Why There Are Words presents poets published in the The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry and special guest novelist Amrit Chima on April 10. Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:15. $10. Studio 333 in Sausalito. Join us for this one of a kind event.
Amrit Chima is the author of the debut novel Darshan (an IndieReader fiction selection). She’s a former freelance travel writer with featured articles in Global Traveler Magazine and on Untapped Cities with syndication on Flavorwire. Born into a family with a history of inspiring migratory adventures, she has followed suit, traveling to over thirty countries, most notably India and Fiji, both of which are settings in Darshan. She holds an MFA from Emerson College in Boston, and after two years in Budapest, teaching English, she is now back home in the San Francisco Bay Area. She spends her free time working on her second novel, as well as curating a new reading series called anthology.
Susan Cohen is the author of Throat Singing. Her new poems appear or are forthcoming in Connotation Press, Hunger Mountain, The Los Angeles Review, Mudfish18, Salamander, Sou’wester, and Harpur Palate which awarded her the 2013 Milton Kessler Memorial Prize, one of her many honors from literary journals. She lives in Berkeley, taught at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, and was a contributing writer for the Washington Post Magazine before rediscovering poetry while on a Knight Fellowship at Stanford University, then earning an MFA from Pacific University. She’s also co-author of Normal at Any Cost, a book about height that won awards from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and the National Association of Science Writers.
Lucille Lang Day is the author of a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, which received a 2013 PEN Oakland – Josephine Miles Literary Award and was a finalist for the 2013 Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. She has also published a children’s book and eight poetry collections and chapbooks, including The Curvature of Blue, The Book of Answers, and Infinities. Her short stories, poems, and essays have appeared in more than 100 literary magazines, such as Atlanta Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Hudson Review, The Paterson Literary Review, and The Threepenny Review. She earned her MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University and her PhD in science/ mathematics education at UC Berkeley. The founder and director of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, she also served for many years as the director of the Hall of Health, an interactive museum in Berkeley. She converted to Judaism in 1974. Twitter: @LucilleLDay.
Colleen McKee grew up with Russian Jews and Southern Baptists in a log cabin in rural Missouri (and lived to tell the tale). Colleen is the author of four collections of poetry, fiction, and memoir–including her new book, called Nine Kinds of Wrong. She now lives in Oakland and teaches at the Academy of Art in San Francisco.
Lee Slonimsky is the author of four books of poems, the most recent Logician of the Wind (2012) from Orchises Press in Virginia. A fifth, Wandering Electron, is forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil Press in New York City in the fall of 2014. Along with Santa Rosa CA poet and radio host Katherine Hastings, he is the co-author of a chapbook, Slow Shadow/White Delirium, published in the fall of 2013 by Word Temple Press. Lee’s individual poems and essays have appeared in Best of Asheville Poetry Review, The Carolina Quarterly, The Classical Outlook, Measure, New Ohio Review, The New York Times, North Dakota Quarterly, Poetry Daily, 32 Poems, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and other journals. And he is co-author, along with his wife, Hammett Prize winning novelist Carol Goodman, of Lee Carroll’s Black Swan Rising urban fantasy trilogy.
Melissa Stein is the author of the poetry collection Rough Honey, winner of the APR/Honickman First Book Prize. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, Harvard Review, New England Review, Best New Poets 2009, and many other journals and anthologies. She is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.
Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet’s The Greenhouse is forthcoming from Bull City Press in 2014. Her first book of poems, Tulips, Water, Ash was selected for the Morse Poetry Prize and published by University Press of New England. Her poems have been awarded a Javits fellowship and a Phelan Award, and have appeared in journals including Cream City Review, At Length, Quarterly West, Blackbird, The Iowa Review, 32 Poems, and Third Coast and in the anthologies Best New Poets and The Bloomsbury Anthology of Contemporary Jewish American Poetry. She writes, edits, and teaches in Oakland, California.
Why There Are Words takes place every second Thursday of the month, when people come from San Francisco, the North Bay, the East Bay — everywhere — to crowd the house. The brainchild of Peg Alford Pursell, this literary goodness has been going strong into its now fifth year.
