Jonah Raskin has invited Steve Wasserman and Garrett Caples to join him in a bookshop celebration of the centennial of Jack Kerouac’s birth, March 12, 1922. Jonah’s recent novel Beat Blues: San Francisco 1955 is an evocative take on that era and the way it felt here when the Beats were tuning into a whole new sense of society and finding the words and the rhythms to express it.

Garrett Caples is a poet who lives in San Francisco. His most recent book of poems is Lovers of Today (Wave Books, 2021). He’s an editor at City Lights Booksellers and Publishers, where he curates the Spotlight Poetry Series, and has worked with Beat Generation legends like Michael McClure, Diane di Prima, David Meltzer, and Joanne Kyger. He occasionally served as Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s personal assistant. He has edited several books by Philip Lamantia.

Jonah Raskin, is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University, where he taught literature, law and guerilla marketing, and served as the chair of the communication studies department. The author of American Scream: Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and the Making of the Beat Generation, For the Hell of It, a biography of Abbie Hoffman and an anthology of Jack London’s writings about war and revolution. A performance poet, he has published six chapbooks, including “Rock and Roll Women” “No Walls Now,” and three murder mysteries. He lives in San Francisco.

Steve Wasserman is publisher of Heyday, a nonprofit independent press founded in Berkeley in 1974. He is a graduate of UC Berkeley and is a former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He was also publisher of Hill & Wang, a division of Farrar, Straus & Giroux and editorial director of Times Books, a former imprint of Random House. He was a partner of Kneerim & Williams, a literary agency, where he represented numerous authors, including Robert Scheer, Christopher Hitchens, David Thomson, Linda Ronstadt, and James Fenton. He lives in Berkeley.

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