist Lucas Bessire and novelist and conservationist William DeBuys join us for a virtual event about their new books, Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton UP) and The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss (Seven Stories Press). The two will discuss the increasingly imperiled water supply in the western U.S. and ways to confront the difficult challenges of the climate emergency.
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains
“Bessire’s Running Out masterfully shifts among scales and genres and in doing so lets the personal, the historic, and the geologic reveal their intimacies and competing urgencies. A beautiful and unusual book, and wholly original.” –Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch
The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force.
Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future.
An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.
About The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss
“The Trail to Kanjiroba is a transformative path on the page by one of America’s most eloquent writers. Bill deBuys has written a walking prayer about beauty, hope, and longing in the service of human dignity and a living planet. Though set in Nepal in the high altitude grace of Dolpo, this is a spiritual pilgrimage contemplating the journey from grief toward love. Hands pressed together, I hold these words close and bow.”–Terry Tempest Williams
In 2016 and 2018 acclaimed author and conservationist William deBuys joined extended medical expeditions into Upper Dolpo, a remote, ethnically Tibetan region of northwestern Nepal, to provide basic medical services to the residents of the region. Having written about climate change and species extinction, deBuys went on those journeys seeking solace. He needed to find a constructive way of living with the discouraging implications of what he had learned in recent years about the diminishing chances of reversing the damage humans have done to Earth–a way of holding onto hope in the face of devastating loss. As deBuys describes these journeys through one of the earth’s most remote regions, his writing celebrates the staggering natural beauty and biodiversity he finds there, and gives his readers a history lesson of two scientific discoveries–evolution and plate tectonics–that forever changed sapiens’ understanding of our planet. Written in a lush and nuanced style evocative of Paul Theroux or Peter Matthiessen, The Trail to Kanjiroba offers a surprising and revitalizing new way to think about Earthcare, one that may enable us to continue the difficult work that needs to be done.
About the authors
William deBuys is the author of ten books, including The Last Unicorn, one of Christian Science Monitor’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2015; River of Traps, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Pulitzer Prize nonfiction finalist; The Walk (an excerpt of which won a Pushcart Prize in 2008); and A Great Aridness. In 2008-2009 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in New Mexico.
Lucas Bessire is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in conversation with Alejandro Murguía
2021-08-24 18:00 - 20:00
discussing Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s
Not A Nation of Immigrants: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion
published by Beacon Press
Debunks the pervasive and self-congratulatory myth that our country is proudly founded by and for immigrants, and urges readers to embrace a more complex and honest history of the United States.
———-

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.
———-
Event is free, but registration is required
(CLICK HERE) to register.
———–
(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. (link coming soon!)
———–
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.
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.
Alejandro Murguía is the author of Southern Front and This War Called Love (both winners of the American Book Award). His non-fiction book The Medicine of Memory highlights the Mission District in the 1970s during the Nicaraguan Solidarity movement. He is a founding member and the first director of The Mission Cultural Center. He was a founder of The Roque Dalton Cultural Brigade, and co-editor of Volcán: Poetry From Central America. Currently he is a professor in Latina Latino Studies at San Francisco State University. He is the author of the short story “The Other Barrio” which first appeared in the anthology San Francisco Noir and recently filmed in the street of the Mission District. In poetry he has published Spare Poems, and this year a new collection Native Tongue. He is the Sixth San Francisco Poet Laureate and the first Latino poet to hold the position.
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
“Not ‘a Nation of Immigrants’ challenges to the core one of the most dominant narratives about the United States, as a country founded by and welcoming for immigrants. Dunbar-Ortiz’s captivating and accessible historical account forces a reckoning with the various layers of the US imperialist project, from territorial control to economic and political influence at the expense of Black populations, migrants, and Indigenous peoples. This myth-shattering book addresses one of the most pressing challenges of our time by demonstrating the implications of White supremacy across time, across groups and spaces, and the connections between them. If there is hope for transformation, it is through the careful, systematic work that this book exemplifies by examining the roots of racism and structural inequality, and bringing forward alternative narratives and movements. It is a must-read.”
—Alexandra Délano, chair and associate professor of global studies, The New School
“Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz has produced a remarkable, engrossing, and readable reexamination of US history. She unites an analysis of the construction of ‘race’ and racism, with the construction of settler colonialism, demonstrating both the historical inaccuracy as well as the strategic blind spot created by thinking of the USA as a ‘nation of immigrants.’ But she does more. Dunbar-Ortiz links the construction of the US as a racial settler state with the growth of US imperialism, decisively demonstrating that global expansion was not accidental nor a matter of policy alone, but the direct outcome of the DNA of the racial settler state.”
—Bill Fletcher Jr., trade unionist and author of “They’re Bankrupting Us!” And Twenty Other Myths About Unions
“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
“This book is meticulously researched and written with eloquence and passion. With it, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, one of our preeminent radical historians, once again delivers a powerful and provocative indictment of settler colonialism and white nationalism, which were foundational in building this country. It could not be more timely. A must-read history for our troubling present.”
—Barbara Ransby, author of Making All Black Lives Matter
“Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s incisive book Not ‘a Nation of Immigrants’ challenges the multicultural myth of US nationalist triumphalism and, instead, powerfully exposes settler colonialism, wars of conquest, and white nationalism as central pillars of immigration. This is a must-read to finally discard unquestioning settler American liberalism and patriotism.”
—Harsha Walia, author of Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism
“Historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz rightly argues that the United States is not ‘a nation of immigrants’ but, more accurately, a nation of colonizers. A must-read.”
—Nick Estes (Lakota), author of Our History Is the Future
“We are here because you were there. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz methodically unravels the pernicious myth of ‘a nation of immigrants,’ standing in the way of collective well-being on this continent and beyond.”
—Manu Karuka, author of Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad
“Once again, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz demonstrates why she is one of the foremost historical scholars we have today, and Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants’ is her most crucial offering yet, opening new insights on this country’s sordid history of systemic oppression, exclusion, and erasure. If we look honestly at ourselves, as human beings occupying this specific slice of space and time together, we see that Dunbar-Ortiz is giving us a thoroughly researched and genuine road map for what we can become, if we dare. Vital reading for anyone with two eyes, a brain, and a beating heart.”
—Tim Z. Hernandez, author of All They Will Call You
“Simply put, if you read this book and learn its lessons, you will have to change everything you think about the history of the United States and the terms we use to fight for justice. It’s your call, but I suggest you put the book in your basket and head for the check-out counter right now.”
—Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States
“From being deeply shaken and disturbed, to ultimately feeling exhilarated and optimistic by Dunbar-Ortiz’s conclusion and ‘call to arms,’ this is a paradigm-shifting work. Dunbar-Ortiz eviscerates ‘the benevolent version of US nationalism’ by showing how the United States has always sought to enlist its new arrivals as accomplices to colonial conquest and mass murder. There is a reckoning on every page of this liberating book.”
—Patrick Higgins, anti-imperialist historian and activist
“Placing settler colonialism at the center, Dunbar-Ortiz untangles the meaning of immigration in a settler state based on the elimination of the Native population. The book traces a ‘self-indigenizing narrative’ by which white immigrants laid claim to the country, turning an aggressive white nationalism into the foundation of US identity. European immigrants became American, and became white, Dunbar-Ortiz shows, by adopting the country’s settler identity. In a tour de force that takes readers from the American Revolution to nineteenth-century New Mexico to contemporary Appalachia to Hamilton and Donald Trump, she shows how different groups of immigrants assimilated into a settler identity that perpetuates US racism and militarism. The book also makes clear that a superficial ‘multicultural’ approach to revising US history still fails to tackle the heart of the problem: colonialism. You will never look at US history the same way after reading Not ‘A Nation of Immigrants.’”
—Aviva Chomsky, author of Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal

Sponsored by the City Lights Foundation

Nomadic Press Virtual Open Mic #77
2021-08-24 18:00 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States

Lucas Bessire and William DeBuys
2021-08-24 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
In conversation about drought, extinction, and ways forward

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Tuesday, August 24, 2021 – 6:00pm

Crowdcast

Tickets:

Sliding scale ($0-$100)

Anthropologist Lucas Bessire and novelist and conservationist William DeBuys join us for a virtual event about their new books, Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains (Princeton UP) and The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss (Seven Stories Press). The two will discuss the increasingly imperiled water supply in the western U.S. and ways to confront the difficult challenges of the climate emergency.
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Running Out: In Search of Water on the High Plains
“Bessire’s Running Out masterfully shifts among scales and genres and in doing so lets the personal, the historic, and the geologic reveal their intimacies and competing urgencies. A beautiful and unusual book, and wholly original.” –Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch
The Ogallala aquifer has nourished life on the American Great Plains for millennia. But less than a century of unsustainable irrigation farming has taxed much of the aquifer beyond repair. The imminent depletion of the Ogallala and other aquifers around the world is a defining planetary crisis of our times. Running Out offers a uniquely personal account of aquifer depletion and the deeper layers through which it gains meaning and force.
Anthropologist Lucas Bessire journeyed back to western Kansas, where five generations of his family lived as irrigation farmers and ranchers, to try to make sense of this vital resource and its loss. His search for water across the drying High Plains brings the reader face to face with the stark realities of industrial agriculture, eroding democratic norms, and surreal interpretations of a looming disaster. Yet the destination is far from predictable, as the book seeks to move beyond the words and genres through which destruction is often known. Instead, this journey into the morass of eradication offers a series of unexpected discoveries about what it means to inherit the troubled legacies of the past and how we can take responsibility for a more inclusive, sustainable future.
An urgent and unsettling meditation on environmental change, Running Out is a revelatory account of family, complicity, loss, and what it means to find your way back home.
About The Trail to Kanjiroba: Rediscovering Earth in an Age of Loss
“The Trail to Kanjiroba is a transformative path on the page by one of America’s most eloquent writers. Bill deBuys has written a walking prayer about beauty, hope, and longing in the service of human dignity and a living planet. Though set in Nepal in the high altitude grace of Dolpo, this is a spiritual pilgrimage contemplating the journey from grief toward love. Hands pressed together, I hold these words close and bow.”–Terry Tempest Williams
In 2016 and 2018 acclaimed author and conservationist William deBuys joined extended medical expeditions into Upper Dolpo, a remote, ethnically Tibetan region of northwestern Nepal, to provide basic medical services to the residents of the region. Having written about climate change and species extinction, deBuys went on those journeys seeking solace. He needed to find a constructive way of living with the discouraging implications of what he had learned in recent years about the diminishing chances of reversing the damage humans have done to Earth–a way of holding onto hope in the face of devastating loss. As deBuys describes these journeys through one of the earth’s most remote regions, his writing celebrates the staggering natural beauty and biodiversity he finds there, and gives his readers a history lesson of two scientific discoveries–evolution and plate tectonics–that forever changed sapiens’ understanding of our planet. Written in a lush and nuanced style evocative of Paul Theroux or Peter Matthiessen, The Trail to Kanjiroba offers a surprising and revitalizing new way to think about Earthcare, one that may enable us to continue the difficult work that needs to be done.
About the authors
William deBuys is the author of ten books, including The Last Unicorn, one of Christian Science Monitor’s 10 Best Nonfiction Books of 2015; River of Traps, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Pulitzer Prize nonfiction finalist; The Walk (an excerpt of which won a Pushcart Prize in 2008); and A Great Aridness. In 2008-2009 he was a Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in New Mexico.
Lucas Bessire is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma and the author of Behold the Black Caiman: A Chronicle of Ayoreo Life.

Jaime Lowe and Kim Kelly
2021-08-24 18:00 - 19:00 | Green Apple Books 9th Avenue, 1231 9th Avenue, San Francisco, CA, 94122, United States
JOIN US ON TUESDAY, AUGUST 24 AT 6PM PT WHEN JAIME LOWE JOINS US TO DISCUSS HER LATEST BOOK, BREATHING FIRE, WITH KIM KELLY ON ZOOM!
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_s8BbIIRxTX6p–3bdGWVmA
About Breathing Fire
A dramatic, revelatory account of the female inmate firefighters who battle California wildfires.
Shawna was overcome by the claustrophobia, the heat, the smoke, the fire, all just down the canyon and up the ravine. She was feeling the adrenaline, but also the terror of doing something for the first time. She knew how to run with a backpack; they had trained her physically. But that’s not training for flames. That’s not live fire.
California’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year — fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews.
In Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine. She has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program and spoken to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders. The result is a rare, illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate — a story that encompasses California’s underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, and historical injustice, but also draws on deeply personal histories, relationships, desires, frustrations, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting.
Lowe’s reporting is a groundbreaking investigation of the prison system, and an intimate portrayal of the women of California’s Correctional Camps who put their lives on the line, while imprisoned, to save a state in peril.
About Jaime Lowe
Jaime Lowe is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and other national publications, and has appeared regularly on This American Life, RadioLab, and NPR. She is the author of Mental and Digging for Dirt and has taught writing at Wallkill Correctional Facility. Born and raised in California, she lives in New York City.
About Kim Kelly
Kim Kelly is a regular labor columnist for Teen VOGUE and the author of Fight Like Hell, a book of intersectional labor history, which will be published next year. She’s written about labor, class, politics, and culture for the New Republic, the Washington Post, the Baffler, and Esquire, among other publications. She’s a member of the Industrial Workers of the World’s Freelance Journalist Union as well as an elected councilperson for the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE). Kelly is based in Philadelphia.

Afternoon Literary Seminar: A Month In The Country by J. L. Carr
2021-08-24 13:00 - 14:30
THIS SESSION IS ONLINE
A Month In The Country by J. L. Carr
Kimberly has been trying to get this slim novella into your hands for over a year! After supply issues, Carr is now ours to discuss. The perfect short novel for the waning days of the summer, A Month concerns an English man who spends a month post World War I restoring a painting in a small country church. This prose is just so gorgeous and the story is intriguing—not to say downright strange. It will be so good to pull apart the ingenious elements of this gem. Make the most of the dog days with this delicious escape.
(For those of you who will have read Brideshead Revisited in the summer intensive, the two will provide a super interesting study in contrasts and similarities.)
There are several ticket options that include books with purchase, books shipped to home, books picked up at Kepler’s Books or seminar only. Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor all shipping costs will be waived for the literary seminars. The books should be read prior to the meeting date.

Beth Morgan and Jean Kyoung Frazier
2021-08-23 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
JOIN US ON MONDAY, AUGUST 23 AT 6PM PT WHEN BETH MORGAN JOINS US TO DISCUSS HER DEBUT NOVEL, A TOUCH OF JEN, WITH JEAN KYOUNG FRAZIER ON ZOOM!
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_tG9Brd46Qsm15Z_rda5AKQ
Praise for A Touch of Jen
“A Touch of Jen is bananas good. Funny and sharp and surprising and bittersweet. Just [three chef’s kiss emojis].”
—Carmen Maria Machado
“Morgan has created a fabulous monster here, legitimately Frankensteined herself a wicked, unflinching, dynamite novel out of razor-sharp dialogue, toxic social media culture, and the nonsense notion that the self is just another brand to be endlessly plumbed for content. Wildly hilarious and absolutely terrifying, A Touch of Jen is truly a touch of genius. I loved every minute of it.”
—Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of WITH TEETH and MOSTLY DEAD THINGS
“Morgan’s got swagger. A Touch of Jen will draw you in with its electric rhythm and razor-sharp wit, but it will make you stay with its wild, beating heart. I came for the blood-thirsty monsters, I left moved by Morgan’s deep understanding of the day-to-day absurdity and pain of 21st century existence. A banger of a debut and the arrival of a bold new voice in fiction.”
—Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of PIZZA GIRL
About A Touch of Jen
A young couple’s toxic Instagram crush spins out of control and unleashes a sinister creature in this twisted, viciously funny, “bananas good” debut. (Carmen Maria Machado)
“Um, holy shit…This novel will be the most fun you’ll have this summer.” —Emily Temple, Literary Hub
Remy and Alicia, a couple of insecure service workers, are not particularly happy together. But they are bound by a shared obsession with Jen, a beautiful former co-worker of Remy’s who now seems to be following her bliss as a globe-trotting jewelry designer. In and outside the bedroom, Remy and Alicia’s entire relationship revolves around fantasies of Jen, whose every Instagram caption, outfit, and new age mantra they know by heart.
Imagine their confused excitement when they run into Jen, in the flesh, and she invites them on a surfing trip to the Hamptons with her wealthy boyfriend and their group. Once there, Remy and Alicia try (a little too hard) to fit into Jen’s exalted social circle, but violent desire and class resentment bubble beneath the surface of this beachside paradise, threatening to erupt. As small disturbances escalate into outright horror, we find ourselves tumbling with Remy and Alicia into an uncanny alternate reality, one shaped by their most unspeakable, deviant, and intoxicating fantasies. Is this what “self-actualization” looks like?
Part millennial social comedy, part psychedelic horror, and all wildly entertaining, A Touch of Jen is a sly, unflinching examination of the hidden drives that lurk just outside the frame of our carefully curated selves.
About Beth Morgan
Beth Morgan grew up outside Sherman, Texas and studied writing as an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence College. She is currently completing an MFA at Brooklyn College. Her work has been published in The Iowa Review and The Kenyon Review Online.

Evening Literary Seminar: A Month in the Country, J.L. Carr
2021-08-23 17:00 - 18:30

Book Celebration: Hurricanes, Love Affairs, & Other Disasters by Susan Praver-Pérez
2021-08-21 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us in continuing the celebration of Hurricanes, Love Affairs, & Other Disasters, Susana Praver-Pérez’ first full-length collection of poetry!
Readings by Nina Serrano, Josiah Luis Alderete, Naomi Quiñonez, Rebeca Lois Lucret, Elijah Pringle III, and of course, Susana Praver-Pérez.
Music by Maria Jose Montijo (“Majo”)!
Order your copy of Hurricanes, Love Affairs, & Other Disasters by Susana Praver-Pérez here: https://www.nomadicpress.org/…/hurricanesloveaffairsand…
Zoom Joining Info
Topic: Book Celebration: Hurricanes, Love Affairs, & Other Disasters by Susan Praver-Pérez
Time: Aug 21, 2021 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
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Meeting ID: 840 1121 1647
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Jingletown Reading & Open Mic
2021-08-21 14:00 - 16:00 | online, CA, United States
Jingletown Reading & Open Mic is a monthly event that celebrates writers & artists committed to social justice and determined to make a positive change in our communities.

3rd Saturday of the Month
2-4 pm
Curators/Hosts: Adela Najarro & harold terezon

Nomadic Press Virtual Open Mic #72
2021-08-20 18:00 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States

Lucy Jones and Stephen Sparks
2021-08-20 12:00 - 13:00
Discuss Losing Eden: Our Fundamental Need for the Natural World and Its Ability to Heal Body and Soul

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Friday, August 20, 2021 – 12:00pm

Crowdcast

Tickets:

Sliding scale ($0-$100)

Lucy Jones discusses her new book, Losing Eden: Our Fundamental Need for the Natural World and Its Ability to Heal Body and Soul (Knopf) with the bookstore’s Stephen Sparks.
“Beautifully written, movingly told and meticulously researched. An elegy to the healing power of nature. A convincing plea for a wilder, richer world.” —Isabella Tree, author of Wilding
“The connection between mental health and the natural world turns out to be strong and deep—which is good news in that it offers those feeling soul-sick the possibility that falling in love with the world around them might be remarkably helpful.” —Bill McKibben
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Losing Eden
A fascinating look at why human beings have a powerful mental, spiritual, and physical need for the natural world—and the profound impact this has on our consciousness and ability to heal the soul and bring solace to the heart, and the cutting-edge scientific evidence proving nature as nurturer.
Lucy Jones interweaves her deeply personal story of recovery from addiction and depression with that of discovering the natural world and how it aided and enlivened her progress, giving her a renewed sense of belonging and purpose.
Jones writes of the intersection of science, wellness, and the environment, and reveals that in the last decade, scientists have begun to formulate theories of why people feel better after a walk in the woods and an experience with the natural world. She describes the recent data that supports evidence of biological and neurological responses: the lowering of cortisol (released in response to stress), the boost in cortical attention control that helps us to concentrate and subdues mental fatigue, and the increase in activity in the parasympathetic nervous system, slowing the heart and allowing the body to rest.
About Lucy Jones
Lucy Jones was born in Cambridge, England, and educated at University College London. She has written extensively on culture, science and nature. Her articles have been published on BBC Earth and in The Sunday Times, The Guardian and the New Statesman. Her first book, Foxes Unearthed, received the Society of Authors’ Roger Deakin Award. Jones lives in Hampshire, England.

Virtual Speaking Axolotl Reading and Open Mic #38
2021-08-19 19:00 - 21:00 | 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
If you enjoy spaces like these, please support Nomadic Press by donating via:
1) the Cash App to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress;
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3) donating through the website at www.nomadicpress.org/donate
We will be posting the features’ Venmo handles during the event.
Zoom Joining Info
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Monthly Speaking Axolotl
Time: Jan 21, 2021 08:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Every month on the Third Thu, 12 occurrence(s)
Jan 21, 2021 08:00 PM
Feb 18, 2021 08:00 PM
Mar 18, 2021 08:00 PM
Apr 15, 2021 08:00 PM
May 20, 2021 08:00 PM
Jun 17, 2021 08:00 PM
Jul 15, 2021 08:00 PM
Aug 19, 2021 08:00 PM
Sep 16, 2021 08:00 PM
Oct 21, 2021 08:00 PM
Nov 18, 2021 08:00 PM
Dec 16, 2021 08:00 PM
Please download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.
Monthly: https://us02web.zoom.us/…/tZYtd…/ics…
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Meeting ID: 820 0677 4895
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Meeting ID: 820 0677 4895
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Jaime Lowe
2021-08-19 19:00 - 21:00
Journalist and writer Jaime Lowe joins us to discuss her new book, Breathing Fire: Female Inmate Firefighters on the Front Lines of California’s Wildfires (MCD).
“In recent years, women inmates have joined the army of prison labor that California relies upon to fight its wildfires, whether defending the Sequoias or celebrity homes on the Malibu Coast. It is dangerous, relentless work that ultimately depends upon the arduous personal transformations that create unity and fighting spirit within each fire crew. Against the background of recent megafires, Lowe chronicles the transcendent moments of triumph and tragedy that stir ambitions of a new life, but then recounts the systemic cruelty that undermines every hope of translating their new skills and hard-won self-confidence into civilian careers. Lionesses betrayed.”—Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Breathing Fire
California’s fire season gets hotter, longer, and more extreme every year — fire season is now year-round. Of the thousands of firefighters who battle California’s blazes every year, roughly 30 percent of the on-the-ground wildland crews are inmates earning a dollar an hour. Approximately 200 of those firefighters are women serving on all-female crews.
In Breathing Fire, Jaime Lowe expands on her revelatory work for The New York Times Magazine. She has spent years getting to know dozens of women who have participated in the fire camp program and spoken to captains, family and friends, correctional officers, and camp commanders. The result is a rare, illuminating look at how the fire camps actually operate — a story that encompasses California’s underlying catastrophes of climate change, economic disparity, and historical injustice, but also draws on deeply personal histories, relationships, desires, frustrations, and the emotional and physical intensity of firefighting.
Lowe’s reporting is a groundbreaking investigation of the prison system, and an intimate portrayal of the women of California’s Correctional Camps who put their lives on the line, while imprisoned, to save a state in peril.
About Jaime Lowe
Jaime Lowe is the author of Mental, a memoir about lithium and bipolar disorder, and Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB, a biography of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, a founding member of the Wu-Tang Clan. She is a frequent contributor to the New York Times magazine and other national and international publications. Lowe has contributed to This American Life and Radiolab, and has been featured on NPR and WNYC numerous times.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin in conversation with Zakiya Dalila Harris
2021-08-19 18:00 - 20:00
reading from
The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You: Stories
published by One World
A collection of raucous stories that offer a panoramic view of New Orleans from the author of the “stunning and audacious” (NPR) debut novel We Cast a Shadow
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.
———–
(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. Link coming soon!
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Maurice Carlos Ruffin has an uncanny ability to reveal the hidden corners of a place we thought we knew. These perspectival, character-driven stories center on the margins and are deeply rooted in New Orleanian culture.In “Beg Borrow Steal,” a boy relishes time spent helping his father find work after coming home from prison; in “Ghetto University,” a couple struggling financially turns to crime after hitting rock bottom; in “Before I Let Go,” a woman who’s been in NOLA for generations fights to keep her home; in “Fast Hands, Fast Feet,” an army vet and a runaway teen find companionship while sleeping under a bridge; in “Mercury Forges,” a flash fiction piece among several in the collection, a group of men hurriedly make their way to an elderly gentleman’s home, trying to reach him before the water from Hurricane Katrina does; and in the title story, a young man works the street corners of the French Quarter, trying to achieve a freedom not meant for him.
These stories are intimate invitations to hear, witness, and imagine lives at once regional but largely universal, and undeniably New Orleanian, written by a lifelong resident of New Orleans and one of our finest new writers.

Maurice Carlos Ruffin is the author of We Cast a Shadow, which was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, the PEN/Open Book Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize and International Dublin Literary Award. A recipient of an Iowa Review Award in fiction, he has been published in the Virginia Quarterly Review, AGNI, the Kenyon Review, The Massachusetts Review, and Unfathomable City: A New Orleans Atlas. A native of New Orleans, he is a graduate of the University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop and a member of the Peauxdunque Writers Alliance.

Praise for the work of Maurice Carlos Ruffin
“The Ones Who Don’t Say They Love You is an ode to all that makes us human. With an acute eye for beauty in seemingly hidden places, Maurice Carlos Ruffin shows us that having true empathy for others is not only transformative but necessary for our evolution as a people. Each story grabs your heart, squeezes the hell out of it, and then, somehow, makes it fuller. I couldn’t stop feeling. Ruffin is a writer whose work will make you a better person without your knowing it.”—Mateo Askaripour, author of Black Buck
“These short stories ring out like the bells of St. Louis Cathedral over Jackson Square. One of our great writers of place, Ruffin dazzles with this sonorous collection of deeply moving New Orleanian tales. Told with humor, insight, and radical empathy, these stories will linger in your heart and mind like the fading song of a brass band, vibrant and beautiful.”—Kali Fajardo-Anstine, author of Sabrina & Corina
“Some are funny, some poetic, others near heartbreaking, but the true hallmark Ruffin’s stories is an interest in what language can do. This is the work of a playful and exuberant writer who is always a joy to read.”—Rumaan Alam, author of National Book Award finalist Leave the World Behind
“Ruffin, more than any of the greats I read, searches for that idea, that style, that genre we think is impossible to do well, and he makes it look easy. What he is doing in these short stories is breathtaking. They are so singular and so reliant on each other for wholeness. This is wonder writing.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy

Nicole Stott with Kishore Hari
2021-08-19 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
RSVP
“Nicole’s wonderful book maps her extraordinary journey from Earth to space and back again. She teaches us how to see our world as the spaceship it really is, and how important it is to take great care of the round blue vehicle in which we all ride.”
— Peter Gabriel, musician and humanitarian
When NASA Astronaut Nicole Stott first saw the Earth from space, she was filled with awe. Our shared home was a brilliant blue marble, with a razor thin atmosphere protecting billions of people, including everyone she loved. She realized that we are all bound together on this fragile planet. When she came back to earth, she knew she had to share this vision to help protect it.
In conversation with Kishore Hari on October 19 for an event in our 2021 climate series, Nicole shares awe-inspiring stories from both on the Earth’s surface and far, far above it. She mines the experiences of environmental scientists, advocates for clean water and climate action, and leaders from all walks of life, all while sharing her stories from spaceflight to create a roadmap to a better world.
Stott sees the real possibility of big, sweeping change on Earth that could help us combat the world’s problems, from the climate crisis to inequality. But to achieve change, she says, we can’t just be passive passengers. Every single one of us has to take up the responsibilities of a crewmember on a spaceflight as we turn our attention to protecting the imperiled planet.
At Kepler’s, we feel starry-eyed to host this accomplished and inspiring author online for readers this Tuesday, October 19! We recommend this conversation for all ages—so strap on your flight suit, and join us for an amazing evening with Astronaut Nicole Stott.
*We encourage you to join with a book or donation to support the production of this event and make it possible for us to continue bringing you great conversations.

On the Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness
2021-08-19 17:30 - 19:00 | Virtual
To live in a body that is fat and Black is to exist at the margins of a society that creates the conditions for anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. Hyper-policed by state and society, passed over for housing and jobs, and derided and misdiagnosed by medical professionals, fat Black people in the United States are subject to socio-politically sanctioned discrimination, abuse, condescension, and trauma.
Da’Shaun Harrison-a fat, Black, disabled, and nonbinary trans writer-offers an incisive, fresh, and precise exploration of anti-fatness as anti-Blackness. They foreground the state-sanctioned murders of fat Black men and trans and nonbinary masculine people in historical analysis. From policing, disenfranchisement, to making invisible fat Black men, trans, and nonbinary masculine people, these are some of the most pervasive and insidious ways that anti-fat anti-Blackness shows up in everyday life.
In Da-Shaun’s writing and work they take on desirability politics, the limitations of gender, the connection between anti-fatness and the carceral system, as well as the incongruity of “health” and “healthiness” for the Black fat, illustrating the myriad harms of anti-fat anti-Blackness. They offer strategies for dismantling denial, unlearning the cultural programming that tells us “bad,” and destroying the world as we know it, so Black fat people can inhabit a place not built on their subjugation.
Join Da’Shaun as they have a conversation about their latest book, Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness, their life and work, and learn how we can all work to dismantle our cultural programming and create real change.
Free, suggested donation of $10.
https://www.ciis.edu/public-programs/event-calendar/harrison-dashaun-august-19-2021 publicprograms@ciis.edu 415-575-6175

Fiction Seminar with Lysley Tenorio and Anthony Doerr: SCENE-STEALING: Scenes by Contemporary Masters and What To Take From Them
2021-08-19 15:00 - 18:00 | online, CA, United States
Register for a cocktail hour literary seminar with SMC MFA fiction Professor Lysley Tenorio with guest author Anthony Doerr
You know the saying: good artists borrow, great artists steal. In this class, we’ll aim for greatness, examining the ways contemporary fiction writers render scenes in their work. How do they use this building block of narrative to generate drama and suspense, and to develop both external and internal conflict in their fiction? How do they use dialogue, internal monologue, and action to develop character, in order to give readers an immersive emotional experience? By studying the strategies used by these celebrated authors, we’ll learn to use their techniques for our own work.
One of the writers we’ll read is Anthony Doerr, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the New York Times bestseller, All The Light We Cannot See. Doerr will make a special virtual visit to our class to offer advice on writing scenes. To celebrate this incredible opportunity, the class will include a signature cocktail, which you can prepare during the class break and enjoy during his visit. The cocktail recipe (with a non-alcoholic, mocktail option) will be sent to students in advance.
This three-hour class includes close readings and discussion, in-class writing and sharing, and an author visit. Recommended (but not required) readings will be sent to students one week before the class.
Lysley Tenorio is the author of the novel The Son of Good Fortune, and the story collection Monstress. He is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Whiting Award, the New American Voices Award, a Stegner fellowship, and the Rome Prize. His stories have appeared in the Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Ploughshares, and have been adapted for the stage in San Francisco and New York City. A finalist for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, he will be a 2021-22 Radcliffe Fellow at Harvard University. He is a professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Anthony Doerr is the author of All the Light We Cannot See, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the Alex Award, and a #1 New York Times bestseller. He is also the author of the story collections Memory Wall and The Shell Collector, the novel About Grace, and the memoir Four Seasons in Rome. He has won five O. Henry Prizes, the Rome Prize, the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the National Magazine Award for fiction, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Story Prize. Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, Doerr lives in Boise, Idaho, with his wife and two sons. His new novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, will be published in the fall of 2021.
Funds raised from this seminar will go to support scholarships for BIPOC/Global Majority students and LGBTQ!+ students in the MFA in Creative Writing program

Lyrics & Dirges
2021-08-18 18:30 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States
3rd Wednesdays, 6:30pm. Here for the latest.

Kyle Beachy and José Vadi
2021-08-18 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
JOIN US ON WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 18 AT 6PM PT WHEN KYLE BEACHY JOINS US TO DISCUSS HIS BOOK, THE MOST FUN THING: DISPATCHES FROM A SKATEBOARD LIFE, WITH JOSÉ VADI ON ZOOM!
Zoom Registration
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ReuRjV4pQ6qwvwlDyWpHxA
Praise for The Most Fun Thing
“A candid, funny, and sometimes damning rumination on why we skateboard. The most thought-provoking writing on skateboarding I’ve ever read.”—Bing Liu, director of the Oscar-nominated documentary Minding the Gap
“As readable as a skate mag and as complex as the best fiction, THE MOST FUN THING imbricates themes of meaning, community, and the soul, and will leave you marveling at skateboarding’s mystery and hopeful for its future. A book as much for the skateboarder as the artist and the writer, the thinker, the feeler.”—Mark Suciu, professional skateboarder
“In THE MOST FUN THING, Kyle Beachy assembles critique, philosophy, anecdote, personal history and imagination, while being shrewd, witty, provocative and—above all—hugely engaging. This is my new favorite book on skateboarding.”—Iain Borden, author of Skateboarding and the City: A Complete History
About The Most Fun Thing
Perfect for fans of Barbarian Days, this memoir in essays follows one man’s decade-long quest to uncover the hidden meaning of skateboarding, and explores how this search led unexpectedly to insights on marriage, love, loss, American invention, and growing old.
In January 2012, creative writing professor and novelist Kyle Beachy published one of his first essays on skate culture, an exploration of how Nike’s corporate strategy successfully gutted the once-mighty independent skate shoe market. Beachy has since established himself as skate culture’s freshest, most illuminating, at times most controversial voice, writing candidly about the increasingly popular and fast-changing pastime he first picked up as a young boy and has continued to practice well into adulthood.
What is skateboarding? What does it mean to continue skateboarding after the age of forty, four decades after the kickflip was invented? How does one live authentically as an adult while staying true to a passion cemented in childhood? How does skateboarding shape one’s understanding of contemporary American life? Of growing old and getting married?
Contemplating these questions and more, Beachy offers a deep exploration of a pastime—often overlooked, regularly maligned—whose seeming simplicity conceals universal truths. THE MOST FUN THING is both a rich account of a hobby and a collection of the lessons skateboarding has taught Beachy—and what it continues to teach him as he strugglesto find space for it as an adult, a professor, and a husband.
About Kyle Beachy
Kyle Beachy’s first novel, The Slide (Dial Press, 2009), won The Chicago Reader’s Best Book by a Chicago Author reader’s choice award for the year. His short fiction has appeared in journals including Fanzine, Pank, Hobart, Juked, The Collagist, 5 Chapters, and others.His writing on skateboarding has appeared in The Point, The American Reader, The Chicagoan, Free Skateboard Magazine (UK & Europe), The Skateboard Mag (US), Jenkem, Deadspin, and The Classical. He teaches at Roosevelt University in Chicago and is a co-host on the skateboarding podcast Vent City with pro skater Ryan Lay and others.

Virtual Get Lit #75
2021-08-17 19:00 - 21:00 | online, CA, United States
We’re in our 6th consecutive year as we continue to celebrate 12–15 writers taking risks and reading never-before-read work (rough drafts/debuts) within a 3-minute time limit + live music. All ages are welcome. Emceed by Abe Becker.
Nomadic Press’ Safe Space Statement and Process: https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess
Poster by Jevohn Tyler Newsome
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!
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Topic: Nomadic Press’ Monthly Get Lit
Time: Feb 16, 2021 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Every month on the Third Tue, until Dec 21, 2021, 11 occurrence(s)
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