Why There Are Words Reading June 13: Transition
Ch-ch-ch-changes, make that Transition. That’s our theme for June 13. What will remain the same at Why There Are Words is the quality of the readers. Join us for the following writers and authors reading from their works. Doors open at 7 pm; readings begin at 7:15. $10. You’ll want extra cash for books and booze.
Melanie Abrams
Melanie Abrams is the author of the novel Playing. She teaches creative writing at UC Berkeley and received her MFA from UNC Greensboro. Her novel has been translated in Italian, French, German, and Hebrew.
Jon Boilard
Jon Boilard was born and raised in Western Massachussetts. He has been living in Northern California since 1986. More than 50 of his short stories have been published in literary journals in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Asia. A River Closely Watched is his first novel, which has been shortlisted for the Northern California Book Award.
Seth Harwood
Seth Harwood’s new novel In Broad Daylight (Thomas & Mercer) features a new character for him, FBI agent Jess Harding. In the novel, she chases a vicious serial killer’s bloody trail across the summer planes and white nights of Alaska. He has also published three other crime novels—Young Junius, This Is Life, and the bestselling Jack Wakes Up – as well as a collection of stories, A Long Way from Disney. He holds an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and teaches creative writing at Stanford and CCSF. Serialized versions of his work as free audio podcasts have been downloaded over one million times via iTunes, Podiobooks and at his website.
Jen Michalski
Jen Michalski is the author of the novel The Tide King (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), the short story collections From Here (Aqueous Books 2013) and Close Encounters (So New 2007), and a collection of novellas, Could You Be With Her Now 2013). She is the founding editor of the literary quarterly jmww, a co-host of The 510 Readings, and also is the editor of the anthology City Sages: Baltimore, which Baltimore Magazine called a “Best of Baltimore” in 2010. She lives in Baltimore and tweets here.
Vicente R. Viray
Vicente R. Viray’s writing has appeared in the Greensboro Review, California Northern, Stymie: A Journal of Sport & Literature, Chelsea Station, Tattoo Highway, and elsewhere. He holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco. He lives in San Francisco with his partner Paul and is currently working on a short story collection.
Jon Wells
Jon Wells is a designer, writer, and filmmaker living in Mill Valley. In his life he has been a soldier, a Marine, a mountaineer, a rock climber, a white water kayaker and a sailor. His film, At the Epicenter of the Epidemic, concerning the HIV/AIDS crisis in Honduras was accepted at the Tiburon International Film Festival. He is an alum of the Squaw Valley Community of writers. He Died All Day Long is his first novel.
Rob Yardumian
Rob Yardumian received his MFA from Warren Wilson College in 1997. The Sound of Songs Across the Water is his first novel. His short fiction has been published in The Southern Review, The New Orleans Review, The Antioch Review, The Madison Review, Sycamore Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, and Porcupine Literary Arts. Before receiving his MFA, Rob spent ten years in the music business, including stints as director of marketing for a record label and creative director for a publishing company. Currently, he lives in Portland, OR.
Mariah K. Young
Mariah K. Young was born in San Leandro, and spent her childhood in the East Bay and in Lahaina, Hawai’i. She graduated with an English degree from California State University East Bay, where she won the inaugural RV Williams fiction prize. Her first short story collection, Masha’allah and Other Stories, received the James D. Houston Award in 2012, honoring books by writers whose voices reflect humane values and a thoughtful literary exploration of California, Hawai’i, and the West. Mariah currently lives and teaches writing in Los Angeles, and is hard at work on a novel.
Why There Are Words celebrated its third year in January 2013, takes place every second Thursday of the month, and is the brainchild of curator Peg Alford Pursell.
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents “Give Me”
Join us for Why There Are Words, December 13 at 333 Caledonia St., Studio 333 in Sausalito, 7 pm, $5. An enchanting night of readings that will leave you chanting, Give me more!
Gabriel Blackwell
Gabriel Blackwell is the author of Shadow Man: A Biography of Lewis Miles Archer and Critique of Pure Reason, a collection of essays and fictions. His work has appeared in Conjunctions, Tin House, Puerto del Sol, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere. He is the reviews editor of The Collagist and a contributor to BIG OTHER.
Laura E. Davis
Laura E. Davis is the author of the chapbook Braiding the Storm (Finishing Line Press). Her poem “Widowing” won the 2012 Crab Creek Review Poetry Contest, judged by Dorianne Laux. Other poems and reviews are featured or forthcoming in Mason’s Road, Right Hand Pointing, The Rumpus, A-Minor, Super Arrow, and Redactions, among others. She is the founding editor of Weave Magazine, and teaches poetry writing, translation, and recitation in San Francisco, where she lives with her partner, Sal.
Steve De Jarnatt
Steve De Jarnatt grew up in the small logging town of Longview, Washington. He attended Occidental College, graduated from The Evergreen State College, and recently completed the Creative Writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles after a long career as a writer and director in film and television. He counts among other credits the indie cult film, “Miracle Mile.” His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Meridian, The Cincinnati Review, The Santa Moncia Review, The Best American Short Stories 2009, and New Stories from the Midwest.
Valerie Fioravanti
Valerie Fioravanti is the author of Garbage Night at the Opera, winner of the 2011 Chandra Prize for Short Fiction. Her fiction, essays, and prose poems have appeared in many literary journals, including North American Review, Cimarron Review, and Hunger Mountain. She was a Fulbright Fellow in Creative Writing, and is at work on a novel set in Italy. She teaches in private workshops in Sacramento and as a writing coach, and runs the award-winning reading series Stories on Stage.
Anne Galjour
Anne Galjour is an award-winning playwright and actor. Her playwriting credits include the upcoming world premiere of Turtles & Alligators, a Cajun Kitchen Comedy at the Bayou Playhouse in Spring 2013; Bird in the Hand; Okra; and The Queen of the Sea. Her solo performance credits include You Can’t Get There from Here, Hurricane Mauvais Temps, Alligator Tales, and The Krewe of Neptune. Awards for her work include the Bay Area Theater Critics Circle Award – Best Original Script; the Will Glickman Playwriting Award and Bay Area Theater Critics Award – Best Original Script; theAmerican Theatre Critics Association Osborn Award for Emerging Playwright; the Bay Area Theater Critics Circle – Best Solo Performance; the S.F. Solo Mio Festival – Outstanding Solo Artist; and the S.F. Bay Guardian “Goldie” for outstanding performance artist. She is a lecturer in the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University.
Daniel Handler
Daniel Handler is the author of the novels The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth, Adverbs, and Why We Broke Up, recently awarded a Michael L. Printz Honor. As Lemony Snicket, he is the author of far too many books for children, including Who Could That Be At This Hour?, the first volume in his new series, All The Wrong Questions.
Arisa White
(photo by Samantha Florio)
Arisa White is the author of the debut collection Hurrah’s Nest, the 2012 winner of the San Francisco Book Festival Award for Poetry. She is a Cave Canem fellow, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and an editor of Her Kind, the official blog for VIDA: Women in Literary Arts. Her second collection, A Penny Saved, is forthcoming from Willow Books.
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents
Join us at Studio 333 in Sausalito, November 8. Our promise: A magical night of stories from seven remarkable writers on the theme, Promise. 333 Caledonia Street, Sausalito, 7 pm. $5.
Fred Arroyo
Fred Arroyo is the author of Western Avenue and Other Fictions (University of Arizona Press, 2012), as well as The Region of Lost Names (U of Arizona P, 2008). Named one of the Top Ten New Latino Authors to Watch (and Read) in 2009 by LatinoStories.com, he is also a recipient of an Individual Artist Grant from the Indiana Arts Commission. Fred has published fiction, poetry, and essays in various literary journals and in the anthologies The Colors of Nature (Milkweed 2011) and Camino del Sol: Fifteen Years of Latina and Latino Writing (University of Arizona 2010). Currently, he is completing a book of essays in which he lyrically meditates on work, reading and writing, migration and place—sources of creativity arising from his life and work in the Midwest, growing up bilingual on the East Coast, and then being caught between urban and rural worlds. He is also working on a novel set primarily in the Caribbean. Fred lives in Vermillion, South Dakota, where he teaches fiction and creative nonfiction in the MA/PhD Program in Creative Writing, as well in the undergraduate program at the University of South Dakota. Fred walks as much as possible, enjoys bike rides with his nine-year-old son, and finds as of late that driving in the upper Midwest is the tonic that brings writing and life together.
Stacy Bierlein
Stacy Bierleinis the author of the story collection A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends and a co-editor of the short fiction anthology Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience. Her award-winning anthology of international fiction, A Stranger Among Us: Stories of Cross Cultural Collision and Connection, is used in university classrooms across the country. She is a founding editor of Other Voices Books and the Morgan Street International Novel Series. Her articles about writing, publishing, and the arts appear on various websites, including The Rumpus. She lives in Southern California.
Leslie Ingham
Leslie Ingham was classically educated at St. John’s College in Annapolis and has her MA in Rhetoric and Composition from the University of Maryland. Her work has appeared in Fiction 365 and Energeia, and been recognized by Narrative Magazine. She is a founding member of San Francisco’s Portuguese Artists Colony, where she regularly reads her work. She is also an editor at PAC: Books, and is currently at work on a novel.
Patricia Ann McNair
Patricia Ann McNair’s collection of short stories is The Temple of Air. She has lived 98 percent of her life in the Midwest, where she’s managed a gas station, sold pots and pans door-to-door, tended bar and breaded mushrooms, worked on the trading floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, and taught aerobics. Today she is an associate professor in the Fiction Writing Department of Columbia College Chicago, where she received a nomination for the Carnegie Foundation’s US Professor of the Year. Her collection of stories, called “a beautiful book, intense and original,” by Audrey Niffenegger, has received a number of honors, among them the winner of Southern Illinois University’s Devil’s Kitchen Reading Award and the Society of Midland Authors Finalist Award.
Zack Rogow
Zack Rogow’s seventh book of poems is My Mother and the Ceiling Dancers, (Kattywompus Press, February 2012). He is editor and/or translator of nineteen books or plays. His writing has appeared in a variety of magazines, from American Poetry Review to Zyzzyva. His translations from French include work by Colette, George Sand, and André Breton. Currently he teaches in the low-residency MFA at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. His blog is titled Advice for Writers.
Jenn Scott
Jenn Scott’s stories have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Bellingham Review, The Gettysburg Review, Seattle Review, Santa Monica Review, Cream City Review, Phoebe, Confrontation, Gulf Coast, Juked, New South, and The Los Angeles Review. She lives with four cats and a husband in Oakland, California where she obsesses over football and is presumably at work on her first novel.
Rayme Waters
Rayme Waters is the author of the debut novel The Angels’ Share. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Dzanc Best of the Web Award. Most recently, her work has appeared in The Summerset Review, The Rumpus, and The Meadowland Review. Born in San Francisco, she grew up in Northern California and the city of Linköping, Sweden.
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series rocks Litquake and more!
October is Roctober with Litquake! We have readings galore for you this month!
FIRST UP, join us for our regularly scheduled event at Studio 333 in Sausalito, October 11. 7pm. This very special show features writers from the audience who entered their names in the drawings over the months. Studio 333 in Sausalito, 7-9pm. $5.
Rosaleen Bertolino
Rosaleen Bertolino‘s fiction has appeared in The MacGuffin, Pure Francis, Prick of the Spindle, and Southern California Review, among others. Her awards include a Marin Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.
April Eberhardt
April Eberhardt joined the literary world as head reader for Zoetrope: All-Story, a literary magazine, followed by five years as an agent with two San Francisco-based literary agencies. She holds an MBA from Boston University in Marketing and Finance, a BA from Hamilton (Kirkland) College in Anthropology and French, and a CPLF degree from the University of Paris. She divides her time between SF, New York and Paris.
Audrey Ferber
Audrey Ferber received an MFA in Writing from Mills College. Her short stories have been anthologized in Virtually Now, Eating Our Hearts Out, and An Intricate Weave. Her essays have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Travelers’ Tales for Women, and most recently in FRONTIERS: A Journal of Women Studies. She has written book reviews for the San Jose Mercury News and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is at work on a memoir about aging, marriage, and dance classes.
Charles Kruger
Charles Kruger is “The Storming Bohemian” and creator of the website “Storming Bohemia,” which has been mentioned in the New York Times for its coverage of the San Francisco literary scene. He is also the editor and lead reviewer for TheatreStorm, a regular contributor to LitSeen, and an occasional book reviewer for The Rumpus. He is also a painter, whose work can be seen online.
Alexandria Melton
Beverly Morrison
Alexandria Melton has spent over a decade writing for other folks in the advertising industry. A recent transplant to Sausalito, she has published absolutely nothing and red-lined just about everything. She has a penchant for the flagrant use of em dashes — really, and possesses truly brilliant Sharpie skills. She is tragically poor, looking for the next great hardcover.
Robert Ofsevit
Beverly Morrison has a B.A. in Creative Writing from SF State. She is a truck driver living in Petaluma with her partner of 16 years, two birds, a gecko, and a cat. She is building a collection of flash fiction stories and specializing in haiku.
Robert Ofsevit saves energy for a living, and expends energy improving his writing, sailing and drawing skills. His BA thesis was published in the Undergraduate Journal of Asian Studies, Vol V, 1991, a highpoint in his literary career.
Alison Owings
Alison Owings is author of the Indian Voices: Listening to Native Americans (Rutgers 2011), a nearly decade-long labor. It appears in paperback in November. Her previous serious books are Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray and Frauen: German Women Recall the Third Reich. Her previous not-so-serious book is The Wander Woman’s Phrasebook: How to Meet or Avoid People in Three Romance Languages. She lectures and teaches about the subjects of her serious books.
Barbara Solomon
Barbara Solomon is a retired attorney, painter, and community volunteer in Marin. Her current project, a short story collection, may turn into a novel.
Townsend Walker
Townsend Walker is a writer living in San Francisco. His stories have been published in over fifty literary journals and included in six anthologies. One story won the SLO NightWriters story contest, and two were nominated for the PEN/O.Henry Award. Four were performed at the New Short Fiction Series in Hollywood.
~
NEXT, join us for everyone’s favorite Litquake’s Litcrawl! Litcrawl: Why There Are Words Presents. October 13. 7:15. (Phase 2) Aldea Home, 890 Valencia Street, SF.
Pam Houston
photo credit: Adan Karsten
Pam Houston is the award-winning author of Contents May Have Shifted, Cowboys Are My Weakness, Waltzing the Cat, A Little More About Me, andSight Hound. Her stories have been selected for the Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and the Best American Short Stories of the Century. She teaches in the graduate writing program at University of California, Davis.
Joshua Mohr
Joshua Mohr is the author of the novelsTermite Parade, which was an Editors’ Choice on The New York Times Best Seller List; Some Things that Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine‘s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a SF Chronicle bestseller; and the brand new Damascus (October 2011). He has published numerous short stories and essays in publications such asThe New York Times Book Review, 7×7, the Bay Guardian, ZYZZYVA, andThe Rumpus, among many others. He lives in San Francisco and teaches in the MFA program at USF.
Michelle Richmond
Michelle Richmond is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Year of Fog, currently under option with Battleplan Productions; the novels No One You Know and Dream of the Blue Room; and the award-winning story collection The Girl in the Fall-Away Dress. In Fall 2012, she held the Catherine Julie Cunningham Chair at Notre Dame de Namur University. She is the founder and publisher of Fiction Attic Press.
Susan Steinberg
Susan Steinberg is the author of the story collections Hydroplane and The End of Free Love, and her third collection, Spectacle, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press. Her stories have appeared in McSweeney’s, Conjunctions, The Gettysburg Review, American Short Fiction, Boulevard, Quarterly West, Denver Quarterly, and The Massachusetts Review, and she has been the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a National Magazine Award. She was the 2010 United States Artists Ziporyn Fellow in Literature. She has a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA in English from The University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is Professor of English at the University of San Francisco.
Ryan Van Meter
Ryan Van Meter is the author of the essay collection, If You Knew Then What I Know Now (2011). His work has appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Iowa Review, The Normal School Magazine, Ninth Letter, and Fourth Genre, among others, and has been selected for anthologies including Best American Essays 2009. A recent finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, he has also been awarded residencies by The MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.
~
BUT WAIT, that’s not all! Come out early (you know what they say about early birds) to the Litcrawl (October 13) at 6pm to Four Barrel Coffee, 375 Valencia Street, SF for Tzara’s Hat: Five Writers, Five New Works.
Tristan Tzara knew something about the creative power of community and constraint. During a Dadaist rally in the 1920s, Tzara offered to create a work on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. The exercise became a well-known surrealism technique, and when applied to flash fiction it works quite effectively by pulling the words from a hat at timed intervals, which must be immediately incorporated into the story being drafted. Come hear the results, at Tzara’s Hat, where five writers will read five new flash fiction works of no more than 750 words.
Peg Alford Pursell‘s fiction has appeared in the Los Angeles Review, Staccato Fiction, Annalemma, Emprise Review & others. She’s an editor & lit reading series curator.
Daniel Levin Becker is reviews editor of The Believer and the youngest member of the Paris-based Oulipo collective.
Ethel Rohan is the author of Hard to Say and Cut Through the Bone. She has published in World Literature Today, Tin House Online, The Rumpus, & elsewhere.
Janey Smith is the writer of The Snow Poems (forthcoming, NAP) and Animals (Plain Wrap Press). Her writing may be found all over the internet.
Olga Zilberbourg writes fiction set in San Francisco, St. Petersburg, Russia, and places between. Her work’s appeared in Narrative Magazine, Santa Monica Review, HTMLGiant, and others.
~LAST, Bonus! Join us for Litquake’s Barely Published Authors: October 6 at 7pm $5 at the door, when Nancy Au reads, as selected by Why There Are Words & North Bay Writers.
//
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents “Ignored”
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents the following readers on the theme Ignored September 13 at Studio 333 in Sausalito, 7-9pm. $5. A stellar night of readings with seven incredible authors? Now that’s something you can’t ignore!
David Booth
David Booth is the author Peer Participation and Software, a book about crowd-sourcing and democracy (MIT Press, 2010). His fiction has appeared in many print and online journals, including Washington Square, The Missouri Review, and The Farallon Review. David was a creative writing instructor at the University of San Francisco for 10 years. He now teaches humanities at Gateway High School in San Francisco’s Fillmore District. He has just completed the first draft of a novel called “The History of Adoption” that explores child adoption and the teaching of literacy to adolescents in the United States.
Traci Chee
Traci Chee is an always-writer and sometimes-teacher. She has a graduate degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University and is looking forward to earning her teaching credential. In recent years her work has been published in The Big Stupid Review and ABJECTIVE. Her collection of short stories Consonant Sounds for Fish Songs is forthcoming from Aqueous Books. She lives in Northern California, where she keeps a fast dog and a weekly blog. She likes fish and ships.
Lindsey Crittenden
Lindsey Crittenden is the author of two books: The Water Will Hold You: A Skeptic Learns to Pray and The View From Below: Stories. Her personal essays—on everything from visiting a group of lifers at San Quentin to the pitfalls of too much California sunshine—have appeared in The New York Times, Image, Real Simple, Bon Appétit, East Bay Express, and Best American Spiritual Writing. Her fiction has won national awards and been published in Glimmer Train, Bellingham Review, Quarterly West, and other publications. She teaches writing at UC Berkeley Extension and through the Glen Online, blogs weekly, and is at work on a novel.
Erich Origen
Erich Origen is a New York Times bestselling humorist. His first book, Goodnight Bush, which he co-created with friend Gan Golan,a bedtime story about the Bush Administration, became a breakout hit in 2008, and the book’s words were sung by jubilant choirs across the country. His second book (also created with Golan), The Adventures of Unemployed Man, a superhero parody about the economic crisis, was an international bestseller and one of the best-reviewed graphic novels of the year. The duo’s latest book is Don’t Let the Republican Drive the Bus! Origen has a special connection to this book’s soul: His mother was a charter bus driver whose livelihood was devastated by Republican union-busting. He studied film and television at the University of Southern California, where he won the Bernard Kantor Award for Academic Excellence. You can follow his blog here.
Caroline Paul
Caroline Paul is the author of Fighting Fire, a memoir of her career as a San Francisco firefighter, and East Wind, Rain, an historical novel that takes place on the Hawaiian island of Niihau at the start of World War II. Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology will be published in April 2013.
Sarah Stone
Sarah Stone is the author of the novel The True Sources of the Nile and co-author of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. Her writing has appeared in Ploughshares, StoryQuarterly, The Future Dictionary of America, the Believer Book of Writers Talking to Writers, Dedicated to the People of Darfur: Writings on Fear, Risk, and Hope, and A Kite in the Wind: Fiction Writers on Their Craft, among other places.She has taught in Seoul, in Bujumbura, at San Francisco State University, at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the MFA in Writing and Consciousness, first at New College of California and later at California Institute of Integral Studies. She teaches in the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Rebecca Wilson
Rebecca Wilson is the author of the memoir A House with No Roof —After My Father’s Assassination, A Memoir, (Counterpoint Press, 2011), with an introduction by Anne Lamott. She was born in San Francisco and raised in Bolinas, California. She graduated from Scripps Women’s College Phi Beta Kappa and traveled to Scotland on a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. During her time in Scotland she published her first book, Sleeping with Monsters: Conversations with Scottish and Irish Female Poets.
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents “Underneath”
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents the following readers on the theme Underneath August 9 at Studio 333 in Sausalito, 7-9pm. $5. Join us for an extraordinary night as seven authors reveal worlds underneath words.
Melissa Cistaro
Melissa Cistaro’s stories have been published in the New Ohio Review, Brevity, Anderbo.com, Sparkle and Blink, the KQED Perspectives series, and in the anthology Cherished: 21 Writers on Animals They Have Loved and Lost. Her essay “The Undertow” was a semi-finalist in Children’s Hospital & Research Center Oakland’s Notes & Words essay contest.
David Corbett
David Corbett is the author of four novels: The Devil’s Redhead, Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar), and Do They Know I’m Running (Spinetingler Award, Best Novel Rising Star Category 2011). His short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, with two stories selected for Best American Mystery Stories (2009 and 2011). In May 2012, Mysterious Press/Open Road Media re-issued his first two novels plus a story collection in ebook format, and Penguin will publish his textbook on the craft of characterization The Art of Character in January 2013.
Jennifer duBois
Jennifer duBois is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and recently completed a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University. Her fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Playboy, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, ZYZZYVA, The Northwest Review, and elsewhere. Her first novel, A Partial History of Lost Causes, was published by The Dial Press in March 2012.
C.J. Hribal is the author of the novel The Company Car, which received the Anne Powers Book Award, and the novel American Beauty. He’s also the author of the short fiction collections Matty’s Heart and The Clouds in Memphis, which won the AWP Award for Short Fiction, and he edited The Boundaries of Twilight: Czecho-Slovak Writing from the New World. He has held Fellowships from the NEA, the Bush, and from the Guggenheim Foundations, and has twice won the Sternig Award for Short Fiction. He is the Louise Edna Goeden Professor of English at Marquette University, and is a member of the fiction faculty at the Warren Wilson College MFA Program for Writers.
Kara Levy
Kara Levy’s fiction appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Mississippi Review Prize Issue 2009, TriQuarterly, Zen Monster, Drunken Boat, the Huffington Post, and Narrative, where she was a winner of the 30Below Prize for writers under 30. A graduate of the MFA program at Columbia University, she was a recent Steinbeck Fellow in Fiction at the Center for Steinbeck Studies in San Jose. She lives in San Francisco.
Wendy Merrill
Wendy Merrill’s memoir, Falling into Manholes: The Memoir of a Bad/Good Girl (Putnam 2008), was sold at the Maui Writers Conference in 2006. Her personal essays also appear in the anthology Single Woman of a Certain Age (Inner Ocean, 2006) and, Single State of the Union (Seal Press, 2007). She is described by Anne Lamott as “a wonderful new voice — smart, funny, and wildly real.” She founded WAM Marketing Group, a unique marketing communications company based in Sausalito, where she currently lives above ground and beyond her means.
Frances Stroh
Frances Stroh is an installation artist turned writer who lived and worked in London for two years on a Fulbright Grant. She is writing a memoir entitled “Fire-Brewed: The Fall of the Stroh’s Beer Family” about her family who made beer in Detroit for a hundred and fifty years. Her work has appeared in Rosebud and on her blog, Irritable Brain Syndrome. She struggles mightily to employ Twitter in creative ways but enjoys the process.
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents “After All”
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents the following readers on the theme After All July 12 at Studio 333 in Sausalito, 7-9pm. $5. Join us as seven authors share stories big and small. It’s why there are words after all!
Lauren Becker
Lauren Becker is editor of Corium Magazine. Her work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, Opium, Hobart, Juked and some other nice places. Her collection of short fiction is included in the anthology Shut Up/Look Pretty (Tiny Hardcore Press, 2012). She lives in Oakland, where she hosts the reading series, East Bay on the Brain. She has never been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Joe Clifford
Joe Clifford’s work has appeared in Big Bridge, the Connecticut Review, Drunken Boat, Fringe, Opium, Thuglit, Word Riot, and Underground Voices, among others. A collection of short stories, Choice Cuts, and his noir novel Wake the Undertaker will be published by Snubnose Press this year. He is the producer of Lip Service West, a “gritty, real, raw” reading series in Oakland. He has been to jail but never prison.
Sere Prince Halverson
Sere Prince Halverson is the author of The Underside of Joy (Dutton, January 2012), translated into fifteen languages. She worked as a copywriter and creative director for 20 years while she wrote fiction and raised kids. She and her husband have four children, and live in Northern California.
Joy Lanzendorfer
Joy Lanzendorfer’s work has appeared in Hotel Amerika, Necessary Fiction, Word Riot, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, Entrepreneur, Bust, and others. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, where she served on the editorial board for Fourteen Hills. Her chapbook The End of the World as I Know It won runner-up for the Michael Rubin Chapbook Award at SFSU. For the last five years, she has been a judge in the Writer’s Digest Self-Published Book Awards. She just completed her first novel.
Ericka Lutz
Ericka Lutz is the author of the recently published novel The Edge of Maybe. Her seven non-fiction books include On the Go with Baby and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Stepparenting, and her short fiction and creative non-fiction have appeared in numerous books, anthologies, and journals, including Literary Mama, Because I Love Her, Paris: A Love Story, and Green Mountains Review. She won the Boston Fiction Festival in 2006 with her story “Deer Story,” and was a two-time fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her full-length solo show “A Widow’s To-Do List” is in development. She teaches writing at U.C. Berkeley. She is currently writing a second novel based in Oakland about family ties… but this one has ghosts.
Aimee Phan
Aimee Phan is the author of The Reeducation of Cherry Truong (St. Martin’s Press, March 2012). Her first book, We Should Never Meet, was awarded the Association for Asian American Studies Book Award in Prose, a Notable Book by the Kiryama Prize in fiction, and a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, USA Today, and The Oregonian, among others. A 2010 National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellow, she received her MFA from the University of Iowa, where she won a Maytag Fellowship. She teaches in the MFA Program in Writing and Writing and Literature Program at California College of the Arts.
Eric Sasson
Eric Sasson’s story collection Margins of Tolerance (Livingston Press, May 2012) was the 2011 Tartt First Fiction Award runner-up. His story “Floating” was a finalist for the Robert Olen Butler prize. Other publication credits include Explosion Proof, BLOOM, Nashville Review, The Puritan, Liquid Imagination, Alligator Juniper, Trans, The Ledge, MARY magazine, and THE2NDHAND, among others. He’s taught fiction writing at the Sackett Street Writers Workshop and lives in Brooklyn.
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents “Animal”
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents the following readers on the theme Animal June 14 at Studio 333 in Sausalito, 7-9pm. $5. Animalis. Latin for “having breath.” Join us for a night of readings that will surely take your breath away!
Tami Anderson
Tami Anderson’s fiction has been published in Other Voices, Passages North, and Soundings East. Her work was selected for a stand-alone performance of The New Short Fiction Series, Los Angeles’s longest running spoken word series. She was a 2006 recipient of the Barbara Jackson Fellowship to the Tomales Bay Writer’s Conference.
Dani Burlison
Dani Burlison is a staff writer at the Pacific Sun, columnist at McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and book reviewer for The Los Angeles Review. Her writing appears in The Rumpus, Hip Mama Magazine, Rad Dad Zine, Bike Monkey, Elephant Journal, The North Bay Bohemian, and elsewhere. She has essays forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, Plowshares, and two anthologies: The People’s Apocalypse and It’s All in Her Head: Women Making Peace With Troubled Minds. She is the co-founder of Petals and Bones zine and writing workshops, and lives in Sonoma County.
Carolyn Cooke
Carolyn Cooke’s Daughters of the Revolution was listed among the best novels of 2011 by the San Francisco Chronicle and The New Yorker Magazine. Her short fiction has appeared in AGNI, The Paris Review, and two volumes each of Best American Short Stories and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards. These stories were collected in The Bostons, which won the PEN/Bingham Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway. She teaches in the MFA writing program at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San Francisco.
Bruce Genaro is a graduate of the MFA in Writing Program at the University of San Francisco, and he has the scars to prove it. His short stories, essays, profiles, and reviews have appeared in numerous obscure and hard to find literary magazines and journals, as well as more notable venues like the Huffington Post. You can read his most recent publication, “Workshopped to Death,” in the 2012 issue of The Alembic, the annual literary journal of Providence College. He is currently working on a book about The Outsiders, a group of seven Bay Area plein air painters, and a novel about the last prince of Italy.
Allison Landa
Allison Landa is a Berkeley-based fiction and memoir writer. Her work has been featured in Salon Magazine, Prick of the Spindle, Swill Magazine, Toasted Cheese, Pindeldyboz, and Defenestration, among other venues, and featured at reading series including Lip Service West, Quiet Lightning, Pints and Prose, and Porchlight SF. She has been a resident at The MacDowell Colony, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and The Julia and David White Artists’ Colony. She earned her MFA in fiction writing at St. Mary’s College of California.
Matt Runkle
Matt Runkle is a writer, cartoonist, and book artist. His work has been featured in The Collagist, Beecher’s, Monkeybicycle, and on BOMBlog. He has read at venues ranging from SOMArts and Brooklyn’s Unnameable Books to the Headlands Center for the Arts. The third issue of his zine, Runx Tales, is due out later this year. Brooklyn Arts Press will publish a collection of his short fiction in 2013, and he is looking for a publisher for his novel,”Twos”, which was a semifinalist for the Noemi Book Award.
James Tipton
James Tipton is the author of Annette Vallon, A Novel of the French Revolution, a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a Barnes and Noble Discover Pick. Born and raised in Berkeley, he has a PhD in English from the University of California, Davis. He has been a lecturer at UC Davis and at the University of Bordeaux, France, and has taught English and creative writing at the College of Marin since 1993.
Justin Torres was raised in upstate New York. His work has appeared in Granta, Tin House, and Glimmer Train. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he was the recipient of a Rolón Fellowship in Literature from United States Artists and is a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford. Among many other things, he has worked as a farmhand, a dog walker, a creative writing teacher, and a bookseller.
Why There Are Words May 10: “Unforgotten”
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents the following readers on the theme Unforgotten May 10 at Studio 333 in Sausalito, 7-9pm. $5. Join us as these authors create another unforgettable night. That’s Why There Are Words.
Dan Coshnear
Daniel Coshnear is the author of Jobs & Other Preoccupations (Helicon Nine 2001), winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Award. He lives in Guerneville where he works at a group home for men and women with mental illnesses and teaches at various SF Bay Area university extension programs. He hopes to publish a new collection of stories in 2012 with Kelly’s Cove Press.
Rob Davidson
Rob Davidson is the author of The Farther Shore: Stories (Bear Star Press, 2012), The Master and the Dean: The Literary Criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells, and Field Observations: Stories. He has won the 2009 Camber Press Fiction Award, a Pushcart Prize nomination, and been twice selected as the artist-in-residence at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony. His work has appeared in Zyzzyva, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Indiana Review, The Normal School, New Delta Review, and elsewhere. Davidson teaches creative writing and American literature at CSU Chico.
Cheryl Dumesnil
Cheryl Dumesnil’s memoir, Love Song for Baby X: How I Stayed (Almost) Sane on the Rocky Road to Parenthood, will be released by Ig Publishing in 2013. Her collection of poems In Praise of Falling won the 2008 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. She is the editor of Hitched! Wedding Stories from San Francisco City Hall and co-editor, with Kim Addonizio, of Dorothy Parker’s Elbow: Tattoos on Writers, Writers on Tattoos. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, Indiana Review, Calyx, and Many Mountains Moving, among others. Her essays have appeared in Hip Mama, MamaZine, and Literary Mama. She is a regular contributor to Out and Around: Writing From the Crossroads of Suburbia, Parenthood, and Lesbian Life.
Stefanie Freele
Stefanie Freele’s newest book is the story collection Surrounded by Water (Press 53, March 2012). She is also the author of the story collection Feeding Strays. She recently won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, and her stories are published or forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Sou’wester, Mid-American Review, Western Humanities Review, Quarterly West, The Florida Review, American Literary Review, Night Train, Edge, and Pank. She is the fiction editor of the Los Angeles Review.
Daniel Handler
Daniel Handler is the author of the novel Why We Broke Up, (Little and Brown, December 2011), awarded a Michael L. Printz Honor, as well as The Basic Eight, Watch Your Mouth , and Adverbs. He has scripted two movies, Rick and Kill The Poor, and he is working on a musical with Stephin Merritt commissioned by the Royal Shakespeare Company. As Lemony Snicket, he is the author of many books for children.
Leota Higgins
Leota Higgins has an MFA from the University of San Francisco and is currently at work on her first novel “Still Searching,” the first chapter of which has been published by Achiote Press in their debut story collection Routes.
Julia Flynn Siler
Julia Flynn Siler is the bestselling author of two works of narrative history, Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure and The House of Mondavi: The Rise and Fall of an American Wine Dynasty. An award-winning journalist and former foreign correspondent, she was a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal and Business Week and also wrote extensively for the New York Times. Her first book, The House of Mondavi, became a New York Times bestseller and was named a finalist for a 2008 James Beard Foundation award and a 2008 Gerald Loeb Award for Distinguished Business Reporting. Her second book, Lost Kingdom, became a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller shortly after being published in early 2012 and has won critical praise.
Lysley Tenorio
Lysley Tenorio is the author of the brand new debut collection of stories Monstress (Ecco Harper Collins, February 2012). His stories have appeared in The Atlantic, Zoetrope: All-Story, Ploughshares, Manoa, and The Best New American Voices and Pushcart Prize anthologies. A Whiting Writer’s Award winner and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, he has received fellowships from the University of Wisconsin, Phillips Exeter Academy, Yaddo, The MacDowell Colony, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Born in the Philippines, he currently lives in San Francisco, and is an associate professor at Saint Mary’s College of California.
Why There Are Words April 12: “Break”
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents the following readers on the theme: Break April 12 at Studio 333 in Sausalito, 7-9pm. $5. Break: an interruption in continuity; a second chance. These seven authors will BREAK through what we think we know about this topic. Join us! And don’t forget to subscribe to our newsletter announcing upcoming readings each month. (We never share your email with anyone!)
Shannon Cain
Shannon Cain’s debut short story collection, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, is the recipient of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her stories have been awarded the Pushcart Prize, the O. Henry Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. They have appeared or are forthcoming in Tin House, The Colorado Review, the New England Review, American Short Fiction, Mid-American Review, and Southwords: New Writing from Ireland. She is the co-editor, with Lisa Bowden, of Powder: Writing by Women in the Ranks, from Vietnam to Iraq (Kore Press, 2008) and co-adapter of Coming In Hot, the stage adaptation of the book. She is the Artist-in-Residence for the City of Tucson’s Ward One and the fiction editor for Kore Press. Her current creative project is Tucson, the Novel: An Experiment in Literature and Civil Discourse.
Stan Goldberg
Stan Goldberg is the author of Lessons for the Living: Stories of Forgiveness,Gratitude, and Courage at the End of Life, which received six national and international awards and was translated into Chinese, Indonesian, and Portuguese. He has published seven books, written numerous articles, and delivered more than 100 lectures and workshops throughout the United States, Latin America, Canada, and Asia on topics ranging from change, to flyfishing, to end of life issues. He is Professor Emeritus at San Francisco State University, and devotee of the shakuhachi (Japanese bamboo flute) and Native American Flute. In 2009 he was named Volunteer of the Year by the Hospice Volunteer Association.
Leo Litwalk
Leo Litwak’s novel Waiting for the News received the National Jewish Book Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award. He has published two novels and two works of nonfiction. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York Times Book Review, Esquire, Look Magazine, and Best American Short Stories. He is a recipient of John Simon Guggenheim and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and first prize in the 1990 O. Henry Prize Stories collection. Professor at San Francisco State University for more than thirty years, he lives in San Francisco.
Meredith Maran
Meredith Maran is a book critic, award-winning journalist, and the author of several bestselling nonfiction books including My Lie, Class Dismissed, and What It’s Like to Live Now. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, she reviews books for People, Salon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Boston Globe, and writes for a number of magazines. Since publishing a poem at age six in Highlights for Kids, she’s dreamed of publishing her first novel. A Theory of Small Earthquakes is it.
Sommer Schafer
Sommer Schafer is a candidate in the MFA program at San Francisco State University. She lives in San Rafael and is currently working on two collections of stories: My Father’s Memoirs, about a family coming to terms with a father’s mental illness and subsequent death, and Hope, about the citizens of a small town in Alaska. You can read her first publication, “The Table,” forthcoming later this year in Barge Journal.
Linda Gray Sexton
Linda Gray Sexton has published several widely acclaimed novels as well as two memoirs about her life and relationship with her mother, Pulitzer Prize winning poet Anne Sexton. Her first memoir, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back To My Mother, was named a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. Her recent memoir, Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide, is about her struggle with her own mental illness and the legacy of suicide left to her by her mother, who took her own life when Sexton was twenty-one. Unlike her mother’s story though, hers is a story of triumph. She lives in Northern California.
Mary Paynter Sherwin
Mary Paynter Sherwin’s work has appeared most recently in The Midway Journal, Drash: Northwest Mosaic, and Unswept. She was also recently named one of the Northwest’s most innovative poets by Rattapallax. Mary is pursuing an MFA at Saint Mary’s College of California and lives in Oakland with her husband, David.
leave a comment