Litseen

Virtual Event: Jonathan Lee and Megha Majumdar
2021-06-23 18:00 - 19:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | online, CA, United States
Join us on Wednesday, June 23 at 6pm PT when Jonathan Lee is joined by Megha Majumdar to discuss his latest novel, The Great Mistake, on Zoom!

Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85879379881

Praise for The Great Mistake
“Jonathan Lee’s wily, virtuosic, very beautiful new novel is an intimate portrait of a public man that also serves as an X-ray of America. The Great Mistake is a great novel of New York, in which the shaping of public space becomes inextricable from the loneliness, longing, and ferocious ambition of a single, damaged man.” —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

“Jonathan Lee is quietly becoming one of the best young novelists on either side of the Atlantic. The Great Mistake is a sweeping historical novel that is also a gripping mystery.” —The Observer (UK)

“Few writers working today have Jonathan Lee’s range or eye for detail. Fewer still are capable of
roaming minds and histories with such bittersweet, richly detailed ease, or taking on with such profound depth all the messy, hilarious, heartbreaking humanity of a person, and a time, and indeed an entire city. The Great Mistake is a wonder and a delight.” —Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife

“Riveting, immersive…An unparalleled feat of elegance and craftsmanship” –Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter

About The Great Mistake
An exultant novel of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, about one man’s rise to fame and fortune, and his mysterious murder.

Andrew Haswell Green is dead, shot at the venerable age of eighty-three, when he thought life could hold no more surprises. The killing—on Park Avenue in broad daylight, on Friday the thirteenth—shook the city. Born to a struggling farmer, Green was a self-made man without whom there would be no Central Park, no Metropolitan Museum of Art, no Museum of Natural History, no New York Public Library. But Green had a secret, a life locked within him that now, in the hour of his death, may finally break free.
A work of tremendous depth and piercing emotion, The Great Mistake is the story of a city transformed, a murder that made a private man infamous, and a portrait of a singular individual who found the world closed off to him—yet enlarged it.

Virtual Event: Jonathan Lee and Megha Majumdar
2021-06-23 18:00 - 20:00
JOIN US ON WEDNESDAY, JUNE 23 AT 6PM PT WHEN JONATHAN LEE IS JOINED BY MEGHA MAJUMDAR TO DISCUSS HIS LATEST NOVEL, THE GREAT MISTAKE, ON ZOOM!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/85879379881
Or One tap mobile :
US: +16699009128,,85879379881# or +13462487799,,85879379881#
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kbaqFmq5Km
Praise for The Great Mistake
“Jonathan Lee’s wily, virtuosic, very beautiful new novel is an intimate portrait of a public man that also serves as an X-ray of America. The Great Mistake is a great novel of New York, in which the shaping of public space becomes inextricable from the loneliness, longing, and ferocious ambition of a single, damaged man.” —Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
“Jonathan Lee is quietly becoming one of the best young novelists on either side of the Atlantic. The Great Mistake is a sweeping historical novel that is also a gripping mystery.” —The Observer (UK)
“Few writers working today have Jonathan Lee’s range or eye for detail. Fewer still are capable of roaming minds and histories with such bittersweet, richly detailed ease, or taking on with such profound depth all the messy, hilarious, heartbreaking humanity of a person, and a time, and indeed an entire city. The Great Mistake is a wonder and a delight.” —Téa Obreht, author of The Tiger’s Wife
About The Great Mistake
An exultant novel of New York City at the turn of the twentieth century, about one man’s rise to fame and fortune, and his mysterious murder—“Riveting, immersive…An unparalleled feat of elegance and craftsmanship” (Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter).
Andrew Haswell Green is dead, shot at the venerable age of eighty-three, when he thought life could hold no more surprises. The killing—on Park Avenue in broad daylight, on Friday the thirteenth—shook the
city.Born to a struggling farmer, Green was a self-made man without whom there would be no Central Park, no Metropolitan Museum of Art, no Museum of Natural History, no New York Public Library. But Green had a secret, a life locked within him that now, in the hour of his death, may finally break free. A work of tremendous depth and piercing emotion, The Great Mistake is the story of a city transformed, a murder that made a private man infamous, and a portrait of a singular individual who found the world closed off to him—yet enlarged it.

Emily Rapp Black and Matthew Zapruder
2021-06-23 19:00 - 21:00
Emily Rapp Black discusses her new book, Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg (Notting Hill Editions), with Matthew Zapruder.
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
Registration info coming soon
About Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg
At first sight of Frida Kahlo’s painting The Two Fridas, Emily Rapp Black felt a connection with the artist. An amputee from childhood, Rapp Black grew up with a succession of prosthetic limbs and learned that she had to hide her disability from the world.
Kahlo sustained lifelong injuries after a horrific bus crash, and her right leg was eventually amputated. In Kahlo’s art, Rapp Black recognized her own life, from the numerous operations to the compulsion to create to silence pain. Here she tells her story of losing her infant son to Tay-Sachs, giving birth to a daughter, and learning to accept her body. She writes of how Frida Kahlo inspired her to find a way forward when all seemed lost.
About Emily Rapp Black and Matthew Zapruder
Emily Rapp Black is the author of Poster Child: A Memoir and The Still Point of the Turning World, a New York Times bestseller and an Editors’ Pick. Her work has appeared in numerous publications, including Vogue; The New York Times; Time; The Wall Street Journal; O, The Oprah Magazine; and the Los Angeles Times. She is a regular contributor to The New York Times Book Review and is the nonfiction editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. Rapp is currently an associate professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, where she also teaches medical narratives in the university’s School of Medicine.
Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry. His poetry, essays, and translations have appeared in publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Tin House, and The Believer. An associate professor in the Saint Mary’s College of California MFA program and English department, he is also editor at large at Wave Books and, from 2016 to 2017, was the editor of the poetry page of the New York Times Magazine. He lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and son.

Author Jamie Brenner Discussing BLUSH in a GGP Online Author Chat
2021-06-23 19:00 - 21:00
Please join us on Wednesday, June 23, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a discussion of BLUSH with author Jamie Brenner in a GGP Online Chat.
Our discussion will be webcast on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83225997080, and on Facebook Live at https://www.facebook.com/ggpbooks/live/.
Order your copy of BLUSH at http://bit.ly/ggpBlush, or in audiobook from Libro.fm at https://bit.ly/BlushAB.
Description

From acclaimed author Jamie Brenner comes a stunning new novel about three generations of women who discover that the scandalous books of their past may just be the key to saving their family’s future.
For decades, the Hollander Estates winery has been the premier destination for lavish parties and romantic day trips on the North Fork of Long Island. But behind the lush vineyards and majestic estate house, the Hollander family fortunes have suffered and the threat of a sale brings old wounds to the surface. For matriarch Vivian, she fears that this summer season could be their last—and that selling their winery to strangers could expose a dark secret she’s harbored for decades. Meanwhile, her daughter, Leah, who was turned away from the business years ago, finds her marriage at a crossroads and returns home for a sorely needed escape. And granddaughter Sadie, grappling with a crisis of her own, runs to the vineyard looking for inspiration.
But when Sadie uncovers journals from Vivian’s old book club dedicated to scandalous novels of decades past, she realizes that this might be the distraction they all need. Reviving the “trashy” book club, the Hollander women find that the stories hold the key to their fight not only for the vineyeard, but for the life and love they’ve wanted all along.
Blush is a bighearted story of love, family, and second chances, and an ode to the blockbuster novels that have shaped generations of women.
About the Author

Jamie Brenner is the author of five novels, including The Forever Summer and The Wedding Sisters. She grew up in suburban Philadelphia on a steady diet of Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz novels, and later moved to New York City to live like the heroines of her favorite books. Jamie now divides her time between Philadelphia and Provincetown.
Praise For…

“Brenner’s lovely latest begs to be read with a view and a glass of wine….Brenner tackles complex issues including gender equality and the devaluation of women’s interests with a light hand, balancing heavy topics with copious descriptions of wine, cheese, and classic romances. [Blush] is sure to please.” –Publishers Weekly
“Brenner deftly pulls from the canon for steamy encounters and dramatic confrontations—some worthy of a Dynasty reboot. A perfect beach read about a family crisis resolved by women.” –Kirkus Reviews

VIRTUAL EVENT: Helene Wecker, The Hidden Palace
2021-06-23 19:00 - 21:00
VIRTUAL EVENT: Helene Wecker’s debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni, was a runaway bestseller that snagged multiple awards. Now, after seven years, she is back with a sequel. In this enthralling historical epic, set in New York City and the Middle East in the years leading up to World War I, Wecker revisits her beloved characters Chava and Ahmad as they confront unexpected new challenges in a rapidly changing human world. This event is cosponsored by Temple Beth El.
Register for this free Crowdcast event by clicking here!
This is a free event. The featured book may be preordered below. You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!

Chava is a golem, a woman made of clay, able to hear the thoughts and longings of the people around her and compelled by her nature to help them. Ahmad is a jinni, a perpetually restless and free-spirited creature of fire, imprisoned in the shape of a man. Fearing they’ll be exposed as monsters, these magical beings hide their true selves and pretend to be human—just two more immigrants in the bustling world of 1900s Manhattan. Having encountered each other under calamitous circumstances, Chava and Ahmad’s lives are now entwined—but they’re not yet certain of what they mean to each other.
Each has unwittingly affected the humans around them. Park Avenue heiress Sophia Winston, whose brief encounter with Ahmad left her with a strange illness that makes her shiver with cold, travels to the Middle East to seek a cure. There she meets a tempestuous female jinni who’s been banished from her tribe. Back in New York, in a tenement on the Lower East Side, a little girl named Kreindel helps her rabbi father build a golem they name Yossele—not knowing that she’s about to be sent to an orphanage uptown, where the hulking Yossele will become her only friend and protector.
Spanning the tumultuous years from the turn of the twentieth century to the beginning of World War I, The Hidden Palace follows these lives and others as they collide and interleave. Can Chava and Ahmad find their places in the human world while remaining true to each other? Or will their opposing natures and desires eventually tear them apart—especially once they encounter, thrillingly, other beings like themselves?
Helene Wecker’s debut novel, The Golem and the Jinni, was awarded the Mythopoeic Award for Adult Literature, the VCU Cabell Award for First Novel, and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and was nominated for a Nebula Award and a World Fantasy Award. A Midwest native, she holds a B.A. in English from Carleton College and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing from Columbia University. Her work has appeared in literary journals such as Joyland and Catamaran, as well as in the fantasy anthology The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories. She currently lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband and children.

Doug Henderson in conversation with K.M. Soehnlein
2021-06-24 18:00 - 20:00
discussing
The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club
published by University of Iowa Press
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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
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(CLICK HERE) to register. Link to be posted.
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(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. Link to be posted.
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On Thursday nights, the players assemble in the back of Readmore Comix and Games. Celeste is the dungeon master; Valerie, who works at the store, was roped in by default; Mooneyham, the banker, likes to argue; and Ben, sensitive, unemployed, and living at home, is still recovering from an unrequited love. In the real world they go about their days falling in love, coming out at work, and dealing with their family lives all with varying degrees of success. But in the world of their fantasy game, they are heroes and wizards fighting to stop an evil cult from waking a sleeping god.
But then a sexy new guy, Albert, joins the club, Ben’s character is killed, and Mooneyham’s boyfriend is accosted on the street. The connections and parallels between the real world and the fantasy one become stronger and more important than ever as Ben struggles to bring his character back to life and win Albert’s affection, and the group unites to organize a protest at a neighborhood bar. All the while the slighted and competing vampire role playing club, working secretly in the shadows, begins to make its move.
Doug Henderson is a winner of the 2019 PEN/Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers for his short story, The Manga Artist, which was also runner-up for the 2018 Iowa Review Award for Fiction. His debut novel, The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club, is forthcoming from the University of Iowa Press. Originally from Cleveland, he received his MFA from the University of San Francisco. He lives in the Castro District with his husband, their two children, and a large collection of role playing games.
K. M. Soehnlein is the author of the novels The World of Normal Boys and You Can Say You Knew Me When. He was also part of the band The Cubby Creatures.
What has been said about The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club

“Henderson’s novel is sure to delight proud nerds with its story of a young man searching to belong against a backdrop of mischief and magic.”—Foreword Reviews
“Henderson has created something special—part Hobbit and part Breakfast Club—a bittersweet story of love and friendship that tackles big subjects like homophobia, social anxiety, and coming out with a touch of magic. Even if you can’t tell neutral-chaotic from lawful-good, or a paladin from a druid, you’ll be swept up with Ben and his lovable band of outsiders—where the game becomes a map for real life and real life sets the course for the game.”—K. M. Soehnlein, The World of Normal Boys
“It turns out that you don’t have to be a gay gamer nerd from Ohio to love Doug Henderson’s novel The Cleveland Heights LGBTQ Sci-Fi and Fantasy Role Playing Club. You just need to be someone who likes to laugh, or likes to watch people awkwardly attempt love and friendship, or likes to read a sweet, funny story about that time the geek got the boy. Henderson is a quirky, terrific, entertaining storyteller.”—Lori Ostlund, After the Parade

Sponsored by the City Lights Foundation

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz in conversation with Alejandro Murguía
2021-06-24 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.
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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.
———–
(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. (link coming soon!)
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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

On Finding the Mother Tree
2021-06-24 19:00 - 20:30 | Virtual
Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence and hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in ways that are dazzling and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls in James Cameron’s Avatar) and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.
Suzanne’s inspiring and accessible work illuminates how trees-living side by side for hundreds of years-have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past. Trees have agency about the future, eliciting warnings and mounting defenses. They compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication-characteristics ascribed to human intelligence and traits that are the essence of civil societies-and at the center of all this complexity and nuance-the Mother Trees, mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.
In her latest book, Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest, Suzanne writes of her own life, born and raised into a logging world in the rainforests of British Columbia, of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the forest, and of her own journey-of love and loss, of observation and change, of risk and reward, making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology.
Join scholar and CIIS staff member Laura Pustarfi for a conversation about Suzanne’s life and work, her latest book, and learn more about the connectedness of the Mother Tree that nurtures the forest in the profound ways that families and human societies do, and how these inseparable bonds enable our survival.
Free, suggested donation of $10.
https://www.ciis.edu/public-programs/event-calendar/simard-suzanne-june-24-2021 publicprograms@ciis.edu 415-575-6175

Virtual Event: Jenny Bitner
2021-06-25 18:00 - 19:00 | online, CA, United States
Join us on Friday, June 25 at 6pm PT when Jenny Bitner discusses her book, Here is a Game We Could Play, on Zoom!

Broadcast live from Green Apple Books
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84868544257

Praise for Here is a Game We Could Play
“Capturing just how much belonging shapes a person, in its absence as much as its presence, the novel strains between those two poles; like any true connection, it is a ‘terrible and beautiful thing.”—Foreword Reviews, starred review

“Tender, yearning, and dangerously imagined. . . A book to pluck you out of your cage and reintroduce you to the wild.”—Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying

“Here Is a Game We Could Play is a piercing and poignant novel with an unforgettable narrator. A haunting debut.”—Vanessa Hua, author of A River of Stars

About Here is a Game We Could Play
This original, funny, and moving novel follows Claudia, a loner with an active fantasy life, as she reckons with past trauma and forms new relationships.

A dreamlike novel set in Pennsylvania in the 1990s, Here Is a Game We Could Play is the story of Claudia, an intelligent eccentric trapped in the rundown industrial town she grew up in—a place plagued with troubling memories and hidden threats. Seeking escape from tedium, loneliness, and her obsessive fear of poisoning, Claudia retreats into books. . . and into a fantasy life with her perfect lover, to whom she addresses letters about her life, all the while imagining outlandish sexual scenarios.

​In each fantasy, her lover takes a different form, ranging from a prison guard in a world where metaphor is forbidden, to a more-than-brotherly Hansel from the Grimms’ fairy tale, to a tentacled mind-reading space alien. All share a desire for a deep intimacy that eludes Claudia, even as she forms new real-life relationships and reconsiders her sexual identity—building a rapport with an elderly volunteer at the library, striking up a friendship with a wily temp at her dead-end job, and embarking on a passionate affair with Rose, the town’s new librarian. When paranoia threatens to ruin her relationship with Rose, Claudia is forced not only to combat her anxiety but to face the unresolved trauma in her past—the disappearance of her father on a night she has long repressed.

Funny, dark, inventive, and moving, Here Is a Game We Could Play is an original debut novel recalling the work of Aimee Bender, Angela Carter, Rebecca Brown, and Margaret Atwood.

About Jenny Bitner
Jenny Bitner’s stories, essays, and poems have been published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, PANK, Fence, Mississippi Review, The Fabulist, and The Sun. She works as a hypnotherapist and writing teacher and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #64
2021-06-25 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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We have a short goal for the evening of $150.
Pandemic times continue in 2021 and we continue to gather our community virtually across state and country lines. Join us to read, join us to listen. All are welcome.
Hosted by Nazelah Jamison (with Tula Biederman on tech). It’s a continuing experiment, and we hope you can join us!
Our safe space process still applies to our collective virtual space, so please read this by visiting https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess.
Zoom Joining Info
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Weekly Virtual Open Mic
Time: Jan 1, 2021 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Every week on Fri, until Dec 10, 2021, 50 occurrence(s)
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Weekly: https://us02web.zoom.us/…/tZcudeqoqjIiE9fnl7dxuB…/ics…
Join Zoom Meeting
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Virtual Event: Jenny Bitner
2021-06-25 18:00 - 20:00
JOIN US ON FRIDAY, JUNE 25 AT 6PM PT WHEN JENNY BITNER DISCUSSES HER BOOK, HERE IS A GAME WE COULD PLAY, ON ZOOM!
BROADCAST LIVE FROM GREEN APPLE BOOKS
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Praise for Here is a Game We Could Play
“Capturing just how much belonging shapes a person, in its absence as much as its presence, the novel strains between those two poles; like any true connection, it is a ‘terrible and beautiful thing.'”—Foreword Reviews, starred review
“Tender, yearning, and dangerously imagined. . . A book to pluck you out of your cage and reintroduce you to the wild.”—Ben Loory, author of Tales of Falling and Flying
“Here Is a Game We Could Play is a piercing and poignant novel with an unforgettable narrator. A haunting debut.”—Vanessa Hua, author of A River of Stars
About Here is a Game We Could Play
This original, funny, and moving novel follows Claudia, a loner with an active fantasy life, as she reckons with past trauma and forms new relationships.
A dreamlike novel set in Pennsylvania in the 1990s, Here Is a Game We Could Play is the story of Claudia, an intelligent eccentric trapped in the rundown industrial town she grew up in—a place plagued with troubling memories and hidden threats. Seeking escape from tedium, loneliness, and her obsessive fear of poisoning, Claudia retreats into books. . . and into a fantasy life with her perfect lover, to whom she addresses letters about her life, all the while imagining outlandish sexual scenarios.
​In each fantasy, her lover takes a different form, ranging from a prison guard in a world where metaphor is forbidden, to a more-than-brotherly Hansel from the Grimms’ fairy tale, to a tentacled mind-reading space alien. All share a desire for a deep intimacy that eludes Claudia, even as she forms new real-life relationships and reconsiders her sexual identity—building a rapport with an elderly volunteer at the library, striking up a friendship with a wily temp at her dead-end job, and embarking on a passionate affair with Rose, the town’s new librarian. When paranoia threatens to ruin her relationship with Rose, Claudia is forced not only to combat her anxiety but to face the unresolved trauma in her past—the disappearance of her father on a night she has long repressed.
Funny, dark, inventive, and moving, Here Is a Game We Could Play is an original debut novel recalling the work of Aimee Bender, Angela Carter, Rebecca Brown, and Margaret Atwood.
About Jenny Bitner
Jenny Bitner‘s stories, essays, and poems have been published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, PANK, Fence, Mississippi Review, The Fabulist, and The Sun. She works as a hypnotherapist and writing teacher and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto.

VIRTUAL: Wall + Response: Youssef Alaoui, Jason Bayani, Genny Lim & Michael Warr
2021-06-25 19:00 - 21:00
Booksmith and The Bindery are proud to host a four-event series presented by Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) called Wall + Response, featuring sixteen Bay Area poets responding to the social/ political/ racial/ justice narratives of four murals on Clarion Alley.
Curated by CAMP artist and organizer Megan Wilson (wall) and poet Maw Shein Win (response), the fourth and final event in the series features Youssef Alaoui, Jason Bayani, Genny Lim and Michael Warr responding to the mural The Will To Live (2018)by Art Forces, Arab Resource Organizing Center (AROC), and Arab Youth Organizing (AYO).
The Will To Live (2018)by Art Forces, Arab Resource Organizing Center (AROC), and Arab Youth Organizing (AYO) celebrates and honors the lives of six Arab leaders: Rasmea Odeh, Mehdi Ben Barka, Naji Diafullah, Leila Khaled, Basel Al Araj, and Yasser Mortaja. The mural manifests and expresses the resilience and resistance of the Bay Area community to attacks on freedom and liberties of Arab, Muslim, people of color, immigrants and refugees. The Will To Live is one of five murals on Clarion Alley with messaging in support of Palestine and in solidarity to call an end to Israel’s apartheid and settler colonial state. The five murals have been hit with hate crime vandalism 21 times in the past two years, between September 2018 – September 2020. CAMP and its artists continue to repair the works as an act of resilience and in support of the global movement for the Palestinian right of return.
This virtual event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.
– ABOUT THE PROJECT –
Wall + Response was originally conceived to culminate in four quarterly public events to be presented on Clarion Alley. However, due to the pandemic the poets will instead be filmed by videographer Mahima Kotian reading their work in front of the murals on Clarion Alley. Kotian will be creating videos for each series that will be presented as part of live online events (of which this is the first). All the events are free and open to the public.
The poets are creating new poems in response to the murals, and will be reading those and other selected works at the events. The specific dates for each event will be announced in the month prior to the event.
Wall + Response is made possible by the generous support of the San Francisco Art Commission and the Zellerbach Family Foundation.
– ABOUT THE AUTHORS –
Youssef Alaoui is a Moroccan Colombian American. His family and heritage are an endless source of inspiration for his varied, dark, spiritual and carnal writings. He has an MFA in Poetics from New College of California. His work has appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Big Bridge, 580 Split, Dusie Press, RIVET Journal, Paris Lit Up, The Opiate, and nominated for a Pushcart at Full of Crow. His short story collection “Fiercer Monsters” was published by Nomadic Press of Oakland, CA. His poetry collection “Critics of Mystery Marvel” was published by 2Leaf Press of NYC. www.youssefalaoui.info
Jason Bayani is the author ofLocus (Omnidawn Publishing 2019) and Amulet (Write Bloody Publishing 2013). He’s an MFA graduate from Saint Mary’s College, a Kundiman fellow, and works as the artistic director for Kearny Street Workshop, the oldest multi-disciplinary Asian Pacific American arts organization in the country. His publishing credits include World Literature Today, Muzzle Magazine, Lantern Review, and other publications. Jason performs regularly around the country and debuted his solo theater show “Locus of Control” in 2016 with theatrical runs in San Francisco, New York, and Austin.
Genny Lim is San Francisco Jazz Poet Laureate emeritus. Her most recent poetry-music collaboration, Don’t Shoot! Requiem in Black, dedicated to Black Lives Matter, premiered at SF Jazz Center in April 2018 with Marshall Trammell, Francis Wong, and Equipto. Lim’s award-winning play, Paper Angels, was the first Asian American play that aired on PBS’s American Playhouse in 1985 and has been produced throughout the U.S., Canada and China. She is author of five poetry collections, Winter Place, Child of War, Paper Gods and Rebels, KRA!, La Morte Del Tempo, and co-author of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants on Angel Island, winner of the American Book Award and the forthcoming anthology of Senior Asian American memoirs, Window: Glimpses of Our Storied Past.
San Francisco poet Michael Warr is the 2020 Berkeley Lifetime Achievement Awardee. His books include Of Poetry & Protest: From Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin (W.W. Norton), The Armageddon of Funk, We Are All The Black Boy, and Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry From Chicago’s Guild Complex. He is a San Francisco Library Laureate and recipient of a Creative Work Fund award for his multimedia project Tracing Poetic Memory, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. His poetry is translated into Chinese as part of “Two Languages / One Community” a collaborative project with poet and translator Chun Yu. Michael is the former Deputy Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora and a board member of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library.

– OTHER PARTICIPATING AUTHORS + EVENTS –
February 26. 2021: Karla Brundage, Jennifer Hasegawa, Tureeda Mikell, and Kim Shuck responding to the mural We Want Respect, Freedom, Land, Housing, Justice, Peace, Bread by Emory Douglas/Black Panther Party / Remix by CUBA, D8, MACE
April 30, 2021: Celeste Chan, MK Chavez, Paul Corman-Roberts and Tim Xonnelly responding to the mural Affordable Housing/Vivienda Asequible by the SF Print Collective working with the Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP)
– ABOUT THE CURATORS –
Megan Wilson is a visual artist, writer, and activist based in San Francisco. Wilson has been a core organizer of Clarion Alley Mural Project (CAMP) since 2001. In 2018 she co-directed and co-organized (with Christopher Statton and Nano Warsono) CAMP’s second international exchange and residency project, Bangkit /Arise between artists from Yogyakarta, Indonesia and San Francisco/Bay Area in collaboration with the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco. The second phase of the project will take place 2021-22.
Maw Shein Win is a poet, editor, and educator who lives and teaches in the Bay Area. Her poetry chapbooks are Ruins of a glittering palace (SPA/Commonwealth Projects) and Score and Bone (Nomadic Press). Invisible Gifts: Poems was published by Manic D Press in 2018. She was a 2019 Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at UC Berkeley. Win is the first poet laureate of El Cerrito, California (2016 – 2018), and her poetry collection Storage Unit for the Spirit Housewill be published by Omnidawn in October 2020.

You can read more about CAMP and Wall + Response here.
—
This virtual event is free and open to all ages, but RSVP is required.

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

Virtual Event: Heino Falcke and Kate Greene
2021-06-26 12:00 - 14:00
JOIN US ON SATURDAY, JUNE 26 AT 12PM PT WHEN HEINO FALCKE IS JOINED BY KATE GREENE TO DISCUSS HIS BOOK, LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS: BLACK HOLES, THE UNIVERSE, AND US, ON ZOOM!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
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International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kd8jY8diBt
About Light in the Darkness
A fascinating and thought-provoking investigation into the nature of black holes—a blend of the spiritual, the philosophical, and the scientific—from the premier German astrophysicist who made history in 2018, capturing the first one on film.
A Light in the Darkness is the story of one of the greatest astronomical achievements of all time: the first photographic evidence of black holes in April 2018, and its significance for humanity, told by the scientist who accomplished it. A man of faith ordained in the Protestant tradition, Heino Falcke wrestles with the ways in which black holes force us to confront the boundary where human life ends and the celestial begins. He also ponders why black holes are difficult for most of us to understand—comparing it to our inability to envisage our own inevitable death.
Black holes develop in outer space when a massive star dies, and its matter is condensed. That extreme amount of mass contained in a small space generates a gigantic amount of gravitational force, allowing the black hole to suck up everything that comes near, including light. These astronomical wonders are the subject of our greatest scientific and philosophical theorizing—the journey to a black hole would be the journey to the end of time itself. In this way, Falcke regards them as the most exquisite representations of fear, death . . . and, surprisingly, the divine.
Empirical and profound, A Light in the Darkness is the first work to examine both the physical nature and spiritual meaning of black holes, those astrophysical mysteries Falcke, calls “the epitome of merciless destruction.”
About Heino Falcke
Heino Falcke is a German professor of radio astronomy and astroparticle physics at the Radboud University Nijmegen. He was a winner of the 2011 Spinoza Prize. His main field of study is black holes. He lives in Berlin.

A Celebration of the Pioneering Legacy of Sasha and Ann Shulgin
2021-06-26 12:00 - 2021-06-27 20:00
City Lights in conjunction with Transform Press and Synergetic Press present
A Celebration Of The Pioneering Legacy of Sasha and Ann Shulgin

Bold explorers of the frontiers of neurochemistry, Alexander “Sasha” Shulgin, master psychopharmacologist, along with his wife Ann, during their lifetimes, helped usher into being a major paradigm shift in the way we view the exploration of human consciousness. In June 2021, Synergetic Press and Transform Press will publish The Nature of Drugs: History, Pharmacology, and Social Impact. This will be the first book by Sasha since 2011. Together, Transform and Synergetic have scheduled an exceptional new series of books for release over the next two years celebrating Professor Shulgin’s life and work.
To coincide with this auspicious occasion, a consortium including his publishers and numerous supporters of his work present a weekend Virtual symposium (June 26 & 27, 2021) exploring the many aspects of Alexander Shulgin’s life and legacy. Through a series of sessions comprising lectures and panel discussions, we will pay tribute to a man known to many as one of the great pioneers of the exploration of human consciousness.
The two-day online event is free. A brief outline of the program follows. Confirmed participants include Ann Shulgin, Michael Pollan, Wendy Tucker, Mariavittoria Mangini, David Nichols, David Presti, Bridgette and Stanislav Groff, Bob Jesse, Hamilton Morris, Janis Phelps, Kile Ortigo, Mike Margolies, Leonard Pickard, Paul Daley and many others.
Special thanks goes out to California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), Erowid Center, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), and the Usona Institute for their support of this event.

Events are free but require registration. Click the provided links to reserve a placement.

Saturday, June 26, 2021
12pm – 2pm Pacific / Session 1: The Shulgin’s Pioneering Psychedelic Research
Host: Peter Maravelis, introduction to event and reflections on City Lights relationship to consciousness studies
Moderator: Bob Jesse – researcher, engineer, convener of the Council on Spiritual Practices (CSP.org)
Brigitte and Stanislav Grof – Stan Groff is the world’s leading researcher in psychedelic therapy, breathwork, and the exploration of non-ordinary states of consciousness, with wife and psychotherapist, Brigitte
David Nichols – co-founder Heffter Institute, Chair in Pharmacology at the Purdue University College of Pharmacy
Paul Daley – Chief Science Officer and Chemist, Alexander Shulgin Research Institute
Ann Shulgin
Wendy Tucker – Publisher, Transform Press, daughter of Ann Shulgin
Connie Littlefield – filmmaker, producer “Better Living Through Chemistry,” documentary
Earth and Fire Erowid – cofounders of the non-profit Erowid Center, largest and most visited collection of information about psychoactives on the web
(CLICK HERE) to make reservations.
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3pm – 5pm Pacific / Session 2: Stories from the Edge: Trailblazers in Psychopharmacology
Moderator: Dr. Mariavittoria Mangini – family nurse midwife for 25 years, author of numerous papers on historiography and social impacts of psychedelics
George Greer – psychotherapist, cofounder Heffter Research Institute, and Requa Greer, nurse practitioner, pioneers in MDMA medical research
Dennis McKenna – ethnobotanist, author, founder of the McKenna Academy of Naturalist Philosophy
Keeper Trout – ethnobotanist, conservationsist, curator the Shulgin Archive Project
(CLICK HERE) to make reservations.
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Sunday, June 27, 2021
12:00pm – 2:00pm Pacific / Session 3: Currents in Psychedelic Research & Regulation
Moderator: Hamilton Morris – chemist, filmmaker, and science journalist
Dr. Rick Doblin – cofounder, CEO, MAPS and John Gilmore, Chairman, MAPS, cofounder Electronic Frontier Foundation
Amanda and Cosmo Feilding – Founder and Executive Director of the Beckley Foundation and Cosmo Feilding, CEO, Beckley Psytech, Limited
Leonard Pickard – chemist, author, former research associate in neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, and Deputy Director of the Drug Policy Analysis Program at UCLA
Dr. Paul Daley – CEO, Chemist, Alexander Shulgin Research Institute and Dr. Nick Cozzi – professor of pharmacology, research scientist
(CLICK HERE) to make reservations.
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3:00pm – 5:00pm Pacific / Session 4: Psychedelic Psychotherapy & Social Impact
Moderator: Janis Phelps – Dean of Faculty at CIIS for the graduate departments in the School of Humanities and Social Science; founder and director of the CIIS Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research
Dr. David Presti – director of UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, neurobiologist, psychologist, and cognitive scientist
Kile Ortigo – clinical psychologist and founder of the Center for Existential Exploration, author of Beyond the Narrow Life: A Guide For Psychedelic Integration and Existential Exploration
Bill Richards – psychologist in the Psychiatry Department of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, consultant/trainer at sites of psychedelic research internationally
Annie Oak – Managing Editor, Lucid News, journalist, long-time public health activist, developed risk reduction strategies for event organizers; cofounder of Woman’s Visionary Council
(CLICK HERE) to make reservations.
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6:00pm – 8:00pm Pacific / Session 5: Towards a Sane and Healthy Future
Moderator: Mike Margolies – psychedelic community catalyst and conversation creator; Founder of Psychedelic Seminars (psychsems.com)
Bob Jesse – researcher, engineer, convener of the Council on Spiritual Practices (CSP.org)
Michael Pollan – NYTimes bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind, cofounder UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics
Ann Shulgin author, collaborator with Sasha Shulgin, with her daughter, Wendy Tucker – Publisher, Transform Press
Dr. Julie Holland – psychiatrist specializing in psychopharmacology, author of numerous books, most recent Good Chemistry: The Science of Connection, From Soul to Psychedelics
Closing statements with Paul Daley, Ann & Wendy & Trout – and the work of the Shulgin Foundation and forthcoming publications
(CLICK HERE) to make reservations.
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Click the following links to purchase:
The Nature of Drugs (Link to be posted soon!)
Also available:
Pihkal (Link to be posted soon!)
Tihkal (Link to be posted soon!)

Nobuko Miyamoto Book Launch Celebration: Not Yo' Butterfly
2021-06-26 15:00 - 17:00
Join us for this celebration of a mold-breaking memoir of Asian American identity, political activism, community, and purpose by Nobuko Miyamoto.
This event is co-sponsored by Eastwind Books of Berkeley, J-SEI, and UC Berkeley’s Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies Department. The event will also be live-streamed on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eastwindbooksberkeley
[Purchase a copy of Not Yo’ Butterfly here] On Special $27 with Nobuko Miyamoto’s autographed book plate
Not Yo’ Butterfly is the intimate and unflinching life story of Nobuko Miyamoto—artist, activist, and mother. Beginning with the harrowing early years of her life as a Japanese American child navigating a fearful west coast during World War II, Miyamoto leads readers into the landscapes that defined the experiences of twentieth-century America and also foregrounds the struggles of people of color who reclaimed their histories, identities, and power through activism and art.
Miyamoto vividly describes her early life in the racialized atmosphere of Hollywood musicals and then her turn toward activism as an Asian American troubadour with the release of A Grain of Sand—considered to be the first Asian American folk album. Her narrative intersects with the stories of Yuri Kochiyama and Grace Lee Boggs, influential in both Asian and Black liberation movements. She tells how her experience of motherhood with an Afro-Asian son, as well as a marriage that intertwined Black and Japanese families and communities, placed her at the nexus of the 1992 Rodney King riots—and how she used art to create interracial solidarity and https://j-sei.org/about/conciliation.
Through it all, Miyamoto has embraced her identity as an Asian American woman to create an antiracist body of work and a blueprint for empathy and praxis through community art. Her sometimes barbed, often provocative, and always steadfast story is now told.
Announcing Author Nobuko Miyamoto’s New Album, 120,000 Stories. Smithsonian Folkways has just announced artist and activist Nobuko Miyamoto’s new album, 120,000 Stories. The album released January 29th.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Tara Brach, Trusting the Gold
2021-06-27 11:30 - 13:30
ara Brach will join us for an online event to share Trusting the Gold: Uncovering Your Natural Goodness, her beautifully illustrated gift book to help us uncover and trust the innate goodness in ourselves and others. This event is cosponsored by Insight Santa Cruz.
Register for this free Crowdcast event by clicking here!
This is a free event. The featured book may be preordered below. You can make a donation to help support Bookshop Santa Cruz here. Thank you!
We receive so many messages from our culture meant to divide us from one another or turn us against ourselves. Yet when we stop judging, stop avoiding, stop trying to resist that which makes us afraid or ashamed, we open to our true nature―a boundless fi eld of awareness that is innately fearless and loving.
This recognition of our essential human goodness may be the most radical act of healing we can take. “The gold of our true nature can never be tarnished,” says Tara Brach. “In the moments of remembering and trusting this basic goodness of our Being, we open to happiness, peace, and freedom.”
In TRUSTING THE GOLD: Uncovering Your Natural Goodness, Tara draws from more than four decades of experience as a meditation teacher and psychologist to share her most valuable practices for reconnecting with the beauty of our humanity―from timeless Buddhist wisdom to techniques adapted to the specific challenges of our modern age. Here you’ll explore three pathways of remembering and living from your full aliveness:
• Opening to the Truth of the present moment
• Turning toward Love in any situation
• Resting in the Freedom of our natural, radiant awareness
Brach offers insights and practices for bringing these qualities into everyday life―including the particular challenges of our time such as fear for the future, anger at authority fi gures, and grief over injustice. “Even in the midst of our deepest emotional suffering, self-compassion is the pathway that will carry us home,” Dr. Brach writes. “What a joy to pause and behold our basic goodness, and to see how it shines through each of us. Seeing that secret beauty, we fall in love with all of life.”

Senator Mazie Hirono with Jan Yanehiro
2021-06-29 18:00 - 19:00
THIS IS AN ONLINE EVENT.
New leaders are driving some of the biggest political shifts in our nation’s history as we speak. But do you know their stories?
Online this summer, Kepler’s is excited to host a powerhouse in the Senate whose autobiography embodies a nation in transformation. On June 29, Hawaiian Senator Mazie Hirono joins in conversation with acclaimed Bay Area journalist Jan Yanehiro for her memoir, Heart of Fire.
Heart of Fire marks Hirono’s journey from soft-spoken immigrant daughter to one of the leading voices for progressive causes today. This powerful memoir, among the most anticipated of 2021, finds the threads of Hirono’s determination in the strength and example of the Senator’s late mother. Laura Hirono was born in Waipahu, Hawaii, and immigrated to Japan. There she gave birth to three children, and after years of struggle she chose despite incredible hurdles to leave an abusive marriage— returning to Hawaii to give her three children a better life, all when Senator Hirono was just 7 years old. Mazie, then called Keiko, was raised in paradise and in relative poverty by a woman whose love was the shining example of courage.
Behind the incredible voice that has garnered headlines for her work in immigration, poverty, racial equality and justice, here is the captivating story of what makes the political personal for one transformative leader.
From Waipahu to her role as the first Asian American woman and first immigrant woman on the Senate Floor, Senator Hirono’s story rings with uniquely American beauty. It is a memoir that will inspire and move you, no matter your politics.
Hear the Senator in person and set your heart on fire with Kepler’s this summer.
Webinar space is limited, so register early! Please consider joining with a book to support programs like this one.

Odd Salon + Context Travel: Doctors, Diseases, and Deities
2021-06-29 18:00 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States
Join us for an exploration of the art, science, and archaeology of medicine in Ancient Rome. This conversation examines a remarkable discovery in Rimini, Italy that has given us an extraordinary amount of information concerning medicine and medical technology in ancient Rome. The “Domus del Chirurgo,” (“House of the Surgeon”) is a treasure trove of artifacts that tell us a great deal about the practice of medicine almost 2000 years ago. We will then go on to discuss the Antonine Plague of the 2nd century, one of the most severe pandemic events the Roman world ever confronted.

Through a combination of primary sources, archaeological discoveries, and modern science, Sarah will examine the pathology of the plague as well as its impact on the economic, political, and religious life of the Roman Empire. What exactly was the “Antonine Plague?” Was it a factor in the destabilization of the Empire in the 3rd century? And most importantly, what lessons can we learn about how to react to population-impacting medical crises today?
Sarah Yeomans is an archaeologist specializing in the Imperial period of the Roman Empire with a particular emphasis on ancient science and religion. Currently pursuing her doctorate at the University of Southern California, she is adjunct faculty at both St. Mary’s College of Maryland and West Virginia University. A native Californian, Sarah holds an M.A. in Archaeology from the University of Sheffield, England, and an M.A. in Art History from the University of Southern California. Her current research involves ancient Roman medicine and the impact of pandemic events on Roman society. She is generally happiest when covered in dirt, roaming archaeological sites somewhere in the Mediterranean region but particularly in Rome, where she lived for six years.
Tuesday, June 29
DOCTORS, DISEASES, AND DEITIES: ILLNESS AND INJURY IN ANCIENT ROME WITH SARAH YEOMANS
Online, via Zoom
This is part one of our four part collaboration with Context Travel, as a special Members & Fellows series. These private events are included for free for all current Odd Salon Members, Fellows. To join us: New members may join by purchasing either the four part series pass for $125, or purchase tickets here to join the membership and reserve a spot for this seminar only for our standard annual membership cost of $100.

ABOUT CONTEXT TRAVEL: Context Learning is a cultural education provider, connecting global scholars with lifelong learners. Founded in Rome in 2003, Context started as a tour operator for travelers seeking off-the-beaten-path experiences in the world’s cultural capitals, growing quickly to 20,000 tours a year across 70+ destinations. After COVID-19 halted travel operations, Context continued to expand, launching live, scholar-led seminars and courses presented online. What emerged was a thriving community of experts and learners keen to continue exploring, growing, and philosophizing, regardless of their location. To date we’ve covered thousands of topics ranging from Tuscany to Timbuktu, Caravaggio to Frida Kahlo, Ancient Rome to Brexit. Context strives to be the cultural center for lifelong learning, at-home, on the ground, and everywhere in between.
If you are not already familiar with the many wonders of Context Travel, we’d heartily encourage you to go forth and explore their virtual and real-world exploration offerings

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Camille Roy in conversation with Eileen Myles
2021-06-29 18:00 - 20:00
celebrating the book release of Camille Roy’s new short fiction collection
Honey Mine
published by Nightboat 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. Links to be posted soon.
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(CLICK HERE) to purchase book. Links to be posted soon.
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Honey Mine unfolds as both excavation and romp, an adventure story that ushers readers into a lesbian writer’s coming of age through disorienting, unsparing, and exhilarating encounters with sex, gender, and distinctly American realities of race and class. From childhood in Chicago’s South Side to youth in the lesbian underground, Roy’s politics find joyful and transgressive expression in the liberatory potential of subculture. In these new, uncollected, and out-of-print fictions by a master of New Narrative, find a record of survival and thriving under conditions of danger.
Camille Roy’s most recent book is ​Sherwood Forest​, from Futurepoem. Other books include ​Cheap Speech​, a play from Leroy Chapbooks, and ​Craquer​, a fictional autobiography from 2nd Story Books, as well as ​Swarm​ (fiction, from Black Star Series). She co-edited ​Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative​ (Coach House 2005, re-issued 2010). Earlier books include ​The Rosy Medallions​ (poetry and prose, from Kelsey St. Press) and ​Cold Heaven​ (plays, from Leslie Scalapino’s O Books). Recent work has been published in Amerarcana and Open Space (SFMoma blog).
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.
Advance Praise for Honey Mine

“It’s poetry stretched over mountains of prose, mythic and dirty like a genius’s sex diary told outta the side of their mouth in a torn bathrobe with a topical map on the back that includes genitals, wisdom & lore. It’s held together by love – lost & known. And the healing power of silence. Honey Mine is one hell of a unique book. It’s a study. It disrupts the category, be it literature, fiction, the essay or the lesbian. It says: whatever you have the nerve to do, I will also do. Honey Mine is an inspirational work.” -Eileen Myles

“This is a huge book; it belongs in the canon of the best queer writers. To read Honey Mine is to be inhabited by the largesse of the word ‘lesbian,’ body, sex, sexuality. And by a lesbian aesthetic of human relations, bookended by the author’s magnificent enduring love with her late partner Angie. These fictions, in resisting…before the theorems arrive… teleological primness, parade language nimble enough to absorb class, cities, memory, grief, shame, without sacrificing a cornucopia of pleasures. Like a tarte tatin, Honey Mine spills over with deliciousness. My tactic vis a vis narrative, says Camille Roy, is really just to bring abandonment into the relationship. She succeeds marvelously.” -Gail Scott

“From Camille Roy’s work, I have learned literal worlds; frog-kicked through summers in musty, abandoned cabins, tread the concrete divisions of Chicago’s South Side. In this expansive, formally promiscuous collection, ‘stories don’t work.’ Fiction and fantasy function not as creative effacements of the brute facts of queer life, but as the very means by which that life innovates itself—as relational, as fickle, as an ongoing ‘survival of self.’ Gauntlet of girlhood ideology, love letter peeled open like a garlic clove. Honey Mine takes apart the toolbox of narrative mechanisms; the aberrant languages and intimacies we use to scrape, mould and manipulate one another. Never bowing to romanticism and yet unmistakable in its communion, this is a book that has, in many ways, seeded and re-made me. I am so grateful for it.”
-Trisha Low

Virtual Event: Rivka Galchen and Paul La Farge
2021-06-29 18:00 - 20:00
JOIN US ON TUESDAY, JUNE 29 AT 6PM PT WHEN RIVKA GALCHEN IS JOINED BY PAUL LA FARGE TO DISCUSS HER LATEST NOVEL, EVERYONE KNOWS YOUR MOTHER IS A WITCH, ON ZOOM!
Zoom Login Info
Please click the link below to join the webinar:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/87992045770
Or One tap mobile :
US: +16699009128,,87992045770# or +12532158782,,87992045770#
International numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kcGethSO7d
Praise for Rivka Galchen
“Skillful, imaginative, often funny . . . In that grand tradition of American innovators, perhaps Ms. Galchen’s greatest artistic creation is herself.” — Adam Langer, The New York Times Book Review
“To read Rivka Galchen is to enter a wonderland where the bizarre and the mundane march in unlikely lockstep.” —Michael Lindgren, The Washington Post
About Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch
The startling, witty, highly anticipated second novel from the critically acclaimed author of Atmospheric Disturbances
The story begins in 1618, in the German duchy of Württemberg. Plague is spreading. The Thirty Years’ War has begun, and fear and suspicion are in the air throughout the Holy Roman Empire. In the small town of Leonberg, Katharina Kepler is accused of being a witch.
Katharina is an illiterate widow, known by her neighbors for her herbal remedies and the success of her children, including her eldest, Johannes, who is the Imperial Mathematician and renowned author of the laws of planetary motion. It’s enough to make anyone jealous, and Katharina has done herself no favors by being out and about and in everyone’s business. So when the deranged and insipid Ursula Reinbold (or as Katharina calls her, the Werewolf) accuses Katherina of offering her a bitter, witchy drink that has made her ill, Katharina is in trouble. Her scientist son must turn his attention from the music of the spheres to the job of defending his mother. Facing the threat of financial ruin, torture, and even execution, Katharina tells her side of the story to her friend and next-door neighbor Simon, a reclusive widower imperiled by his own secrets.
Drawing on real historical documents but infused with the intensity of imagination, sly humor, and intellectual fire for which Rivka Galchen is known, Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch will both provoke and entertain. The story of how a community becomes implicated in collective aggression and hysterical fear is a tale for our time. Galchen’s bold new novel touchingly illuminates a society and a family undone by superstition, the state, and the mortal convulsions of history.

Kate Zambreno in conversation with T Fleischmann
2021-06-30 18:00 - 20:00
discussing
To Write as if Already Dead
published by Columbia University Press
To Write as if Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno’s failed attempts to write a study of Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. In this diaristic, transgressive work, the first in a cycle written in the years preceding his death, Guibert documents with speed and intensity his diagnosis and disintegration from AIDS and elegizes a character based on Michel Foucault.
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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 to be posted soon)
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(Click Here) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon)
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The first half of To Write as if Already Dead is a novella in the mode of a detective story, searching after the mysterious disappearance of an online friendship after an intense dialogue on anonymity, names, language, and connection. The second half, a notebook documenting the doubled history of two bodies amid another historical plague, continues the meditation on friendship, solitude, time, mortality, precarity, art, and literature.
Throughout this rigorous, mischievous, thrilling not-quite study, Guibert lingers as a ghost companion. Zambreno, who has been pushing the boundaries of literary form for a decade, investigates his methods by adopting them, offering a keen sense of the energy and confessional force of Guibert’s work, an ode to his slippery, scarcely classifiable genre. The book asks, as Foucault once did, “What is an author?” Zambreno infuses this question with new urgency, exploring it through the anxieties of the internet age, the ethics of friendship, and “the facts of the body”: illness, pregnancy, and death.

Kate Zambreno is the author of many acclaimed books, including Drifts (2020), Appendix Project (2019), Screen Tests (2019), Book of Mutter (2017), and Heroines (2012). Her writing has appeared in the Paris Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She teaches in the graduate nonfiction program at Columbia University and is the Strachan Donnelley Chair in Environmental Writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
T Fleischmann is the author of Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through and Syzygy, Beauty.

PRAISE FOR TO WRITE AS IF ALREADY DEAD:

“Zambreno’s most urgent and charged work since Heroines.”
—Brian Blanchfield, author of Proxies: Essays Near Knowing

“Here, as ever, Zambreno proves herself a brilliantly generous and ambitious reader, one capable of engaging a text so acutely that the line between self and art blurs. To Write As If Already Dead is gossipy and smart, angry and agile, doubling and doubled—and a serious pleasure to read.”
—Danielle Dutton, author of Margaret the First

“This book is a tour de force. I was completely awestruck by the way Zambreno enacts the concept of the title, and by the way she writes the body, hers and Guibert’s.”
—Moyra Davey, author of Index Cards: Selected Essays

“Kate Zambreno stylizes a thrilling form of reading as writing and writing as reading, one that speaks to the overlapping crises of our contemporary moment. No one thinks better and more carefully about the embodied practice of writing. She is the only person who could have written this book.”
—Amy Hollywood, author of Acute Melancholia and Other Essays

“Guibert’s voice is restored to the present through an act of transportation that left me slightly afraid of Zambreno’s power. But then that’s why you read her, and him: for a new awe of life.”
—Andrew Durbin, author of Skyland

Sponsored by the City Lights Foundation

VIRTUAL: Courtney Cook with Mara Altman / The Way She Feels
2021-06-30 18:00 - 20:00
Booksmith is excited to host a virtual event with Courtney Cook for her debut, the graphic memoir The Way She Feels: My Life on the Borderline in Pictures and Pieces.. She’ll be in conversation with the one and only Mara Altman, who we are delighted to welcome back. 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 The Way She Feels here and we’ll ship it directly to you (or hold for pickup at our San Francisco shop).
Order Gross Anatomy by Mara Altman here.
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
What does it feel like to fall in love too hard and too fast, to hate yourself in equal and opposite measure? To live in such fear of rejection that you drive friends and lovers away? Welcome to my world. I’m Courtney, and I have borderline personality disorder (BPD), along with over four million other people in the United States. Though I’ve shown every classic symptom of the disorder since childhood, I wasn’t properly diagnosed until nearly a decade later, because the prevailing theory is that most people simply “grow out of it.” Not me.
In my illustrated memoir, The Way She Feels: My Life on the Borderline in Pictures and Pieces, I share what it’s been like to live and love with this disorder. Not just the hospitalizations, treatments, and residential therapy, but the moments I found comfort in cereal, the color pink, or mini corndogs; the days I couldn’t style my hair because I thought the blow-dryer was going to hurt me; the peace I found when someone I love held me. This is a book about vulnerability, honesty, acceptance, and how to speak openly—not only with doctors, co-patients, friends, family, or partners, but also with ourselves.
“The Way She Feels is a lifeline to anyone who’s ever felt alone.”– Piper Weiss, author of You All Grow Up and Leave Me
“Audaciously human and raw. The Way She Feels is a rainbow during the rain.” – Mara Altman
About the authors
Courtney Cook is a writer, illustrator, teacher, and lover of naps. Courtney received an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and an MFA in creative nonfiction from the University of California, Riverside. She grew up in Winnetka, Illinois, and now resides in Chicago with her cat, Bertie. Author photo by Caity Krone.
Mara Altman enjoys writing about issues that embarrass her (e.g., chin hair), because she has found that putting shame on the page defuses the stigma, leaving her with a sense of empowerment and freedom. Her first book, Thanks for Coming, an investigation into love and orgasm, was translated into three languages. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, and New York magazine, among other publications. Before going freelance, Altman worked as a staff writer for The Village Voice and daily newspapers in India and Thailand. An alumna of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, she lives in San Diego with quite a few other hairy beings.
This event is free and all ages, but RSVP is required.

Gillian Osborne Celebrating the release of Green Green Green
2021-06-30 18:00 - 20:00
Gillian Osborne reads from Green Green Green (Nightboat Books), a collection of hybrid essays that engage the intersection of habitats, horticulture, and histories both poetic and personal.
“Gillian Osborne writes prose lithely and thinks with quickness and imagination. I think I learned something or saw something freshly on almost every page of her Green Green Green.” — Robert Hass
This event will be streamed on our Crowdcast channel.
REGISTER HERE
About Green Green Green
For earlier writers like Emily Dickinson and William Blake, the green world was a space of haunted opposites: life and death, innocence and experience, and the sensitivities of plants. In these essays, letters, repetitions, and experiments, Gillian Osborne draws on a poetic and scientific archive spanning from the late eighteenth century to the present to explore contemporary meanings of green as both/and: environment as ailing and vital, global and close to home. This is nature writing as reading, and homemaking, in vicinity with others.
About Gillian Osborne
Gillian Osborne is a writer, educator, and aspirational gardener living in California. She is the co-editor of a collection of critical essays on modern and contemporary ecopoetics, and teaches for the Harvard Extension School and the Bard College Language & Thinking Program.

Author Emily Henry Discussing PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION in a GGP Online Author Chat
2021-06-30 19:00 - 21:00
Please join us on Wednesday, June 30, 2021 at 7 PM PDT for a discussion of PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION with author Emily Henry.
Our discussion will be webcast on Zoom at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81360287172, and on Facebook Live at https://www.facebook.com/ggpbooks/live/.
Order your copy of PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION at http://bit.ly/ggpPeopleWeMeet, or in audiobook from Libro.fm at http://bit.ly/PeopleWeMeetAB.
Description

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2021 by Newsweek ∙ Oprah Magazine ∙ Marie Claire ∙ Parade ∙ PopSugar ∙ BookPage ∙ BookBub ∙ Betches ∙ SheReads ∙ Good Housekeeping ∙ BuzzFeed ∙ and more!
Two best friends. Ten summer trips. One last chance to fall in love.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Beach Read, a sparkling new novel that will leave you with the warm, hazy afterglow usually reserved for the best vacations.
Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together.
Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven’t spoken since.
Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees.
Now she has a week to fix everything. If only she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong?
About the Author

Emily Henry writes stories about love and family for both teens and adults. She studied creative writing at Hope College and the New York Center for Art & Media Studies, and now spends most of her time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the part of Kentucky just beneath it. Find her on Instagram @EmilyHenryWrites.

VIRTUAL EVENT: Molly Ostertag, The Girl from the Sea
2021-07-01 18:00 - 20:00
VIRTUAL EVENT: Molly Ostertag, author of The Witch Boy trilogy, will share The Girl from the Sea, her new graphic novel about family, romance, and first love, which School Library Journal calls an “adorable and authentic coming-out story.” This event is cosponsored by Prism Comics.
Register for this free Crowdcast event by clicking here!
Fifteen-year-old Morgan has a secret: She can’t wait to escape the perfect little island where she lives. She’s desperate to finish high school and escape her sad divorced mom, her volatile little brother, and worst of all, her great group of friends…who don’t understand Morgan at all. Because really, Morgan’s biggest secret is that she has a lot of secrets, including the one about wanting to kiss another girl. Then one night, Morgan is saved from drowning by a mysterious girl named Keltie. The two become friends and suddenly life on the island doesn’t seem so stifling anymore. But Keltie has some secrets of her own. And as the girls start to fall in love, everything they’re each trying to hide will find its way to the surface…whether Morgan is ready or not.
“This endearing and often funny graphic novel cohesively combines queer teen romance, realism, and fantasy.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
Molly Knox Ostertag is the author and illustrator of the acclaimed graphic novels The Witch Boy and The Hidden Witch and the illustrator of several projects for older readers, including the webcomic Strong Female Protagonist and Shattered Warrior by Sharon Shinn. She grew up in the forests of upstate New York and graduated in 2014 from the School of Visual Arts, where she studied cartooning and illustration. She currently lives in Los Angeles with her girlfriend and several pets. Visit her online at mollyostertag.com.

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #65
2021-07-02 18:00 - 19:30 | online, CA, United States

Quiet Lightning / Better Ancestors: Valentina De Roca Fuerte, Lourdes Figueroa, Kelechi Ubozoh, ASHA & Teju Adisa-Farrar
2021-07-05 19:00 - 20:00 | online, CA, United States
Quiet Lightning presents the third Better Ancestors, featuring readings and performance by Valentina De Roca Fuerte, Lourdes Figueroa, Kelechi Ubozoh, ASHA and Teju Adisa-Farrar.
ABOUT THE SERIES
One of Quiet Lightning’s efforts to diversify and move toward racial equity, Better Ancestors is a new quarterly showcase of writers of color. Developed in partnership with Michael Warr, the series features 5 authors reading or performing whatever they choose. Each author selects one performer for the following show, so the series – and community – is self-generating. All authors are paid and published in an end of the year anthology.
Why Better Ancestors? As one of our initiatives to diversify from a board that has historically been mostly white, this showcase aims to provide a long-term, forward-thinking goal. As a society, we are suffering the consequences of pervasive systemic injustice against people of color, queer and trans people, the poor, disabled, and otherwise disadvantaged. But we are all ancestors of the future. If the planet is to remain inhabitable; if the function of humanity is not to sort and oppress our descendants based on their skin color, accent, or material property, we must be better ancestors. This begins by listening to one another, and by giving each other space to be heard.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS (pictured above, clockwise from top left)
Valentina De Roca Fuerte is a performing poet, awakening visual artist, workshop facilitator, and creative wellness educator. Born in Bogotá Colombia, raised in the DMV & Washington state, to now living in Harlem; she carries all these places with her. Her words are motivated by the urgency to write through brown immigrant women’s pain & power. She recently graduated with a Masters in Art Politics from NYU Tisch & is now teaching brilliant middle-schoolers in Brooklyn.
Kelechi Ubozoh is a Nigerian-American writer and mental health advocate who blends the reality of trauma, race, and mental health into her writing. Kelechi co-hosts the Bay Area submission-based reading series MoonDrop Productions with Cassandra Dallett. She has performed at the Berkeley Poetry Festival (2019), Oakland’s Beast Crawl (2016-2017) and San Francisco’s Litquake (2018-2019). For the past three years she has performed at Litcrawl with Cocoa Fly, an all-Black women troupe. Her work is published in Endangered Species, Enduring Values edited by Shizue Seigel. In 2019, she published her anthology with L.D. Green, We’ve Been Too Patient: Voices from Radical Mental Health. She is currently working on a collection of poetry through memoir.
ASHA is an Artist, Educator, and Revolutionary. Originally from LA, ASHA has been a public school teacher for the last 10 years in the bay area. She is an international poet, striving to use art to create radical change. ASHA has been featured on the cover of Content Magazine, KQED Arts, and many of the prominent poetry events in the Bay Area, as well as been an active speaker, emcee, and performer at numerous rallies and marches for civil and human rights. Her Tedx tells her diasporic journey of identity through poetry, and her latest book release, Not Your Masi’s Generation tackles mental health and healing from generational trauma. Her dream is to establish her own K-12 school rooted in restorative practices, art and social justice based standards. ASHA consistently uses her platform to voice out against injustice and to speak up for those who have been marginalized and silenced for centuries.
Teju Adisa-Farrar is a Jamaican-American writer, poet and geographer from Oakland. Her writing explores experiences of exclusion, coloniality, geographies of Blackness, urban culture, environmental equity, and systemic change. Teju has performed poetry and conducted workshops all over the world including in Austria, Denmark, Portugal, Botswana and the United States. She has been published on several digital sites and magazines, as well as has an e-book of poetry entitled searching to find home (2014) and a poetry chapbook entitled to belong. (2017) based on her travels throughout Israel and Palestine. Teju is interested in documenting and mapping Black (read: alternative) futures.

Lourdes Figueroa was born in Yuba City, California, during a trip her parents made from Mexico to the USA when they worked in the campo tilling the soil. Her work is rooted in migration, what her family lived when they moved to this country. In 2009 and 2011 she attended VONA. In 2012 she completed an MFA with a focus in poetry at USF. Her work has been published in Jack Hirschman’s Poets 11 2008 & 2010, Generations, Eleven Eleven, Something Worth Revising and BACKWORDS Press. She currently works and lives in San Francisco with her wife. yolotl was her first chapbook, published by Spooky Actions. Her chapbook Ruidos=To Learn Speak, written during her Alley Cat Residency, is forthcoming.

ABOUT MICHAEL WARR (pictured above, right)
Michael Warr’s books include Of Poetry and Protest: From Emmet Till to Trayvon Martin, edited by Michael Warr (W.W. Norton), and from Tia Chucha Press The Armageddon of Funk, We Are All The Black Boy, and Power Lines: A Decade of Poetry From Chicago’s Guild Complex. In 2017 he was named a San Francisco Library Laureate. Other poetry honors include a Creative Work Fund award for his multimedia project Tracing Poetic Memory in Bayview Hunters Point, PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award for Excellence in Literature, Black Caucus of the American Library Association Award, Gwendolyn Brooks Significant Illinois Poets Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. Michael is the former Deputy Director of the Museum of the African Diaspora and has extensive experience in community-based arts. He became a board member of the Friends of the San Francisco Public Library in 2018. In 2020, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Berkeley Poetry Festival. Follow his creative work at https://michaelwarr-creativework.tumblr.com/.

ABOUT QUIET LIGHTNING
Now in its 12th year, Quiet Lightning is a literary movement to create and foster community around the written and spoken word. QL aims to democratize public space by offering performances, curation opportunities, and programming with no barriers to entry, providing a launchpad for new and emerging artists, a reliable platform for professional writers, and an inclusive, accessible gathering place for the public. QL is committed to care-taking and progressing the rich threads of literary culture that exist in the San Francisco Bay Area. Recognized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts as one of the 100 “people, organizations, and movements who are shaping the future of culture”, Quiet Lightning’s flagship is the literary mixtape, a submission-based series with a blind selection process and different curators for each show. The shows, which are free to attend, are published as books, handed out free to the first 100 people, and all participating artists are paid. QL has now produced 137 shows featuring 1,673 readings by 879 local authors in 91 venues, ranging from dive bars and art galleries to state parks and national landmarks, and has published 115 books and produced two films, all selected by 74 different curators. In 2019, Quiet Lightning pioneered an application process for limited-term board-membership, called Disruptors, to regularly bring new ideas and energy into the organization. QL maintains Litseen.com, a daily calendar of literary events.
MAKE A ONE-TIME DONATION OR SUPPORT US ON PATREON
Every tax deductible donation helps Quiet Lightning invest in a sustainable, ethical arts ecosystem, with the goal of building that culture into the fabric of our lives. You can donate by Venmo or PayPal or pledge a recurring donation by becoming one of our supporters on Patreon, which comes with a few additional perks and helps us expand on the work that we do.

VIRTUAL: Michael Pollan / This Is Your Mind On Plants
2021-07-06 18:00 - 20:00
Booksmith is thrilled to present Michael Pollan again for his new book, This Is Your Mind On Plants, a radical challenge to how we think about drugs and an exploration into the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants—and the equally powerful taboos—from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Change Your Mind.
Please note:

Each ticket includes admission for one to this exclusive event, 1 **signed** copy of This Is Your Mind On Plants (while supplies last), and domestic shipping.
Event link will be sent to everyone who gets tickets.
Tickets are non-refundable and non-transferable.
Any questions? Contact us at events@booksmith.com.

About the book
Of all the things humans rely on plants for–sustenance, beauty, medicine, fragrance, flavor, fiber–surely the most curious is our use of them to change consciousness: to stimulate or calm, fiddle with or completely alter, the qualities of our mental experience. Take coffee and tea: People around the world rely on caffeine to sharpen their minds. But we do not usually think of caffeine as a drug, or our daily use as an addiction, because it is legal and socially acceptable. So, then, what is a “drug”? And why, for example, is making tea from the leaves of a tea plant acceptable, but making tea from a seed head of an opium poppy a federal crime?
In This Is Your Mind on Plants, Michael Pollan dives deep into three plant drugs–opium, caffeine, and mescaline–and throws the fundamental strangeness, and arbitrariness, of our thinking about them into sharp relief. Exploring and participating in the cultures that have grown up around these drugs while consuming (or, in the case of caffeine, trying not to consume) them, Pollan reckons with the powerful human attraction to psychoactive plants. Why do we go to such great lengths to seek these shifts in consciousness, and then why do we fence that universal desire with laws and customs and fraught feelings?
In this unique blend of history, science, and memoir, as well as participatory journalism, Pollan examines and experiences these plants from several very different angles and contexts, and shines a fresh light on a subject that is all too often treated reductively–as a drug, whether licit or illicit. But that is one of the least interesting things you can say about these plants, Pollan shows, for when we take them into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways we can. Based in part on an essay published almost twenty-five years ago, this groundbreaking and singular consideration of psychoactive plants, and our attraction to them through time, holds up a mirror to our fundamental human needs and aspirations, the operations of our minds, and our entanglement with the natural world.
About the author
Michael Pollan is the author of eight books, including How to Change Your Mind, Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Pollan teaches writing at Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.
Please note: This is a ticketed, all-ages event. Each ticket includes a copy of This Is Your Mind On Plants – no exceptions. If you already have a copy, remember that books make great gifts! If you’ve already gifted this title to all of your friends, please write events@booksmith.com and we’ll work things out.
