Murkiness, muddiness, confusion, part truth, part fiction. We live between two poles. Join us May 8 when the following readers will read from their works exploring the theme Contradiction. Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:15. $10. Studio 333 in Sausalito.
Natalie Baszile is the author of the debut novel Queen Sugar. An early version of Queen Sugar won the Hurston Wright College Writer’s Award, was a co-runner up in the Faulkner Pirate’s Alley Novel-in-Progress competition, and excerpts were published in Cairn and ZYZZYVA. She has had residencies at the Ragdale Foundation where she was awarded the Sylvia Clare Brown fellowship, Virginia Center for the Arts, and Hedgebrook. Her non-fiction work has appeared in The Rumpus.net, Mission at Tenth, and in The Best Women’s Travel Writing Volume 9. She is a former fiction editor at The Cortland Review, and is a member of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. She has a M.A. in Afro-American Studies from UCLA, and is a graduate of Warren Wilson College’s MFA Program for Writers where she was a Holden Minority Scholar.
Belo Cipriani is the writer-in-residence at Holy Names University and the spokesperson for Earl, the new reading application for the Apple OS. His first book, Blind: A Memoir, is a multiple award-winner and has been listed on various high school and college reading lists. His writing has appeared in Business Insider, Yahoo, Matador, The Good Men Project, and elsewhere. He keynoted the 2011 A.D.A celebration in San Francisco, has guest lectured at Yale University, and is a sought speaker at GLBT, disability, Latino and literary organizations around the country. He is also one of very few blind Capoeira players in the world.
Maria Hummel is the author of the poetry collection House and Fire, winner of the 2013 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, and two novels: Motherland (Counterpoint, 2014) and Wilderness Run (St. Martin’s, 2003). Her poetry and prose have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Narrative, The Sun, and The Believer. Her work was also featured in the 2012 Pushcart Prize anthology and the centenary anthology The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry, Hummel teaches at Stanford University.
A native Angeleno and graduate of Columbia University and UCLA Film School, David Kukoff has eleven produced film and television credits to his name. He has published two books on film and television writing, has been the subject of features in Variety, Entertainment Weekly, and The Hollywood Reporter, and has taught writing at Northwestern University. Though he does not currently reside in Laurel Canyon, he has spent the better part of his adult life trying to get himself, as Joni Mitchell put it, “back to the garden.” Children of the Canyon is his first novel.
Alice LaPlante is an award-winning fiction writer and teacher of writing. Her novel Turn of Mind, was a New York Times bestseller and winner of the Wellcome Prize for Literature and the California Book Award as well as the silver medal for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers prize. She was a Stegner Fellow and Jones Lecturer at Stanford University and has taught creative writing at both Stanford and San Francisco State University. Her new book, Circle of Wives, explores the mystery that is at the heart of every marriage through a story about a polygamous doctor.
Jessica Levine is the author of the debut novel The Geometry of Love (She Writes Press, April 2014). Her stories, essays, poetry, and translations have appeared in many journals, including Green Hills Literary Lantern, North American Review, The Southern Review, and Spoon River Poetry Review. She earned her Ph.D. in English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Delicate Pursuit: Literary Discretion in Henry James and Edith Wharton (Routledge, 2002) and has translated several books from French and Italian into English.
Porter Shreve is the author of four novels: The Obituary Writer, Drives Like a Dream, When the White House Was Ours, and the recently published The End of the Book. His novels have been named New York Times Notable Book, Chicago Tribune Book of the Year, San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book, among others. He is coeditor of six fiction and essay anthologies and a forthcoming book with Pearson on Creative Writing Craft. He has taught at the University of Michigan, and in the MFA programs at the University of Oregon, the University of North Carolina-Greensboro, Purdue and the University of San Francisco.
Jane Vandenburgh‘s latest book is The Wrong Dog Dream. She is the award-winning author of two novels, Failure to Zigzag and The Physics of Sunset, as well as the nonfiction works, Architecture of the Novel, A Writer’s Handbook, and The Pocket History of Sex in the Twentieth Century, A Memoir. She has taught writing and literature at U. C. Davis, the George Washington University, and, most recently, at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, Callfornia. A native of Berkeley, she has returned to live with her family in the West, and with Wayne Thiebaud, her new dog.
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 fifth year.
