Why There Are Words presents an evening of readings on the theme “The Heart of the Matter.” Join us February 11, 2016, at Studio 333 on 333 Caledonia Street in Sausalito. Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:15. $10.
Peter Neil Carroll, Belmont poet and historian, has published three collections of poetry, most recently Fracking Dakota: Poems for a Wounded Land (Turning Point, 2015) and A Child Turns Back to Wave: Poetry of Lost Places which won the Prize Americana. His poems have appeared recently in Catamaran Literary Review and Southern Humanities Review. Other books include a memoir titled Keeping Time. He has taught creative writing at the University of San Francisco, taught history and American Studies at Stanford and Berkeley, and hosted “Booktalk” on Pacifica Radio. He is Poetry Moderator for portside.org
Iris Jamahl Dunkle‘s latest poetry book, There’s a Ghost in this Machine of Air, about the untold history of Sonoma County, CA, was published in November 2015. Her debut poetry collection, Gold Passage, was selected by Ross Gay to win the 2012 Trio Award and was published by Trio House Press in 2013. Her chapbooks Inheritance and The Flying Trolley were published by Finishing Line Press in 2010 and 2013. Her poetry, essays and creative non-fiction have been published widely. She is currently co-writing a new biography on Jack London’s wife, Charmian London. She teaches writing and literature at Napa Valley College. She received her B.A. from the George Washington University, her M.F.A. in Poetry from New York University, and her Ph.D. in American Literature from Case Western Reserve University. She is on the staff of the Napa Valley Writers conference. She is the poet laureate of Sonoma County.
Jan Ellison is an O. Henry Prize winner and author of the debut novel, A Small Indiscretion, which was a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. A graduate of Stanford, Jan left college for a year at nineteen to live and work in Europe and try her hand at writing. Twenty years later, her notebooks from that year became the germ of A Small Indiscretion. Jan’s essays about parenting, writing and travel have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Writer’s Digest and elsewhere. Jan grew up in L.A. and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her husband of twenty years and their four children.
Gina Frangello’s forthcoming novel, Every Kind of Wanting, will be released on Counterpoint in September 2016. Her last novel, A Life in Men (Algonquin, 2014), was selected for the Target Emerging Authors series, has been optioned by Universal Cable Productions/Denver & Delilah, and was a book club selection for NYLON magazine, The Rumpus, and The Nervous Breakdown. She is also the author of two other books of fiction: Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press, 2010), which was a Foreword Magazine Best Book of the Year finalist, and My Sister’s Continent (Chiasmus, 2006). She has nearly 20 years of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books, and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, the Executive Editor for Other Voices magazine, and the faculty editor for TriQuarterly Online. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, Dame, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, Fence, FiveChapters, Prairie Schooner, the Chicago Reader, and in many other magazines and anthologies.
Alison Moore is a graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers and a former Assistant Professor of English/Creative Writing in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the University of Arizona. She is the author of four books, Small Spaces between Emergences, (Mercury House, 1993), Synonym for Love (Mercury House, 1995), The Middle of Elsewhere (Phoenix International/University of Arkansas Press, 2004) and Riders on the Orphan Train (Roadworthy Press, 2012). She is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in fiction, The Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, and the J. Frank Dobie/Paisano Fellowship from the University of Texas at Austin. She tours nationally with a multi-media presentation about the orphan trains. That production is now the official outreach program for the National Orphan Train Complex Museum and Research Center in Concordia, Kansas.
Ginger Murchinson together with Thomas Lux, founded POETRY at TECH, where she served as associate director five years and has been one of its McEver Visiting Chairs in Poetry since 2009. A three-time Pushcart nominee, she is a graduate of Warren Wilson’s M.F.A. Program for Writers and Editor-in-Chief of the acclaimed Cortland Review. Her first chapbook of poems, Out Here, was published by Jeanne Duval Editions in 2008. She has published interviews with A.E. Stallings and Stephen Dobyns, and has poems published in Atlanta Review, Chattahoochee Review, Terminus Magazine, Poetry Kanto, and Mead and Connotations online. Her latest collection, A Scrap of Linen, A Bone, is a Tom Lombardo selection for the Poetry Series at Press 53, and is due out in Spring, 2016.
Rob Roberge is the author of the memoir Liar (Crown, 2016) and four previous works of fiction, including Drive and More Than They Could Chew, and the short story collection Working Backwards from the Worst Moment of My Life. His work has appeared in numerous literary journals and anthologies, including ZYZZYVA, Chelsea, Black Clock, Other Voices, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the “Ten Writers Worth Knowing” issue of The Literary Review. He teaches at the UCR/Palm Desert low-residency MFA program. He’s the guitarist for the seminal punk band The Urinals.
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.
