Brian Hassett's Beat Cafe
2017-06-02 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | The Beat Museum, 540 Broadway, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac and keynote essayist in The Rolling Stone Book of the Beats, Brian Hassett performs a comical collage of original and Beat works including a nobody’s-ever-done-it-before chapter from Kerouac’s final novel Pic.
Longtime friend of Edie Kerouac-Parker, Carolyn Cassady, Henri Cru, and numerous other Beat and Prankster luminaries, Hassett is a natural and funny storyteller, and has preformed Kerouac & the Beats on stage in Amsterdam, London, Toronto, New York, L.A. & at The Beat Museum’s own Beatnik Shindig in 2015.
This appearance is celebrating a new special “Summer of Love Edition” of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac with additional photos, bringing the total in the book to 70!
This will be his first Bay Area performance in two years and the only one this Summer of Love.
Special guests are likely.
Lively guests are a certainty.
Charming event.

First Friday: Naked Truth real.stories.live
2017-06-02 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Main Reading Room, Mill Valley Public Library, 375 Throckmorton Ave, Mill Valley , CA, 94941, United States
Registration highly recommended. Registration will open Friday May 19th.
For Adults and High School Students only.
Sit back, enjoy a glass of wine and watch as the Library is transformed into a venue for real people telling real-life stories, raw and without notes.
It’s the 50th anniversary of the summer of love, when tens of thousands of young people, in search of something different, came to San Francisco to find it. In honor of this very special moment in time, our line-up of talented storytellers will share their own present-day stories of peace, love, and liberation.
Josh Healey is back to emcee with storytellers Emily Epstein White, Phil Surkis, and others.
If you have a story to tell from the summer of love, we want to hear it. Throw your name in the hat to tell a one minute story in our optional audience lightening round.

RHINO Poetry Magazine's 40th Anniversary Reading Series
2017-06-02 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Adobe Bookstore welcomes RHINO Poetry magazine and hosting a the reading as part of their 40 Readings in 40 Cities tour! A great series of readings to celebrate RHINO Poetry magazine’s 40th anniversary.
Special guests:
Peter Kline, Brittany Perham, Roy Mash and Cintia Santana.
http://rhinopoetry.org/

Poets of Color Podcast
2017-06-02 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Galería de la Raza, 2857 24th Street, San Francisco , CA, 94110, United States
Fundraiser: Poets of Color Podcast
Friday, June 2, 2017 | 7:00 pm
Fundraiser and Showcase for the upcoming Poets of Color Podcast.
The Poets of Color Podcast is dropping June 2017 and your host’s Asha Sudra & Chris “L7” Cuadrado need your help to make it happen!
Come enjoy some poetry from local bay area poets of color, find out what we have planned for the show, and meet other folks in the community invested in PoC words and narratives.
Featuring:
Asha Sudra
Chris “L7” Cuadrado
Flavia Mora
Sharif Zakout
Hablo Rw

& More TBA!
$5 – $10 (NOTAFLOF)

2017 Bay Area Book Festival
2017-06-03 00:00 - 2017-06-04 00:00 UTC | Downtown Berkeley
Join the Center for the Art of Translation at the 2017 Bay Area Book Festival! Numerous international writers and translators will appear.
As a festival sponsor, the Center will be participating in panels and events, and you’ll have the opportunity to meet Center staff and purchase Two Lines Press publications at our booth.
Stay tuned for more information.

Drag Queen Story Hour
2017-06-03 12:00 - 14:00 UTC | San Francisco Public Library, 100 Larkin St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
DRAG QUEEN STORY HOUR – EUREKA VALLEY LIBRARY

June 3 @ 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
San Francisco Public Library – Eureka Valley/Harvey Milk Memorial Branch •

Saturday June 3
12pm
Eureka Valley Library
San Francisco
FREE
Featuring Panda Dulce

ABOUT DRAG QUEEN STORY HOUR
Created by Michelle Tea and RADAR Productions in San Francisco, Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) is just what it sounds like—drag queens reading stories to children in libraries, schools, and bookstores. DQSH captures the imagination and play of the gender fluidity of childhood and gives kids glamorous, positive, and unabashedly queer role models. In spaces like this, kids are able to see people who defy rigid gender restrictions and imagine a world where people can present as they wish, where dress up is real.
ABOUT PANDA
Panda Dulce is a drag queen who was born and raised in San Francisco. Sometimes Panda dresses like a girl, and sometimes Panda dresses as a boy. (But she feels most special when you call her a girl). Panda believes that whatever makes you different, is beautiful and powerful. Remember to be proud of yourself, always.

Youth Poetry Workshop w/ Kim Shuck + Dan Vera
2017-06-03 12:30 - 15:00 UTC | Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Poets Kim Shuck of San Francisco and Dan Vera of Washington, DC will host a poetry workshop for young adults, by drawing on the poetry anthology, Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands (Aunt Lute Books, 2016). Students will have a chance to explore new voices and styles of poetry–concentrating on the work of Gloria Anzaldúa–and will write and share their own poetry over the course of the workshop.
This event is free and open to the public, but young, aspiring Latino/a poets are especially encouraged to participate. This workshop will be held in Studio D, in the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts.
Hosted by Aunt Lute Books, and underwritten by the NEA and CAC.
Snacks will be provided.

Bay Area Poets Coalition First Saturday
2017-06-03 15:00 - 17:00 UTC | Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison Street, Berkeley, CA, 94702, United States
Addison is one block south of and parallel to University Ave.
between Acton & Bonar St.
Parking on the street (NOT in the S.C.L. parking lot)
Check in at the front desk and you will be directed to the meeting location
(usually Movie Room, or backyard garden)
All Ages Welcome
Come and enjoy a friendly and informal read-around —
3-5 minutes per poet/reader, or “just listening” is fine too 🙂

Babylon Salon
2017-06-03 17:30 - 20:00 UTC | The Armory Club, 1799 Mission St, San Francisco, CA, 94103, United States
Saturday, June 3
featuring

Brenda Hillman

Meron Hadero

Erin Byrne

and many more…

at our exciting new venue
The Armory Club
in the
downstairs performance space
1799 Mission St
(across from the Armory Building)

Imaniman: A Night of Poetry
2017-06-03 18:30 - 20:30 UTC | Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, 2868 Mission Street, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Join contributors from Imaniman: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands for an evening of poetry and reflections on fronteras, identity, and art.
Featured poets: Dan Vera, Kim Shuck, Tomas Moniz, Suzy de Jesus Huerta
Appetizers and drinks will be provided. This event is free and open to the public. Imaniman will be available for purchase at this event. We take both cash and credit card. Imaniman: A Night of Poetry is a MAPP event.

Tea with Mr. E
2017-06-03 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Edwin Markham House in History Park, 1650 Senter Road, San Jose, 95112, United States
Tea with Mr. E:
A one-day class on T.S. Eliot with Nils Peterson
Saturday, June 3, 2017, 7:00pm
Nils Peterson will offer a class on T.S. Eliot discussing “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Wasteland” and one of the Quartets. If there is time, there will be a writing exercise.
$25 PCSJ Members, $35 general, $15 Students
Very limited space, reserve now!

Edwin Markham House in History Park
1650 Senter Road, San José, CA 95112
Nils Peterson is Professor Emeritus in English at San JosÃ© State University. In 2009 he was chosen the first Poet Laureate of Santa Clara County. He has published poetry, science fiction, and articles on subjects as varied as golf and Shakespeare. Nils has been singing in chorales for more than 60 years. His chapbooks include: Here Is No Ordinary Rejoicing, Driving a Herd of Moose to Durango, For This Day, The Revenge of the Socks, and For This Day II. A collection of poems, The Comedy of Desire, edited and introduced by Robert Bly, was published by The Blue Sofa Press. His newest collection, A Walk to the Center of Things, was published by Poetry Center San Jose. An e-chapbook, Talk In The Reading Room, was published by Wordrunner Press early in 2014. Bring: Writing equipment; Sack Lunch and beverage. Parking and entrance to the campus is on Phelan Avenue.

3 Blues-y Ladies
2017-06-04 03:30 - 18:00 UTC | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Intimate wordy emotive acoustic singer-songwriter and poet bookstore show! Starring:
Banty Hen (Ester Kang) — Ukulele and voice. Clarion, drowning, knock-you-out-and-leave-you-for-dead beautiful. Like driving down the 1 in the fog. You’ve never heard a voice or songwriting quite like this.
Andrea Passwater — Poet from Alabama, by way of Taiwan, will do a short reading that might make you cry. Like reading your great aunt’s teenage diary. Her poems are better than most blues singers at singing the blues.
Rosie Cima — Guitar and voice. Singer songwriter no.2, with more gravel, has lots of new stuff for this show, not all of it sad. Been meditating a lot lately, and listening to a lot of Nina Simone.

Courtney Maum
2017-06-04 15:00 - 16:00 UTC | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Courtney Maum to the store to discuss and sign her new novel, Touch, on Sunday, June 4th at 3:00 pm.
Sloane Jacobsen is one of the world’s most powerful trend forecasters (she was the foreseer of “the swipe”), and global fashion, lifestyle, and tech companies pay to hear her opinions about the future. Her recent forecasts on the family are unwavering: the world is over-populated, and with unemployment, college costs, and food prices all on the rise, having children is an extravagant indulgence.
So it’s no surprise when the tech giant Mammoth hires Sloane to lead their groundbreaking annual conference, celebrating the voluntarily childless. Not far into her contract, Sloane begins to sense the undeniable signs of a movement against electronics that will see people embracing compassion, empathy, and “in-personism” again. She’s struggling with the fact that her predictions are hopelessly out of sync with her employer’s mission and that her closest personal relationship is with her self-driving car when her partner, the French “neo-sensualist” Roman Bellard, reveals that he is about to publish an op-ed on the death of penetrative sex–a post-sexual treatise that instantly goes viral. Despite the risks to her professional reputation, Sloane is nevertheless convinced that her instincts are the right ones, and goes on a quest to defend real life human interaction, while finally allowing in the love and connectedness she’s long been denying herself.
A poignant and amusing call to arms that showcases her signature biting wit and keen eye, celebrated novelist Courtney Maum’s new book is a moving investigation into what it means to be an individual in a globalized world.
Courtney Maum is the author of the novel I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You and the chapbook Notes from Mexico. Her short fiction, book reviews, and essays on the writing life have been widely published in outlets such as The New York Times, Tin House, Electric Literature, and Buzzfeed, and she has co-written films that have debuted at Sundance and won awards at Cannes. At various points in her life, she has been a trend forecaster, a fashion publicist, and a party promoter for Corona Extra. She currently works as a product namer for M-A-C cosmetics from her home in Litchfield County, CT.

Bazaar Writers Salon Reading
2017-06-04 18:00 - 20:00 UTC | Bazaar Cafe, 5927 California St, San Francisco, CA, 94121, United States
Readings by Aamina Ahmad, Peg Alford Pursell, Michael Shewmaker, and Shelley Wong
Hosted by Peter Kline
Aamina Ahmad grew up in London. She completed her MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Teaching-Writing Fellow. Her full length play, The Dishonored, toured the UK in 2016. Her short fiction has appeared in The Normal School, The Missouri Review, Ecotone and the anthology, And the World Changed.

Peg Alford Pursell is the author of Show Her a Flower, A Bird, A Shadow (ELJ Editions, March 2017), a collection of hybrid prose and micro-fictions with praise from Peter Orner, Joan Silber, Antonya Nelson and others. Her stories and poems have appeared in Permafrost, the Los Angeles Review, Forklift Ohio, Joyland Magazine, RHINO, VOLT, and many other journals and anthologies. She is the founder and director of the national reading series Why There Are Words and founder and director of WTAW Press. Visit her at www.pegalfordpursell.com
Michael Shewmaker is the winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and author of Penumbra (Ohio UP, 2017). Born in Texarkana, Texas, he earned an MFA from McNeese State University and a PhD in creative writing from Texas Tech University. His poems have recently appeared in Yale Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Sewanee Review, Poetry Daily, Parnassus, Oxford American, Narrative, and elsewhere. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, he is a Jones Lecturer in poetry at Stanford University.
Shelley Wong is the author of RARE BIRDS, a winner of the 2016 Diode Editions chapbook award. Her poems have recently appeared in Crazyhorse, The Volta, Sixth Finch, and Southern Humanities Review. A Kundiman fellow and a Pushcart Prize recipient, she holds an MFA from Ohio State University and lives in Oakland.

Quiet Lightning
2017-06-05 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Clarion Music Performing Arts Center, 816 Sacramento St., San Francisco, CA, 94108, United States
Now accepting submissions: 6/5 @ Clarion Music Performing Arts Center
All forms of writing are accepted. This will be a free show, and the first 100 people will receive a book featuring all of the selected writing and cover art by a local artist. Thanks to a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission all authors will be paid, and will read/perform as a literary mixtape, with no introductions or banter.
The deadline is End of Day 5/17. SUBMIT NOW!

Lisa Ko
2017-06-06 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Book Passage Marin, 51 Tamal Vista Blvd. , Corte Madera, CA, 94925, United States
One morning, Deming Guo’s mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her.
With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. They rename him Daniel Wilkinson in their efforts to make him over into their version of an “all-American boy.” But far away from all he’s ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his new life with his mother’s disappearance and the memories of the family and community he left behind.
Set in New York and China, The Leavers is a vivid and moving examination of borders and belonging. It’s the story of how one boy comes into his own when everything he’s loved has been taken away–and how a mother learns to live with the mistakes of her past.
This powerful debut is the winner of the 2016 PEN/Bellwether Prize for fiction, awarded by Barbara Kingsolver for a novel that addresses issues of social justice.
Lisa Ko’s fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2016, Narrative, Copper Nickel, the Asian Pacific American Journal, and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the MacDowell Colony, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Writers OMI at Ledig House, the Jerome Foundation, and Blue Mountain Center, among others. A founding coeditor of Hyphen and a fiction editor at Drunken Boat, Ko was born in Queens and lives in Brooklyn.

Shut Up + Share
2017-06-06 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Adobe Books, 3130 24th St., San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Have you wondered what your fellow Shut Up & Write writers are up to? Have you wanted to share your own work in a no-pressure environment? Join us at Adobe Books to read your own work and support your fellow SU&W writers. Here’s how it works:
1) Readings are first come, first serve and will last for up to seven minutes.
2) You can read an excerpt from a story, a poem, blog post, article you’re writing, etc. We expect that you’ll use your best judgment about the type of material to read.
3) Sign-ups are first come, first serve on the night of the meetup at the bookstore.
Open to all! More info: i.magdaleno@gmail.com

Lisa Locascio/Golden State 2017: New Writing from California
2017-06-06 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith is thrilled to host writer and editorLisa Locascio for the launch of Golden State 2017: New Writing from California.
Please join us, along with contributorsSusanna Kwan, Rebecca Baumann, Alia Volz, Lyndsey Ellis, Olga Zilberbourg,Jasper Henderson, Kara Vernor, andMicah Perkins, in celebrating the publication of the fourth installment of this terrific annual collection. You can read Lisa’s introduction to the book here.
Lisa Locascio, this year’s Golden State anthology editor, is publisher of Joyland Magazine and editor of the ekphrastic collaboration magazine 7×7. Her work has appeared in The Believer, Bookforum, Santa Monica Review, n+1, Western American Literature, Tin House online, and many other magazines. She is Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Wesleyan University.

Diana Aehegma, Claudia Cortese, + Steffi Drewes
2017-06-06 19:30 - 21:30 UTC | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Diana Aehegma grew up on the Big Island of Hawaii, and lives in Oakland, CA. She earned her MA and MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University, where she won the Ann Fields Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in Monday Night, the Tinfish Press anthology Jack London is Dead, The Press at CSU Fresno anthology Shadowed: Unheard Voices, the Featherboard Writing Series / Aggregate Space Gallery chapbook Crossing Paths, and at Bang Out SF, among other venues.
Claudia Cortese’s first book, Wasp Queen (Black Lawrence Press, 2016) explores the privilege and pathology, trauma and brattiness of suburban girlhood. Cortese’s poems and stories have appeared in Blackbird, Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, and The Offing, among others, and she writes reviews for Muzzle Magazine. The daughter of Neapolitan immigrants, Cortese grew up in Ohio and lives in New Jersey. She also lives at claudia-cortese.com
Steffi Drewes is the author of Tell Me Every Anchor Every Arrow (Kelsey Street Press, 2016) and the poetry chapbooks Magnetic Forest, Cartography Askew, and History of Drawing Circles. Her poems have appeared in various journals and in the anthology It’s night in San Francisco but it’s sunny in Oakland (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2014). She has attended writing and art residencies at Vermont Studio Center and The Wassaic Project in New York. Currently, she works as a freelance writer and editor in the Bay Area.

Beat Poetry: The Revolutionary Letters of Diane DiPrima
2017-06-07 18:00 - 19:00 UTC | Mad Monk Center for Anachronistic Media, 2454 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94704, United States
Twice a month Mel Ash (http://www.melash.com/about_mel_ash.php) leads visitors in a very authentic Beat Poetry experience with a featured writer of the Beat Generation.

An evening of poetry w/ Hass, Manuel, + Hood
2017-06-07 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Robert Hass, Douglas Manuel, and Charles Hood to the store to discuss and sign their latest works on Wednesday, June 7th at 7:00 pm.
In addition to his magisterial poetry, Robert Hass is beloved for his incisive, meditative criticism. A Little Book on Form takes up the central contradiction between poetry as genre and the poetics of the imagination. A wealth of vocabulary exists with which to talk about, map, and explain poetry in rigorous formal terms, but the more intuitive, creative aspects of a poet’s work and processes are more elusive: if the most interesting parts of form are those expressive, essential gestures inside it, how can we come to a better understanding of form as passion, as art?
A Little Book on Form brilliantly synthesizes Hass’s formidable gifts as both a poet and a critic. In suggestive, informal notes, Hass breaks the idea of a poem down to its barest building blocks, from the one line haiku to the villanelle and sonnet. His approach singularly employs postmodern perspectives on shape, thought, feeling, content, and movement, calling on Catullus and Allen Ginsberg, Issa and Czeslaw Milosz. Begun as a project for students of poetry, Hass investigates the ancient roots of the poetic impulse, taking a wide-ranging look at the most intense experience of human thought and feeling in language.
A Little Book on Form is a rousing reexamination of our most enduring mode of literature from one of our greatest living poets, who writes prose every bit as zestful, penetrating, and sure-footed as his poetry.
Robert Hass was born in San Francisco. His books of poetry include The Apple Trees at Olema, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Time and Materials, Sun Under Wood, Human Wishes, Praise, and Field Guide, which was selected by Stanley Kunitz for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Hass also co-translated several volumes of poetry with Nobel Laureate Czeslaw Milosz and authored or edited several other volumes of translation, including Nobel Laureate Tomas Transtromer’s Selected Poems and The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa. His essay collection Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Hass served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and as Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He lives in California with his wife, poet Brenda Hillman, and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.
A brave, brilliant debut about the African-American experience in the American Midwest. A contemplation of race, masculinity, religion, and class, Testify, in a very personal way, confronts some of the most critical issues in today’s society.
A book of elegiac ambivalence, Testify’s speaker often finds himself trapped between received binaries: black and white, ghetto and suburban, atheism and Catholicism. In many ways, this work is a bildungsroman detailing the maturation of a black man raised in the crack-laden 1980s, with hip-hop, jazz, and blues as its soundtrack. Rendered with keen attention to the economic decline of the Midwest due to the departure of the automotive industry, this book portrays the speaker wrestling with his city’s demise, family relationships, interracial love, and notions of black masculinity. Never letting anyone, including the speaker, off the hook, Testify refuses sentimentality and didacticism and dwells in a space of uncertainty, where meaning and identity are messy, complicated, and multivalent.
Douglas Manuel was born in Anderson, Indiana. He received a BA in Creative Writing from Arizona State University and a MFA from Butler University where he was the Managing Editor of Booth a Journal. He is currently a Middleton and Dornsife Fellow at the University of Southern California where he is pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing. He was a recipient of the Chris McCarthy Scholarship for the Napa Valley Writers’ Conference and has been Poetry Editor for Gold Line Press as well as one of the Managing Editors of Ricochet Editions. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Rhino, North American Review, The Chattahoochee Review, New Orleans Review, Crab Creek Review, Many Mountains Moving, and elsewhere.
Brimming with natural history and bright flashes of language, the poems in Partially Excited States take us from Paleolithic caves to modern movie theaters, and along the way we fix time machines with Tom Hanks, enter a Rousseau painting, and collect diamonds from the moons of Neptune.
Charles Hood is a writer of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, a photographer, and an artist. His many books include Mouth, South x South, Rio de Dios: 13 Histories of the Los Angeles River, The Half-Life of Salt: Voices of the Enola Gay, and Red Sky, Red Water: Powell on the Colorado. A longtime animal spotter, he has seen more than six hundred mammal species and more than five thousand species of wild birds. In his global travels, he has trekked to the South Pole, been lost in a Tibetan whiteout, and recovered from bubonic plague. He lives in Palmdale, California.

Jess Arndt
2017-06-07 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
Reading from her short fiction debut, Large Animals.
Jess Arndt’s striking debut collection confronts what it means to have a body. Boldly straddling the line between the imagined and the real, the masculine and the feminine, the knowable and the impossible, these fourteen stories are an exhilarating expression of voice and deliver a profoundly original punch to the gut. In “Jeff,” Lily Tomlin confuses Jess for Jeff, instigating a dark and hilarious identity crisis. In “Together,” a couple battles a mysterious and unnamed STD that slowly undoes their relationship, while outside a ferocious weed colonizes their urban garden. And in “Contrails,” a character on the precipice of a seismic change goes on a tour of past lovers, confronting their own reluctance to move on.
Arndt’s subjects are canny noticers even while they remain dangerously blind to their own truest impulses. Often unnamed, these narrators challenge the limits of language—collectively, their voices create a transgressive new formal space that makes room for the undefined, the nonconforming, the queer. And yet, while they crave connection, love, and understanding, they are constantly at risk of destroying themselves. Large Animals pitches toward the heart, pushing at all our most tender parts—our sex organs, our geography, our words, and the tendons and nerves of our culture.
Jess Arndt received her MFA at Bard and was a 2013 Graywolf SLS Fellow and 2010 Fiction Fellow at the New York Foundation of the Arts. She has written for Fence, BOMB, Aufgabe, and the art journal Parkett, among others. She is a co-founder of New Herring Press, and lives in Los Angeles.

Moon Drop presents Prince
2017-06-07 19:00 - 21:30 UTC | Nomadic Press: Uptown, 2301 Telegraph Ave., Oakland, CA, 94612, United States
Moon Drop is a quarterly reading series first Wednesdays.
Each reading will have a theme, June 7th being The Beautiful One’s Birthday will be a tribute to Prince.
With readings about or inspired by Prince’s life and music, featured readers will include Cassandra Dallett, Jenee Darden, Ingrid Keir, Joel Landmine, Natasha Dennerstein, Tomas Moniz, Airial Clark, James Cagney and Amber Flame. There willl also be seven open mic spots. Show up early and get your name on the list!!!!!!!!!!
We will feature purple everything!!
Let’s Work!!!
Cassandra Dallett and Kelechi Ubozoh

Trina Robbins + Artists
2017-06-07 19:30 - 21:00 UTC | The Booksmith, 1644 Haight St, San Francisco , CA, 94117, United States
Booksmith is excited to host author Trina Robbins for her new graphic novel, A Minyen Yidn! Also in attendence will be a few of the artists that contributed to the work: Steve Leialoha, Caryn Leschen, and Robert Triptow. Please join us!
A Minyen Yidn is based on the 1938 memoir of Trina Robbin’s father, Muttel (Mutye) Perechudnik, and was originally published in Yiddish. This memoir features a collection of 13 stories drawn from Muttel’s (later Max Perlson’s) life growing up in a shtetl in Belarus and immigrating to Brooklyn in the late 1910s at the age of 16. Here he became a journalist, contributing short stories in Yiddish to Jewish newspapers. The memoir has been translated to English and adapted to graphic novel format by his daughter, Trina Robbins, who says of the stories within: “They are slyly humorous portraits of his little village in Belarus, and of life in Brooklyn after he came to America. It’s a snapshot of a way of life that would end with the coming of the Nazis and WW2, although none of them knew it yet.”
The cover was drawn by famed underground comic artist Barbara Mendes and each of the 13 stories was recreated visually by the following artists: Shary Flenniken, Eve Furchgott, Miriam Katin, Miriam Libicki, Michael Netzer, Anne Timmons, Robert Triptow, Jen Vaughn, Steve Leialoha, Elizabeth Watasin, Caryn Leschen, Joan Steacy, Ken Steacy, and Terry Laban.

Kevin Kwan: Rich People Problems
2017-06-08 12:30 - 14:30 UTC | Book Passage San Francisco, 1 Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA, 94111, United States
Kevin Kwan, bestselling author of Crazy Rich Asians and China Rich Girlfriend, is back with an uproarious new novel of a family riven by fortune, an ex-wife driven psychotic with jealousy, a battle royal fought through couture gown sabotage, and the heir to one of Asia’s greatest fortunes locked out of his inheritance.
When Nicholas Young hears that his grandmother, Su Yi, is on her deathbed, he rushes to be by her bedside—but he’s not alone. The entire Shang-Young clan has convened from all corners of the globe to stake claim on their matriarch’s massive fortune. With each family member vying to inherit Tyersall Park—a trophy estate on 64 prime acres in the heart of Singapore—Nicholas’s childhood home turns into a hotbed of speculation and sabotage. As her relatives fight over heirlooms, Astrid Leong is at the center of her own storm, desperately in love with her old sweetheart Charlie Wu, but tormented by her ex-husband—a man hell bent on destroying Astrid’s reputation and relationship. Meanwhile Kitty Pong, married to China’s second richest man, billionaire Jack Bing, still feels second best next to her new step-daughter, famous fashionista Colette Bing.
Rich People Problems is a sweeping novel that takes us from the elegantly appointed mansions of Manila to the secluded private islands in the Sulu Sea, from a kidnapping at Hong Kong’s most elite private school to a surprise marriage proposal at an Indian palace, caught on camera by the telephoto lenses of paparazzi. Kevin Kwan’s hilarious, gloriously wicked new novel reveals the long-buried secrets of Asia’s most privileged families and their rich people problems.
Kevin Kwan is the author of the international bestsellers Crazy Rich Asians, soon to be a major motion picture, and China Rich Girlfriend. Born in Singapore, he has called New York’s West Village home since 1995.

Voz Sin Tinta: Our monthly bilingual poetry series and open mic.
2017-06-08 18:30 - 21:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Sponsored by Alejandro Murguia, curated by Marguerite Munoz and Rene Vaz.
This month’s readers TBD.

Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi: Kintu
2017-06-08 19:00 - 20:00 UTC | DIESEL, A Bookstore, 5433 College Ave, Oakland, CA, 94618, United States
DIESEL, A Bookstore in Oakland welcomes Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi to the store to discuss and sign Kintu, on Thursday, June 8th at 7:00 pm. She will be in conversation with DIESEL bookseller Aaron Bady, who also wrote the introduction.
First published in Kenya in 2014 to critical and popular acclaim, Kintu is a modern classic, a multilayered narrative that reimagines the history of Uganda through the cursed bloodline of the Kintu clan. Divided into six sections, the novel begins in 1750, when Kintu Kidda sets out for the capital to pledge allegiance to the new leader of the Buganda Kingdom. Along the way, he unleashes a curse that will plague his family for generations. In an ambitious tale of a clan and a nation, Makumbi weaves together the stories of Kintu’s descendants as they seek to break from the burden of their shared past and reconcile the inheritance of tradition and the modern world that is their future.

Laleh Khadivi
2017-06-08 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
in conversation with Micheline Aharonian Marcom
celebrating the release of
A Good Country
By Laleh Khadivi
from Bloomsbury Publishing
A timely novel about the radicalization of a Muslim teen in California–about where identity truly lies, and how we find it.
Laguna Beach, California, 2010. Alireza Courdee, a fourteen-year-old straight-A student and chemistry whiz, takes his first hit of pot. In as long as it takes to inhale and exhale, he is transformed from the high-achieving son of Iranian immigrants into a happy-go-lucky stoner. He loses his virginity, takes up surfing, and sneaks away to all-night raves. For the first time, Reza–now Rez–feels like an American teen. Life is smooth; even lying to his strict parents comes easily.
But then he changes again, falling out with the bad boy surfers and in with a group of kids more awake to the world around them, who share his background, and whose ideas fill him with a very different sense of purpose. Within a year, Reza and his girlfriend are making their way to Syria to be part of a Muslim nation rising from the ashes of the civil war.
Timely, nuanced, and emotionally forceful, A Good Country is a gorgeous meditation on modern life, religious radicalization, and a young man caught among vastly different worlds. What we are left with at the dramatic end is not an assessment of good or evil, east versus west, but a lingering question that applies to all modern souls: Do we decide how to live, or is our life decided for us?
Laleh Khadivi was born in Esfahan, Iran, in 1977. In the aftermath of the Islamic Revolution her family fled, finally settling in Canada and then the United States. Khadivi received her MFA from Mills College and was a Creative Writing Fellow in Fiction at Emory University. In 2008 she received The Whiting Writers’ Award. In 2009 she published her first novel The Age of Orphans. Laleh Khadivi lives in California.
Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the author of five books including the critically acclaimed trilogy of novels: Three Apples Fell from Heaven (2001), The Daydreaming Boy (2004) which earned her the 2004 Lannan Literary Fellowship as well as the 2005 PEN/USA Award for Fiction, and Draining the Sea (2008). She currently teaches Creative Writing at Mills College and is also on the faculty of the Goddard College MFA in Creative Writing Program.

Andrew Shvarts
2017-06-08 19:00 - 21:00 UTC | Kepler’s Books, 1010 El Camino Real, Menlo Park , CA, 94025, United States
Join us to celebrate the launch of Royal Bastards by local author Andrew Shvarts whose action-packed debut champions diversity, counsels perseverance, and highlights the human cost of war. Think Game of Thrones meets The Breakfast Club. Andrew will be in conversation with Tara Sim, author of Timekeeper

Why There Are Words: Arrivals
2017-06-08 19:15 - 21:15 UTC | Studio 333, 333 Caledonia Street, Sausalito , CA, 94965, United States
Join Why There Are Words (WTAW) on June 8th, 2017, at Studio 333 in Sausalito as seven acclaimed authors explore the theme Arrivals. Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:15. Entry fee is $10 at the door, though donations to WTAW, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, are always welcome.
Readers: Elaine Fletcher Chapman, Barbara Edelman, Rachel Hall, Toni Mirosevich, Lisa Rizzo, Andrew Roe, and Renate Stendhal.
