LIVE! From City Lights

Héctor Tobar with Oscar Villalon discussing Héctor Tobar's new book "The Last Great Road Bum," published by Farrar Straus and Giroux. This event was recently broadcast via Zoom and hosted by Josiah Luis Alderete. Héctor Tobar is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and novelist. He is the author of the New York Times bestseller Deep Down Dark, as well as The Barbarian Nurseries, Translation Nation, and The Tattooed Soldier. Tobar is also a contributing writer for the New York Times opinion pages and an associate professor at the University of California, Irvine. He has written for The New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and other publications. His short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, L.A. Noir, ZYZZYVA, and Slate. The son of Guatemalan immigrants, he is a native of Los Angeles, where he lives with his family. Oscar Villalon is the Managing Editor of Zyzzyva Magazine. He is is the former book editor at the San Francisco Chronicle and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle. His reviews have appeared on NPR.org and KQED's "The California Report."

Joshua Bennett is joined in conversation with Tongo Eisen Martin, Jesse McCarthy, and Simone White to discuss his new book "Being Property Once Myself: Blackness and the End of Man" published by Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. The prize-winning poet Joshua Bennett argues that blackness acts as the caesura between human and nonhuman, man and animal. This event was originally broadcast live via Zoom and hosted by Josiah Luis Alderete. Joshua Bennett is the author of The Sobbing School, winner of the National Poetry Series and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award. He has received grants and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ford Foundation, and MIT and was a Junior Fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. He is the Mellon Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. Tongo Eisen-Martin is the author of Heaven Is All Goodbyes (City Lights Books, 2017) and someone's dead already (Boostrap Press, 2015) and his poetry has been featured in Harper's Magazine and New York Times Magazine. Heaven Is All Goobyes was shortlisted for the Griffin International Poetry Prize and awarded the California Book Award for Poetry, an American Book Award, and a PEN Oakland Book Award. He is also a movement worker and educator whose work in Rikers Island was featured in the New York Times. He has been a faculty member at the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University, and his curriculum on extrajudicial killing of Black people, "We Charge Genocide Again!" has been used as an educational and organizing tool throughout the country. He's from San Francisco. Jesse McCarthy is assistant professor jointly appointed in the Department of English and the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. His research is concerned with the intersection between politics and aesthetics in African American literature, postwar or post-45 literary history, and Black Studies. His dissertation The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War, 1945 – 1965 argues for a reinterpretation of black literary aesthetics in the early Cold War and for the value of a discrete periodization of that era. He is also interested in modernism, film, poetics and translation. While a graduate student at Princeton he founded a Digital Humanities project based on the Sylvia Beach archives held at Princeton's Firestone Library called Mapping Expatriate Paris. His writing on culture, politics, and literature has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, Dissent, The New Republic and n+1. He also serves as an editor at The Point. Simone White is the author of Dear Angel of Death, Of Being Dispersed, and House Envy of All the World and of the poetry chapbooks Unrest and, with Kim Thomas, Dolly. Her writing has appeared in publications including Arttforum, BOMB, e-flux journal, the Chicago Review, and the New York Times Book Review. She teaches at the University of Pennsylvania.

Maw Shein Win with Nathalie Khankan and Marcelo Hernandez Castillo reading from new poetry, Storage Unit for the Spirit House, (Maw Shein Win) and Quiet Orient Riot (Nathalie Khankan), both published Omnidawn. Maw Shein Win is the author of Invisible Gifts: Poems and her chapbooks include Ruins of a Glittering Palace and Score and Bone. Maw is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito (2016–18). She lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Nathalie Khankan teaches Arabic language and literature in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and she is the founding director of the Danish House in Palestine. Her work has previously appeared in the Berkeley Poetry Review, jubilat, and Crab Creek Review. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and daughters. Marcelo Hernandez Castillo is the author of Cenzontle, winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. prize (BOA editions 2018), winner of the 2019 Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award in poetry, a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and named a best book of 2018 by NPR and the New York Public Library. Su Hwang is a recipient of the inaugural Jerome Hill Fellowship in Literature, the Academy of America Poets James Wright Prize, and writer-in-residence fellowships to Dickinson House and Hedgebrook, among others, Her debut poetry collection BODEGA, published with Milkweed Editions, won the 2020 Minnesota Book Awards in poetry. She currently lives in South Minneapolis.

Mauro Javier Cárdenas in conversation with Carlos Fonseca, discussing Mauro's new novel, Aphasia, published by Farrar Straus Giroux. Mauro Javier Cárdenas, the critically-acclaimed author of The Revolutionaries Try Again—"an original, insubordinate novel" (New York Times)—pens a profound story of literature about a man coming to terms with his dysfunctional Colombian family, as well as his own behavior, as an immigrant in America. Mauro Javier Cárdenas is the author of The Revolutionaries Try Again, which The New York Times called "an original, insubordinate novel." In 2017, the Hay Festival included him in Bogotá39, a selection of the best young Latin American novelists working today.

Day two of two: a weekend of events celebrating the 20-volume milestone of the City Lights Spotlight Series. Hosted by Garrett Caples (Series Editor). With readings by Andrew Joron, Cedar Sigo, Will Alexander, Julian Talamantez Brolaski, Lisa Jarnot, Alli Warren, John Coletti, Elaine Kahn, Edmund Berrigan, and Sophia Dahlin. In September 2020, City Lights is publishing the next two volumes in the Spotlight Poetry Series: No. 19, Facing You by acclaimed Nigerian-American poet Uche Nduka, and No. 20, Natch, the debut collection of Bay Area queer poet Sophia Dahlin.

Day one of two: a weekend of events celebrating the 20-volume milestone of the City Lights Spotlight Series. Hosted by Garrett Caples (Series Editor). With readings by Norma Cole, Anselm Berrigan, Micah Ballard, Cathy Wagner, Eric Baus, Julien Poirier, David Brazil, Barbara Jane Reyes, Carmen Gimenez Smith, and Uche Nduka. In September 2020, City Lights is publishing the next two volumes in the Spotlight Poetry Series: No. 19, 'Facing You' by acclaimed Nigerian-American poet Uche Nduka, and No. 20, 'Natch,' the debut collection of Bay Area queer poet Sophia Dahlin.

Third Man Books (the publishing imprint of Jack White's Third Man Records) returns to City Lights to launch three new titles: IT CAME FROM MEMPHIS by Robert Gordon, CAR MA by Alison Mosshart, and 9 Bar Blues by Sheree Renée Thomas. This event was originally broadcast live via Zoom. Robert Gordon is a writer and a filmmaker, a native Memphian who has been exporting the city's authentic weirdness since long before his first book, It Came From Memphis (1995). Alison Mosshart is best known for her work in her musical duo The Kills, as well as fronting the Grammy nominated rock n’ roll band, The Dead Weather. Her 5 major solo exhibits: "Fire Power," Joseph Gross Gallery in NYC, 2015, "Fire Power Los Angeles," Maxfield in Los Angeles, 2017, "Tonight Only," Muscle Shoals, Alabama, 2016, "Side Effects," Panteon in Mexico City, 2018, and "Los Trachas," FF-1051 Gallery in Los Angeles, 2018. Sheree Renée Thomas imagines stories that are sonic rituals, works that cultivate and affirm the magical and the mystical in everyday living. Nine Bar Blues explores the multitudinous forms of music and the people who make it and appreciate it—the body’s music, the spirit’s music, and what moves a soul forward in the crossroads journey of life.

Gary Kamiya with Paul Madonna, celebrating their new book, Spirits of San Francisco: Voyages through the Unknown City, published by Bloomsbury Books.From two bestselling, prizewinning, and critically acclaimed contemporary chroniclers of San Francisco comes a rich, illustrated, idiosyncratic portrait of this great city. Gary Kamiya is a writer, journalist, and historian. He is the author of the bestselling book Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco and the history column "Portals of the Past" (soon to be a podcast) which appears every other Saturday in the San Francisco Chronicle. He also offers unique walking tours by appointment and is available as a speaker about all things San Francisco. Paul Madonna is a San Francisco-based artist and writer. He is the creator of the comic series "All Over Coffee" and the author of four books, All Over Coffee, Everything is its Own Reward, On to the Next Dream, and Close Enough for the Angels. He is the Comics Editor for TheRumpus.net, has taught drawing at the University of San Francisco, and frequently lectures on creative practice, even when not asked.

City Lights celebrates the award-winning literary periodical's fall issue. Editor Michael Ray and Managing Editor Manjula Martin are joined by several contributors in an afternoon of readings and celebrations. Guests include Frances de Pontes Peebles, Patrick Dacey, and Daniel Orozco. Founded by Francis Ford Coppola in 1997, Zoetrope: All-Story is a quarterly print magazine of short fiction, one-act plays, and essays on film. Among the most celebrated literary periodicals in the world, it has won every major story award, including four National Magazine Awards for Fiction, along with a number of design commendations. The magazine's contributors comprise the most promising and significant writers of our era: Mary Gaitskill, Colum McCann, Rachel Cusk, Jim Shepard, Elena Ferrante, Daniel Alarcón, Karen Russell, Yiyun Li, Jonathan Lethem, Wes Anderson, Elizabeth McCracken, David Mamet, Ha Jin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Margaret Atwood, Pedro Almodóvar, Ethan Coen, Yoko Ogawa, Charles D'Ambrosio, Neil Jordan, Haruki Murakami, and many more.

Eileen Myles reading from their new book, For Now, published by Yale University Press. In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity's immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as a presence in time. Eileen Myles is an acclaimed poet and writer who has published over twenty works of fiction, poetry, nonfiction, and libretto. Their prizes and awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Warhol/Creative Capital grant, an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a poetry award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts