LIVE! From City Lights

Celebrating RESISTENCIA: Poems of Protest and Revolution with Mark Eisner, Tina Escaja, Romina Funes, Rebeca Lane, Jack Hirschman, and Jessica Powell. Co-presented by the Red Poppy Art House and Tin House Books. This event was originally broadcast live via Zoom. Carolina De Robertis, Resistencia translator, a writer of Uruguayan origins, is the author of four novels, most recently Cantoras, which received a Stonewall Book Award and a Reading Women Award. Mark Eisner, co-editor of Resistencia: In 2004 Mark was involved in the early stages of the Red Poppy Art House. Tina Escaja, co-editor of Resistencia, is a Spanish American author, digital artist, and Distinguished Professor at the University of Vermont. Romina Funes, poeta, was born in General San Martin, Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1981. For the past decade, Romina has organized "Letras & Música.” Jack Hirschman, Resistencia translator, is Poet Laureate emeritus of San Francisco. Rebeca Lane, contributing poet/rapper, was born in Guatemala City. As a teenager she became involved with social movements. Jessica Powell, Resistencia translator, has published dozens of translations of literary works by a wide variety of Latin American writers.

Jenny Bhatt in conversation with Devi S. Laskar discussing Janny Bhatt's new short fiction collection, EACH OF US KILLERS: Stories, published by 7.13 Books. Set in the American Midwest, England, and India the stories in Each of Us Killers are about people trying to realize their dreams and aspirations through their professions. This event was originally broadcast live on Zoom. Jenny Bhatt is a writer, literary translator, and literary critic. She is the host of the Desi Books podcast. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in various venues in the US, UK, and India, including NPR, The Washington Post, Electric Literature, The Atlantic, BBC Culture, Literary Hub, Longreads, The Millions, and others. Her fiction has been nominated for Pushcart Prizes and the 2017 Best American Short Stories. Devi S. Laskar is the author of The Atlas of Reds and Blues, winner of 7th annual Crook's Corner Book Prize (2020) for best debut novel set in the South, winner of the 2020 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature sponsored by the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association; selected by The Georgia Center for the Book as a 2019 book "All Georgians Should Read," long-listed for the 9th annual DSC Prize in South Asian Literature and long-listed for the 2019 Golden Poppy Award sponsored by the NCIBA.

John Freeman celebrates his new collection of poetry, The Park, published by Copper Canyon Press. He's joined by D.A. Powell, also reading from his own new work. This event was originally broadcast on Zoom. John Freeman is the editor of Freeman's, a literary biannual of new writing, and executive editor of Literary Hub. His books include How to Read a Novelist and Dictionary of the Undoing (forthcoming), as well as a trilogy of anthologies about inequality, including Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation, and Tales of Two Planets (forthcoming), which features storytellers from around the globe on the climate crisis. Maps, his debut collection of poems, was published in 2017. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages and has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New York Times. He is the former editor of Granta and is a Writer in Residence at New York University. D. A. Powell is the author of five collections of poetry, including Chronic, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and Repast: Tea,Lunch, and Cocktails. Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He lives in San Francisco.

Jennifer Worley discusses her book, Neon Girls: A Stripper's Education in Protest and Power, published by Harper Collins. This event was originally broadcasted via Zoom. Neon Girls is a riveting true story of a young woman's days stripping in grunge-era San Francisco where a radical group of dancers banded together to unionize and run the club on their own terms. Jennifer Worley is a professor of English at City College of San Francisco and recently finished her term as President of the faculty union, AFT 2121. Her film Sex On Wheels, documents the history of San Francisco's sex industry and sex worker activism and has played at film festivals and universities worldwide. Her writing has appeared in Bitch, Captive Genders, Invisible Suburbs, The Queerist, and PRI's Outright Radio. [editor's note: at the time of this recording, City Lights Bookstore was only open for curbside pickup and online order. The store has since opened fully and the hours are 12-8PM every day.]

Frank Wilderson III in conversation with Justin Desmangles, discussing Frank's new book, "Afropessimism." This event was originally broadcast via Zoom and hosted by Josiah Luis Alderete. Professor and chair of African American studies at the University of California, Irvine, and author of Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid, Frank B. Wilderson III has received an NEA Literature Fellowship and a Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award for Creative Nonfiction, among other awards. Justin Desmangles is chairman of the Before Columbus Foundation, administrator of the American Book Award, and host of the radio broadcast New Day Jazz, now in its fifteenth year. A member of the board of directors of the Oakland Book Festival, Mr. Desmangles is also a program producer at the African-American Center of the San Francisco Public Library.

Cara Black and Jacqueline Winspear discussing the writing of fiction that takes place in World War II Europe. They explore topics that closely parallel many of the issues of the day as well as discussing the challenge and complexities of placing one's writing in a dynamic historic period. This event was originally broadcast via Zoom and hosted by Peter Maravelis. Cara Black's most recent book is "Three Hours in Paris," published by Soho Press. Jacqueline Winspear's essay "Writing about War" will be published in the new anthology, "Private Investigations: Mystery Writers On The Secrets", "Riddles and Wonders In Their Lives," published by Seal Press. Cara Black, doyenne of the Parisian crime novel, is at her best as she brings Occupation-era France to vivid life in this gripping story about one young woman with the temerity—and drive—to take on Hitler himself. Cara Black is also the author of the bestselling Aimee Leduc Series. The most recent release in that series being "Murder in Bel-Air" published by Soho Books. Jacqueline Winspear is the author of the Masie Dobb's Series, following the exploits of the renowned psychologist and investigator Masie Dobbs through her exploits in WW2 London. The most recent novel in the series is T"he American Agent (number 15)" published by Harper Collins. Additional books in the series include: "To Die But Once; In This Grave Hour; Journey to Munich" and many others.

Katherine Silver in conversation with Mauro Javier Cárdenas, discussing Katherine's new translations of the work of Julio Ramón Ribeyro ("The Word of the Speechless : Selected Stories," published by NYRB) and Juan Carlos Onetti ("A Dream Come True: the Complete Stories of Juan Carlos Onetti," published by Archipelago Press). This event was originally broadcast via Zoom and hosted by Josiah Luis Alderete. Katherine Silver has translated more than thirty books, mostly of literature from the Americas. Her most recent and forthcoming translations include works by María Sonia Cristoff, Julio Ramón Ribeyro, Julio Cortázar, Daniel Sada, Horacio Castellanos Moya, César Aira, and Pedro Lemebel. She has received numerous awards and prizes, including three National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowships. She was recently translator-in-residence at the University of Iowa, and is the former director of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre. In 2019 What Books Press published her book Echo under Story. Mauro Javier Cardenas grew up in Guayaquil, Ecuador, and graduated with a degree in Economics from Stanford University. He's the author of The Revolutionaries Try Again (Coffee House Press). In 2016 he received a Joseph Henry Jackson Award and in 2017 the Hay Festival included him in Bogota 39, a selection of the best young Latin American novelists. His interviews and essays on/with László Krasznahorkai, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Javier Marias, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Juan Villoro, and Tatiana Huezo have appeared in Music & Literature, San Francisco Chronicle, BOMB, ZYZZYVA, and The Quarterly Conversation.

Emerson Whitney discussing and reading from their new book, "Heaven" published by McSweeney's. This event was broadcast live via Zoom, hosted by Caitlyn Wild. At Heaven's center, Whitney seeks to understand their relationship to their mother and grandmother, those first windows into womanhood and all its consequences. Whitney retraces a roving youth in deeply observant, psychedelic prose—all the while folding in the work of thinkers like Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and C. Riley Snorton—to engage transness and the breathing, morphing nature of selfhood. An expansive examination of what makes us up, Heaven wonders what role our childhood plays in who we are. Can we escape the discussion of causality? Is the story of our body just ours? With extraordinary emotional force, Whitney sways between theory and memory in order to explore these brazen questions and write this unforgettable book. Emerson Whitney is the author of Ghost Box. Emerson teaches in the BFA creative writing program at Goddard College and is a postdoctoral fellow in gender studies at the University of Southern California.

"Mapping the Bay," San Francisco Poet Laureate Kim Shuck is joined by Thea Matthews and Kevin Madrigal, reading new poetry. Kim Shuck's latest book of poems is Deer Trails, published by City Lights. Kim Shuck is an Ani Yun Wiya (Cherokee)/Polish-American poet, author, weaver, and bead-work artist who draws from Southeastern Native American culture and tradition as well as contemporary urban Indian life. She was born in San Francisco, California and belongs to the Northern California Cherokee diaspora. She is a member of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. She earned a B.A. in Art (1994), and M.F.A. in Textiles (1998) from San Francisco State University. Her basket weaving work is influenced by her grandmother Etta Mae Rowe and the long history of California Native American basket making. She is the winner of the Diane Decorah First Book Award from the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas and the Mary Tallmountain Award for Freedom Voices. In 2017, she was named the 7th Poet Laureate of San Francisco. Her newest book, Deer Trails, was published by City Lights in summer 2019. She is also one of 13 recipients of the Academy of American Poets inaugural Poets Laureate Fellowships. Born and raised in San Francisco, CA Thea Matthews is an emerging poet, scholar, and activist. She earned her BA in Sociology at UC Berkeley where she studied and taught June Jordan’s program Poetry for the People. A seasoned performer of spoken word, she also poems published in the Atlanta Review, Foglifter, The Rumpus, For Women Who Roar magazine, and others. She is a contributing author in anthologies Still Here San Francisco (Foglifter Press 2019) and Love WITH Accountability: Digging up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse (AK Press 2019). Currently, she is working on getting her first full-length collection of poetry Unearth [The Flowers] was published by Red Light Lit in 2020. Kevin Madrigal is a decolonizer of food, art, and health. He is a Chicano first-generation child of inmigrantes Mexicanos from Sur San Francisco. In 2016, he founded Farming Hope in San Francisco to provide employment opportunities in food for folks experiencing homelessness. Currently, he's working on a collection of poems about anxiety and promoting positive mental behaviors as well as an ancestral Mexican cookbook.

Roy Scranton reading from his novel, I Heart Oklahoma, published by Soho. Suzie's seen it all, but now she's looking for something she lost: a sense of the future. So when the chance comes to work with a maverick video artist on his road movie about Donald Trump's America, she's pretty sure it's a bad idea but she signs up anyway, hoping for an outside shot at starting over. A provocative, genderqueer, shapeshifting musical romp through the brain-eating nightmare of contemporary America, I Heart Oklahoma! is a book about art, guns, cars, American landscapes, and American history. This kaleidoscopic novel moves from our bleeding-edge present to a furious Faulknerian retelling of the Charlie Starkweather killings in the 1950s, capturing in its fragmented, mesmerizing form the violence at the heart of the American dream. Roy Scranton is the author of Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the End of a Civilization (published by City Lights Books), and co-editor of Fire and Forget: Short Stories from the Long War. He grew up in Oregon, dropped out of college, and spent several years wandering the American West. In 2002, he enlisted in the US Army. He served from 2002 to 2006, including a fourteen-month deployment to Iraq. After leaving the Army he earned a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree at the New School for Social Research, then completed his PhD in English at Princeton.