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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210225T180000
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SUMMARY:Lidia Yuknavich in conversation with Lance Olsen
DESCRIPTION:reading from their work and talking about literature \nLidia Yuknavich celebrates the paperback release of \nVerge: stories \npublished by Riverhead Books \nNamed one of the Best Books of the Year by Bustle and Lit Hub \nA fiercely empathetic group portrait of the marginalized and outcast in moments of crisis\, from one of the most galvanizing voices in American fiction \n——— \nThis 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. \n———- \nEvent is free\, but registration is required. \n(Click Here) to register. \n———– \nLidia Yuknavitch is a writer of rare insight into the jagged boundaries between pain and survival. Her characters are scarred by the unchecked hungers of others and themselves\, yet determined to find salvation within lives that can feel beyond their control. In novels such as The Small Backs of Children and The Book of Joan\, she has captivated readers with stories of visceral power. Now\, in Verge\, she offers a shard-sharp mosaic portrait of human resilience on the margins.The landscape of Verge is peopled with characters who are innocent and imperfect\, wise and endangered: an eight-year-old black-market medical courier\, a restless lover haunted by memories of his mother\, a teenage girl gazing out her attic window at a nearby prison\, all of them wounded but grasping toward transcendence. Clear-eyed yet inspiring\, Verge challenges us with moments of uncomfortable truth\, even as it urges us to place our faith not in the flimsy guardrails of society but in the memories held—and told—by our own individual bodies. \n\nLance Olsen will also be reading from his recently released novel \nMy Red Heavenpublished by Dzanc Books \nSet on a single day in 1927\, My Red Heaven imagines a host of characters―some historic\, some invented―crossing paths on the streets of Berlin. \nThe subjects include Robert Musil\, Otto Dix\, Werner Heisenberg\, Anita Berber\, Vladimir Nabokov\, Käthe Kollwitz\, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe\, and Rosa Luxemburg―as well as others history has forgotten: a sommelier\, a murderer\, a prostitute\, a pickpocket\, and several ghosts. \nDrawing inspiration from Otto Freundlich’s painting by the same name\, My Red Heaven explores a complex moment in history: the rise of deadly populism at a time when everything seemed possible and the future unimaginable. A terrific read for fans of Richard Powers’ The Overstory and Colum McCann’s Let the Great World Spin. \nLidia Yuknavitch is the nationally bestselling author of the novels The Book of Joan\, The Small Backs of Children\, and Dora: A Headcase\, and of the memoir The Chronology of Water. She is the recipient of two Oregon Book Awards and has been a finalist for the Brooklyn Public Library Literary Prize and the PEN Center USA Creative Nonfiction Award. She lives in Portland\, Oregon. \nLance Olsen is author of more than 25 books of and about innovative writing\, including\, most recently\, the novel Dreamlives of Debris. His short stories\, essays\, and reviews have appeared in hundreds of journals and anthologies\, such as Conjunctions\, Black Warrior Review\, Fiction International\, BOMB\, McSweeney’s\, and Best American Non-Required Reading. A Guggenheim\, Berlin Prize\, D.A.A.D. Artist-in-Berlin Residency\, N.E.A. Fellowship\, and Pushcart Prize recipient\, as well as a Fulbright Scholar\, he teaches experimental narrative theory and practice at the University of Utah\, where he directs the creative writing program. \n\nPraise for VERGE:\n\nPraise for Verge: \n“At several points while reading Verge\, I found myself curled into a ball\, my fingers gripping the pages so tightly they almost tore the paper. It was as if the words had crawled off the page and under my skin.”  —Cornelia Channing\, The Paris Review \n“Full of suspense . . . Young or old\, male or female\, the characters in Verge will shock and impress themselves onto the reader.” —LitHub \n“This book is a gem. . . . A brilliant collection of twenty stories that contain as much compassion as suffering . . . In Yuknavitch’s hands\, words are both swords and feathers. . . . She writes with a sensibility that is both blunt and empathic\, as if to open the reader’s heart and make it bleed.” —Ms. Magazine \n“Diverse and impactful\, unlike some collections\, where only a few stories shine . . . Verge boldly asks some pressing yet unspoken questions\, such as: How is it that Americans can say anything with a straight face? Does it hurt more to keep the secrets or tell them? It also forces us to acknowledge—and even embrace—the unsettling answers.” —San Francisco Chronicle \n“Dynamite. . . . I don’t know of any other writer who can render the brutality of life with such honesty and dazzle. . . . That Lidia Yuknavitch can create such beauty out of the tragedy of contemporary life is testament to her skill as an artist. Verge is volatile and vital\, and it hits where it hurts\, in the most oddly pleasurable way.” —Lambda Literary \n“Lidia Yuknavitch displays the same gift for exploring the borderland between art\, sex\, and trauma that readers have come to expect . . . . [turning] her powers toward life on the margins.” —The Millions  \n“Yuknavitch writes with rare empathy about the repercussions of grief\, loss and dislocation.” —Jane Ciabattari\, BBC Culture \n“Disturbing and delightful all at once.” —BookRiot \n“With the publication of Verge\, Yuknavitch’s writing flies into hyperspace. . . . [Verge is] an act of courage and urgency. The book is historically specific\, yet ultimately timeless.” —The Brooklyn Rail \n“Brilliant. . . . Consistently incisive\, with sharp sentences and a barreling pace. . . . This riveting collection invites readers to see women whose points of view are typically ignored.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) \n“Insistently visceral . . . These howls from the throats of women\, queer characters\, the impoverished\, and the addicted remind us of the beauty and pain of our shared humanity. Gutsy stories from one of our most fearless writers.” —Kirkus Reviews \n“A vertiginous and revelatory book whose characters—sometimes in desperate situations\, and sometimes\, finally\, in a place of safety—have much to say about the world that we live in now. Lidia Yuknavitch is astonishing.”\n —Kelly Link  \n“Verge is a wonderful\, challenging book. I know these people. I know their dilemmas\, and where I don’t recognize them\, I believe them. The passion Lidia Yuknavitch brings to the page is astounding. I am caught up\, shaken up\, and now and then simply delighted. ‘Listen to this\,’ I call out to friends\, and then\, minutes later: ‘No\, wait\, listen to this!’”\n—Dorothy Allison        \nPraise for My Red Heaven \n\n“The combined effect of the different styles on display here is virtuosic\, but Olsen never loses sight of the bigger scope of history―or the tragedies the future will hold for most of these characters. This novel manages the impressive task of being both experimental and accessible―and thoroughly moving to boot.”\n―Kirkus Reviews“Inspired by German artist Otto Freundlich’s painting of the same title\, this meditation on the effects of a specific moment in history and the human condition reaches past cultural barriers and time to create a narrative that pushes boundaries and reflects on what is means to dwell in the here and now.”\n―Publishers Weekly \n“Olsen employs a full suite of experimental techniques to tell the story\, including newsreel headlines\, screenplay excerpts\, poetic verses\, and ekphrastic reflections on unsettling scenes of bombed-out and abandoned buildings. But the real draw is Olsen’s supple\, exacting prose\, which captures the energy of cutting-edge art movements amid impending political uncertainty. There’s an eerie familiarity to the air of technological and social breakthroughs\, with fallout or resolution just around the corner.”\n―Booklist \n“Olsen is a fine\, clear stylist. … My Red Heaven captures the eeriness of a city on the brink of an epochal descent into barbarism.”\n―Wall Street Journal \n“Lance Olsen is as innovative as he is prolific and an irreplaceable figure in avant-garde fiction. … Told in vignettes that are formally daring\, yet always musical and accessible\, this is a powerful book in every respect and an important one for readers here in this country in 2020.”\n―Robert Lopez for The Believer \n\n“The fleeting encounters of the famous and not-so-famous dead\, in their own voices\, sketch out a vanishing moment in a Berlin on the brink. Lance Olsen’s My Red Heaven is a work of necromantic dazzlement.”\n―Shelley Jackson\, author of Riddance\, Half Life\, and The Melancholy of Anatomy“Lance Olsen locates his porous\, alluring\, heartbreaking\, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom\, it is a ravishing meditation on history\, on time\, and on what is it to be alive.”\n―Carole Maso\, author of Ava and The Art Lover \n“In this twenty-four-hour novel\, Olsen explores new subjectivities and new histories both after and before the moments directly written about. It’s fascinating and wonderfully readable. Kafka\, Nabokov\, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe all make their appearances…and strange lists of newsworthy events cascade down before us now and again. It’s a fitting follow-up to Calendar of Regrets and beautifully written.\n―Samuel R. Delany\, author of Dhalgrenand Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders \n“The moment in which you awaken is on fire. You are alive or the other thing\, falling to scorched earth or ascending to the rooftops of Berlin\, a radiantly red heaven. You feel yourself besieged\, swirling inside one startling sensibility and then another\, deliriums of joy pierced by devastations of loss and sorrow. Sparked by the exuberant energy of his own multivalent perception\, ignited by the brilliance of his wildly playful imagination and unfathomably expansive compassion\, Lance Olsen has translated My Red Heaven\, Otto Freundlich’s abstract cubist painting\, into a novel full of dissonant shocks and thrilling confusions\, a library of loss revealing the perilous ecstasies of life in Berlin between the wars. Layer by layer\, he unpeels a palimpsest of paint\, turning his fiercely attentive\, unbounded love to every being in every moment\, exposing infinite unknown dimensions\, delivering us to exhilaration and terror as we watch the future and the past irradiate our present moment.”\n―Melanie Rae Thon\, author of The Voice of the River\, Silence & Song “Where to stand in this original novel as History that unspeakably painfully hurts while montaging all our astonishing\, poignant\, and gross ironies. Between lives\, even our own\, that are less here than nearby or elsewhere; between Dietrich and Heisenberg; between\, on one hand (literally)\, Arendt and Heidegger showering and thinking about thinking\, and deaths there perhaps are no words for; between what is actually\, terribly being evoked and\, dissolve after dissolve\, an exquisite narrative prose risking again and again an incorrigible lightness. At random\, I thought of Wittgenstein in Duffy’s The World as I Found It; dictatorship in Spufford’s Red Plenty; the sculptural work of Joseph Beuys; and\, where fact seems all the more fact in a context of fictive documentation\, the great Sebald.”\n―Joseph McElroy\, author of Women and Men and Cannonball
URL:https://litseen.com/event/lidia-yuknavich-in-conversation-with-lance-olsen/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210226T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210226T193000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111205
CREATED:20210203T021038Z
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SUMMARY:HIGH DAWN 6: LAWRENCE / LEUNG / LOU / BASU
DESCRIPTION:Small Press Traffic and UC Berkeley Poetry Colloquium present the sixth installment of HIGH DAWN\, a reading series featuring poets and musicians from the Bay Area and beyond.\nReadings by Stephon Lawrence & Muriel Leung\nIntroduced by Angie Sijun Lou\nMusic by Beast Nest\nArtist bios below \nRSVP for Zoom link: spt-feb.eventbrite.com\nUpcoming Small Press Traffic events: https://www.smallpresstraffic.org/upcomingevents \n  \n  \nArtist Bios: \n\n\nStephon Lawrence is a Brooklyn born & based writer\, and artist. She is a graduate of the MFA in Writing at Pratt Institute and is co-founder and an editor of The Felt\, a journal of otherworldly poetics interested in the creation and cultivation of emancipatory poetic spaces for felt sentiments that have been marginalized\, displaced\, or estranged from the dominant culture. Her first book u know how much i hate being alone in social situations// is forthcoming from Futurepoem Books. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Cosmonauts Avenue\, Horseless Press\, Queen Mob’s Teahouse\, GlitterMOB\, Fanzine & other places. Her micro-chap //GERMZ is available from Ghost City Press. And her chapbook //EVIL TWIN is available from Resolving Host. She is a recipient of a Summer Workshop Scholarship at The Fine Arts Work Center. Stephon spends her free time watching anime and kdramas\, training muay thai\, yelling about white supremacy\, and being cute for the ‘gram. Her work aims to encapsulate all of this. She is almost always online. You can find her on twitter @nnohpetss and instagram @alphaheaux. \n\n\n\n\nMuriel Leung is the author of Imagine Us\, The Swarm\, forthcoming from Nightboat Books and Bone Confetti\, winner of the 2015 Noemi Press Book Award. A Pushcart Prize nominated writer\, her writing can be found in The Baffler\, Cream City Review\, Gulf Coast\, The Collagist\, Fairy Tale Review\, and others. She is a recipient of fellowships to Kundiman\, VONA/Voices Workshop and the Community of Writers. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Gold Line Press and Poetry Co-Editor of Apogee Journal. She also co-hosts The Blood-Jet Writing Hour podcast with Rachelle Cruz and MT Vallarta. She is a member of Miresa Collective\, a feminist speakers bureau. Currently\, she is a Dornsife fellow in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. She is from Queens\, NY. \n\n\n\n\nAngie Sijun Lou is a writer from Seattle. Her work has appeared\, or is forthcoming\, in the American Poetry Review\, FENCE\, Black Warrior Review\, the Adroit Journal\, the Asian American Literary Review\, Hyphen\, the Margins\, and others. She is a Kundiman Fellow\, a PhD candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz\, and a calculus instructor at San Quentin State Prison. \n\n\n\n\nSharmi Basu (they/them/she/her) is an Oakland born and based South Asian woman of color creating experimental music as a means of decolonizing musical language. They attempt to catalyze a political\, yet ethereal aesthetic by combining their anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics with a commitment to spirituality within the arts. Beast Nest\, Sharmi’s primary performing project\, utilizes multi-dimensional soundscapes to transmute trauma and suffering into moments of deep presence. They are an MFA graduate from the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in Electronic Music and Recording Media and have worked with Fred Frith\, Roscoe Mitchell\, John Bischoff\, Pauline Oliveros\, Chris Brown\, Maggi Payne\, and more. Their workshops on “Decolonizing Sound” have been featured at the International Society for Improvised Music\, the Empowering Women of Color Conference\, and have reached international audiences. They perform almost 100 times a year and has toured through the US and Canada as well as internationally in Europe. She specializes in new media controllers\, improvisation in electronic music\, and intersectionality within music and social justice. They also founded and hosted an all people-of-color improvisation and performance group called the MARA Performance Collective in Oakland\, CA and was a founder of the Universe is Lit: A Bay Area Black and Brown Punk Fest. They are on the board of directors for Safer DIY Spaces and Soundwave SF. She is also a certified mediator and much of her multimedia work centers on familial healing\, transformative justice\, accountability\, and the investigation of interpersonal harm.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/high-dawn-6-lawrence-leung-lou-basu/
LOCATION:Zoom
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210226T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210226T200000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111205
CREATED:20201205T003213Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210127T031741Z
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SUMMARY:*Postponed* VIRTUAL: Wall + Response: Karla Brundage\, Jennifer Hasegawa\, Tureeda Mikell & Kim Shuck
DESCRIPTION:*** PLEASE NOTE: due to the new lockdown orders\, we are postponing this event until we can faithfully – and safely – record all authors in front of their corresponding murals. We will announce a new date ASAP. Thank you for understanding\, and apologies for any inconvenience. *** \nBooksmith 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. \nCurated by CAMP artist and organizer Megan Wilson (wall) and poet Maw Shein Win (response)\, the second event in the series features 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. \nWe Want Respect\, Freedom\, Land\, Housing\, Justice\, Peace\, Bread (2011) by Emory Douglas/Black Panther Party / remix by CUBA D8\, MACE reflects the legacy of the Black Panthers and their core work towards social\, political\, racial\, economic\, and food justice. The mural\, based on a design by Emory Douglas with elements from the Black Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program is a remix painted by graffiti artists CUBA (Clarence Robbs)\, D8 (David Petrelli)\, and MACE (Alex Douhovnikoff). The artists ensure the work is maintained and periodically add messaging based on critical needs of the moment. These gestures of care and thoughtfulness reflect the intent of the original work and support the ongoing movement to secure the demands stated in What We Want Now!. \nThis virtual event is free and all ages\, but RSVP is required. \n– ABOUT THE PROJECT – \nWall + 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. \nThe 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. \nWall + Response is made possible by the generous support of the San Francisco Art Commission and the Zellerbach Family Foundation. \n– ABOUT THE AUTHORS – \nKarla Brundage is a Bay Area based poet\, activist\, and educator with a passion for social justice. She believes that in order to restore balance and to reclaim our humanity as Black people\, this issue of racism and the racist structures that uphold this belief\, must be dismantled. Her writing is primarily for Black women and people disenfranchised by poverty\, abuse\, neglect or violence. She is the founder of West Oakland to West Africa Poetry Exchange and her work can be found at http://westoaklandtowestafrica.com/ as well as on https://www.karlabrundage.com/ . \nJennifer Hasegawa is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet who has sold funeral insurance door-to-door. She was born and raised in Hilo\, Hawaiʻi and lives in San Francisco. The manuscript for her first book of poetry\, La Chica’s Field Guide to Banzai Living\, won the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award. Her work has appeared in The Adroit Journal\, Bamboo Ridge\, Tule Review\, and Vallum and is forthcoming in Bennington Review and jubilat. \nTureeda Mikell\, Ture Ade\, Story Medicine Woman\, an ‘activist for holism\, called a ‘word magician\,’ an award winning poet\, published nationally and internationally. Qigong Healer\, workshop leader\, storyteller\, lyricist\, performance artist\, BMI and ASCAP member. Published 72 student anthologies with CA Poets in the Schools since 1989. Performed in schools\, libraries and universities\, Google\, Genentech\, Aspire\, Lawrence Hall\, Golden Gate Academy of Sciences\, Randall\, Oakland\, and De Young Museums. 2020\, was featured spoken word artist at SOAN [Soul of a Nation] Exhibit\, the American Academy of Poets\, Fire Thieves\, at the De Young\, and MoAD’s Lit-Quake Afrofuturism. Featured storyteller for the 50 Year Anniversary of the Black Panther Party\, National Association of Black Storytellers\, featured poet storyteller celebrating Octavia Butler’s 70th birthday\, and Eth-Noh-Tec Nu Wa Delegate storyteller in Beijing\, China in collaboration with the University of Beijing\, 2018. Latest publication\, Synchronicity\, The Oracle of Sun Medicine\, released 2/2020\, by Nomadic Press. \nKim Shuck is the solo author of seven collections of poetry. Fog gazer\, collector of odd ends and dreamer\, Shuck was born in the 60s in San Francisco. Kim is the seventh poet laureate of that city. In 2019 Shuck was awarded a National Laureate Fellowship by the Academy of American Poets and a Censorship Award from PEN Oakland. In 2020 Kim was awarded a Golden Poppy Award from the California Independent Booksellers Association and a Groundbreaker Award from the Northern California Book Awards. Kim’s latest published work is a single poem chapbook Whose Water from Mammoth Publications. Shuck is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. \n \n– OTHER PARTICIPATING AUTHORS + EVENTS –  \nMarch 26\, 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) \nJune 25\, 2021: Youssef Alaoui\, Jason Bayani\, Genny Lim\, and Michael Warr responding to the mural The Will To Live by Art Forces\, Arab Resource Organizing Center (AROC)\, and Arab Youth Organizing (AYO) \n– ABOUT THE CURATORS –  \nMegan 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. \nMaw 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 House will be published by Omnidawn in October 2020. \nYou can read more about CAMP and Wall + Response here. \n— \nThis virtual event is free and open to all ages\, but RSVP is required. \n  \n\n\n\nPolicies\n\nRefund Policy:\nNo refunds or returns. Contact events@booksmith.com with any questions. \nCancellation Policy:\nIf we have to cancel an event\, you will be refunded within 4 business days of the event date.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/virtual-wall-response-karla-brundage-jennifer-hasegawa-tureeda-mikell-kim-shuck/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
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DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210227T110000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210227T120000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111205
CREATED:20210217T024056Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210217T024056Z
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SUMMARY:Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow on Instagram IGTV
DESCRIPTION:reading Your Name is a Song.  \n“This lovely celebration of African American culture\, featuring a Muslim family\, offers a fresh way to look at the tradition of creating new names…delightful.”–Kirkus Reviews\, starred review \nJoin us on Instagram IGTV. Follow along @MRSDALLOWAYS. Videos disappear after 24 hours so be sure to watch! \n\n\n\n\n\nSaturday\, February 27\, 2021 – 11:00am\n\n\n\n\n\nFrustrated by a day full of teachers and classmates mispronouncing her beautiful name\, a little girl tells her mother she never wants to come back to school. In response\, the girl’s mother teaches her about the musicality of African\, Asian\, Black-American\, Latinx\, and Middle Eastern names on their lyrical walk home through the city. Empowered by this newfound understanding\, the young girl is ready to return the next day to share her knowledge with her class. Your Name is a Song is a celebration to remind all of us about the beauty\, history\, and magic behind names. \nYour Name is a Song includes back matter perfect for parents\, educators\, caregivers\, and young readers who want to learn more about the names featured in the story. The “Glossary of Names” lists each name’s meaning\, origin\, and pronunciation. Additionally\, readers can use a listed link to access an online video of the author pronouncing all the names in the book. \nJamilah Thompkins-Bigelow is an educator and writer who centers Black and Muslim children in her work. She is also the author of Mommy’s Khimar. She provides free and fun community writing programs for local youth in Philadelphia where she lives with her family.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/jamilah-thompkins-bigelow-on-instagram-igtv/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/you-name-is-a-song.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210227T140000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210227T160000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111205
CREATED:20210203T051220Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210203T051220Z
UID:61974-1614434400-1614441600@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Eastwind Book Club: The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata
DESCRIPTION:Join Eastwind Book Club this February as we read Gina Apostol’s novel\, The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. \nAbout this Event\nEastwind Book Club is a community of readers connected by Asian and Asian American literature. Members gather once a month through a virtual meeting to discuss the month’s book selection. February’s book club pick is The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata by Gina Apostol. \nThe book club meeting will take place via Zoom on Saturday\, February 27 at 2pm PST. Register to receive the meeting link. \nBook Club members can use coupon code EWBOOKCLUB21 for a 10% discount. \nCopies of The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata are available for order at www.asiabookcenter.com. Choose to ship your orders to your home or select in-store pick up at Eastwind Books of Berkeley\, 2066 University Ave.\, Berkeley\, CA 94704. \nJoin our Book Club Facebook* group to engage in conversation throughout the month: www.tinyurl.com/ewclub \nSAVE THE DATE:\nConversation with author Gina Apostol\nSaturday\, March 20 at 1pm PST \nABOUT THE BOOK\nGina Apostol’s riotous second novel takes the form of a memoir by one Raymundo Mata\, a half-blind bookworm and revolutionary\, tracing his childhood\, his education in Manila\, his love affairs\, and his discovery of writer and fellow revolutionary\, Jose Rizal. Mata’s 19th-century story is complicated by present-day foreword(s)\, afterword(s)\, and footnotes from three fiercely quarrelsome and comic voices: a nationalist editor\, a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst critic\, and a translator\, Mimi C. Magsalin. \nIn telling the contested and fragmentary story of Mata\, Apostol finds new ways to depict the violence of the Spanish colonial era\, and to reimagine the nation’s great writer\, Jose Rizal\, who was executed by the Spanish for his revolutionary activities\, and is considered by many to be the father of Philippine independence. \nThe Revolution According to Raymundo Mata offers an intoxicating blend of fact and fiction\, uncovering lost histories while building dazzling\, anarchic modes of narrative. \nABOUT THE AUTHOR\nGina Apostol is the PEN Open Book Award-winning author of Gun Dealers’ Daughter\, as well as a two-time winner of the National Book Award in the Philippines for her novelsBibliolepsy and The Revolution According to Raymundo Mata. Her short stories have appeared in various anthologies and journals including The Gettysburg Review and the Penguin anthology of Asian American fiction\, Charlie Chan Is Dead\, Volume 2. \nEastwind Book Club is co-sponsored by OCA – Asian Pacific American Advocates Bay Area Chapters\, Asian Pacific American Student Development (APASD) and AsAmNews (www.asamnews.com).
URL:https://litseen.com/event/eastwind-book-club-the-revolution-according-to-raymundo-mata/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/revolution.jpeg
ORGANIZER;CN="Eastwind Books":MAILTO:eastwindbooks@gmail.com
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210227T173000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210227T190000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111205
CREATED:20210203T020908Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210203T020908Z
UID:61761-1614447000-1614452400@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Drop Leaf Press (Virtually) Presents: Diana Fisher & Asako Shimazaki’s ALL OF IT\, TINGED
DESCRIPTION:Drop Leaf Press invites you to celebrate the release of ALL OF IT\, TINGED\, a curated juxtaposition of the photography of Asako Shimazaki and the writing of Diana Fisher. Shimazaki’s quietly charged images from her solo wanderings across Northern Japan reflect and inflect Fisher’s diligent poetic narrative about a novitiate and her convent absorbing the results of a catastrophic national election. This event will also feature Jennifer S. Cheng and friends. \nFollowing the reading\, we invite you to join us for a forty-five minute Post-Inauguration Talking Circle. In the vein of ALL OF IT\, TINGED\, this will be a facilitated safe space for anyone who wants to share how they are processing the impact of the new presidency. All feelings welcome! <3 \nREGISTER FOR FREE AT:\nhttps://tinyurl.com/y3ueju22\nAfter registering\, you’ll receive a confirmation email with info about joining the event.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/drop-leaf-press-virtually-presents-diana-fisher-asako-shimazakis-all-of-it-tinged/
LOCATION:online
CATEGORIES:Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/File_000-7-copy-2.png
ORGANIZER;CN="Drop Leaf Press":MAILTO:dropleafpress@gmail.com
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210227T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210227T200000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111205
CREATED:20210127T185336Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210127T185336Z
UID:61839-1614448800-1614456000@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Sesshu Foster with Arturo Ernesto Romo
DESCRIPTION:celebrating the book launch of \nELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines \npublished by City Lights Books \n———- \nThis 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. \n———- \nEvent is free\, but registration is required. \n(Click Here) to register. \n———– \n(Click Here) to purchase book. \n———– \nA breathtaking free fall into the long-buried (and fictional) history of a utopian era in American lighter-than-air travel\, as told by its death-defying\, aero-acrobatic heroes. \n“Foster and Romo’s ‘real fake dream’ of the future-past history of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is a superb and loving phantasmagoria that gobbles up real histories for breakfast and spits out the seeds. It has everything you could wish for\, academic satire\, crazy sculpture in the desert\, sex\, violence\, falafel\, graffiti\, and zeppelin chase scenes.” – Jonathan Lethem\, author of Motherless Brooklyn \nIn the early years of the twentieth-century\, the use of airships known as dirigibles—some as large as one thousand feet long—was being promulgated in Southern California by a semi-clandestine lighter-than-air movement. Groups like the East LA Balloon Club and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club were hard at work to revolutionize travel\, with an aim to literally lift oppressed people out of racism and poverty. \nELADATL tells the story of this little-known period of American air travel in a series of overlapping narratives told by key figures\, accompanied by a number of historic photographs and recently discovered artifacts\, with appendices provided to fill in the missing links. The story of the rise and fall of this ill-fated airship movement investigates its long-buried history\, replete with heroes\, villains\, and moments of astonishing derring-do and terrifying disaster. \nWritten and presented as an “actual history of a fictional company\,” this surrealist\, experimental novel is a tour de force of politicized fantastic fiction\, a work of hybrid art-making distilled into a truly original literary form. Developed over a ten-year period of collaborations\, community interventions\, and staged performances\, ELADATL is a hilarious send-up of academic histories\, mainstream narratives\, and any traditional notions of the time-space continuum. \n\nSesshu Foster taught composition and literature in East L.A. for over 20 years\, and at the University of Iowa\, the California Institute for the Arts\, and the University of California\, Santa Cruz. His work is published in The Oxford Anthology of Modern American Poetry\, Language for a New Century: Poetry from the Middle East\, Asia and Beyond\, and State of the Union: 50 Political Poems. His most recent books are City of the Future\, poetry; World Ball Notebook\, poetry; and Atomik Aztex\, a novel. \nA celebrated writer\, his literary awards are numerous: Sesshu was awarded the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award in Poetry for World Ball Notebook; the Believer Book Award for Atomik Aztex; an American Book Award for Invocation LA: Urban Multicultural Poetry; and finalist for the PEN Center West Poetry Prize\, as well as the Paterson Poetry Prize\, for City Terrace Field Manual.  Sesshu is based in Alhambra\, CA. \n\natomikaztex.wordpress.com\nArturo Ernesto Romo was born in Los Angeles\, California in 1980. His artwork\, mostly collaborative mixed media works but also drawing\, has been circulated internationally. Fluency\, agency and folly are central themes in his practice; he sees his artwork as a companion multiplier\, folding folds\, netting nets. His art-making is pushed through explorations on the streets of East and North East Los Angeles\, which feed into an ongoing series of collaborations with writer Sesshu Foster. He is based in Alhambra\, CA. \nPraise for ELADATL \n“ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is one of the wildest\, most creative and deeply-cutting novels I’ve read in years\, a genuine piece of newness in both content and form. Sesshu Foster and Arturo Romo have managed\, from the mind-bending perch of alternate time and space\, to construct a perfect lookout from which to view the deranged spectacle of late-capitalism America. To wade through this surreal narrative archeology—composed of everything from oral histories to inspirational posters to lunch menus—is to experience\, in the finest sense\, literature as fever dream.”—Omar El Akkad\, author of American War: A Novel \n“Visionary\, hilarious\, anarchic\, this assemblage of breakneck dialog\, blisteringly brilliant film criticism\, bureaucratic documents\, revolutionary chatter\, mass transit\, and fake dreams of the secret police\, is the counterfactual novel to beat all counterfactual novels . . . Sesshu Foster and Arturo Romo float high above the the landlubbing bulk of American fiction.”—Mark Doten\, author of Trump Sky Alpha \n“Forget the zombie apocalypse\, forget priapic gun-crazy Hollywood dystopias—all these troubled times require is an economy ticket on the East L.A. Dirigible Air Transport Lines. Enter the isotherm with Foster and Romo and cruise high over the trashed and blasted landscapes of imperial decay. ELADATL is more than a novel—it’s the secret history of the secret history\, the map they always kept hidden\, a dream inside a dream of a dream. Hilarious and prophetic and profound\, truer than truth\, and realer than all realities currently available for purchase\, ELADATL is strong medicine against the erasures of history\, a mega-vitamin for struggles yet to come. This book combats despair.”—Ben Ehrenreich\, author of Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time \n“Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo’s ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is a portfolio in prose and pictures that’s 100% made up but that I nonetheless believe to be 100% true. It reads like a cross between Yamashita’s I Hotel and Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49\, although saying so does ELADATL a disservice—it stands proudly on its own\, a smile on its face and middle finger raised. If I don’t see a young bookseller sporting an ELADATL tattoo within the next couple years\, I’ll be shocked.”—James Crossley\, Madison Books\, Seattle\, WA \n“Hold this infra-surreal\, no-surreal\, under-realm account (in gyroscopic fashion and thru various sightings re-dacted and questionable dialogues\, voice pepperings) of our fast approaching Kaliyuga. Multiple reincarnated figures appear (Lee Harvey Oswald\, Tina Lerma\, and Elmer Fudd\, CIA Agent). Not to mention truish photos of things. Live things! Be mindful of the encyclopedic plethoras aimed at your pineal glands. Woe are those that are not privy to the East LA Dirigible Air Transport Lines (buzzing over you at this very critical moment in our wild lives)—here is the evidence in your febrile hands. Power\, Culture\, Text\, Bhaktin\, are in a clash Hip-Hop—in a Marvin Gaye ‘What’s going on?’ As stated in these investigations: ‘The Poet of the Universe will stand on her or his balcony as night falls and consider her or his options.’ Mind-crushing consciousness blasting artefactos of our dissolving propellers. Viva Sesshu Foster! I bow to you!”—Juan Felipe Herrera\, Poet Laureate of the USA\, 2015-2017 \n“Plunge upward into ELADATL’s phantasmagoric skies\, where Los Angeles outsiders fly pirate dirigibles to legendary cities built of trash. This hip\, avant\, alternate history wriggles into and out of all ordinariness\, transforming oppression into adventure and you\, oh fortunate reader\, into a witness of the glorious exploits of Swirling Alhambra and his rebel cohort. Get ready to leave the status quo behind and soar beyond the probable to the possible\, your brain buoyed by this book’s heady mix of fear and joy and outraged delight.”—Nisi Shawl\, author of Everfair: A Novel \n“Sesshu Foster’s second novel ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines is not some preciously honed theoretical tale scripted as an abstracted warriors’ syllabus\, but instead\, it gives a powerful account of a curious quotidian revolt that accompanied the East LA Balloon Club and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club rife with the contradiction that singed their arcane thriving. This novel not only explores the actual quest for physical elevation\, but\, more significantly\, with the complication of inner elevation\, attempting to rise above a circumstance studded with racism and looming financial debacle. Mr. Foster’s novel magically inscribes the trenchant character of an opaque and transitional zeitgeist.”—Will Alexander\, author of Kaleidoscope Omniscience \n“Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo co-pilot the ELADATL phantasmagoric journey across historic/imagined skies with magnificent views of a post-industrial East Los Angeles wasteland that is dotted with cinematic/cultural phantoms: Raquel Welch\, Oscar Zeta Acosta\, Anthony Quinn\, and Brown Berets who invoke the mantra\, ‘Don’t believe the fake dreams of the secret police.’ Human skin\, dirigible skin\, chorizo skins\, are simultaneously celebrated as art while being attacked by Zeppelin gunships. ELADATL lifts the reader into a free intellectual airspace where airships of new thinking reign.”—Harry Gamboa Jr.\, author of Urban Exile: Collected Writings of Harry Gamboa Jr. \n“‘The strange future of war over Los Angeles\, zeppelins versus dirigibles . . . ‘ Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo capture the uncapturable. ‘Experience levitation and death\,’ ‘attune your cellular vibrations to the frequency of Star Beings\,’ ‘the merciless winds of the human heart\,’ ‘the Atmospheric Trash Vortex.’ Who is the I here? ‘The welcoming hosts at the front door\, you want to look inside?’ The nightmare does not erase the comedy. ‘The CIA behind the million faces\, hair and fingernails still growing.’ ‘Sign your sorrow over . . . they’re taking everything; let’s give it to them\, the sober whisky of Love.’ Unforgetable read. ‘Isn’t someone in charge?'”—Sharon Doubiago\, author of My Beard: Memoir Stories \n“A fierce\, bittersweet\, and hilarious antidote to our increasingly deracinated personhoods and neighborhoods\, ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines inspires us to hold our ground in a here and now that includes futures and pasts we both know and can barely imagine. Set against the absence of Hollywood—that perfect hierarchical structure that occludes most of the actual labor that goes into making the finished product—Sesshu Foster and Arturo Romo take us through the hood and under the hood while celebrating and mourning the intimacy of social life in all its vicissitudes. Along the way\, our fearless guides introduce us to the living politics of a particular place whose accumulated experience reverberates throughout the cosmos.”—Ammiel Alcalay\, Founder and General Editor of Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative
URL:https://litseen.com/event/sesshu-foster-with-arturo-ernesto-romo/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/eladatl.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210228T080000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210228T170000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111205
CREATED:20210301T055444Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210301T055444Z
UID:62543-1614499200-1614531600@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #57
DESCRIPTION:90 minutes\n30 readers\n3 minutes each\nOn Zoom!\nFREE AND ALL WELCOME!\n\nSign up to read here:\nhttps://forms.gle/4nYSi5fLNyo229Lj9\n\nIf you enjoy spaces like this and can swing it in these tight times\, please consider supporting us via:\n\n1) the Cash App to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress;\n2) donating via the “ticket” option here:\nhttps://www.eventbrite.com/…/nomadic-press-weekly…; OR\n3) donating through the website at www.nomadicpress.org/donate\n\nWe have a short goal for the evening of $150.\n\nPandemic 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.\n\nHosted by Nazelah Jamison (with Tula Biederman on tech). It’s a continuing experiment\, and we hope you can join us!\n\nOur safe space process still applies to our collective virtual space\, so please read this by visiting https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess.\n\nZoom Joining Info\nTopic: Nomadic Press’ Weekly Virtual Open Mic\nTime: Jan 1\, 2021 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)\nEvery week on Fri\, until Dec 10\, 2021\, 50 occurrence(s)\nPlease download and import the following iCalendar (.ics) files to your calendar system.\nWeekly: https://us02web.zoom.us/…/tZcudeqoqjIiE9fnl7dxuB…/ics…\nJoin Zoom Meeting\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/83323049893\nMeeting ID: 833 2304 9893\nOne tap mobile\n+16699006833\,\,83323049893# US (San Jose)\n+13462487799\,\,83323049893# US (Houston)\nDial by your location\n+1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose)\n+1 346 248 7799 US (Houston)\n+1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma)\n+1 929 205 6099 US (New York)\n+1 301 715 8592 US (Washington D.C)\n+1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago)\nMeeting ID: 833 2304 9893\nFind your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/kvor64nsu
URL:https://litseen.com/event/nomadic-press-virtual-open-mic-57/
LOCATION:online
CATEGORIES:East Bay,Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Virtual-Open-Mic-57.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210228T080000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210228T170000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111205
CREATED:20210301T063358Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210301T063358Z
UID:62558-1614499200-1614531600@litseen.com
SUMMARY:High Dawn 7: Ahsan / Montes / Low / Dennis
DESCRIPTION:Presented in partnership with UC Berkeley Poetry Colloquium \nRSVP for Zoom link: spt-march.eventbrite.com \n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nBahaar Ahsan is a poet in the Bay Area. Bahaar’s work is both speculative and deeply embedded in lineage(s). Recent work can be found in Berkeley Poetry Review\, We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics(forthcoming from Nightboat Books)\, and elsewhere. \n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n\nPhoto credit: Venn Daniel \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nLara Mimosa Montes is the author of THRESHOLES (Coffee House Press\, 2020). Her work has appeared in Fence\, BOMB\, Jacket2\, and elsewhere. She is a CantoMundo fellow and has been awarded residencies from Storm King: Shandaken\, Marble House Project\, and Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2018\, Lara was awarded a McKnight Fellowship in Poetry. Currently\, she is a senior editor of Triple Canopy. She lives in Minnesota. \n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n\nPhoto credit: Kari Orvik \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nTrisha Low is the author of The Compleat Purge (Kenning Editions 2013) and Socialist Realism (Emily Books\, 2019). She lives in the East Bay. \n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nRyanaustin Dennis is an Oakland based art work and cultural strategist. Their practice is concerned with how 20th and 21st century experimental performance\, film\, and writing histories are shaped by the metaphysics of blackness. They have done curatorial work for Kadist\, SFMOMA Open Space\, Eastside Arts Alliance\, and Soundwave Biennial. They currently co-curate the Black Life series at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive and Pro Arts Gallery & Commons.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/high-dawn-7-ahsan-montes-low-dennis/
LOCATION:online
CATEGORIES:Free,San Francisco,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/https___cdn.evbuc_.com_images_110881639_133764875210_1_original.jpeg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210301T080000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210301T170000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111205
CREATED:20210301T182416Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210301T182416Z
UID:62618-1614585600-1614618000@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Ismail Muhammad & Marie Mutsuki Mockett
DESCRIPTION:Wednesday\, May 5\, 2021\, 2:00pm via Zoom \nIsmail Muhammad is the reviews editor for The Believer\, a staff writer at the Millions\, a contributing editor at ZYZZYVA\, and a board member at the National Books Critics Circle. He’s been a recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Emerging Critics Fellowship\, and a Simpson Family Literary Fellow. His work\, which focuses on literature\, art\, identity\, and black popular and visual culture\, has appeared in publications like The New York Times\, Slate\, New Republic\, the Los Angeles Review of Books\, Real Life\, and Catapult. \nIn Spring 2021\, Muhammad is teaching English 361: Contemporary Nonfiction \n\nMarie Mutsuki Mockett’s memoir\, Where the Dead Pause and the Japanese Say Goodbye\, was a finalist for the 2017 PEN Open Book Award\, the Indies Choice for Nonfiction and the Northern California Book Award for Creative Nonfiction. She received a Fellowship from the US/Japan Creative Artist Fellowship\, funded by the NEA. Her novel\, Picking Bones from Ash\, published by Graywolf\, was a finalist for the Saroyan Prize and the Paterson Prize. Her new book\, American Harvest: God\, Country and Farming in the Heartland\, published by Graywolf in April 2020\, was a finalist for the Lukas Prize. \nIn 2020-2021 Mockett is teaching English 372: Craft Seminar in Creative Nonfiction\, English 332: Fiction Workshop\, and English 342: Fiction Tutorial
URL:https://litseen.com/event/ismail-muhammad-marie-mutsuki-mockett/
LOCATION:online
CATEGORIES:East Bay,Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/M-and-M.jpg
ORGANIZER;CN="Saint Mary's MFA in Creative Writing":MAILTO:writers@stmarys-ca.edu
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210301T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210301T190000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111205
CREATED:20210217T014721Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210217T014721Z
UID:62229-1614621600-1614625200@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Special Presentation: Anne Lamott
DESCRIPTION:This event is online.\nA constant reader favorite with over a dozen bestsellers to her name\, there’s one Bay Area author who has earned an international reputation for raw honesty and contagious optimism. A specialist on hope during dark times\, this is exactly the person we want to hear from when the going gets tough. \nFor a special\, one-of-a-kind\, multi-bookstore presentation and book launch\, Kepler’s is proud to present the vividly funny Anne Lamott for Dusk\, Night\, Dawn: On Revival and Courage. For years\, our readers have sung the praises of Lamott’s soul-searching and inspiring memoirs—books like Operating Instructions\, Small Victories\, Help\, Thanks\, Wow and Bird by Bird. Now\, Lamott offers a pathway to rediscovering hope and stability in a world turned upside down. In collaboration with Riverhead Books and other independent booksellers including Vroman’s\, Bookshop Santa Cruz and Book Passage\, Kepler’s Literary Foundation is thrilled to host this uniquely uplifting hour of conversation. \nAs bad news piles up—from climate crises to the daily crush of one unprecedented news item after another—how can we cope? Where\, Lamott asks\, “do we start to get our world and joy and hope and our faith in life itself back…with our sore feet\, hearing loss\, stiff fingers\, poor digestion\, stunned minds\, broken hearts?” \nWe begin\, Lamott says\, by accepting our flaws and embracing our humanity. In a one-hour webinar presentation\, the thoughtful\, warm\, comic\, and wise Lamott guides us back to the better angels of our nature. \nAll tickets include a hardcover of Dusk\, Night\, Dawn. A *limited* number of signed copies are available on a first come\, first-served basis. Pre-order early to ensure a signed copy. \nPlease note: This event will be pre-recorded and live streamed to ticketholders in a secure webinar at 6pm PST on March 1\, 2021. Ticketholders are invited to pre-submit Q&A at the time of registration\, and there will be no live Q&A. \nThis is a very special book launch event\, held the evening before the book’s official publication date. Shipping and pickup of books will not take place until after this launch event webinar—more complete book shipment and pickup information will be sent by email to individual ticketholders. Tickets are non-refundable.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/special-presentation-anne-lamott/
CATEGORIES:Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/dusk-night-dawn.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210301T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210301T190000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111205
CREATED:20210301T021810Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210301T021810Z
UID:62462-1614621600-1614625200@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Patricia Lockwood in conversation with Sheila Heti
DESCRIPTION:City Arts & Lectures presents: Patricia Lockwood in conversation with Sheila Heti\nMonday\, March 1\, 2021\n6:00pm Pacific Time\nKQED Broadcast: 03/14/2021\, 03/16/2021\, 03/17/2021\nTICKETS \nThis event appears in the series\nFiction/Friction: A Miniseries \n \n\n\n“I really admire and love this book. Patricia Lockwood is a completely singular talent and [No One is Talking About This] is her best\, funniest\, weirdest\, most affecting work yet.” – Sally Rooney \nPatricia Lockwood is a poet and the author of the memoir Priestdaddy\, an extraordinarily funny account of growing up the daughter of the most singular Catholic priest in America. Lockwood is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books\, and has written on Nabokov\, John Updike\, Lucia Berlin\, Joan Didion\, the Internet\, and more\, suffusing her book reviews with her characteristic wit and analytic breadth. She also has a vast following on Twitter\, which regularly features her Internet-famous cat\, Miette. Lockwood is the author of the two poetry collections Balloon Pop Outlaw Black and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals. Her forthcoming first novel\, No One is Talking About This\, reckons with the feeling of being eternally online\, unable to shut off the feed that keeps on scrolling\, no matter what we do to stop it. \nSheila Heti is the author of eight books of fiction and non-fiction\, including the novels Motherhood\,  How Should a Person Be? and Ticknor\, and the story collection\, The Middle Stories. She was named one of “The New Vanguard” by The New York Times; a list of fifteen women writers from around the world who are “shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century.” Her play\, All Our Happy Days are Stupid\, had sold-out runs in New York and Toronto\, and she is currently developing a new play called The Dug Out. Her new novel\, Pure Colour\, will be published in January 2022.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/patricia-lockwood-in-conversation-with-sheila-heti/
LOCATION:online
CATEGORIES:San Francisco,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/lockwood-square.png
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210301T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210301T201500
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210217T010048Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210217T010048Z
UID:62053-1614625200-1614629700@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Workshop: Know Your Name with Virgie Tovar\, Author\, Podcaster\, Educator & Icon
DESCRIPTION:How do we begin to see the elements that enable rape culture as the elements that are built into the structure and ethos of how we think about gender\, bodies\, food and weight? Virgie Tovar\, author of The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color and You Have the Right to Remain Fat leads this evening session with meditation\, a short discussion and journaling. Bring your journal\, a snack and a cup of tea. \nVirgie Tovar hosts the podcast Rebel Eaters Club\, is a contributor for Forbes.com and started the hashtag campaign #LoseHateNotWeight. Tovar is the author of The Self-Love Revolution: Radical Body Positivity for Girls of Color (New Harbinger Publications 2020) and You Have the Right to Remain Fat (Feminist Press 2018).
URL:https://litseen.com/event/workshop-know-your-name-with-virgie-tovar-author-podcaster-educator-icon/
LOCATION:San Francisco Public Library – Virtual Library
CATEGORIES:Classes and Workshops,Virtual
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210302T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210302T190000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210127T191559Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210127T191559Z
UID:61851-1614704400-1614711600@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Virtual Event: Megan Wagner Lloyd and Michelle Mee Nutter with Raina Telgemeier
DESCRIPTION:JOIN US ON TUESDAY\, MARCH 2 AT 5PM PT FOR THE LAUNCH OF MEGAN WAGNER LLOYD AND MICHELLE MEE NUTTER’S BOOK\, ALLERGIC\, WITH RAINA TELGEMEIER ON ZOOM!\nZoom Login Info \nPlease click the link below to join the webinar:\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_J-UKISA_R8OgXu7bA1T8aQ\n \nAbout Allergic \nA coming-of-age story featuring a girl with severe allergies who just wants to find the perfect pet! \nAt home\, Maggie is the odd one out. Her parents are preoccupied with the new baby they’re expecting\, and her younger brothers are twins and always in their own world. Maggie thinks a new puppy is the answer\, but when she goes to select one on her birthday\, she breaks out in hives and rashes. She’s severely allergic to anything with fur! \nCan Maggie outsmart her allergies and find the perfect pet? With illustrations by Michelle Mee Nutter\, Megan Wagner Lloyd draws on her own experiences with allergies to tell a heartfelt story of family\, friendship\, and finding a place to belong.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/virtual-event-megan-wagner-lloyd-and-michelle-mee-nutter-with-raina-telgemeier/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210302T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210302T190000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210127T193041Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210127T193041Z
UID:61865-1614708000-1614711600@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Cassandra Clare with Holly Black
DESCRIPTION:This event is online. Webinar access comes with a signed copy of Chain of Iron \n\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n We are absolutely thrilled to welcome New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Cassandra Clare for CHAIN OF IRON\, the dangerous and romantic sequel to Chain of Gold in which the Shadowhunters must catch a killer in Edwardian London. \nCordelia Carstairs seems to have everything she ever wanted. She’s engaged to marry James Herondale\, the boy she has loved since childhood. She has a new life in London with her best friend Lucie Herondale and James’s charming companions\, the Merry Thieves. She is about to be reunited with her beloved father. And she bears the sword Cortana\, a legendary hero’s blade. \nBut the truth is far grimmer. James and Cordelia’s marriage is a lie\, arranged to save Cordelia’s reputation. James is in love with Grace Blackthorn whose brother\, Jesse\, died years ago. Cortana burns Cordelia’s hand when she touches it\, while her father has grown bitter and angry. And a serial murderer is targeting the Shadowhunters of London\, killing under cover of darkness\, then vanishing without a trace. \nTogether with the Merry Thieves\, Cordelia\, James\, and Lucie must follow the trail of the knife-wielding killer through the city’s most dangerous streets. All the while\, each is keeping a shocking secret: Lucie\, that she plans to raise Jesse from the dead; Cordelia\, that she has sworn a dangerous oath of loyalty to a mysterious power; and James\, that he is being drawn further each night into the dark web of his grandfather\, the arch-demon Belial. And that he himself may be the killer they seek. \nClick here for a table read of a party scene from Chain of Iron and get a glimpse into why this is a must read. \n\n\n\n\n \n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nCassandra Clare\, named the new queen of fantasy by the Wall Street Journal\, is the author of the #1 New York Times\, USA TODAY\, Wall Street Journal\, and Publishers Weekly bestselling Shadowhunter Chronicles. She is also the coauthor of the bestselling Magisterium series with Holly Black. The Shadowhunter Chronicles have been adapted as both a major motion picture and a television series. Her books have more than fifty million copies in print worldwide and have been translated into more than thirty-five languages. \nShe will be chatting with Holly Black\, her longtime critique partner and the #1 New York Times bestselling author of over thirty fantasy novels for kids and teens. She has been a finalist for an Eisner and a Lodestar Award\, and the recipient of the Mythopoeic Award\, a Nebula\, and a Newbery Honor. Her books have been translated into 32 languages worldwide and adapted for film.  They will be discussing the writing process and their craft. Following the discussion there will be an audience Q&A. \nDon’t wait – RSVP early to guarantee your spot in this webinar. This will be so much fun and is bound to sell out early. It does not get better than this! \nPlease note: Each ticket comes with a signed copy of Chain of Iron\, a Chain of Iron tour exclusive enamel pin and a Chain of Iron paper doll set (while supplies last) \nPlease also note that we have a zero tolerance policy for harassment or intimidation of any kind during our virtual events. In the event that someone joins the event who is not there to celebrate the author\, the store will immediately remove any disrespectful comments and remove this individual from the event. Once removed\, they cannot rejoin. If at any time an unsafe atmosphere occurs before or during the event\, both the author and event partner will have the right to withdraw from the event immediately and without further obligation.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/cassandra-clare-with-holly-black/
CATEGORIES:Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/chain-of-iron.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210302T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210302T210000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210112T231138Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210112T231138Z
UID:61483-1614711600-1614718800@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks | GGP Online Book Club
DESCRIPTION:Please join us on Tuesday\, March 2\, 2021 at 7 PM PST for a GGP Online Book Club discussion of Year of Wonders: A Novel of the Plague by Geraldine Brooks. \nThe Zoom meeting will be at https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83154659317 \nYou can order a print copy at http://bit.ly/ggpYearOfWonders or in audiobook from Libro.fm\, GGP’s audiobook partner\, at http://bit.ly/YearOfWondersAB \nDescription\n\n“Plague stories remind us that we cannot manage without community . . . Year of Wonders is a testament to that very notion.” – The Washington Post \nAn unforgettable tale\, set in 17th century England\, of a village that quarantines itself to arrest the spread of the plague\, from the author The Secret Chord and of March\, winner of the Pulitzer Prize  \nWhen an infected bolt of cloth carries plague from London to an isolated village\, a housemaid named Anna Frith emerges as an unlikely heroine and healer. Through Anna’s eyes we follow the story of the fateful year of 1666\, as she and her fellow villagers confront the spread of disease and superstition. As death reaches into every household and villagers turn from prayers to murderous witch-hunting\, Anna must find the strength to confront the disintegration of her community and the lure of illicit love. As she struggles to survive and grow\, a year of catastrophe becomes instead annus mirabilis\, a “year of wonders.” \nInspired by the true story of Eyam\, a village in the rugged hill country of England\, Year of Wonders is a richly detailed evocation of a singular moment in history. Written with stunning emotional intelligence and introducing “an inspiring heroine” (The Wall Street Journal)\, Brooks blends love and learning\, loss and renewal into a spellbinding and unforgettable read. \nAbout the Author\n\nGeraldine Brooks is the author of five novels: the Pulitzer Prize-winning March; the international bestsellers Caleb’s Crossing\, People of the Book\, and Year of Wonders; and\, most recently\, The Secret Chord. She has also written the acclaimed nonfiction works Nine Parts of Desire and Foreign Correspondence. Born and raised in Australia\, she lives on Martha’s Vinyard with her husband\, the author Tony Horwitz\, and their two sons. \nPraise For…\n\nPraise for Year of Wonders: \n“The novel glitters . . . A deep imaginative engagement with how people are changed by catastrophe.” —The New Yorker \n“Plague stories remind us that we cannot manage without community . . . Year of Wonders is a testament to that very notion . . . [The villagers] assume collective responsibility for combating the plague\, rather than seeing it as an act of God before which they are powerless.” —The Washington Post
URL:https://litseen.com/event/year-of-wonders-a-novel-of-the-plague-by-geraldine-brooks-ggp-online-book-club/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/year-of-wonders.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210302T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210302T210000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210217T013326Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210217T013326Z
UID:62220-1614711600-1614718800@litseen.com
SUMMARY:TICKETED VIRTUAL EVENT: Mari Andrew\, My Inner Sky
DESCRIPTION:TICKETED VIRTUAL EVENT: Bestselling author and illustrator Mari Andrew will be in conversation with award-winning journalist and producer Noor Tagouri about Andrew’s new book\, My Inner Sky\, a collection of essays and illustrations\, divided into phases of the sky—twilight\, golden hour\, night\, and dawn—that serves as a loyal companion for life’s curveballs. \nPURCHASE TICKETS HERE! \nA whole\, beautiful life is only made possible by the wide spectrum of feelings that exist between joy and sorrow. In this insightful and warm book\, writer and illustrator Mari Andrew explores all the emotions that make up a life\, in the process offering insights about trauma and healing\, the meaning of home and the challenges of loneliness\, finding love in the most unexpected of places—from birds nesting on a sculpture to a ride on the subway—and a resounding case for why sometimes you have to put yourself in the path of magic. \nMy Inner Sky empowers us to transform everything that’s happened to us into something meaningful\, reassurance that even in our darkest times\, there’s light and beauty to be found. \nPlease note: Mari will be providing an exclusive print for each of her events! One lucky winner will be drawn from our pool of ticketholders to win the giveaway of this original print. Each ticket purchased will enter you to win. \nMARI ANDREW is a writer\, artist\, and speaker based in New York City. She is the author of Am I There Yet? and posts her writing and illustrations on Instagram at @bymariandrew. \nNOOR TAGOURI is an award-winning journalist and producer blazing a trail across mainstream media. At 27\, she’s built an aware and engaged community of over two million social media followers while garnering international praise as one of new media’s most influential voices. Noor’s innovative storytelling spans across media\, emphasizing subcultures and marginalized communities in the U.S. Her documentary and subsequent podcast series\, Sold in America: Inside Our Nation’s Sex Trade received a 2019 Gracies Award for Best Investigative Series. Noor is a touring speaker of 10+ years focused on identity\, representation in media\, and breaking barriers through storytelling. In 2019 Noor announced her consulting and production company\, At Your Service. AYS works with partners to tell representative stories as a form of service. With a finger on the pulse of people’s concerns\, Noor’s storytelling is recognized for her innovative approach to fostering relationships across lines of difference.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/ticketed-virtual-event-mari-andrew-my-inner-sky/
CATEGORIES:Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Mari-Andrew-750-copy.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210302T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210302T210000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210223T161330Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210223T161330Z
UID:62327-1614711600-1614718800@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with Laila Lalami
DESCRIPTION:Viet Thanh Nguyen in conversation with Laila Lalami \nBay Area Book Festival in conjunction with City Lights and Grove Atlantic Press \ncelebrate the release of Viet Thanh Nguyen’s new novel \nThe Committed \npublished by Grove Press \n———- \nThis is a virtual event that will be hosted by Bay Area Book Festival in conjunction with City Lights on a live streaming platform. You will need a computer or other device that is capable of accessing the internet. This will be a ticketed event. Stand by for more information on how to reserve your virtual seating. \n———- \nTicket purchase is required. \n(Click Here) to register. \n———– \n(Click Here) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon) \n———– \nThe long-awaited new novel from one of America’s most highly regarded contemporary writers\, The Committed follows the unnamed Sympathizer as he arrives in Paris in the early 1980s with his blood brother Bon. The pair try to overcome their pasts and ensure their futures by engaging in capitalism in one of its purest forms: drug dealing. \nTraumatized by his reeducation at the hands of his former best friend\, Man\, and struggling to assimilate into French culture\, the Sympathizer finds Paris both seductive and disturbing. As he falls in with a group of left-wing intellectuals whom he meets at dinner parties given by his French Vietnamese “aunt\,” he finds stimulation for his mind but also customers for his narcotic merchandise. But the new life he is making has perils he has not foreseen\, whether the self-torture of addiction\, the authoritarianism of a state locked in a colonial mindset\, or the seeming paradox of how to reunite his two closest friends whose worldviews put them in absolute opposition. The Sympathizer will need all his wits\, resourcefulness\, and moral flexibility if he is to prevail. \nBoth literary thriller and novel of ideas\, The Committed is a blistering portrayal of commitment and betrayal that will cement Viet Thanh Nguyen’s position in the firmament of American letters. \nViet Thanh Nguyen was born in Vietnam and raised in America. His novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction\, as well as five other awards. He is also the author of the nonfiction books Nothing Ever Dies and Race and Resistance. The Aerol Arnold Professor of English and American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California\, he lives in Los Angeles. \nLaila Lalami is the award winning author of four novels\, including The Moor’s Account\, which won the American Book Award\, the Arab-American Book Award\, the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction\, and The Other Americans\, a national bestseller and a finalist for the Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction. Her new book\, a work of nonfiction called Conditional Citizens\, was published by Pantheon in September 2020.Her essays and criticism have appeared in the Los Angeles Times\, the Washington Post\, The Nation\, Harper’s\, the Guardian\, and the New York Times. She has received fellowships from the British Council\, the Fulbright Program\, and the Guggenheim Foundation and is currently a full professor of creative writing at the University of California at Riverside. She lives in Los Angeles. \nPraise for The Committed: \nNamed a Most Anticipated Book by USA Today\, TIME\, Forbes and O\, the Oprah Magazine \n“A sumptuous sequel to The Sympathizer . . . The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist captures\, with grace and restraint\, the foibles of two young men caught in a duel between East and West.”—O\, the Oprah Magazine \n“The conflicted spy of Nguyen’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sympathizer returns\, embroiled in Paris’s criminal underworld . . . The pages are rife with prostitutes\, drugs\, and\, in the late pages\, gunplay. But\, as in The Sympathizer\, Nguyen keeps the thriller-ish aspects at a low boil\, emphasizing a mood of black comedy driven by the narrator’s intellectual crisis . . . Nguyen is deft at balancing his hero’s existential despair with the lurid glow of a crime saga. A quirky intellectual crime story that highlights the Vietnam War’s complex legacy.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review) \n“Undeniably erudite and culturally fluent as ever—interweaving history\, philosophy\, political treatise\, theology\, even literary criticism—Nguyen effortlessly enhances the story with snarky commentary\, sly judgments\, and plenty of wink-wink-nod-nod posturing to entertain committed readers.”—Terry Hong\, Booklist \n“Call The Committed many things. A white hot literary thriller disguised as a searing novel of ideas. An unflinching look at redemption and damnation. An unblinking examination of the dangers of belief\, and the need to believe. A sequel that goes toe to toe with the original then surpasses it. A masterwork.”—Marlon James\, author of Black Leopard\, Red Wolf \n“The Committed is nothing short of revelatory. As it haunts\, bifurcates\, and envelops us in its illumination of all that we have failed to notice about the far reaches of colonization\, we are also thrilled by its many turns and charms. This book is fierce\, and unrelentingly good. Hilarious and subversive\, philosophical and hallucinatory\, it is much more than a sequel\, more like a necessary appendage in a brilliant and expansive anti-colonial body of work\, from the twisted and playful mind of the one and only Viet Thanh Nguyen. Bravo.”—Tommy Orange\, New York Times-bestselling author of There There \n“This follow-up to his seminal The Sympathizer is Nguyen at his most ambitious and bold. Fierce in tone\, capacious\, witty\, sharp\, and deeply researched\, The Committed marks\, not just a sequel to its groundbreaking predecessor\, but a sum total accumulation of a life devoted to Vietnamese American history and scholarship. This novel\, like all daring novels\, is a Trojan Horse\, whose hidden power is a treatise of global futurity in the aftermath of colonial conquest. It asks questions central both to Vietnamese everywhere—and to our very species: How do we live in the wake of seismic loss and betrayal? And\, perhaps even more critically\, How do we laugh?”—Ocean Vuong\, New York Times-bestselling author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous \n“The Committed\, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s furious and exhilarating sequel to The Sympathizer\, is part gangster-thriller\, part searing cultural analysis of the post-colonial predicament\, seen through the eyes of a Vietnamese-French mixed race bastard double agent. Paris of forty years ago swirls to life around him\, from intellectual salons to filthy toilets—with glimpses of everyone from Johnny Hallyday to Frantz Fanon to Julia Kristeva. Like Ellison’s Invisible Man\, these novels will surely become classics.”—Claire Messud \n“An elegy to idealism\, Orientalism\, and existentialism in all its tragic forms\, Nguyen’s novel doesn’t so much inhabit early eighties Paris\, as it pulls the plug on the City of Light. Think of The Committed as the declaration of the 20th ½ Arrondissement. A squatter’s paradise for those with one foot in the grave and the other shoved halfway up Western civilization’s ass.”—Paul Beatty \n“The Committed is a wonderful successor to The Sympathizer\, a splendid tapestry of a novel\, full of dubious but richly realized characters. It solidifies what we already know — Viet Thanh Nguyen is a gifted storyteller. It is difficult to know where to start with the praise. The characters have a sad and often tragic complexity\, and the language offers a terrific ride for the reader. This is a grand novel full of breathtaking and luminous insights and a pure joy to read. Anticipation is why we come to a book\, and joy is why we keep turning page after page. The Committed offers both\, and so very much more.”—Edward P. Jones\, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World \n“The Committed is a rich and exhilarating story of friendship\, loyalty\, and greed. Set in 1980s Paris\, it follows the characters from The Sympathizer as they try to fashion new lives among all the wretched of the earth. Viet Thanh Nguyen gives us an unsparing look at the poisonous effects of ideology—whether colonialism\, communism\, or capitalism—even as he explores the deep-seated need we all have to believe in something. A deep\, compelling and humorous portrait of how we are shaped by fictions others have for us.”—Laila Lalami\, author of The Other Americans\, finalist for the National Book Award \n  \n  \nThis event has been sponsored by the City Lights Foundation
URL:https://litseen.com/event/viet-thanh-nguyen-in-conversation-with-laila-lalami/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/the-committed.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210303T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210303T174500
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210127T192552Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210127T192552Z
UID:61863-1614790800-1614793500@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Online Literary Seminar: Home Movie by Jerry Burger
DESCRIPTION:THIS SESSION IS ONLINE\nLiterary Seminar; Home Movie by Jerry Burger\nJoin Kimberly (and Jerry!) for a BONUS LITERARY SEMINAR \nNot only is ”Home Movie” a mystery story well worth digging into—it was just chosen for The Best American Mystery Stories!—but it was written by our very own long-time seminar-goer Jerry Burger! \nThe 45-minute webinar will be fascinating\, what with Kimberly doing her close reading of the story’s unique frame\, its excellent character development\, and its plot elements—only to have Jerry reveal whether or not her interpretations are “correct.” So fun! \nThe seminar could not be better timed\, coming on the heels of the Agatha Christie lecture\, which will allow us the chance to examine interesting elements of the genre in a very different context. \nPlease join us for what will be an excellent addition to the usual seminar series. \nTicket Information: $20.00   \nThe book is included with your ticket and can be shipped to you or picked up at Kepler’s (and read) prior to the seminar. Thanks to a generous anonymous donor\, the shipping cost will be waived if you elect to have the book shipped to you in the ticketing options.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/online-literary-seminar-home-movie-by-jerry-burger/
CATEGORIES:Virtual
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210303T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210303T200000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210203T025943Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210203T025943Z
UID:61946-1614794400-1614801600@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Book Passage Presents: Carol Edgarian with Tobias Wolff - Vera
DESCRIPTION:New York Times bestselling author Carol Edgarian delivers an astonishing feat of imagination\, a grand adventure set in 1906 San Francisco—a city leveled by quake and fire—featuring an indomitable heroine coming of age in the aftermath of catastrophe and her quest for love and reinvention. \nMeet Vera Johnson\, the uncommonly resourceful fifteen-year-old illegitimate daughter of Rose\, notorious proprietor of San Francisco’s most legendary bordello and ally to the city’s corrupt politicians. Vera has grown up straddling two worlds—the madam’s alluring sphere\, replete with tickets to the opera\, surly henchmen\, and scant morality\, and the violent\, debt ridden domestic life of the family paid to raise her. \nOn the morning of the great quake\, Vera’s worlds collide. As the shattered city burns and looters vie with the injured\, orphaned\, and starving\, Vera and her guileless sister\, Pie\, are cast adrift. Vera disregards societal norms and prejudices and begins to imagine a new kind of life. She collaborates with Tan\, her former rival\, and forges an unlikely family of survivors. Together they navigate their way beyond disaster. \nIn Vera\, Carol Edgarian creates a cinematic\, deeply entertaining world\, in which honor and fates are tested; notions of sex\, class\, and justice are turned upside down; and love is hard-won. A ravishing\, heartbreaking\, and profound affirmation of youth and tenacity\, Vera’s story brings to life legendary characters—tenor Enrico Caruso\, indicted mayor Eugene Schmitz and boss Abe Ruef\, tabloid celebrity Alma Spreckels—as well as an unforgettable cast that includes Vera’s young lover\, Bobby\, protector of the city’s tribe of orphans\, and three generations of a Chinese family competing and conspiring with Vera. \nThis richly imagined\, timely tale of improbable outcomes and alliances takes hold from the first page\, gifting readers with remarkable scenes of devastation\, renewal\, and joy. Told with unflinching candor and wit\, Vera celebrates the audacious fortitude of its young heroine and marks a stunning achievement by an inventive and generous writer. \nCarol Edgarian is the author of the New York Times bestseller Three Stages of Amazement and the international bestseller Rise the Euphrates\, winner of the ANC Freedom Prize. Her articles and essays have appeared in The Wall Street Journal\, NPR\, and W\, among many others. She is cofounder and editor of Narrative\, a digital publisher of fiction\, poetry\, and art\, and Narrative in the Schools\, which provides free libraries and writing resources to teachers and students around the world. Edgarian lives with her family in San Francisco. \nTobias Wolff is the author of the novels The Barracks Thief and Old School\, the memoirs This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army\, and the short story collections In the Garden of the North American Martyrs\, Back in the World\, and The Night in Question. His most recent collection of short stories\, Our Story Begins\, won The Story Prize for 2008. Other honors include the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award—both for excellence in the short story—the Los Angeles Times Book Prize\, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has also been the editor of Best American Short Stories\, The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories\, and A Doctor’s Visit: The Short Stories of Anton Chekhov. His work appears regularly in The New Yorker\, The Atlantic\, Harper’s\, and other magazines and literary journals.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/book-passage-presents-carol-edgarian-with-tobias-wolff-vera/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/vera.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210303T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210303T200000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210105T191425Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210105T191425Z
UID:61412-1614796200-1614801600@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Courtney Zoftness with Rita Bullwinkel and Mat Johnson
DESCRIPTION:celebrating the publication of Courtney Zoftness’ new memoir \nSpilt Milk \npublished by McSweeney’s \n———- \nThis 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. \n———- \nEvent is free\, but registration is required. \n(Click Here) to register. (link to be posted soon) \n———– \n(Click Here) to purchase book. (link to be posted soon) \n———– \nWhat role does a mother play in raising thoughtful\, generous children? In her literary debut\, internationally award-winning writer Courtney Zoffness considers what we inherit from generations past—biologically\, culturally\, spiritually—and what we pass on to our children. Spilt Milk is an intimate\, bracing\, and beautiful exploration of vulnerability and culpability. Zoffness relives her childhood anxiety disorder as she witnesses it manifest in her firstborn; endures brazen sexual advances by a student in her class; grapples with the implications of her young son’s cop obsession; and challenges her Jewish faith. Where is the line between privacy and secrecy? How do the stories we tell inform who we become? These powerful\, dynamic essays herald a vital new voice. \n\n\n\nCourtney Zoffness won the 2018 Sunday Times Short Story Award\, the most valuable international prize for short fiction\, amid entries from 38 countries. She joins a winners list that includes Junot Díaz\, Anthony Doerr\, and Yiyun Li. (Read more about this here and here.) Other honors include an Emerging Writers Fellowship from the Center for Fiction\, the Arts & Letters Creative Nonfiction Prize\, a Bread Loaf Writers Conference scholarship\, and two residency fellowships from MacDowell. Her writing has appeared in various journals and anthologies\, including the Paris Review Daily\, Longreads\, The Southern Review\, The Rumpus\, and No Tokens\, she had Notable essays in Best American Essays 2018 & 2019. She lives with her family in Brooklyn\, New York. \nRita Bullwinkel is the author of the story collection Belly Up\, which won the 2018 Believer Book Award. Bullwinkel’s writing has been published in Tin House\, The White Review\, Conjunctions\, BOMB\, Vice\, NOON\, and Guernica. She is a recipient of grants and fellowships from The MacDowell Colony\, Brown University\, Vanderbilt University\, Hawthornden Castle\, and The Helene Wurlitzer Foundation. Both her fiction and translation have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes. She is an Editor at Large for McSweeney’s and a Contributing Editor for NOON. She lives in San Francisco and teaches at the California College of the Arts. \n\n\nMat Johnson is the author of the novels Loving Day\, Pym\, Drop\, and Hunting in Harlem\, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro Plot\, and the comic books Incognegro and Dark Rain. He is a recipient of the American Book Award\, the United States Artist James Baldwin Fellowship\, The Hurston/Wright Legacy Award\, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection\, and the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature. He is a Professor at the University of Oregon. \n\n\n\n\n\nPraise for Spilt Milk: \n“I don’t know what I love the most about Courtney Zoffness’s Spilt Milk. The taut originality of the prose? The acuity of its insights? The daring vulnerability? There is so much I want to say about Spilt Milk\, but honestly they’re all variations of This is fucking brilliant. Whatever you think this book is\, it’s more. A debut writer this talented and skilled is an event in itself.”\n—Mat Johnson\, author of Pym \n“Gentle\, playful and laced with subtle wit\, these essays are a welcome balm in an insane and un-gentle time.”\n—Mary Gaitskill\, author of This is Pleasure and Bad Behavior \n“Spilt Milk contains the wisdom of a mother\, the maturity of an older sister\, and the wide-eyed wonder of a small child. It’s a magical gift of a collection.”\n—Lisa Taddeo\, author of Three Women \n“In these ten musical\, open-hearted essays\, Courtney Zoffness establishes herself as one of our most soulful\, clear-eyed narrators. A lucid dream of a book I wished would never end.”\n—Elisa Albert\, author of After Birth \n“Wry and masterful—Spilt Milk examines the multiplicities of self and culture\, asking the tough questions with remarkable concision. Courtney Zoffness is a writer of supernatural acuity and wit.”\n—T Kira Madden\, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls \n“Courtney Zoffness beautifully captures the self-aware irony and absolute panic of being an anxious parent\, illustrating how childhood terrors manifest later in life in ways that are both still childish\, and still terrifying. This book is urgent and essential.”\n—Jesse Eisenberg\, actor and author of Bream Gives me Hiccups and Other Stories \n“Courtney Zoffness’s collection is written with a fierce and sometimes funny honesty. Zoffness explores motherhood and daughterhood\, and how these early attachments make us and unmake us\, how they connect us to others—until they are us.”\n—Tiphanie Yanique\, author of Land of Love and Drowning \n“These bright\, knowing essays spill over with intelligence and wit. Courtney Zoffness traces the dizzying conflict faced by parents—the daily ricochet between burden and joy—and\, with a sharply lyric voice\, discovers hidden connections between this domestic struggle and the larger cultural and political winds shifting around us.”\n—Ben Marcus\, author of Notes from the Fog \n“On one level\, Spilt Milk is an extraordinary exploration of the connections\, small and large; real and imagined\, between childhood and parenthood. On another level\, it’s irrefutable proof that Courtney Zoffness is a wondrous calculus of a prose writer: keen\, inventive\, candid\, open-hearted\, not to mention one helluva stylist.”\n—Mitchell S. Jackson\, author of Survival Math
URL:https://litseen.com/event/courtney-zoftness-with-rita-bullwinkel-and-mat-johnson/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/spilt-milk.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210303T183000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210303T203000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210212T043641Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210212T043641Z
UID:62177-1614796200-1614803400@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Contemporary Classics - Interior Chinatown
DESCRIPTION:Patricia Holt\, former book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle\, continues her popular book group\, “Contemporary Classics.” \nA book should stand the test of time before becoming a classic\, but very often\, critics and literary judges leap to praise books as “instant classics” soon after publication. These are the titles Pat’s group will hold up to scrutiny—in fact\, the chewier\, more literary\, more dense\, and “hard to read” the better. One needn’t have read widely\, studied literature\, or learned about literary criticism to join. Just drop in or join us for the whole series\, and let the developing wisdom of the group be your only guide. \nEmail Pat to register and to receive a Zoom link for the meeting. You can write to her at p.holt12@comcast.net. \nSpring dates: \nMarch 3: Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu \nApril 7: This Mournable Body by Tsitsi  Dangarembga \nMay 5: Maud’s Line by Margaret Verble \nJune 2: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart \nJuly 7: Real Life by Brandon Taylor \n\nAbout Patricia Holt\nPat was book editor and critic at The San Francisco Chronicle for 17 years and has been writing reviews and book industry commentary at Holt Uncensored since 1998. She has facilitated book groups for the past 15 years and also joins the Marin West Review’s editors\,  Myn Adess and Doris Ober\, on Radio Bookmobile\, a lively discussion on West Marin Community Radio KWMR\, usually the first Thursday of every month at 10-11 a.m.\, about the most beautiful passages and stirring controversies they can find on the current book scene.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/contemporary-classics-interior-chinatown/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/interior-chinatown.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T130000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20201108T004354Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20201127T225841Z
UID:60699-1614859200-1614862800@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Berkeley Lunch Poems: Mary Jo Bang
DESCRIPTION:Berkeley Lunch Poems\nA noontime poetry reading series\nReadings will take place remotely for the 2020-2021 academic year. Zoom links will be available approximately two weeks before the event. All readings will be recorded and posted to youtube. To keep up to date\, please join our list by emailing poems@library.berkeley.edu. \nLink for all readings: https://berkeley.zoom.us/j/96370640480 \n\nMary Jo Bang\nMary Jo Bang is the author of eight books of poems—including A Doll for Throwing\, Louise in Love\, The Last Two Seconds\, and Elegy\, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. Her translation of Dante’s Inferno\, illustrated by Henrik Drescher\, was published by Graywolf Press in 2012. Her translation of Purgatorio is forthcoming from Graywolf in July 2021. She has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University\, a Guggenheim Fellowship\, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/berkeley-lunch-poems-mary-jo-bang/
LOCATION:online
CATEGORIES:East Bay,Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/Mary-Jo-Bang.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T120000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T133000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210217T010106Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210217T010106Z
UID:62063-1614859200-1614864600@litseen.com
SUMMARY:San Francisco Public Library Presents: Celeste-Marie Bernier\, Judith Butler and Isaac Julien in Conversation
DESCRIPTION:This online conversation with Celeste-Marie Bernier\, Judith Butler and Isaac Julien\, explores Douglass’ legacy and the influence of key historical figures featured in Lessons of the Hour. \nWhile widely acknowledged as an icon of abolitionism\, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) is less understood as an early figure in the intersectional pursuit of human rights\, a dissonance which informed filmmaker and artist Isaac Julien’s immersive moving-image installation Lessons of the Hour—Frederick Douglass (2019). In this wide-ranging conversation\, Julien is joined by the celebrated philosopher and educator Judith Butler and acclaimed Douglass scholar Celeste-Marie Bernier to explore Douglass’ legacy as well as the influential role of figures such as his wife Anna Murray-Douglass\, the suffragettes and others important to his life and voice. Butler’s renowned scholarship in the fields of philosophy\, ethics and feminist\, queer and literary theory guides her moderation of the conversation. \nCurrently the Maxine Elliot Professor of Comparative Literature at University of California\, Berkeley\, Butler’s theories have compelled generations of activists\, artists and students to grapple with notions of gender performativity\, individualism and power. As professor of United States and Atlantic Studies at the University of Edinburgh\, Bernier specializes in the literatures\, histories\, politics\, visual cultures and philosophies of women\, men and children living in the African Diaspora. Julien worked closely with Bernier on Lessons of the Hour’s narration to construct “tableaux vivants” that reimagine Douglass’ relationships to a range of key historical figures\, including Murray-Douglass\, his second wife Helen Pitts and the suffragette Susan B. Anthony.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/san-francisco-public-library-presents-celeste-marie-bernier-judith-butler-and-isaac-julien-in-conversation/
LOCATION:San Francisco Public Library – Virtual Library
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/438c1e28-a3fa-43c1-9917-510847091b14.jpeg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T170000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T183000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210301T025413Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210301T025515Z
UID:62465-1614877200-1614882600@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Seismic Salon: Alka Joshi
DESCRIPTION:Seismic Salon: Alka Joshi\nThu Mar 4th 5:00pm – 6:30pm\n\n\n  Buy Tickets \n\n\n\nLitquake’s second season of Seismic Salons begins with the always fascinating Alka Joshi\, whose debut novel The Henna Artist was chosen for Reese Witherspoon’s book club\, and appears in paperback this April 6. Born in Jodhpur\, Rajasthan\, India\, she has lived in the U.S. since the age of nine. Alka has a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from California College of the Arts\, and ran her own advertising and PR agency for 30 years. Currently\, she is working both on a screen adaption of The Henna Artist\, and a third novel. Join us as Alka entertains and informs about the rigors of writing a historical novel for many years (how much research did she have to do?) and finally seeing the labor pay off handsomely. \nBuy Alka Joshi’s book at the Litquake Bookshop. \nSeismic Salons are a series of fundraisers offering conversation time with A-list authors for 10 lucky participants. All proceeds benefit Litquake’s on-going programs.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/alka-joshi/
LOCATION:online
CATEGORIES:San Francisco,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/scaled_640.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T190000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210223T161818Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210223T161818Z
UID:62195-1614880800-1614884400@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Virtual Event: Jamie Figueroa and Marie-Helene Bertino
DESCRIPTION:Join us on Thursday\, March 4th at 6pm PT when Jamie Figueroa is joined by Marie-Helene Bertino to discuss her debut novel\, Brother\, Sister\, Mother\, Explorer\, on Zoom!\n\nZoom Login Info\nPlease click the link below to join the webinar:\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/81822157575\n\nPraise for Brother\, Sister\, Mother\, Explorer\n“Brother\, Sister\, Mother\, Explorer is so full of voice. It is utterly bright and original.”—Tommy Orange\, author of There There\n“Brother\, Sister\, Mother\, Explorer is a haunting of a novel centered around the hustle of an utterly unforgettable brother and sister. Jamie Figueroa’s faultless language surprises\, enchants\, and does nothing less than articulate that which is unseen and eaten by profound grief. Supervised by a wild\, booted angel (a character for the ages)\, this marvel of a first novel seems powered by a force that wrecks itself and is made glorious\, again and again\, until its stunning conclusion. Singular\, devastating\, and divine.”—Marie-Helene Bertino\, author of Parakeet\n\n“In language that is blade-sharp and sun-bright\, Jamie Figueroa weaves a story of generations of love and loss that is powerful and aching and utterly new. Brother\, Sister\, Mother\, Explorer will never\, ever leave me.”—Ramona Ausubel\, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and No One Is Here Except All of Us\n\n“Jamie Figueroa’s writing is decadent. Sentences in this book require the reader to breathe and sigh with the revelation of their beauty; others slap you in the face with their sharp assumptiveness. Brother\, Sister\, Mother\, Explorer begins in prayer and does what prayer does—gives us hope\, reveals our deepest griefs\, and sometimes even redeems.”—Tiphanie Yanique\, author of Land of Love and Drowning\nAbout Brother\, Sister\, Mother\, Explorer\n\nA fableistic\, “curious and dazzling” debut novel of enormous power and grace about a sister trying to hold back her brother from the edge of the abyss for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Tommy Orange (Booklist\, starred review).\n\nIn the tourist town of Ciudad de Tres Hermanas\, in the aftermath of their mother’s passing\, two siblings spend a final weekend together in their childhood home. Seeing her brother\, Rafa\, careening toward a place of no return\, Rufina devises a bet: if they can make enough money performing for privileged tourists in the plaza over the course of the weekend to afford a plane ticket out\, Rafa must commit to living. If not\, Rufina will make her peace with Rafa’s own plan for the future\, however terrifying it may be.\n\nAs the siblings reckon with generational and ancestral trauma\, set against the indignities of present-day prejudice\, other strange hauntings begin to stalk these pages: their mother’s ghost kicks her heels against the walls; Rufina’s vanished child creeps into her arms at night; and above all this\, watching over the siblings\, a genderless\, flea-bitten angel remains hell-bent on saving what can be saved.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/virtual-event-jamie-figueroa-and-marie-helene-bertino-2/
LOCATION:online
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2_4-Figueroa-Flyer.png
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T193000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210203T042958Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210203T042958Z
UID:61949-1614880800-1614886200@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Isabel Allende - The Soul of a Woman (Virtual Event)
DESCRIPTION:From the New York Times bestselling author of A Long Petal of the Sea comes a passionate and inspiring meditation on what it means to be a woman. \n“When I say that I was a feminist in kindergarten\, I am not exaggerating\,” begins Isabel Allende. As a child\, she watched her mother\, abandoned by her husband\, provide for her three small children without “resources or voice.” Isabel became a fierce and defiant little girl\, determined to fight for the life her mother couldn’t have. \nAs a young woman coming of age in the late 1960s\, she rode the second wave of feminism. Among a tribe of like-minded female journalists\, Allende for the first time felt comfortable in her own skin\, as they wrote “with a knife between our teeth” about women’s issues. She has seen what the movement has accomplished in the course of her lifetime. And over the course of three passionate marriages\, she has learned how to grow as a woman while having a partner\, when to step away\, and the rewards of embracing one’s sexuality. \nSo what feeds the soul of feminists—and all women—today? To be safe\, to be valued\, to live in peace\, to have their own resources\, to be connected\, to have control over our bodies and lives\, and above all\, to be loved. On all these fronts\, there is much work yet to be done\, and this book\, Allende hopes\, will “light the torches of our daughters and granddaughters with mine. They will have to live for us\, as we lived for our mothers\, and carry on with the work still left to be finished.” \nIsabel Allende won worldwide acclaim in 1982 with the publication of her first novel\, The House of the Spirits. Since then\, she has authored twenty-five bestselling and critically acclaimed books\, which have been translated into more than forty-two languages. In addition to her work as a writer\, Allende devotes much of her time to human rights causes. In 1996\, following the death of her daughter\, Paula Frias\, she established a charitable foundation in her honor\, which has awarded grants to more than one hundred nonprofits worldwide on behalf of women and girls. In 2014\, President Barack Obama awarded Allende the Presidential Medal of Freedom\, the nation’s highest civilian honor\, and in 2018 she received the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation. She has also received PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award. Raised in Chile\, she now lives in California.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/isabel-allende-the-soul-of-a-woman-virtual-event/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/soul-of-a-woman.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T200000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210119T235018Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210119T235018Z
UID:61692-1614880800-1614888000@litseen.com
SUMMARY:VIRTUAL: Launch for Luiza Flynn-Goodlett / Look Alive\, with K-Ming Chang\, Alicia Mountain\, Arhm Choi Wild & Meg Day
DESCRIPTION:Booksmith and The Bindery are very pleased to host the virtual launch for Luiza Flynn-Goodlett’s debut full-length collection of poems Look Alive. She’ll be joined for a group reading by K-Ming Chang\, Alicia Mountain\, Arhm Choi Wild & Meg Day. \nThis event is free and all ages\, but RSVP is required. Event link will be sent to everyone who registers. \nYou can order Look Alive here – we’re currently offering free shipping throughout San Francisco and the East Bay. \nPlease note that this event will include ASL interpretation and auto-generated live captioning. If you have any questions or additional special needs\, do not hesitate to email events@booksmith.com and we will do our absolute best to accommodate you. \nAbout the book\nLook Alive documents the construction of a queer femme self in the hostile territory of American late capitalism. Its speaker encounters darkness—in the form of violence perpetrated by both individuals and by societal systems of power and oppression—and yet\, rejects the narratives articulated by that violence\, celebrating instead softness and gentleness\, and ultimately\, cleaving to the natural world in all its radiant\, mysterious queerness. \n“This is a book composed of poems shaped like doors\, trapdoors\, and gates\, and rightly so. They offer us entry to the sublime\, to the kind of aliveness only accessible by passing through death where blooms are “bruises / both faded and freshly made” and “though the heart thuds with lack. / lack\, lack\,” it flowers. These are lean\, meticulously curated poems that nonetheless let so much in; loss\, embodiment\, injury\, victimization\, witnessed and voiced. “What chafes\,” Flynn-Goodlett writes\, “life / to light.” This lifting into the light—one of the most crucial functions of the lyric poem—allows for a survival “half-forgotten as / tampons at the bottom of a purse. / saying you’ve bled\, still bleed\, live.” Look Alive finally does not simply look alive. It lives. It aims a flashlight at my own dark corners. It sisters me.” – Diane Seuss\, author of Four-Legged Girl and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl \nAbout the authors\nLuiza Flynn-Goodlett previously published six chapbooks\, most recently Shadow Box\, winner of the 2019 Madhouse Press Editor’s Prize\, and Tender Age\, winner of the 2019 Headmistress Press Charlotte Mew Prize. Her poetry can be found in TriQuarterly\, Third Coast\, Pleiades\, and elsewhere. She serves as editor-in-chief of Foglifter in sunny Oakland\, California. \nK-Ming Chang is a Kundiman fellow\, a Lambda Literary Award finalist\, and a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. She is the author of the debut novel BESTIARY (One World/Random House). More of her writing can be found online at kmingchang.com. \nAlicia Mountain is the 2020–2021 Artist in Residence in the Department of English at the University of Central Oklahoma. She is a lesbian poet\, interdisciplinary artist\, and educator. Mountain won the Iowa Poetry Prize with her debut collection\, High Ground Coward (Iowa\, 2018). She is also the author of Thin Fire\, a digital chapbook published by BOAAT Press. Mountain earned an MFA at the University of Montana in Missoula and her PhD at the University of Denver. She is based in New York. \nArhm Choi Wild is a queer\, Korean-American poet who grew up in the slam community of Ann Arbor\, Michigan\, and went on to perform across the country\, including at Brave New Voices\, the New York City Poetry Festival\, and Asheville Wordfest. Their debut book of poems\, CUT TO BLOOM\, was the winner of the 2019 Write Bloody Book Contest. Arhm is a Kundiman fellow with an MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College\, and was a finalist for the Jake Adam York Prize in 2019. They have been anthologized in Daring to Repair by Wising Up Press and The Queer Movement Anthology of Literatures\, and their work appears in Barrow Street\, The Massachusetts Review\, Pleiades\, Split this Rock\, and other publications. They work as the Director of the Progressive Teaching Institute and as a Diversity Coordinator at a school in New York City. For more information\, visit arhmchoiwild.com. \nDeaf\, genderqueer poet Meg Day is the author of Last Psalm at Sea Level (Barrow Street\, 2014)\, winner of the Publishing Triangle’s Audre Lorde Award\, and a finalist for the 2016 Kate Tufts Discovery Award\, and the co-editor of Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master (Pleiades\, 2019). The 2015-2016 recipient of the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship and a 2013 recipient of an NEA Fellowship in Poetry\, Day’s work can be found in\, or forthcoming from\, Best American Poetry 2020\, The New York Times\, AGNI\, Beloit Poetry Journal\, & elsewhere. Day is Assistant Professor of English & Creative Writing at Franklin & Marshall College. www.megday.com \nThis event is free and all ages\, but RSVP is required. \n  \n\n\n\nPolicies\n\nRefund Policy:\nNo refunds or returns. Contact events@booksmith.com with any questions. \nCancellation Policy:\nIf we have to cancel an event\, you will be refunded within 4 business days of the event date.
URL:https://litseen.com/event/virtual-launch-for-luiza-flynn-goodlett-look-alive-with-k-ming-chang-alicia-mountain-arhm-choi-wild-meg-day/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/lookalive-jpg-max-front.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T180000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T200000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210127T191242Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210127T191242Z
UID:61847-1614880800-1614888000@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Virtual Event: Jamie Figueroa and Marie-Helene Bertino
DESCRIPTION:JOIN US ON THURSDAY\, MARCH 4 AT 6PM PT WHEN JAMIE FIGUEROA IS JOINED BY MARIE-HELENE BERTINO TO DISCUSS HER DEBUT NOVEL\, BROTHER\, SISTER\, MOTHER\, EXPLORER\, ON ZOOM!\nZoom Login Info\nPlease click the link below to join the webinar:\nhttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/81822157575\nOr iPhone one-tap :\nUS: +16699009128\,\,81822157575#  or +13462487799\,\,81822157575#\nInternational numbers available: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/keqMEp28ep \nPraise for Brother\, Sister\, Mother\, Explorer \n“Brother\, Sister\, Mother\, Explorer is so full of voice. It is utterly bright and original.”—Tommy Orange\, author of There There \n“Brother\, Sister\, Mother\, Explorer is a haunting of a novel centered around the hustle of an utterly unforgettable brother and sister. Jamie Figueroa’s faultless language surprises\, enchants\, and does nothing less than articulate that which is unseen and eaten by profound grief. Supervised by a wild\, booted angel (a character for the ages)\, this marvel of a first novel seems powered by a force that wrecks itself and is made glorious\, again and again\, until its stunning conclusion. Singular\, devastating\, and divine.”—Marie-Helene Bertino\, author of Parakeet \n“In language that is blade-sharp and sun-bright\, Jamie Figueroa weaves a story of generations of love and loss that is powerful and aching and utterly new. Brother\, Sister\, Mother\, Explorer will never\, ever leave me.”—Ramona Ausubel\, author of Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty and No One Is Here Except All of Us \n“Jamie Figueroa’s writing is decadent. Sentences in this book require the reader to breathe and sigh with the revelation of their beauty; others slap you in the face with their sharp assumptiveness. Brother\, Sister\, Mother\, Explorer begins in prayer and does what prayer does—gives us hope\, reveals our deepest griefs\, and sometimes even redeems.”—Tiphanie Yanique\, author of Land of Love and Drowning \nAbout Brother\, Sister\, Mother\, Explorer  \nA fableistic\, “curious and dazzling” debut novel of enormous power and grace about a sister trying to hold back her brother from the edge of the abyss for readers of Jesmyn Ward and Tommy Orange (Booklist\, starred review).
URL:https://litseen.com/event/virtual-event-jamie-figueroa-and-marie-helene-bertino/
CATEGORIES:Free,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/brother-sister.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T190000
DTEND;TZID=America/Los_Angeles:20210304T200000
DTSTAMP:20260403T111206
CREATED:20210301T182849Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210301T182849Z
UID:62620-1614884400-1614888000@litseen.com
SUMMARY:Cristina Rivera Garza and Kit Schluter\, reading and in conversation
DESCRIPTION:Remote access event\, free and open to the public \nREGISTER TO ATTEND\n—or—\nWatch this program at YouTube \nWith emcee\, Carolina de Robertis \nSupported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts \nThis remote-access event starts promptly at 7:00 pm Pacific Time\, and is free and open to the public. Real-Time Captioning link will be provided at the event. Media Captioning provided after the event\, at our YouTube channel and at Poetry Center Digital Archive. For other reasonable accommodations please contact poetry@sfsu.edu \n\n\n\nCelebrated novelist\, poet\, and essayist Cristina Rivera Garza returns to The Poetry Center. She’ll be joined by poet and translator Kit Schluter\, in Mexico City. They’ll each read from their own writings\, then join in conversation with one another and with novelist Carolina de Robertis as emcee\, and respond to questions from the audience. \n\nOne day\, on a cloudy March afternoon to be more exact\, I was in a classroom lined with long\, rectangular windows in an old colonial building in the heart of Mexico City. Through one of those windows\, in the most surprising manner\, someone entered. It was a young man. He said he’d come from Oaxaca and that he wanted to meet me. I believe he sat in on the session in which we discussed the methods of documentary poetry\, the writing practice that incorporates and subverts\, that embraces and tests the public language of the dispossessed and the suffering…. Later\, that same young man who came in through the window as if it was a door asked me something impossible\, which is the only thing worth asking for.\n—Cristina Rivera Garza\, “Taking Shelter\,” Introduction to Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country\n\nCristina Rivera Garza. “Born in Mexico and a resident of the United States for over two decades\, Rivera Garza is a prolific and multifaceted author of fiction\, essays\, and scholarship\, including nearly twenty works in Spanish. Her novels…are deeply informed by her training as a historian and frequently feature characters who stumble upon images\, texts\, or people that disturb the supposed clarity of the historical record.” (from the MacArthur Fellows citation\, 2020). Three of Rivera Garza’s acclaimed six novels have appeared in the US—most recently\, The Taiga Syndrome (El mal de la taiga\, trans. Suzanne Jill Levine and Aviva Kana); The Iliac Crest (La cresta de Ilión\, trans. Sarah Booker); and No One Will See Me Cry (Nadie me verá llorar\, trans. Andrew Hurley). \nWithin this past year\, Rivera Garza’s complete poems\, La fractura exacta: Poesía completa\, were published in Spanish (from Ediciones Libros del cardo\, in Chile). And three remarkable books of nonfiction also appeared\, in the US in English translation: Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country (tr. Sarah Booker); The Restless Dead: Necrowriting & Disappropriation (tr. Robin Myers); and La Castañeda Insane Asylum: Narratives of Pain in Modern Mexico (tr. Laura Kanost). On the faculty at the University of Houston since 2016\, Rivera Garza is Distinguished Professor of Hispanic Studies and Creative Writing. Visit her blog (in Spanish and English)\, No hay tal lugar: U-tópicos contemporáneos. \n\nTrust\nWhen I first looked in the mirror\, I thought I looked dead\, but I had simply become a child. Beside my face was a blue cake so radiant\, even its light was edible.\n—Kit Schluter\, at The Brooklyn Rail\n\nKit Schluter is a poet-translator and bookmaker. His poetry and stories have appeared in Boston Review\, BOMB\, Brooklyn Rail\, Folder\, Hyperallergic\, and in the chapbooks Inclusivity Blueprint\, Journals\, Translations of Forgetting\, Without is a Part of Origin\, and the collections of stories and drawings\, 5 Cartoons/5 caricaturas (tr. Mariana Rodríguez\, Juan Malasuerte Editores)\, The Good in Having a Nuclear Family (Despite Editions)\, and his first full-length collection of poetry\, Pierrot’s Fingernails (Canarium Books\, 2020). Among his prolific translations—from the French\, Occitan\, and Spanish—are books by Olivia Tapiero (Phototaxis\, Nightboat)\, Anne Kawala (Screwball\, Canarium)\, Jaime Saenz (The Cold\, Poor Claudia)\, Michel Surya (Dead End\, Black Sun Lit)\, Julio Torri (Essays & Poems\, Archivo48)\, Marcel Schwob (The Book of Monelle; The Children’s Crusade\, foreword by J.L. Borges; and The King in the Golden Mask\, all Wakefield Press)\, Amandine André (Circle of Dogs\, with Jocelyn Spaar; Some Thing\, with Lindsay Turner\, Aphonic Space)\, and Clamenç Llansana (Goliard Songs\, Anomalous)\, with others on the way. Schluter co-edits O’clock Press\, designs for Nightboat Books and Juan Malasuerte Editories\, and with Tatiana Lipkes organizes the monthly reading series at Aeromoto\, a public arts library in Mexico City. More\, including links to publishers and selected writings\, here. \n\n\n\n\n\n\nFeatured: \nCristina Rivera Garza\, MacArthur Foundation Fellows Citation\, 2020 \nChristina Rivera Garza\, on The Taiga Syndrome\, at the 2019 Library of Congress National Book Festival\, Washington\, D.C. \nKit Schluter interviewed\, National Poetry Month featured poet\, at Entropy\, April 2017 \nKit Schluter\, reading with Brandon Brown and Wendy Trevino\, at Woolsey Heights\, May 25\, 2019 \n\n\n\n\nEvent contact:\n\nThe Poetry Center\n\n\n\nEvent email:\n\npoetry@sfsu.edu\n\n\n\nEvent sponsor:\n\nThe Poetry Center\n\n\n\nRegister to Attend:\n\n\nhttps://sfsu.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_kSpx1UTcQYy9W87DIjCshg
URL:https://litseen.com/event/cristina-rivera-garza-and-kit-schluter-reading-and-in-conversation/
LOCATION:online
CATEGORIES:Free,San Francisco,Virtual
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://litseen.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/CristinaKit-banner.jpg
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