Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles…
Why There Are Words presents an evening of readings on the theme “Slings and Arrows.” Join us March 10, 2016 at Studio 333 on 333 Caledonia Street in Sausalito to hear the following acclaimed authors. Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:15. $10.
Michelle Adelman holds an MFA in Writing from Columbia University, and BS and MS degrees in Journalism from Northwestern University. She has worked as a magazine writer and editor, a university instructor, and a high school English teacher and dean. She grew up in Connecticut and has lived in New York, San Diego, and the Bay Area, where she currently resides. Piece of Mind is her first novel.
Kate Asche writes poetry, essays, and short stories. A graduate of the UC Davis Creative Writing Program, she’s a writing teacher and literary community builder in Sacramento, CA. Her first poetry collection, the chapbook Our Day in the Labyrinth, was published by Finishing Line Press in September 2015 and she has poems forthcoming in Natural Bridge. Her poem “Incoming” was selected by Camille Dungy for the summer 2015 issue of Colorado Review, and her poem for two voices was a finalist for the 2011 Audio Prize at The Missouri Review. She has published poetry in Bellingham Review, RHINO, Pilgrimage, the 2012 anthology Late Peaches: Poems by Sacramento Poets, and elsewhere. Her creative nonfiction appears in Under the Gum Tree. She received two Elliot Gilbert Prizes in Poetry and an Academy of American Poets Award.
Cara Black is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of 14 books in the Private Investigator Aimée Leduc series, which is set in Paris. Cara has received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards, a Washington Post Book World Book of the Year citation, the Médaille de la Ville de Paris—the Paris City Medal, which is awarded in recognition of contribution to international culture—and invitations to be the Guest of Honor at conferences such as the Paris Polar Crime Festival and Left Coast Crime. With more than 400,000 books in print, the Aimée Leduc series has been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew.
Lucille Lang Day is the author of ten poetry collections and chapbooks, including most recently Dreaming of Sunflowers: Museum Poems, co-winner of the 2014 Blue Light Poetry Prize, and Becoming an Ancestor, a full-length collection from Červená Barva Press. She is also the author of a children’s book, Chain Letter, and a memoir, Married at Fourteen: A True Story, which received a 2013 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was a finalist for the Northern California Book Award in Creative Nonfiction. Her poems, stories, and essays have received nine Pushcart Prize nominations and have appeared widely in magazines and anthologies.
Frances Dinkelspiel is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Tangled Vines: Greed, Murder, Obsession and an Arsonist in the Vineyards of California and the San Francisco Chronicle bestseller, Towers of Gold: How One Jewish Immigrant Named Isaias Hellman Created California. Dinkelspiel is also an award-winning journalist who cofounded the local news site Berkeleyside. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, People magazine and elsewhere. She lives in Berkeley.
Jane Juska was born in 1933, reared in small-town Ohio, grew up at the University of Michigan and the University of California Berkeley. She taught high school English for 33 years, college and prison for 5, then went in search of men to give her aid and comfort. Her ad in the New York Review of Books—“Before I turn 68, I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like”—brought her undreamed of success. She wrote two books about that search: A Round-Heeled Woman and Unaccompanied Women. Since then her essays have appeared in Vogue and Self, in various anthologies and online. Her book reviews have appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. In 2012 she left her Berkeley home for life in the mountains next door to the grandchildren and their parents. She has at last completed a novel, Mrs. Bennet Has Her Say, published by Penguinrandomhouse, about Pride & Prejudice’s foolish mother as she might have been at 15. At present she is working on a last-ditch memoir about aging.
Naomi Ruth Lowinsky’s poetry is widely published. Her chapbook The Little House On Stilts Remembers was co-winner the 2014 Blue Light Poetry Prize. Her fourth full-length poetry collection, The Faust Woman Poems, follows one woman’s Faustian adventures during the 1960s and ’70s, through Women’s Liberation and the return of the Goddess. Her memoir, The Sister from Below: When the Muse Gets Her Way, tells stories of her pushy muse. She is a Jungian Analyst and a member of the San Francisco Jung Institute where she has taught a poetry workshop, Deep River, for many years. She blogs about poetry and life at www.sisterfrombelow.com.
Why There Are Words takes place every second Thursday of the month, when people come from San Francisco, the North Bay, the East Bay, the South Bay–everywhere–to crowd the house. The brainchild of Peg Alford Pursell, this literary goodness has been going strong for six years.
