Come celebrate the release of the eighth issue of AMERARCANA: A Bird & Beckett Review, with two readings by contributors.

Robert Glück, Camille Roy, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Aaron Shurin, Kirstin Wagner, and Jamie Townsend (reading for Steve Abbott), hosted by guest editor Eric Sneathen and founding editor Nicholas James Whittington, read Wednesday, July 31, 7pm, at Bird & Beckett.

     A second reading, with Bahaar Ahsan,
최 Lindsay, Angel Dominguez, Evan Kennedy, Lauren Levin, and Tatiana Luboviski-Acosta, will be held August 10, 7pm, at Moe’s Books, 2476 Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley.

buy a copy here, or at Bird & Beckett, Moe’s and other fine brick and mortar bookshops.

READER NOTES

STEVE ABBOTT (1943-1992), whose work will be read by Jamie Townsend at the Bird & Beckett reading on July 31, was a poet, critic, editor, novelist and artist based in San Francisco. One of the original New Narrative writers, Steve was a frequent contributor to Bay Area arts and news publications including The Advocate, The Sentinel, and the Bay Area Reporter. He was also one of the founding editors of the literary arts newsletter Poetry Flash and the publisher/editor of the journal Soup. His books of poetry and prose include Wrecked Hearts, Stretching the Agape Bra, Lives of the Poets, Holy Terror, Skinny Trip to a Far Place, and a collection of essays titled View Askew: Postmodern Investigations. Abbott died of AIDS complications on December 2, 1992. His novel The Lizard Club was published posthumously.

BAHAAR AHSAN (reading August 10 at Moe’s) is a writer, artist, and translator based in the Bay Area, with familial origins in the port city of Abadan in the south of Iran. Like any other tgirl, Bahaar’s work is both speculative and deeply embedded in lineage(s) and aims to interrogate ontologies which separate the ideological from the somatic, the aural from the visual, homeland from host-land, past from present from future. Bahaar serves as a Contributing Editor and Resource Coordinator at The Operating System. Her writing appears in baest, Apogee, and elsewhere.

최 LINDSAY (reading August 10 at Moe’s) is the author of Transverse, forthcoming from Futurepoem in Spring 2020, and a chapbook, Matrices (speCt! books, 2017). They are a Kundiman fellow and a Ph.D. student in English literature at UC Berkeley. Recent projects include a creative manuscript in and out of translation on the colonial history of leprosy and opium in Korea, excerpts from which are forthcoming in Aster(ix) Journal and elsewhere. More of their writing can be found in OmniVerse, The Felt, HOLD: A Journal, and more. Their editorial work includes a print journal of translations and experiments in collaboration between Swedish and American poets, released in Sweden, Denmark, and the U.S. Visit them at www.
lindsaychoi.com.

ANGEL DOMINGUEZ (reading August 10 at Moe’s) is a Latinx poet and artist of Yucatec Mayan descent, born in Hollywood, and raised in Van Nuys, CA by his immigrant family. He’s the author of Desgraciado (Econo Textual Objects, 2017), and Black Lavender Milk (Timeless Infinite Light, 2015). His work can be found in Brooklyn Magazine, Dreginald, Entropy, Queen Mobs, The Tiny, The Wanderer, and elsewhere in print or on the internet. He’s currently working on a book of poems, as well as the follow-up to Black Lavender Milk, Rose Sun Water forthcoming from The Operating System, in 2020.

ROBERT GLÜCK (reading July 31 at Bird & Beckett) is a poet, fiction writer, editor, and New Narrative theorist, who has served as director of San Francisco State University’s Poetry Center, codirector of the Small Press Traffic Literary Center, and associate editor at Lapis Press. He is the author of 11 books, including two novels, Margery Kempe and Jack the Modernist, and, most recently, Communal Nude: Collected Essays. In 2019, Margery Kempe will be republished by New York Review of Books Classics. Glück edited, with Camille Roy, Mary Burger, and Gail Scott, the anthology Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative. He lives “high on a hill” in San Francisco.

EVAN KENNEDY (reading August 10 at Moe’s) is a poet and bicyclist who lives in San Francisco. He is the author of Jerusalem Notebook (O’clock Press), The Sissies (Futurepoem), and Terra Firmament (Krupskaya).

LAUREN LEVIN (reading August 10 at Moe’s) is a poet and mixed-genre writer, author of The Braid (Krupskaya, 2016) and Justice Piece // Transmission (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2018). With Emji Spero, they were developmental editor for We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, edited by Ellis Martin and Zachary Ozma (Nightboat, 2019), and with Eric Sneathen, they are editing Camille Roy’s selected prose. Their gender identity is some mix of belated queer, Jewish greataunt, and aspirational Frank O’Hara. They are still figuring it out. They live in Richmond, CA, are from New Orleans, LA, and are committed to queer art, intersectional feminism, being a parent, and anxiety.

TATIANA LUBOVISKI-ACOSTA (reading August 10 at Moe’s) is an artist and poet. Their first book, The Easy Body (Timeless, Infinite Light, 2017), is a love letter from hell that navigates the apocalypse. Their work, cutting across various materials and disciplines, has been shown & performed in the Los Angeles River, galleries, punk houses, plazas, and microcinemas across California.

CAMILLE ROY (reading July 31 at Bird & Beckett) has most recently published Sherwood Forest, from Futurepoem. Other books include Cheap Speech, a play, from Leroy Chapbooks, and Craquer, a fictional autobiography from 2nd Story Books , as well as Swarm (fiction, from Black Star Series). She co-edited Biting The Error: Writers Explore Narrative (CoachHouse 2005, re-issued 2010). Earlier books include The Rosy Medallions (poetry and prose, from Kelsey St. Press) and Cold Heaven (plays, from Leslie Scalapino’s O Books).

JOCELYN SAIDENBERG (reading July 31 at Bird & Beckett) is a writer, performer, and educator. Her most recents books are Dead Letter (Roof Books, 2014) and kith & kin (The Elephants, 2018).

AARON SHURIN (reading July 31 at Bird & Beckett) is the author of fourteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Flowers & Sky: Two Talks (Entre Rios Books, 2017), The Skin of Meaning: Collected Literary Essays and Talks (University of Michigan Press, 2015), and two books from City Lights: Citizen (poems, 2012) and King of Shadows (essays, 20008). The Blue Absolute is forthcoming from Nightboat Books. His work has appeared in over forty national and international anthologies, and has been supported by grants from The National Endowment for the Arts, The California Arts Council, The San Francisco Arts Commission, and the Gerbode Foundation. A longtime educator, he’s Professor Emeritus and former Director of the MFA Writing Program at the University of San Francisco.

KIRSTIN WAGNER (reading July 31 at Bird & Beckett) is a writer, teacher, and PhD candidate in the UCSC Literature Department. Her research concerns inherited trauma in families organizing around domestic violence. Her creative work is published/forthcoming in Genealogy, Bombay Gin Literary Journal, Gesture Literary Journal, and Something on Paper, as well as the chapbook, [aphotic]. She has taught creative writing at Naropa University, Indiana University, UC Santa Cruz, and in the Boulder public school system. You can find her hiding fairies in the redwoods, writing at the beach at 3am, or eating pizza anywhere, anytime.

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