Sunday, September 23rd — 2:00 p.m.

PAWA (Philippine American Writers & Artists) co-presents with Bird & Beckett “Birds of a Feather” — a reading featuring Bay Area writers Rabih Alameddine, Laura Goode and Barbara Jane Reyes.

RABIH ALAMEDDINE is the author of three novels, The Hakawati, I, the Divine, and Koolaids, as well as The Perv, a book of short stories. He lives in San Francisco and Beirut.

LAURA GOODE is a novelist, essayist, poet, and screenwriter living in San Francisco.  Her first novel for young adults, Sister Mischief, was released by Candlewick Press in 2011, and called a “Best Book You Haven’t Read of 2011” by Vanity Fair online, as well as “a provocative, authentic coming-of-age story…full of big ideas, big heart, and big poetry” by Booklist in its starred review. She is the executive producer of the feature film Farah Goes Bang, which she co-wrote with Meera Menon.  Her poems and essays have appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus and numerous other publications.  Laura was raised outside Minneapolis, where she was a spelling bee kid, and received her BA and MFA from Columbia University.

BARBARA JANE REYES was born in Manila, Philippines, and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of Gravities of Center (Arkipelago Books), Poeta en San Francisco (‘finfish Press), which received the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets, and Diwata (BOA Editions, Ltd.), which was a finalist for the California Book Award. She is also the author of the chapbooks Easter Sunday (Ypolita Press), Cherry (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), and For the City that Nearly Broke Me (Aztlan Libre Press). She is an adjunct professor in the Yuchengco Philippine Studies Program at University of San Francisco, where she teaches Filipino/a Literature in Diaspora, and Pinay Lives and Voices in Literature. She lives with her husband, poet Oscar Bermeo, in Oakland.

If any work of fiction might be powerful enough to transcend the mountain of polemic, historical inquiry, policy analysis and reportage that stands between the Western reader and the Arab soul, it’s this wonder of a book — a book not about a jihadi but a hakawati (Arabic for storyteller). “Listen,” Rabih Alameddine invites. “Allow me to be your god. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.” — from Lorraine Adams’ review of The Hakawati in the Sunday New York Times, May 18, 2008.  To read the entire review, click here.