Why There Are Words Reading April 11: Edge
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents the following award-winning writers reading from their works on the theme “Edge” on April 11, 2013 (during the “cruelest month.”) Get down to Studio 333, where you can mix memory and desire, breed lilacs out of the dead land, etc. Doors open at 7 pm & we begin at 7:15. $10. Bring extra cash for books and booze.
Jayne Benjulian
Jayne Benjulian’s poetry appears in the literary journals The Seattle Review, Zone 3, Sequoia, Verdad, and Barrow Street among others. Her essays and interviews with playwrights and artists are published in magazines, theater playbills, and HowlRound, the online theater zine. She was Fulbright Lecturer in American Language & Literature in Lyon, France, and from 2008-2011, Director of New Play Development at Magic Theatre. She is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.
Claire Blotter
Claire Blotter writes and performs poetry with movement, sound, and body rhythms. Her work has been published in Barnwood, Gargoyle, the We’Moon Datebooks, California Quarterly, and Canary, among others. She represented San Francisco in poetry slams in the early ’90′s, placing second in National Team Competitions in Boston and Chicago. Her award winning video documentary, “Wake Up Call: Saving the Songbirds,” has been screened in 11 film festivals from Mill Valley to Chicago. She also taught writing and theater at S.F. State University, John F. Kennedy University, Dominican University, and the College of Marin. Her third chapbook, Moment in the Moment House, will be published by Finishing Line Press in early 2013.She teaches in the Independent Study, California Poets in the Schools, and Poetry Out Loud Programs in Marin County.
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. In 2012, Mysterious Press/Open Road Media re-issued all four of his novels plus a story collection in ebook format, and in January 2013 Penguin published his textbook on the craft of characterization, The Art of Character (“A writer’s bible that will lead to your character’s soul.” —Elizabeth Brundage).
Rebecca Foust
The year she turned 50, Rebecca Foust took a look at her bucket list and realized she needed to get moving. She earned her MFA from Warren Wilson in 2010, the same year her first and second books were published. God, Seed won the Foreword Book of the Year Award and was a finalist for the Massachusetts Book Award. All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song won the Many Mountains Moving Book Prize and was nominated for the Poet’s Prize. New poems are in the Hudson Review, JAMA, Sewanee Review, Woman’s Review of Books, and Zyzzyva . She also writes book reviews and essays, and she reads fiction as an assistant editor for Narrative Magazine.
Jennifer Gennari
Jennifer Gennari is the author of My Mixed-up Berry Blue Summer (Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2012), an Association of Booksellers for Children Spring 2012 New Voices title and American Library Association Rainbow List title. Her poems have appeared in Marin Poetry Center anthologies. A graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts and a former reporter, she lives on a houseboat in Sausalito with her husband and (occasionally) their four daughters.
Laleh Khadivi
Laleh Khadivi is the author of The Age of Orphans and The Walking. She is the recipient of a number of prizes and some very excellent teaching and guidance concerning the reading and writing of fiction. Her work has appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and The Virginia Quarterly Review.
Joshua Mohr
Joshua Mohr is the author of four novels, including Damascus, which The New York Times called “Beat-poet cool.” He’s also written the novels Some Things that Meant the World to Me, one of O Magazine’s Top 10 reads of 2009 and a San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, and Termite Parade, an editors’ choice on The New York Times Bestseller List. He lives in San Francisco and teaches in the MFA program at USF. His latest novel is Fight Song, published in February 2013.
Why There Are Words Reading March 14: Serendipity
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents seven award-winning writers reading from their works on the theme “Serendipity” on March 14, 2013. Get down to Studio 333 to discover what literary fortune awaits in this Chinese Year of the Snake! Doors open at 7 pm & we begin at 7:15. $10. Bring extra cash for books and booze.
Rahimeh Andalibian
Rahimeh Andalibian is the author of the memoir, The Rose Hotel, which chronicles the story of her Iranian Muslim family and their fight to strive after being uprooted from their homeland to California during the Iranian Revolution of l979. The Rose Hotel has received rave reviews and recently topped Amazon’s #1 bestseller list in the memoir category. She has worked as a licensed clinical psychologist in Laguna Beach and New York City, conducting intergenerational family therapy sessions with individuals, children, couples, and families. She employs creative expression and storytelling to support others in understanding their suffering and break through encrusted communication patterns to create positive change in themselves and the world.
Daniel Levin Becker
Daniel Levin Becker is Reviews Editor of The Believer and a member of the Paris-based Oulipo collective. His first book, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, was published by Harvard University Press in 2012.
Beth Bosworth
Beth Bosworth won the 2012 Drue Heinz Literature Prize for her short fiction collection The Source of Life and Other Stories, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press. She has taught at the New School for Social Research, CUNY’s NYC Technical College, and for many years at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, where she is also founding editor of the Saint Ann’s Review. Her publications include a novel, Tunneling, and a collection of short stories, A Burden of Earth. Her stories have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Seneca Review, Forward, IMAGE, Hanging Loose, Guernica, and elsewhere.
Laurie Ann Doyle
Laurie Ann Doyle admits to being born in Bakersfield way before it was shrouded in smog. She’s won the Alligator Juniper National Fiction Award, as well as nominations for a 2012 Pushcart Prize and Best New American Voices 2008. Her short stories, essays, and poems have appeared in over a dozen literary publications, including Arroyo Literary Review, Dogwood Journal, and Farallon Review. She teaches writing at UC Berkeley, co-hosts San Francisco’s eclectic reading series Babylon Salon, and is hard at work on a book of stories touching on love, death, and a few points in between.
Trebor Healey
Recipient of the 2004 Ferro-Grumley and Violet Quill awards for his first novel, Through It Came Bright Colors (Harrington Park Press), Trebor Healey is also the author of a collection of poems, Sweet Son of Pan, (Suspect Thoughts, 2006), as well as a short story collection, A Perfect Scar & Other Stories (Harrington Park Press, 2007). He co-edited (with Marci Blackman) Beyond Definition: New Writing from Gay and Lesbian San Francisco (Manic D Press, 1994) and co-edited (with Amie M. Evans) Queer & Catholic (Routledge, 2008). His novels Faun (Lethe Press) and A Horse Named Sorrow (University of Wisconsin Press) were released this fall.
Ron Nyren
Ron Nyren’s fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, The Missouri Review, The North American Review, Glimmer Train Stories, Mississippi Review, and elsewhere. He has an MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan and is a former Stegner Fellow, a former editor of Furious Fictions: The Magazine of Short-Short Stories, and co-author, with Sarah Stone, of Deepening Fiction: A Practical Guide for Intermediate and Advanced Writers. He currently works as a freelance writer and teaches for Stanford Continuing Studies.
Elaine Russell
Elaine Russell’s first adult novel, Across the Mekong River (2012), developed from an interest in the Hmong community in Sacramento and a subsequent trip to Laos. The novel was a finalist in the Carolina Wren Press 2010 Doris Bawkin Award, the Maui Writer’s Conference 2003 Rupert Hughes Writing Competition, and the Focus on Writers 2001 Friends of the Sacramento Library Awards. Other published works include short stories for adults and children and the Martin McMillan middle-grade adventure series (2004 and 2012). Elaine graduated with a BA in History at UC Davis and an MA in Economics at CSU Sacramento. After working for many years as an environmental consultant, she turned to writing full time.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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 “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.
Why There Are Words March 8: “Unspeakable”
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents the following authors March 8 at Studio 333 in Sausalito, 7-9pm. $5. Can the unspeakable be put into words? Come find out when these six writers take on that theme.
Chris Cole
Chris Cole’s first novel, The Speed at Which I Travel, is about an existentialist, time-traveling teenager from the Midwest. Chris Cole sits on the board of the SF literary organization Quiet Lightning, and is a co-founder of the Pints and Prose reading series. Under the name “Disembodied Poetics,” he writes a daily blog of verse and occasional prose to thousands of dedicated followers.
Timothy Crandle
Timothy Crandle’s fiction has been honored with the Jack Dyer Prize from Crab Orchard Review, the Waasmode Prize from Passages North,and second prize in the Zoetrope: All-Story Fiction Contest where it was selected from over 2500 entries by Joyce Carol Oates. In autumn 2010 he was writer in residence at Ox-Bow School of the Arts. He has worked as a roofer, painter (walls only, never canvases), pizza delivery man, casting director, and electrical engineer. He holds an MFA from the University of San Francisco, and lives and writes in Oakland.
Krys Lee
Krys Lee is the author of the debut novel Drifting House. Born in Seoul, South Korea, she was raised in California, and studied in the U.S. and England. A finalist for Best New American Voices in 2006, her work has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Narrative magazine, California Quarterly, Pacific Ties, the Korea Times, and Asia Weekly. She lives in Seoul.
Kate Moses
Kate Moses is the author of Cakewalk, A Memoir,nominated for a Northern California Book Award, and the internationally acclaimed, award-winning novel Wintering: A Novel of Sylvia Plath, published in fifteen languages. As a founding editor and staff writer for Salon, Kate Moses co-edited Salon’s groundbreaking daily feature Mothers Who Think and two bestselling anthologies of essays on motherhood inspired by the site, Mothers Who Think and Because I Said So. A native of San Francisco, she teaches in the creative writing programs at San Francisco State and the University of San Francisco.
Meghan Thornton
Meghan Thornton won the poetry prize at the 2010 San Francisco Writer’s Conference and was published in the Poets 11 Anthology. She is a board member of Quiet Lightning, and her poetry and short stories can be found in Sparkle & Blink. She wrote her first novel, a vampire romance, in high school. Knowing that it would never sell, she moved on to poetry. She is currently editing her novel, “The Sword in the Cellar,” the first in a middle grade fantasy series that, unfortunately, has nothing to do with vampires.
Barry Willdorf
Barry Willdorf is author of the novel, The Flight of the Sorceress. In 2001, he published a semi-autobiographical novel, Bring the War Home. His legal publishing credits include co-authoring How To Pass the LSATs,/em>, and part of the Matthew Bender series, California Forms of Jury Instructions. He was a contributing editor for Matthew Bender’s Trial Master series. Born in New York City, he grew up in Massachusetts, and claims to be the first person to have surfed on Cape Ann.
Why There Are Words February 9: “Vision”
Why There Are Words Literary Reading Series presents the following readers on the theme: Vision February 9 at Studio 333 in Sausalito, 7-9pm. $5. Come see for yourself what all the rave reviews for the reading series have been about.
Marcus Banks
Marcus Banks finds himself at many literary gatherings. A blogger and critic, his book reviews have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, Prick of the Spindle, and Rain Taxi. He has also published personal essays in Superstition Review, and from 2005-2007 was the technology columnist for the Gotham Gazette. You can follow his jottings at http://mbanks.typepad.com/.
Kirstin Chen is a 2011-2012 Steinbeck Fellow at San Jose
Kirstin Chen
State University. She has won awards from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Emerson College. Her stories have appeared in Hobart, Pank, Juked, The Good Men Project, and others, and have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best New American Voices anthology. She holds a BA from Stanford University and an MFA from Emerson College. She currently lives in San Francisco, where she is completing her first novel, Soy Sauce for Beginners, set in her homeland of Singapore.
Nicole McFeeley
Nicole McFeely is the author of hundreds of bar napkin scribblings and countless other incoherent jottings. She has not written a book, won a grant, or enrolled in a graduate program but has plans to do perhaps two of these things in the next ten years. Destroyer of free time, she currently works as a bartender and freelance editor and serves as the Director of Outreach for Quiet Lightning and the Assistant Editor of Litseen.com. http://nicmcfeely.wordpress.com/
Chicken John is a Showman living in San Francisco. A contributor and instigator
Chicken John
with a long history of arranging Serendipity to accommodate Chaos when she comes to Destiny’s house for dinner. He is a documented confusionist. He is a qualified insultant. He also a mechanic and a writer. He owns a gigantic bus and an odd warehouse in San Francisco. In his spare time he enjoys longs walks off a short pier, underwater basket weaving, and writing dumb bios about himself. He would like you to buy his new book, The Book of the Is. http://chickenjohn.com/
Jacqueline Luckett
Jacqueline Luckett is the author of the new novel, Passing Love. After wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and planning.’ Prayin’ and dreamin’ . . . just like that old Dusty Springfield song urges, Jacqueline Luckett finally put pen to paper and wrote, not one, but two novels. Jacqueline considers her novels great way to get a lot off her mind and to visit her favorite city, Paris. She travels frequently in search of another city that mesmerizes her as much as Paris, and is sure that when she finds it more story ideas will come her way.
Carol Sheldon
Carol Sheldon’s first novel, Mother Lode placed in the top five percent of Amazon’s International Breakthrough Novel Contest of 2011. She’s published two books of poetry. Her poetry can also be found in Robert Bly’s Great Mother Conference Anthology, Hot Flashes and Marin Poetry Anthology. Two of her plays, Sandcastles, and Lifelines were chosen for professional productions. Several other works have won awards. She holds an MA from University of Michigan, and teaches poetry, novel, and memoir writing classes. She also enjoys directing and acting, believing her experience on stage has informed her writing. http://carolsheldon.wordpress.com/
Susanna Solomon’s fiction has appeared in the online magazine Harlot’s Sauce
Susanna Solomon
Radio, in print in Vintage Voices, West Winds Centennial, and the Point Reyes Light. Her fiction lately has been inspired by entries in the Sheriff’s Calls Section of the Point Reyes Light. She is at work on a short story collection and is polishing her first novel. In cafes all over Marin, in quiet corners, she is often visited by her characters Mildred and Fred, who not only have a lot to say about what they read in the paper, but about getting older, burglars in their backyard, and uncooperative lawn chairs.
Jon Wells
Jon Wells is a designer, writer, and filmmaker living in Mill Valley. He Died All Day Long is his first novel. His design work has been recognized in venues such as the San Francisco Show, Addy Awards, Print Magazine books, and the American Institute of Graphic Arts. His first film, At the Epicenter of the Epidemic, documenting the HIV/AIDS crisis in Honduras, was shown at the Tiburon International Film Festival. He is a member of the Tuesday Night Writers and is a Squaw Valley Community of Writers alum.
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