LIVE! From City Lights

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.

Aaron Cohen discusses the subject of his new book, Move On Up: Chicago Soul Music and Black Cultural Power, published by the University of Chicago Press. Drawing on more than one hundred interviews and a music critic’s passion for the unmistakable Chicago soul sound, Cohen shows us how soul music became the voice of inspiration and change for a city in turmoil. Aaron Cohen is the author of Aretha Franklin's 'Amazing Grace' (Bloomsbury). He teaches humanities, journalism and English composition at City Colleges of Chicago and received a Public Scholar fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2016. Cohen's articles have appeared in The Chicago Tribune, DownBeat, Washington Post and The Nation and he is the two-time recipient of the Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP).

(From February 2019) Chloe Aridjis reading from her novel, "Sea Monsters," published by Catapult Press. Pulsing to the soundtrack of Joy Division, Nick Cave, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, an intoxicating portrait of Mexico in the late 1980s by this brilliant Guggenheim fellow and Prix du Premier Roman Étranger–winning author. Chloe Aridjis is a Mexican-American writer who was born in New York and grew up in the Netherlands and Mexico. After completing her Ph.D. at the University of Oxford in nineteenth-century French poetry and magic shows, she lived for nearly six years in Berlin. Her debut novel, Book of Clouds, has been published in eight languages and won the Prix du Premier Roman Étranger in France. Aridjis sometimes writes about art and insomnia and was a guest curator at Tate Liverpool. In 2014, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She lives in London.

Gillian Conoley and Donna de la Perrière reading from their new poetry collections. Gillian reading from A Little More Red Sun On The Human: New and Selected Poems, published by Nightboat Books; Donna de la Perrière reading from Works of Love & Terror, published by Talisman House. Gillian Conoley was awarded the 2017 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. A Little More Red Sun on the Human: Selected Poems is forthcoming with Nightboat Books in Fall 2019. Her seventh poetry collection, PEACE, was named an Academy of American Poets Standout Book for 2014 and a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Conoley’s work has received the Jerome J. Shestack Poetry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Her translations of Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken, appeared with City Lights in 2014. Conoley is Poet-in-Residence and Professor of English at Sonoma State University, where she edits Volt. Donna de la Perrière is the author of SAINT ERASURE (2010) and TRUE CRIME (2009), both from Talisman House. The recipient of a 2009 Fund for Poetry award, she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs at California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University and curates the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series.

Kal Spelletich in conversation with Catharine Clark, discussing his new project, Significance Machines and Purposeful Robots. 'Significance Machines and Purposeful Robots' was an exhibit of work by Kal Spelletich at St. Mary's College Museum of Art through December 2019 that includes life size praying robots, photos, sound machines, drawings, videos and interactive sculptures which explore the question: can technology do spiritual work? Via audience operated robots that are meditative and violent, Spelletich's work enacts a liberated awareness and pushes his audience to a creative response to in their own lives. City Lights celebrates the release of the catalog for this show. The catalog is enshrined inside a unique artifact produced in a limited edition. The artifact is composed of a suitcase shell that contains a mechanized spinning stone Buddha, LED lights, sound recording of spiritual music, a speaker, laser cut text on acrylic, caliper measuring tool, assorted photos, drawings and prints, a thumb drive with videos photos and texts, pen, paper, laser cut marble, folded sculpture, monograph, and whiskey. The catalogue was organized by Saint Mary's College Museum of Art curator, April Bojorquez, with a forward by Lauren MacDonald, and an interview by Catherine Clarke that provide perspectives on the work and the artist in relation to contemporary art and technology issues. Kal Spelletich builds interactive machines and robots. He scours the world for industrial items in which the technology can be repurposed. Spelletich has collaborated with artists all over the world though his home base is in San Francisco. Kal works with bio-morphic sensors, (sometimes uncontrollable) that trigger his robots and provide viewers with a hands-on interactive experience. His work mines the space between what robots and humans can and cannot do. Recent exhibits of his work have been held in Namibia, Lubjianna, Berlin, Vienna, New York, India, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. A monographic exhibit of his work will be presented at Saint Mary's College in August 2019. Spelletich's practice is across genres and his work extends to curating exhibits and activism. His projects have been featured in the NY Times, PBS, and in other critical journals and media.

(From March 2019) City Lights celebrates the release of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's new novel, Little Boy, published by Doubleday Books with special guests reading passages from the book including: Andrew Sean Greer, Armistead Maupin, Michael Krasny, Maxine Hong Kingston, Shobha Rao, and Julien Poirier. A pre-recorded remark by Lawrence plays at the conclusion. This event was part of our Ferlinghetti 100th birthday celebrations in Spring 2019. In this unapologetically unclassifiable work Lawrence Ferlinghetti lets loose an exhilarating rush of language to craft what might be termed a closing statement about his highly significant and productive 99 years on this planet. The "Little Boy" of the title is Ferlinghetti himself as a child, shuffled from his overburdened mother to his French aunt to foster childhood with a rich Bronxville family. Service in World War Two (including the D-Day landing), graduate work, and a scholar gypsy's vagabond life in Paris followed. These biographical reminiscences are interweaved with Allen Ginsberg-esque high energy bursts of raw emotion, rumination, reflection, reminiscence and prognostication on what we may face as a species on Planet Earth in the future. Little Boy is a magical font of literary lore with allusions galore, a final repository of hard-earned and durable wisdom, a compositional high wire act without a net (or all that much punctuation) and just a gas and an inspiration to read.

Terry Tempest Williams reading from her new book, Erosion: Essays of Undoing, published by Sarah Critchton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Introduction by City Lights bookseller Ryan Darley. Erosion are fierce, timely, and unsettling essays from an important and beloved writer and conservationist.Terry Tempest Williams is the award-winning author of The Hour of Land: A Personal Topography of America's National Parks; Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place; Finding Beauty in a Broken World; and When Women Were Birds, among other books. Her work is widely taught and anthologized around the world. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she is currently the Writer-in-Residence at the Harvard Divinity School. She and her husband Brooke Williams divide their time between Cambridge, Massachusetts and Castle Valley, Utah.

A discussion of Silvina Ocampo, focusing on the two new translations published by City Lights––"Forgotten Journey" & "The Promise"--with the books' translators: Suzanne Jill Levine, Katie Lateef-Jan and Jessica Powell. Opening statement by Elaine Katzenberger, publisher/executive director of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers, who also edited these two books. Silvina Ocampo was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1903. A central figure of Argentine literary circles, Ocampo's accolades include Argentina's National Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim fellowship. She was an early contributor to Argentina's Sur magazine, where she worked closely with its founder, her sister Victoria Ocampo; Adolfo Bioy Casares, her husband; and Jorge Luis Borges. In 1937, Sur published Ocampo's first book, Viaje olvidado. She went on to publish thirteen volumes of fiction and poetry during a long and much-lauded career. Ocampo died in Buenos Aires in 1993. La promesa, her only novel, was posthumously published in 2011. Suzanne Jill Levine is the General Editor of Penguin's paperback classics of Jorge Luis Borges’ poetry and essays (2010) and a noted translator, since 1971, of Latin American prose and poetry by distinguished writers such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Julio Cortázar, Carlos Fuentes, Manuel Puig, Severo Sarduy, and Adolfo Bioy Casares. She has published over 40 booklength translations not to mention hundreds of poetry and prose translations in anthologies and journals such as the New Yorker (including one of Ocampo’s stories in their recent flash fiction issue). Levine has received many honors, among them PEN awards, several NEA and NEH grants, Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and more recently the PEN USA Translation prize for José Donoso’s posthumous novel The Lizard’s Tale. Founder of Translation Studies at UCSB, she has mentored students throughout her academic career (including Jessica Powell and Katie Lateef Jan). Levine is author of several books including the poetry chapbook Reckoning (2012); The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (1991; 2009); Manuel Puig and the Spiderwoman: His Life and Fictions (FSG, 2000, 2002). Her most recent translation is Guadalupe Nettel’s Bezoar and Other Unsettling Stories (2020) for Seven Stories Press. Jessica Powell has published dozens of translations of literary works by a wide variety of Latin American writers. She was the recipient of a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship in support of her translation of Antonio Benítez Rojo's novel, Woman in Battle Dress(City Lights, 2015), which was a finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Translation. Her translation of Wicked Weeds by Pedro Cabiya (Mandel Vilar Press, 2016), was named a finalist for the 2017 Best Translated Book Award and made the longlist for the 2017 National Translation Award. Her translation of Pablo Neruda's book-length poem, venture of the infinite man, was published by City Lights Books in October 2017. Her most recent translation, of Edna Iturralde's award-winning book, Green Was My Forest, was published by Mandel Vilar Press in September, 2018. Katie Lateef-Jan is a PhD Candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara in Comparative Literature with a doctoral emphasis in Translation Studies. Her research focuses on twentieth-century Latin American literature, specifically Argentine fantastic fiction. She is the co-editor with Suzanne Jill Levine of Untranslatability Goes Global: The Translator's Dilemma (2018). Her translations from the Spanish have appeared in Granta; Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas; and ZYZZYVA.