To err is human… In fact, blundering may be what we humans do best. Our common thread: one lovely slip-up after another. Don’t make the MISTAKE of missing what our readers have to share about this topic. (You knew we were going to say that, didn’t you?) Studio 333 in Sausalito, September 12, 2013. Curated by Peg Alford Pursell. Doors open at 7 pm; readings begin at 7:15. $10. Bring extra cash for books and booze.
Thaisa Frank’s sixth book, Enchantment, includes two semi-autobiographical novellas and thirty-three stories. Heidegger’s Glasses (2010), about the mythical haven of an underground mine during WWII, sold to ten foreign countries. She is also the author of Sleeping in Velvet and A Brief History of Camouflage. Her one non-fiction book, Finding Your Writer’s Voice, has been translated into Portuguese and Spanish and is used in MFA programs.
Cristina García is the author of, most recently, the novel King of Cuba. She is the author of six other novels, including: Dreaming in Cuban, The Agüero Sisters, Monkey Hunting, A Handbook to Luck, and The Lady Matador’s Hotel. She has edited two anthologies, Cubanísimo: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Cuban Literature and Bordering Fires: The Vintage Book of Contemporary Mexican and Chicano/a Literature. Two works for young readers, The Dog Who Loved the Moon, and I Wanna Be Your Shoebox were published in 2008. A collection of poetry, The Lesser Tragedy of Death, was published in 2010. Her recent young adult novel, Dreams of Significant Girls, is set in a Swiss boarding school in the 1970s. Her work has been nominated for a National Book Award and translated into fourteen languages. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, and an NEA grant, among others. Recently, she was a Visiting Professor at the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas-Austin as well as the University of Miami. Currently, she is University Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University-San Marcos.
Helen Hooper’s fiction appears in the journals The Common, Bellevue Literary Review, Hopkins Review, New South, and the anthology Gravity Dancer: Fiction from Washington Area Women. A 2011-2013 Stegner fellow, she is a former Kenyon Review workshop Peter Taylor fellow and a recipient of residencies at Ucross, Ragdale and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She worked in environmental policy in Washington, D.C. for twenty-five years, most recently as a lobbyist for The Nature Conservancy. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson. She is currently working on a novel set in northern Alabama.
Rebecca Lawton is an author and naturalist whose literary honors include the Ellen Meloy Fund Award for Desert Writers, residencies at Hedgebrook and The Island Institute, and three Pushcart Prize nominations – in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Her collection of essays about whitewater guiding, Reading Water: Lessons from the River, was a San Francisco Chronicle Bay Area Bestseller in 2008 and ForeWord Nature Book of the Year finalist in 2003. She is co-author of four additional books on creativity and the outdoors, including the forthcoming Sacrament: Homage to a River (Heyday, 2013). Her debut novel, Junction, Utah, explores the impact of oil exploration on American wilderness and rural life (van Haitsma Literary, 2013). She was one of the first women guides on Western rivers, spending ten of fourteen seasons in Grand Canyon. Currently she serves on the Board of Directors for Friends of the River.
Keenan Norris’ novel Brother and the Dancer is the winner of the 2012 James D. Houston Award and will be published by Heyday Books in November 2013. He holds an MFA from Mills College and a PhD from the University of California, Riverside. His research interests include urban literature and the publishing industry. He teaches English, African-American Literature and promotes the AFFIRM program at Evergreen Valley College in San Jose, California. His work, both fiction and non-fiction, has appeared in the Santa Monica, Green Mountains, and Evansville Reviews, Connotation Press, Inlandia: A Literary Journey Through California’s Inland Empire, and BOOM: A Journal of California. He is also the editor of Scarecrow Press’s upcoming collection of critical essays Street Lit: Popularity, Controversy & Analysis and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Elizabeth Scarboro is the author of the memoir My Foreign Cities, an unlikely love story set on the frontiers of modern medicine, which was listed by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the Top Ten Memoirs for Spring. She is also the author of two novels for children. Her writing has appeared most recently in the New York Times and the Bellevue Literary Review. She lives with her family in Berkeley, California.
Ransom Stephens is a science writer, physicist, and novelist. He’s written over 300 articles on subjects ranging from quantum physics to parenting teenagers, produces events for Litquake, and co-produces two literary series. His first novel, The God Patent, was “the first debut novel to emerge from the new paradigm of online publishing,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. His second novel, The Sensory Deception, is a mind-blowing, globe-trotting ride that will take readers from cut-throat Silicon Valley boardrooms to the pirate ships off the Somali coast to the devastated rain forests of the Amazon all to ask the question: what is a human life worth compared to that of an entire planet?
Monica Wesolowska is the author of the memoir, Holding Silvan: A Brief Life (Hawthorne Books, March 2013 with an intro by Erica Jong), which explores the love and ethics behind forgoing medical intervention for her newborn son. She has published her work in many literary journals and anthologies including Best New American Voices 2000; My Little Red Book; Beach: Stories from the Sand and Sea; The Carolina Quarterly; Pisgah Review; Quarter After Eight; and online at Literary Mama. A former fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, she has taught fiction writing at UC Berkeley Extension for over a decade. She lives in her hometown of Berkeley with her family.
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 for three years.
