Why There Are Words is drawing raves and a full house of Marin, Sonoma, SF, and East Bay residents. Make plans now for March 11 to hear the following six authors read from their work on the theme of “Breaking Away.” Studio 333, 7 PM, $5 donation at the door.
Justin Allen has written on music, culture, travel, and politics for the Sacramento News and Review, Midtown Monthly, Ashcan Magazine, and The San Francisco Public Press. His short fiction has appeared in Sussurrus, Transfer, and Right Hand Pointing. He has been self-publishing ‘zines and chapbooks since the late 90s. His most recent chapbook is Satellite Memories. He studied creative writing at San Francisco State University and resides in Oakland.
Natalie Baszile is the author of the novel-in-progress, “The Grinding Season,” the story of a woman and her daughter who leave Los Angeles and strike out for Louisiana where the woman has inherited a sugar cane farm. “The Grinding Season” won the Hurston Wright College Writer’s Award and was a runner up for the Faulkner Pirate’s Alley competition for novels-in-progress. Natalie has had artists’ residencies at the Ragdale Foundation where, in 2008, she was awarded the Sylvia Clare Brown fellowship. Excerpts of “The Grinding Season” have been published in CAIRN and ZYZZYVA. She is a fiction editor at The Cortland Review and a member of the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto. Natalie is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers where she received a Holden Minority Scholarship. She has a MA in Afro-American Studies from UCLA and a BA in English from UC Berkeley. Natalie lives in San Francisco with her husband and two daughters.
Ann Dickinson has blogged about the San Francisco Bay watershed for KQED, held the Sara Shallenberger Brown Fellowship in Environmental Literature at the University of Virginia, and spent a year as a research assistant studying ecology in a Panamanian rainforest. She works in the public information office at a local water agency and is at work on a Gothic natural history novel set in Victorian England.
Dylan Landis is the author of Normal People Don’t Live Like This, a Newsday best book of 2009. She has published short stories in Tin House, Bomb and Best American Nonrequired Reading, won a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, and, in a past life, was a newspaper reporter. Spiritually Californian, she lives in DC. See her website for more info.
The New York Times called Leslie Larson’s second novel, Breaking Out of Bedlam, “A kick.” Publishers Weekly said, “Delightful…Plenty of heart and humor.” And the San Francisco Chronicle called it “A good read: funny, sad and easy.” Leslie s critically acclaimed first novel, Slipstream, was a BookSense Notable Book, a Target Breakout Book, winner of the Astraea Award for Fiction, and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her work has appeared in Faultline, the East Bay Express, Writer magazine, and the Women’s Review of Books, among other publications. She has been a writer-in-residence at Hedgebrook and an instructor at the Macondo Writers Workshop and San Diego Ink. She lives in Berkeley. See her website for more.
Ransom Stephens is a professor of particle physics turned writer and speaker. He has worked on experiments at SLAC, Fermilab, CERN, and Cornell, discovered a new type of matter, and was on the team that discovered the top quark. He is the author of over 200 articles on impossible subjects like quantum physics, the future of publishing, and parenting teenagers. His first novel, The God Patent, is set in the battle between science and religion over the nature of the soul and the origin of the universe. Ransom lives in Petaluma. He has a website.
