Holloway Reading Series: A Memorial for Sean Bonney
2020-04-01 18:30 - 20:00 (America/Los_Angeles) | Maude Fife Room, UC Berkeley, 2000 Carleston Street, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States

Lyric & Dirges: Ether Edition #1
2020-04-01 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Join us for the launching of Lyrics & Dirges: Ether Edition
We have a new format and the same literary wonderland.
Our inaugural virtual reading is happening on April 1st with three amazing writers Norma Liliana Valdez, Georgina Marie, and Nick Johnson
We will be meeting on Zoom, specific details below and if you’re new to Zoom you can download the app here:
https://zoom.us/ and here’s a handy
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Beth Lisick
2020-04-01 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reads from
Edie On The Green Screen: A Novel
published by 7.13 Books
City Lights welcomes back Beth Lisick to celebrate her debut novel from 7.13 Books.
Edie Wunderlich was the It girl, on the covers of the city’s alt-weeklies, repping the freak party scene on the eve of the first dot-com boom. Fast-forward twenty years, and Edie hasn’t changed, but San Francisco has. Still a bartender in the Mission, Edie now serves a seemingly never-ending stream of tech bros while the punk rock parties of the millennium’s end are long gone. When her mother dies, leaving her Silicon Valley home to Edie, she finds herself mourning her loss in the heart of the Bay Area’s tech monoculture, and embarks on a last-ditch quest to hold on to her rebel heart. New York Times bestseller Beth Lisick’s first novel EDIE ON THE GREEN SCREEN chronicles Silicon Valley’s rapidly changing culture with biting observational humor, an insider’s wisdom, and disarming pathos, while asking, “What comes after It?”
Beth Lisick is a writer and actor from the San Francisco Bay Area, currently living in Brooklyn. She is the author of five previous books, including the New York Times bestseller Everybody Into the Pool, and co-founder of the Porchlight Storytelling Series. Beth has also worked as a baker, a promotional banana mascot, a background extra for TV and film, and an aide to people with developmental disabilities and dementia. This is her first novel.

Jane Hirshfield / Ledger
2020-04-01 19:30 - 21:00 | Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, 2904 College Ave, Berkeley, CA, 94705, United States
reads from her new volume of poetry Ledger, a book of personal, ecological, and political reckoning from the internationally renowned poet named “among the modern masters” (Washington Post).

Wednesday, April 1, 2020 – 7:30pm

From one of our most celebrated contemporary poets–long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England’s T.S. Eliot Prize–comes Jane Hirshfield’s Ledger, her most important work yet. From its already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance (“Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw.”), Hirshfield’s poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments, and call us to action. They summon our responsibility to sustain one another and the earth while pondering, acutely and tenderly, the crises of refugees, justice, and climate. They consider “the minimum mass for a whale, for a language, an ice cap,” recognize the intimacy of interconnection (“lichens, burdocks, mycelial mats between trees– / forgive this hubris”), and apply the lever of questions (“How came separation to chisel, / to cherish, to chafe?”) by which we might begin to find a way forward. Finally, it is the human spirit and words themselves–loyal instruments of recognition, humility, and praise–that triumph in this stunning accounting by an essential poet.
Jane Hirshfield is the author of nine books of poetry, including Ledger; The Beauty; Come, Thief; and Given Sugar, Given Salt. She is also the author of two now-classic collections of essays, Nine Gates and Ten Windows, and has edited and co-translated four books of world poets from the past. Her books have received the Poetry Center Book Award, the California Book Award, and the Donald Hall-Jane Kenyon Prize in American Poetry. Hirshfield has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Academy of American Poets, and presents her work at literary and interdisciplinary events worldwide. Her poems appear in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement, The Washington Post, The New York Times, New Republic, Harper’s, and Poetry, and have been selected for ten editions of The Best American Poetry. A resident of Northern California, she is a 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Hilary Leichter, Mary South, Rita Bullwinkel, & R.O. Kwon
2020-04-01 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Hilary Leichter and Mary South discuss their new works, Temporary and You Will Never Be Forgotten, with Rita Bullwinkel and R.O. Kwon.
Praise for Temporary
“A narrative so deliciously allusive and disarmingly literal that this reader kept thinking maximum glee had been attained, only for the glee to somehow grow even more maximal just a few sentences later.” —Helen Oyeyemi
“Temporary took me by storm. Each short chapter is a wallop of topsy-turvy wisdom and humor, and together they build a strange and sparkling universe. The novel is about work and identity and the masks we wear, but it’s also about our weird little human hearts and what they can bear. I am a Hilary Leichter superfan.”—Ramona Ausubel
“In Temporary, the quest for gainful employment is epic; operatic; deliciously, sunnily, terrifyingly entertaining. Hilary Leichter is a conjurer of rare talent.” —Kelly Link
About Temporary
In Temporary, a young woman’s workplace is the size of the world. She fills increasingly bizarre placements in search of steadiness, connection, and something, at last, to call her own. Whether it’s shining an endless closet of shoes, swabbing the deck of a pirate ship, assisting an assassin, or filling in for the Chairman of the Board, for the mythical Temporary, “there is nothing more personal than doing your job.”
This riveting quest, at once hilarious and profound, will resonate with anyone who has ever done their best at work, even when the work is only temporary.
Praise for You Will Never Be Forgotten
“Mary South gets it. With dark humor, she knocks down like so many lined-up ducks all the consoling pieties that nurture humanist fiction, and sets up in their place a vision of subjects irremediably mediated, strung out along networks that far exceed them. Her universe is glitchy, full of weakly-encrypted memory, open-source desire, self-replicating fantasy: the human in hock to the algorithm.” —Tom McCarthy, author of Satin Island
“Mary South’s stories are a vital mix of wry humor, cunning provocation, disturbing prophecy and deep feeling. A brilliant and brilliantly strange and strangely funny and menacing debut!” —Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark
“Mary South’s wickedly, exquisitely hilarious collection dwells in the intimate aches of modern life, writ large in strange, delightful stories that include, but are not limited to, clones, brain surgery, internet trolls, and warehouses full of spare men. Dazzlingly imagined and full of wit, You Will Never Be Forgotten is a gift to readers everywhere, a ferocious transmission from one of the most audacious, most original new voices in fiction.” —Alexandra Kleeman, author of Intimations
About You Will Never Be Forgotten
In this provocative, bitingly funny debut collection, people attempt to use technology to escape their uncontrollable feelings of grief or rage or despair, only to reveal their most flawed and human selves
An architect draws questionable inspiration from her daughter’s birth defect. A content moderator for “the world’s biggest search engine,” who spends her days culling videos of beheadings and suicides, turns from stalking her rapist online to following him in real life. At a camp for recovering internet trolls, a sensitive misfit goes missing. A wounded mother raises the second incarnation of her child.
In You Will Never Be Forgotten, Mary South explores how technology can both collapse our relationships from within and provide opportunities for genuine connection. Formally inventive, darkly absurdist, savagely critical of the increasingly fraught cultural climates we inhabit, these ten stories also find hope in fleeting interactions and moments of tenderness. They reveal our grotesque selfishness and our intense need for love and acceptance, and the psychic pain that either shuts us off or allows us to discover our deepest reaches of empathy. This incendiary debut marks the arrival of a perceptive, idiosyncratic, instantly recognizable voice in fiction—one that could only belong to Mary South.

Lunch Poems: Mary Jo Bang
2020-04-02 12:10 - 12:50 | Morrison Library, UC Berkeley, 2000 Carleston Street, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States
Mary 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—and a translation of Dante’s Inferno, illustrated by Henrik Drescher. She has received a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship at the American Academy of Berlin. She teaches creative writing at Washington University in St. Louis.

Screenside Chat #1: Thea Matthews, MK Chavez, JP Howard
2020-04-02 18:00 - 19:00 | CA
Join us for our first Screenside Chat, a new limited-run series where Nomadic Press partners with other publishers to bring you “fireside chat”-esque engaging readings and conversations between 2–3 writers, all from the comfort of your home. There will be a brief Q&A at the end, as well, for audience members to ask our writers
questions.
For this iteration of Screenside Chat, we have paired up with the wonderful Red Light Lit (founded and run by Jennifer Lewis). Our writers are Thea Matthews (author of Unearth [The Flowers], forthcoming with Red Light Lit), Mk Chavez (author of Dear Animal, and Mothermorphosis published by Nomadic Press), and JP Howard (author of SAY/MIRROR published by The Operating System & Liminal Lab). Jennifer Lewis will emcee, and J. K. Fowler will be working tech and handling the chat.
Free and welcome to all. For those that can, please show your monetary support so that we can continue our work. You can do so via Cash App at $NomadicPress or https://cash.app/$NomadicPress. You can also “purchase” a ticket through this Facebook event to donate any amount that is feasible for you in this moment.
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Time: Apr 2, 2020 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
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Canceled: Cowboy & Other Poems: Alejandro Albarrán Polanco and Rachel Galvin
2020-04-02 19:00 | Alley Cat Books, 3036 24th St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
Mexican poet Alejandro Albarrán Polanco joins poet and translator Rachel Galvin to talk about his chapbook, Cowboy & Other Poems, from Ugly Duckling Presse.
About Cowboy & Other Poems, Maricela Guerrero writes “Prosthesis poems raising questions about the means by which the discourse of terror erodes our conversations. Piles of poems bursting into piles of words, crashing against the univocal: Albarrán’s work is an ensemble of voices resonating from the most sincere tenderness to the most terrible and terrifying ways in which the contemporary world of crime and horror is narrated. In this book a cowboy gallops on a thousand prairies of senseless sense, carrying us mounted on the rump, expectant.”

CONTACT:

Leslie-Ann Woofter
lwoofter@catranslation.org
415.512.8812

AUTHOR
Alejandro Albarrán Polanco

Alejandro Albarrán Polanco (b. Mexico City) is the author of Algunas personas no son caballos, which won the Premio Internacional Manuel Acuña in 2018. He is a founding editor of the press Canón Accidental and co-director of the radio program Radio Rara. He is also a musician and conceptual artist whose performances, installations, and artist’s books have been featured in numerous art exhibitions.

TRANSLATOR
Rachel Galvin

Rachel Galvin is an award-winning poet, translator, and scholar. Her books include two collections of poetry, Pulleys & Locomotion and Elevated Threat Level; a work of criticism, News of War: Civilian Poetry 1936-1945; and Hitting the Streets, a translation from the French of Raymond Queneau. She is a co-founder of the Outranspo, an international creative translation collective, and assistant professor at the University of Chicago.

YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: POETRY, PROSE & EVERYTHING GOES... ONLINE!
2020-04-02 19:00 | CA
You’re Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes Online!
an ONLINE Open Mic w/Ned Buskirk & the You’re Going to Die Team!
Yeah. It’s an ONLINE OPEN MIC.
I need it. You need it. Let’s do it.
Thursday, April 2nd
Virtual Doors at 7pm
Show at 7:30pm
Seating is first come, first served… to the person who gets the seat in your house.
REGISTER HERE: https://bit.ly/33US8Gz
PLEASE NOTE:
Registration DOES NOT guarantee a spot on the call!!!
There are only 100 call spots – our commitment is to keep it intimate, so whoever needs to share, gets to share…
Do not wait – don’t be late!!
TICKETING:
Like so many other artists & nonprofits with an event focus, much of our work for the foreseeable future is cancelled. For this special online event we suggest that people pay between $10-50, but don’t hesitate to go above or below based on what feels possible. And PLEASE, if you are suddenly in financial danger, DO NOT pay us. We’re just happy you’re alive & able to join. If you’re still earning income (or are just generally resourced), we very much welcome your generosity.
Venmo: @Peter-Buskirk
Paypal: chelsea@yg2d.com
You’re Going to Die: Poetry, Prose & Everything Goes ONLINE!
is an ONLINE open mic event, the communal offering for us to explore the conversation of death & dying, to embrace our losses & mortality, to grieve, bereave & honor what we’ve lost & love… while all the while making room for simply being ALIVE.
Sign-ups will be during the Zoom Call & the list will fill up quickly, so if you want to share, say so sooner rather than later.
If you’re going to perform, keep it under 5 MINUTES. That’s right: 5 MINUTES. WE WILL TIME YOU. And YES – NED WILL VIRTUALLY HUG YOU IF HE HAS TO!
Poetry, prose, music, dancing, comedy, drama, happy, sad, & on & on & on… Remember: EVERYTHING GOES… so share whatever you want. And you don’t have to perform anything; the audience is as essential as the performers.
Please contact ned@yg2d.com with any questions, concerns or feedback!
Looking forward to sharing a special evening together…
Mortally Yours,
the You’re Going to Die Team
www.yg2d.com

Litquake on Lockdown: Poets for National Poetry Month
2020-04-02 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Join Litquake for our annual National Poetry Month celebration, for readings from some of America’s best poets: Kazim Ali, Tongo Eisen-Martin, and Jane Hirshfield. Curated and hosted by Rebecca Foust. Originally scheduled to be held at Grace Cathedral atop the city’s Nob Hill, now streaming live for you!
All authors’ books available from your favorite indie bookstores, order from bookshop.org!
Livestream link to be posted the morning of!

Moderators

Rebecca Foust
Rebecca Foust was the Poet Laureate of Marin County and is the author of Paradise Drive and The Unexploded Ordnance Bin, released November 2019. A new book, ONLY, will come out with Four Way Books in 2022.

Speakers

Jane Hirshfield
Jane Hirshfield’s ninth collection, Ledger (Knopf), just released. Chancellor emerita of the Academy of American Poets and recently elected into the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, she works frequently at the intersection of poetry and science. Her essays, poems, and translations… Read More →

Tongo Eisen-Martin
Tongo Eisen-Martin is the author of Someone’s Dead Already and Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Pocket Poets Series), which won the 2018 California Book Award.

Kazim Ali
Kazim Ali’s many books include The Far Mosque, which won an Alice James Books award and Inquisition (2018), as well as the prose books The Disappearance of Seth, Bright Felon, and Resident Alien. Ali co-founded Nightboat Books and is a professor at U.C. San Diego.

Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai
2020-04-02 19:00 - 20:30 | City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94133, United States
reading from
The Mountains Sing
from Workman Publishing Company
“An epic account of Việt Nam’s painful 20th century history, both vast in scope and intimate in its telling . . . Moving and riveting.” —VIET THANH NGUYEN, author of The Sympathizer, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
With the epic sweep of Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko or Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing and the lyrical beauty of Vaddey Ratner’s In the Shadow of the Banyan, The Mountains Sing tells an enveloping, multigenerational tale of the Trần family, set against the backdrop of the Việt Nam War. Trần Diệu Lan, who was born in 1920, was forced to flee her family farm with her six children during the Land Reform as the Communist government rose in the North. Years later in Hà Nội, her young granddaughter, Hương, comes of age as her parents and uncles head off down the Hồ Chí Minh Trail to fight in a conflict that tore not just her beloved country, but her family apart.
Vivid, gripping, and steeped in the language and traditions of Việt Nam, The Mountains Sing brings to life the human costs of this conflict from the point of view of the Vietnamese people themselves, while showing us the true power of kindness and hope.
The Mountains Sing is celebrated Vietnamese poet Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s first novel in English.
Born into the Viet Nam War in 1973, Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai grew up witnessing the war’s devastation and its aftermath. She worked as a street seller and rice farmer before winning a scholarship to attend university in Australia. She is the author of eight books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction published in Vietnamese, and her writing has been translated and published in more than 10 countries, most recently in Norton’s Inheriting the War anthology. She has been honored with many awards, including the Poetry of the Year 2010 Award from the Ha Noi Writers Association, as well as many grants and fellowships. Married to a European diplomat, Quế Mai is currently living in Jakarta with her two teenage children.
For more information about Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai, visit her at www.nguyenphanquemai.com

Carolyn Forche, In the Lateness of the World at Bookshop Santa Cruz
2020-04-02 19:00 - 21:00 | Bookshop Santa Cruz, 1520 Pacific Ave, Santa Cruz , CA, 95060, United States
Bookshop Santa Cruz is delighted to welcome celebrated poet Carolyn Forché for a reading and signing of In the Lateness of the World—her new poetry collection of uncanny grace and moral force.
Over four decades, Carolyn Forché’s visionary work has reinvigorated poetry’s power to awaken the reader. Her groundbreaking poems have been testimonies, inquiries, and wonderments. They daringly map a territory where poetry asserts our inexhaustible responsibility to each other.
Her first new collection in seventeen years, In the Lateness of the World, is a tenebrous book of crossings, of migrations across oceans and borders but also between the present and the past, life and death. The poems call to the reader from the end of the world where they are sifting through the aftermath of history. Forché envisions a place where “you could see everything at once … every moment you have lived or place you have been.” The world here seems to be steadily vanishing, but in the moments before the uncertain end, an illumination arrives and “there is nothing that cannot be seen.” In the Lateness of the World is a revelation from one of the finest poets writing today.
Carolyn Forché is an American poet, translator, and memoirist. Her books of poetry are Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. Her memoir, What You Have Heard Is True, was published by Penguin Press in 2019. In 2013, Forché received the Academy of American Poets Fellowship given for distinguished poetic achievement. In 2017, she became one of the first two poets to receive the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a University Professor at Georgetown University. She lives in Maryland with her husband, photographer Harry Mattison.

Monica Sok: A Nail the Evening Hangs On
2020-04-02 19:30 - 21:00 | Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 9th Ave, San Francisco , CA, 94122, United States
Monica Sok discusses her debut poetry collection, A Nail the Evening Hangs On, with Barbara Jane Reyes.
Praise for A Nail the Evening Hangs On
“Sok’s reflective debut teases out how the trauma of the Khmer Rouge is remembered and retained in the fabric of the country and within her own family… Weaving the threads of her family’s stories, history, place, and identity, these poems glimmer with strength and presence.” —Publishers Weekly
“An unsettling, powerful, important debut.” —Booklist
“The poet is able to offer quiet wisdom without sentimentality. Ultimately this poet refuses to surrender to victimhood. The chapbook ends optimistically in the borough of Brooklyn, where the young speaker lives happily, sometimes seen in the neighborhood eating bagels with friends and writing new poems. She has found her way to ‘the healing fields.’” ―Marilyn Chin
About A Nail the Evening Hangs On
In this staggering poetry debut, Monica Sok illuminates the experiences of Cambodian diaspora and reflects on America’s role in escalating the genocide in Cambodia. A Nail the Evening Hangs On travels from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, where Tuol Sleng and other war museums reshape the imagination of a child of refugees; to New York City and Lancaster, where the dailiness of intergenerational trauma persists on the subway or among the cornfields of a small hometown. Embracing collective memory, both real and imagined, these poems move across time to break familial silence. Sok pieces together voices and fragments—using persona, myth, and imagination—in a transformative work that builds towards wholeness.

Nomadic Press' Virtual Open Mic #3
2020-04-03 18:00 - 19:30 | CA
FREE AND ALL WELCOME!
Donate (only if you can swing it) by clicking on the “ticket” link or dropping donations via the $Cash app to $NomadicPress OR https://cash.app/$NomadicPress
90 minutes
30 readers
3 minutes each
On Zoom!
It feels really important to gather in these times, and we need to prioritize the health of most vulnerable community members (our elders, those who work with elders, and those with suppressed immune systems). So we are hosting another virtual open mic (this time a little earlier for our east coast friends)! Feel free to join just to listen, too! We can hold up to 100 people.
Hosted by Nazelah Jamison (with J. K. on tech). It’s a continuing experiment, and we hope you can join us!
SIGN-UP SHEET:
https://forms.gle/1ZNKSnnzRZpXxvUE7
Our safe space process still applies to our collective virtual space, so please read this by visiting https://www.nomadicpress.org/safespaceprocess.
Joining information
Topic: Nomadic Press’ Virtual Open Mic #3
Time: Apr 3, 2020 06:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Join Zoom Meeting
https://zoom.us/j/787778071
Meeting ID: 787 778 071
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Litquake on Lockdown: Beth Lisick and "Edie on the Green Screen"
2020-04-03 19:00 - 20:00 | CA
Beth Lisick’s canceled book tour for her debut novel transmogrifies into an at-home spoken word and music performance with her husband, musician and studio wizard Eli Crews (Tune-yards, Deerhoof). Though rarely in the same place at the same time, they’ve spent the last few weeks collaborating on making hand sanitizer, falafel, and music. Beth will read excerpts from her new book accompanied by organs, synths, and other assorted gadgetry. Presented live from their Spillway Sound recording studio in New York’s Hudson Valley.
Book releases March 26, 2020.
Order from your favorite indie bookstore at bookshop.org!
Livestream link to be posted the morning of!

Speakers

Eli Crews
Eli Crews is a sound engineer and record producer based in New York. He is a house engineer at Figure 8 Recording in Brooklyn, where he has lived and worked since 2012. He also just built a getaway, residential recording studio in the Catskills near the Ashokan Reservoir, called Spillway… Read More →

Beth Lisick
Beth Lisick is a writer and actor from the San Francisco Bay Area, currently living in Brooklyn. She is the author of six books, including the New York Times bestseller Everybody Into the Pool, and co-founder of the Porchlight Storytelling Series. Beth has also worked as a baker… Read More →

Bess Kalb / Nobody Will Tell You This But Me
2020-04-03 19:00 - 20:30 | CA
Booksmith hosts a live-stream with Bess Kalb for her new book Nobody Will Tell You This but Me.
Please join us … we’ll be streaming on our Facebook page!

“When I stop crying, I’m calling my mother immediately and making her read it.” – Jodi Picoult
“Comic lines as good as in any movie, and pathos as deep as in any novel” – Mike Birbiglia
Bess Kalb, Emmy-nominated TV writer and New Yorker contributor, saved every voicemail her grandmother Bobby Bell ever left her. Bobby was a force–irrepressible, glamorous, unapologetically opinionated. Bobby doted on Bess; Bess adored Bobby. Then, at ninety, Bobby died. But in this debut memoir, Bobby is speaking to Bess once more, in a voice as passionate as it ever was in life.
Recounting both family lore and family secrets, Bobby brings us four generations of indomitable women and the men who loved them. There’s Bobby’s mother, who traveled solo from Belarus to America in the 1880s to escape the pogroms, and Bess’s mother, a 1970s rebel who always fought against convention. Then there’s Bess, who grew up in New York and entered the rough-and-tumble world of L.A. television. Her grandma Bobby was with her all the way–she was the light of Bess’s childhood and her fiercest supporter, giving Bess unequivocal love, even if sometimes of the toughest kind.
In Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, Bobby reminds Bess of the experiences they shared, and she delivers–in phone calls, texts, and unforgettable heart-to-hearts brought vividly to the page–her signature wisdom:
If the earth is cracking behind you, you put one foot in front of the other.
Never. Buy. Fake. Anything.
I swear on your life every word of this is true.
With humor and poignancy, Bess Kalb gives us proof of the special bond that can skip a generation and endure beyond death. This book is a feat of extraordinary ventriloquism and imagination by a remarkably talented writer.

Bess Kalb is an Emmy-nominated writer for Jimmy Kimmel Live. Her writing for the show earned her a Writer’s Guild Award in 2016. She has also written for the Oscars and the Emmys. A regular contributor to The New Yorker‘s “Daily Shouts,” her work has been published in The New Republic, Grantland, Salon.com, Wired, The Nation, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles. Author photo by Lucas Foglia.

This event is free and all ages.
RSVP appreciated but not required.

Luiza, Colleen, and Audra Have a Book Party at Wolfman Books
2020-04-03 19:00 - 21:00 | E.M. Wolfman General Interest Small Bookstore, 410 13th Street, Oakland , CA, 94612, United States
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, winner of the Charlotte Mew Prize, and Colleen McKee and Audra Puchalski, finalists for the Charlotte Mew Prize, read from their chapbooks, all published in January by Headmistress Press.
Luiza Flynn-Goodlett’s chapbook Tender Age won the 2019 Headmistress Press Charlotte Mew contest. She is also the author of the forthcoming collection Look Alive, winner of the 2019 Cowles Poetry Book Prize from Southeast Missouri State University Press, along with five other chapbooks, most recently Shadow Box, winner of the 2019 Madhouse Press Editor’s Prize. Her poetry can be found in Third Coast, Pleiades, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She serves as editor-in-chief of Foglifter and lives in sunny Oakland, California.

Poetry with Jeanne Heuving, Eleni Stecopoulos and Susan Gevirtz
2020-04-03 19:00 - 21:00 | The Green Arcade, 1680 Market St, San Francisco , CA, 94102, United States
Jeanne Heuving’s latest book is Mood Indigo, selva oscura press (2019) and she is the co-editor, along with Tyrone Williams, of Inciting Poetics: Thinking and Writing Poetry (Recencies Series, University of New Mexico Press, 2019.
Eleni Stecopoulos is the author of Visceral Poetics (ON Contemporary Practice, 2016), Armies of Compassion (Palm Press, 2010), and Daphnephoria (Compline, 2012)
Susan Gevirtz is the author of seven books of poetry, including Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger, Thrall, and Hourglass Transcripts. Her critical works include Narrative Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson and Coming Events (Collected Writings)

About Last Night: A One Night Stand Storytelling Series April
2020-04-03 20:00 - 23:00 | Make-Out Room, 3225 22nd St, San Francisco, CA, 94110, United States
About Last Night – Join us for an evening of laughter, sex positivity and of course hilariously true one night stand stories. 7 brave souls will once again climb on our stage to share true tales of their most intimate and embarrassing one night stands.
About Last Night is a monthly San Francisco one night stand / poor life choice storytelling series. This event features real people sharing hilarious (way too personal) stories about horrifying one night stands, awkward hookups, and embarrassing sexual adventures. Come join us for a night of complete and utter hysteria, and unlike most of your one night stands, we can promise you that you won’t regret it!
Have a story you’d like to tell? Visit our website: www.aboutlastnightstorytelling.com

Bay Area Poets Coalition
2020-04-04 15:00 - 17:00 | Strawberry Creek Lodge, 1320 Addison Street, Berkeley, CA, 94702, United States
STRAWBERRY CREEK LODGE
1320 Addison St., Berkeley, CA

Addison is one block south of and parallel to University Ave.
between Acton & Bonar St.
Parking on the street (NOT in the S.C.L. parking lot)

Check in at the front desk and you will be directed to the meeting location
(usually Movie Room, or backyard garden)

All Ages Welcome

Come and enjoy a friendly and informal read-around —
3-5 minutes per poet/reader, or “just listening” is fine too 🙂

After the reading, join us for dinner if you’d like at a nearby restaurant

BINDERY: Kate Radford / Drought
2020-04-04 19:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts a special evening with Kate Radford, a sonic poetry performance and book release. Drought is fusing contemporary poetry, cinematic landscapes and electronic harmonic compositions. This is the premiere performance in San Francisco – please join us!

Please note: This is a ticketed event, with tickets on a sliding scale from $0-15. Advance tickets are highly recommended, as door tickets are not guaranteed. Unless otherwise noted here, tickets will be available at the door.

Drought is a compositional performance piece using cinematic landscapes, contemporary poetry and sound to create and explore art space as part ritual and place of transformation, using language, mythology and folklore to transmute collective pain inflicted on women throughout fiction and non-fiction, the real world and our cultural subconscious, with a focus on the orchestra of language in a fine art performance context.
“It is challenging. But above all, it is redemptive. It is a love song. Through pain, beyond heartache, and into the sun itself. The bright can burn, but it also – illuminates….” – Kate Radford
Exploring characters hidden deep within Ovid’s metamorphoses, transformed into original poetry, fusing mythological narratives, part-autobiography, part compositional ritual.
Written and Performed by Kate Radford
Original Compositions by Kate Radford
Landscape Imagery by Bryony Good

Kate Radford is a multi-award winning poet and artist working internationally to transform women’s stories and embed cultural narratives with a legacy of possibility and transformation.

REVIEWS
★ ★ ★ ★ ‘Hauntingly beautiful!’ (Ask The Ushers) ‘A visually impressive feminist cry’ – Broadway World
‘Radford re-tells using lyrical writing, her own extraordinary voice and digital projections’ – Lyne Gardner, Stagedoor
‘A mesmerising punch in the gut’ – Voila! Festival
“Kate is a storyteller, a songstress, a performance artist and a poet. The amazing thing is I think she really had no idea how brilliant she is, she simply is THIS. She is what the best of artists are—a person bringing art—her art—to the world with no artifice.” – Grace Jasmine, Hollywood Fringe
“Kate will take you on a spiritual journey, using mythological narrative to examine violence women have suffered and will suffer at the hands of man. It is not an attack but a look at old truths rooted in ancient and modern-day storytelling. Kate’s use of her foot to control the electronic music became its own form of poetry as her voice soared and roared through the dark space, as footage of old ruins swelled the tiny theatre, Drought became a new religion.” – Constance Hall, LA Female Playwrights Initiative.
“Drought begins quite disarmingly with mythic riffs on the historic ocean of female oppression. Then Kate Radford opened her mouth to sing and became that ocean. Vast and deep, powerful and personal, her loops lured me in and pulled me under until I surrendered. Then she returned me to the surface and laid me breathless on the shore. I almost died. I wanna do it again.” – Jonathan Liptake, Hollywood Fringe

Please note: this event will be held at The Bindery, 1727 Haight.
This is an all-ages event. The bar opens at 7pm; event starts at 7:30pm.
Facebook RSVP appreciated but not required.
Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs please let us know and we’ll do our absolute best to accommodate you: events@booksmith.com.

Litquake on Lockdown: "Home Baked" Booty Shake
2020-04-04 19:00 | CA
In the seventies, when author Alia Volz was tucked into in her stroller, her parents ran Sticky Fingers Brownies, an underground bakery that delivered more than 10,000 marijuana edibles each month in San Francisco. From the frothy 1970s through the depths of the AIDS crisis and the dawn of medical marijuana, Volz’s new memoir Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco is a kaleidoscopic portrait of a city in the throes of change and the community that came together when things fell apart.
Pour yourself a tequila sunrise, twist a doobie, and join Volz and luminaries Rebecca Skloot and Marke Bieschke for a taste of home-baked San Francisco love. Followed by a funkalicious living-room dance party with special guest DJs.
Book is released on April 20, 2020, pre-order it from your favorite indie bookstore, at bookshop.org!
Livestream link to be posted the morning of the event!

Moderators

Rebecca Skloot
Rebecca Skloot is author of the #1 New York Times Bestseller, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which was made into an Emmy-nominated HBO film. Lacks took more than a decade to research and write, and instantly hit the New York Times bestseller list, where it has remained for… Read More →

Speakers

Marke Bieschke
Marke Bieschke is the publisher and arts editor of 48 Hills and the SF Bay Guardian, and the author most recently of Queer: The Ultimate LGBTQ Guide for Teens (Zest Books, 2019) and the forthcoming Into the Streets: A Young Person’s Visual History of Protest in the United States (Lerner… Read More →

Alia Volz
Alia Volz is the author of Home Baked: My Mom, Marijuana, and the Stoning of San Francisco, due for release on 4/20 of this year. You’ll find her work in The Best American Essays, The New York Times, Tin House, and elsewhere.

Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor of Welcome to Night Vale / The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home
2020-04-05 16:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts a special afternoon event with Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor of Welcome to Night Vale for their new novel, The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home. Join us!
Please note: This event is ticketed, with each ticket including a book, and will take place at The Bindery, 1727 Haight St. Tickets are available in advance here. Unless otherwise noted here, general admission tickets will be available at the door.
In the town of Night Vale, there’s a faceless old woman who secretly lives in everyone’s home, but no one knows how she got there or where she came from…until now. Told in a series of eerie flashbacks, the story of The Faceless Old Woman goes back centuries to reveal an initially blissful and then tragic childhood on a Mediterranean Estate in the early nineteenth century, her rise in the criminal underworld of Europe, a nautical adventure with a mysterious organization of smugglers, her plot for revenge on the ones who betrayed her, and ultimately her death and its aftermath, as her spirit travels the world for decades until settling in modern-day Night Vale.
Interspersed throughout is a present-day story in Night Vale, as The Faceless Old Woman guides, haunts, and sabotages a man named Craig. In the end, her current day dealings with Craig and her swashbuckling history in nineteenth century Europe will come together in the most unexpected and horrifying way.
Part The Haunting of Hill House, part The Count of Monte Cristo, and 100% about a faceless old woman who secretly lives in your home.

Joseph Fink created the Welcome to Night Vale and Alice Isn’t Dead podcasts. He lives with his wife in the Hudson River Valley and Los Angeles. He is the author of the novel Alice Isn’t Dead. Jeffrey Cranor co-writes the Welcome to Night Vale and Within the Wires podcasts. He also co-creates theater and dance pieces with choreographer/wife Jillian Sweeney. They live in New York. Together, they are the authors of the New York Times best-selling novels Welcome to Night Vale, It Devours!, and four Welcome to Night Vale episode script books: Mostly Void, Partially Stars, The Great Glowing Coils of the Universe, The Buying of Lot 37, and Who’s a Good Boy? In 2016, Fink and Cranor announced their podcast network “Night Vale Presents” which has produced 14 original fiction and non-fiction podcasts. For more on Welcome to Night Vale, upcoming events, and the books, visit: www.welcometonightvale.com.

Please note: this event will be held at The Bindery, 1727 Haight.
This is a free, all-ages event. The bar opens with the store at 2pm; event starts at 4pm.
Facebook RSVP appreciated but not required.
Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs please let us know and we’ll do our absolute best to accommodate you: events@booksmith.com.

Smack Dab Queer Open Mic Online!
2020-04-05 17:00 - 19:00 | CA
We are giving ONLINE Smack Dab Queer & Trans Open Mic a try. Meet us on Zoom at our usual time 🙂
Smack Dab Queer Open Mic is a free LGBTQ2SIA community event. Our slogan? “All ages, all genders, all the time.” We’re the longest running Q/T Open mic in the bay and we welcome YOU to join us to share: stories, poems, a song, dance, your visual art or your latest manifesto. Want to simply join us as friends, family and supportive allies in Queer and Trans community? Our hosts Larry-bob Roberts {he/him} and Dana Hopkins {she/her} welcome you to come on in!
If you’d like to perform at the open mic, please come sign up at 4:45 pm and bring five minutes of whatever you want to share {we do pay attention to time.}
For Zoom details and instructions about how to join in message us here at Smack Dab Queer Open Mic OR stay tuned to this space for those details. We will post them here on Sunday .

Litquake on Lockdown: Met Cute--The Happy Side of Gay Romance
2020-04-05 19:00 | CA
In these stressful times, everyone could use a little fun. Because sometimes loving goes best with laughter, four bestselling authors of gay romance read from their lighter works–J. Scott Coatsworth, Kim Fielding, Angel Martinez, and Amy Lane. Discussion and Q&A about why love stories help soothe frayed nerves and anxious minds to follow.
All authors’ books available from your favorite indie bookstores, order from bookshop.org!
Livestream link to be posted the morning of!

Speakers

Kim Fielding
Kim Fielding is the bestselling author of numerous m/m romance novels, novellas, and short stories. Like Kim herself, her work is eclectic, spanning genres such as contemporary, fantasy, paranormal, and historical. Her stories are set in alternate worlds, in 15th century Bosnia, in… Read More →

J. Scott Coatsworth
Scott lives with his husband Mark in a yellow bungalow in Sacramento. He was indoctrinated into fantasy and sci fi by his mother at the tender age of nine. He devoured her library, but as he grew up, he wondered where all the people like him were. He decided that if there weren’t… Read More →

AM
Angel Martinez
Angel Martinez is the pen name of a writer of several genres who writes both kinds of queer fiction – Science Fiction and Fantasy. (What? There are others?) Currently living part time in the hectic sprawl of northern Delaware, (and full time inside the author’s head) Angel has… Read More →

Amy Lane
Amy Lane has two kids who are mostly grown, two kids who aren’t, two cats, and two Chi-who-whats at large. She lives in a crumbling crapmansion with most of the children and a bemused spouse. She also has too damned much yarn, a penchant for action adventure movies, and a need to… Read More →

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight / Hex
2020-04-06 19:00 | The Bindery, 1727 Haight St, San Francisco , 94117, United States
The Bindery hosts Rebecca Dinerstein Knight (The Sunlit Night) for her new novel Hex. Please join us!
Nell Barber, an expelled PhD candidate in biological science, is exploring the fine line between poison and antidote, working alone to set a speed record for the detoxification of poisonous plants. Her mentor, Dr. Joan Kallas, is the hero of Nell’s heart. Nell frequently finds herself standing in the doorway to Joan’s office despite herself, mesmerized by Joan’s elegance, success, and spiritual force.
Surrounded by Nell’s ex, her best friend, her best friend’s boyfriend, and Joan’s buffoonish husband, the two scientists are tangled together at the center of a web of illicit relationships, grudges, and obsessions. All six are burdened by desire and ambition, and as they collide on the university campus, their attractions set in motion a domino effect of affairs and heartbreak.
Meanwhile, Nell slowly fills her empty apartment with poisonous plants to study, and she begins to keep a series of notebooks, all dedicated to Joan. She logs her research and how she spends her days, but the notebooks ultimately become a painstaking map of love. In a dazzling and unforgettable voice, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight has written a spellbinding novel of emotional and intellectual intensity.

“In her brilliant second novel, Rebecca Dinerstein Knight cannily explores both the poisons and the antidotes of love, ambition, mentorship, and yearning, and she does it all in prose so lively that I often found myself laughing with pleasure. Hex is some dark and joyous witchery.” – Lauren Groff, author of Florida
“Rebecca has written a book that examines our natural and absolutely astounding reactions to each other. The language of this novel is so finely tailored, so elegant yet organic, so absorbing that it takes the reader a moment to realize that this is not just a deliciously engaging tale of what it is like to be social and sexual, but that this writing is an actual incantation in itself. It is a beautiful, spooky spell that divides and processes our innate potential for poison or pleasure.” – Jenny Slate, actress and author of Little Weirds
“Hex reads like a botanist’s cross-breeding of The Secret History and Department of Speculation, full of brilliant and bodily obsession. Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is both a scientist and a magician, and she conjures this beautiful spell of a novel with total control.” – Emma Straub, author of Modern Lovers

Rebecca Dinerstein Knight is the author of the novel and screenplay The Sunlit Night, and a collection of poems, Lofoten. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker online, among others. Born and raised in New York City, she lives in New Hampshire. Photo by Nina Subin.

Please note: this event will be held at The Bindery, 1727 Haight.
This is a free, all-ages event. The bar opens at 6:30pm; event starts at 7pm.
RSVP appreciated but not required.
As with all of our events, seating may be limited; you can guarantee a seat by pre-purchasing the book below — when checking out, just be sure to include a note that you’d like to attend the event. If you cannot attend the event but would like to request a signed copy of Hex, order below and be sure to put your request in the comments field.
Accessibility is important to us! If you have special needs please let us know and we’ll do our absolute best to accommodate you: events@booksmith.com.

D. A. Powell and Paola Capó-García
2020-04-06 19:00 | Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Ave, Berkeley, 94704
Paola Capó-García is the author of CLAP FOR ME THAT’S NOT ME (Rescue Press, 2018), selected by D.A. Powell as the winner of Rescue Press’ 2017 Black Box Poetry Prize. Her poems have appeared in The Volta, Puerto Rico en mi corazón, Latino Book Review, jubilat, Poetry Society of America, Academy of American Poets, and others. Originally from San Juan, PR, she now lives in San Diego, CA, where she teaches 12th grade English.
D. A. Powell’s books include Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys and Repast, both from Graywolf Press. He received the 2019 John Updike Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He teaches at University of San Francisco.

Malcolm Harris - - Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit w/Robin Sloane
2020-04-06 19:00 | East Bay Booksellers, 5433 College Avenue, Oakland, 94618
EAST BAY BOOKSELLERS is excited to welcome Malcolm Harristo read from his new book, Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit on Tuesday, April 7th at 7pm. He will be joined in conversation by Robin Sloane.
From the writer hailed for giving voice to a generation in Kids These Days comes a bold rejection of a society in which inequality, student debt, and exploitation have come to define our lives
Our economic situation, political discourse, and future prospects have gotten much worse since a guy brought a sign that said “Shit is Fucked Up and Bullshit” to the Occupy Wall Street protests. We all knew what he meant then . . . but where are we now? And how has so much happened since the so-called end of history?
Malcolm Harris, one of our sharpest and most versatile critics, tackles these questions in over 30 new and selected pieces, examining everything from the lowering of wages to the rise of fascism–and the maddening cultural landscape in between. Along the way, he cops to being the guy who tricked protestors into thinking Radiohead was playing Occupy Wall Street; investigates why the robots that will replace us so often look like sex objects; and, most comfortingly, assures us that Marx saw the necessity of a crisis moment just like the one we’re in.
Rarely does a writer come along who can turn our world so thoroughly upside-down that we can finally understand it for what it really is, but Harris’s wry and biting essays do just that, and help us laugh at what we see.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Malcolm Harris is a freelance writer and an editor at The New Inquiry. His work has appeared in the New Republic, Bookforum, the Village Voice, n+1, and the New York Times Magazine. His first book was Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials. He lives in Philadelphia.
Robin Sloan grew up in Michigan and now splits his time between San Francisco and the Internet. He is the author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough.

Litquake on Lockdown: DIY Flash with the Flash Fiction Collective
2020-04-06 19:00 | CA
A reading of dozens of tiny stories from micro-fictionistas, including guest readers, plus a discussion of the Art of Flash and prompts—including visual prompts—to write and submit your own, with a selection to be published on the Flash Fiction Collective Facebook page.
All authors’ books available from your favorite indie bookstores, order from bookshop.org!
Livestream link to be posted the morning of!

Speakers

Jane Ciabattari
Jane Ciabattari, author of the short story collection Stealing the Fire, writes the Between the Lines column for BBC Culture. She is a former president of the National Book Critics Circle and a member of the Writers Grotto. Her reviews, interviews and cultural criticism have appeared… Read More →

Grant Faulkner
Grant Faulkner is the Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. He has published two books on writing, Pep Talks for Writers: 52 Insights and Actions to Boost Your Creative Mojo, and Brave the Page, a teen writing guide… Read More →

Kirstin Chen
Kirstin Chen‘s second novel, Bury What We Cannot Take (Little A, March 2018), was named a best book of the year by Entropy, Popsugar, and Book Bub, and a top pick of the season by Electric Literature, The Millions, The Rumpus, Harper’s Bazaar, and InStyle. She is also the aut… Read More →

Meg Pokrass
Meg Pokrass is the U.K. based author of six flash fiction collections, an award-winning collection of prose poetry, and a novella-in-flash from the Rose Metal Press. Her latest is a flash fiction collection called The Dog Seated Next To Me, published in 2019 by Pelekinesis Press. A new novella in flash The Smell Of Good Luck will be published in 2020 by Flash: The International Short Short Story Press. Meg’s work has been recently anthologized in two Norton Anthology Readers: New Micro (W.W. Norton & Co, 2018) and Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton & Co., 2015), The Best Small Fict… Read More →

Escape From Quarantine Reading - a weekly online thing
2020-04-06 19:00 - 20:30 | CA
a weekly digital gathering and poetry reading.
join our weekly zoom chat to meet with friends without having to leave your house. this is a space to just talk about what’s going on and how we feel about it and also share our work.
Topic: escape from quarantine reading
Time: Mar 23, 2020 07:00 PM Pacific Time (US and Canada)
Every week on Mon, until May 4, 2020, 7 occurrence(s)
Mar 23, 2020 07:00 PM
Mar 30, 2020 07:00 PM
Apr 6, 2020 07:00 PM
Apr 13, 2020 07:00 PM
Apr 20, 2020 07:00 PM
Apr 27, 2020 07:00 PM
May 4, 2020 07:00 PM
Join Zoom Meeting
https://us04web.zoom.us/j/293972268
Meeting ID: 293 972 268
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Meeting ID: 293 972 268
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