girlchild
Join debut novelist Tupelo Hassman
for a book launch party, with live music
Saturday
Feb. 18th
7 pm to 9 pm
Read the New York Times review here!
The author: Tupelo Hassman
The book: Girlchild (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 2012)
The band: Buckeye Knoll
“Life is a crazy risk, a foolish venture, a journey hardly worth attempting by poor daughters raised by poor daughters who have no maps or guidebooks (and no teeth, either), who receive no justice that doesn’t hurt about the same as the injustice it means to remedy. This story is your worst white nightmare. Tupelo Hassman’s GIRLCHILD is a triumph and a philosophical treatise on survival.”
–Bonnie Jo Campbell, author of National Book Critics Circle and National Book Award Finalist American Salvage
Author Alan Kaufman in conversation with publisher & writer Brenda Knight on his new memoir, Drunken Angel — Sunday, February 19th – 2:00 pm
Alan Kaufman is a renowned writing coach here in the Bay Area, teaching countless writers the art of the memoir. He is also a skilled novelist (Matches), memoirist (Jew Boy) and anthologist (The Outlaw Book of American Poetry, editor, and The Outlaw Book of American Literature, co-editor with Barney Rosset). Alan’s new book, Drunken Angel, is “the story of a rebel poet’s climb from drunken hell to reclaim the gift he betrayed and to find the daughter he abandoned.”
Brenda Knight, author of Women of the Beat Generation and publisher of Viva Editions and Cleis Press, has done much as a writer to deepen our understanding of the Bay Area literary heritage and as a publisher to expand on that mission by bringing important new voices into print.
View a YouTube piece on Alan and Brenda discussing Alan’s work at this link.
This Sunday… Feb. 19, 4:30-6:30 pm: The San Francisco Bluegrass and Old-Time Festival co-presents, with our which way west? series:
Dark Hollow performs traditional favorites and slam-bang originals with equal gusto. The group’s virtuoso musicianship, love of tunes, melodies, harmonies and drivingbluegrass rhythms blends together to make a traditional sound spiced up with a bit of home-grown joie de vivre, powered by the vocals of leader John Kornhauser.
Info on the entire Blues & Old-Time Festival line-up can be found at this link. The Festival runs from Feb. 10 to 19th at venues all over town.
Les Gottesman/Bill Crossman – poetry/piano – plus open mic — Monday, February 20th, 7 p.m.
Les Gottesman‘s first published poems were in Ted Berrigan’s C magazine in 1965. More recently, his poems have appeared in Juked, Beatitude, Harper’s,Antioch Review, and Columbia Review. Les has been a teacher and political activist in San Francisco for over 30 years. He received his MFA in Writing from California College of the Arts in 2011. Website: lesgottesman.com
Bill Crossman is a poet, jazz pianist/composer, human rights activist, professor, and author. “John Brown’s Truth,” a musical theater piece he created which includes his poetry, will be performed in 2012 in the Bay Area. Bill frequently performs with violinist India Cooke (India Cooke-Bill Crossman Duo) and with the Troublemakers Union band. At Bird & Beckett, Bill will be reading new poems from his Sound Ground: Poems for the Years Since 9/11.
Brian Auerbach, Q R Hand Jr. and Lewis Jordan (shown left to right here) are joined by Julian Carroll in an acapella jazz poets aggregation that will set you on your ear. Four voices augmented by Lewis’s saxophone weave an intricate web of word strands to create heady music indeed.
