|
Moe's literary events began as a weekly poetry reading called Monday@Moe's. Over the years Moe's Books has become one of the premier Bay Area venues to hear novelists, poets, activists, and scholars read from their works. We archive our events in audio and video files that can be accessed from our webpage.
|
Unless otherwise mentioned, all events begin at 7:30pm.
|
Upcoming events:
Thursday, June 17th: Poetry Flash presents Indigo Moor & Judith McCombs
Indigo Moor's Tap-Root was published in 2006 as part of Main Street Rag's Editor's Select Poetry Series .
His 2nd book Through the Stonecutter's Window is scheduled for an April 10 release by Northwestern University Press as winner of their 2nd Book Prize. He is a 2003 recipient of Cave Canem 's Writing fellowship in poetry, former vice president of the Sacramento Poetry Center, and editor for the Tule Review . He is the winner of the 2005 Vesle Fenstermaker Poetry Prize for Emerging Writers, a 2009 Pushcart Prize nominee and 2009 Jack Kerouac Poetry contest winner.
Other honors include: finalist finishes for the T.S. Eliot Prize , Crab Orchard First Book Prize , Saturnalia First Book Award , Naomi Long Madgett Book Award , and WordWorks Prize . He has received scholarships to the Summer Literary Series in St. Petersburg Russia, the 2006 Idyllwild Summer Poetry Program , the Indiana University Writer's Conference , and the Napa Valley Writer's Conference .
His work has appeared in the Arkansas Review , Xavier Review , LA Review , Mochila Review , Boston University's The Comment , the Pushcart Prize nominated Out of the Blue Artists Unite , Poetry Now , Cave Canem Anthologies VIII and IX, The Ringing Ear , the NCPS 2006 Anthology , Blue Moon Literary & Arts Review , Breathe 101: Contemporary Odes , and Gathering Ground . He was recently the featured artist for the Suisun Valley Review.
Judith McCombs grew up in almost all the continental states, in a geodetic surveyor's family. Her work appears in Calyx, Nimrod (a Neruda Award), Poet Lore, Poetry Northwest, Potomac Review (Poetry Prize), Prairie Schooner, Prism, Sisters of the Earth, and online in Beltway, Innisfree Poetry Journal, and Not Just Air. She has held NEH and Canadian Senior Embassy Fellowships, and Michigan and Maryland Arts Awards. She teaches at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, edits for Word Works, and arranges the Kensington Row Bookshop Poetry Readings.
|
|
 |
Wednesday, June 23rd: Michael Parenti
Michael Parenti is an internationally known award-winning author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leading progressive political analysts. His highly informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.
God and His Demons
Michael Parenti brings his critical acumen and gifted writing skills to bear on the dark side of religion, the many evils committed in the name of godly virtue throughout history. This is not a blanket condemnation of all believers. The focus is on the threat posed by fundamentalists and theocratic reactionaries. Historically anchored and biblically informed, this eloquent indictment of organized religion's delusions and abuses will be welcomed by secular laypersons and progressive religionists alike. |
Tuesday, June 29th: George Kimball and John Schulian, editors of The Fighter Still Remains: a Celebration of Boxing in Poetry and Song
Confirmed readers and speakers for this event:
Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Leonard Gardner
George Kimball
Taj Mahal
David Meltzer
Ishmael Reed
Michael Rothenberg
John Schulian
Holly St. John Bergon |
 |
Wednesday, June 30th: Poets Stephen Ratcliffe and Robert Grenier
Stephen Ratcliffe's Reading the Unseen: (Offstage) Hamlet ) is out from Counterpath Press. REAL , 474 pages written in 474 consecutive days, was published by Avenue B in 2007. CLOUD / RIDGE (also 474 pages) and HUMAN / NATURE (1,000 pages), appear in ubu editions “Publishing the Unpublishable” series ( www.ubu.com ). The complete (14 hour) reading/performance of HUMAN / NATURE at UC Davis is up at PennSound ( http://writing.upenn.edu/ pennsound/x/Ratcliffe.html). Previous books include Portraits & Repetition_ (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002) and SOUND/ (system) (Green Integer, 2002). He lives in Bolinas and teaches at Mills College in Oakland
Born in 1941 in Minneapolis, MN and athlete of the year at Roosevelt High School, Robert Grenier attended Harvard College and the Iowa Writers Workshop. He has taught modern literature and creative writing at Berkeley, Tufts, Franconia and Mills. Sentences , a 1978 box of 500 5x8 cards has recently been added to the Heller Rare Book Collection at Mills. He is co-editor of The Collected Poems of Larry Eigner (Stanford, 2010). An archive of Grenier's work over the years is housed in Stanford University's Green Library; other materials can be found at http://epc.buffalo.edu/ authors/grenier/ .
Thursday, July 8th: Poetry Flash presents Neeli Cherkovski & David Meltzer
Neeli Cherkovski is a longtime contributor to the West Coast literary scene. Emerging from the Los Angeles underground of the Sixties, Cherkovski is an applauded poet, critic and literary biographer. He has written ten books of poetry, including the award winning Leaning Against Time , Elegy for Bob Kaufman and Animal; two acclaimed biographies, Bukowski: A Life and Ferlinghetti: A Biography; his book, Whitman's Wild Children (a collection of critical memoirs), has become an underground classic. In the late 1960s Cherkovski co-edited the poetry anthology Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns with Charles Bukowski. Since 1975, Neeli has lived and worked in San Francisco. For ten years he was Writer-in-Residence at New College of California, where he taught literature and philosophy.
One of the key poets of the Beat generation, David Meltzer is also a jazz guitarist and Cabalist scholar and the author of more than 50 books of poetry and prose. 2005 saw the publication of David's Copy: The Selected Poems of David Meltzer (edited by Michael Rothenberg , with an introduction by Jerome Rothenberg ) which provides a current "overview" of Meltzer's work.
Meltzer's other books include No Eyes, poems on Lester Young, and a book of interviews, San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets ( City Lights Books ).
Meltzer teaches at the New College of California in the Poetics Program which was originally founded by Robert Duncan. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area . |
Dennis Letbetter
|
Monday July 12th: Megan Prelinger
Megan Prelinger is a historian and a lifelong collector of space history ephemera and science fiction literature. She is co-founder and architect of information design of the Prelinger Library, a private research library open to the public, which houses more than forty thousand books and other print artifacts on North American regional and land use history, media and cultural studies, and technology, including a space history collection. She is also a naturalist and rehabilitator of aquatic avian species. She lives and works in San Francisco.
On May 25, 2010--the 49th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy's speech proclaiming America's commitment to "landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth"--Blast Books will publish an illustrated book like no other: Megan Prelinger's Another Science Fiction: Advertising the Space Race, 1957-1962.
This "stupendous" (Jonathan Lethem) volume showcases nearly 200 spectacular images from the Mad Men era of space advertising and provides a "fascinating entrée into the rich history of spaceflight" (Roger D. Launius, National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution).
Boldly entertaining and uniquely insightful, this hybrid of eye candy and brain food is winning remarkable advance accolades from the worlds of space, style, and science fiction. Adding his voice to praise from William Gibson, Gay Perello, Jonathan Lethem, and Roger D. Launius is Fred Ordway, former member of the Wernher von Braun rocket team and consultant to Stanley Kubrick for 2001: A Space Odyssey : "To the author of this remarkable work go well-deserved laurels for rescuing rocket/space ad artwork from virtual obscurity. Megan Prelinger's book is
a treasure that should find a worldwide readership of space historians, lovers of space art, and all who seek to understand the evolution of humanity's transition to a face sparing species."
|
|
|
|
Wednesday, July 14th: Dale Pendell
Dale Pendell is the author of the award-winning Pharmako trilogy on shamanic ethnobotany, Inspried Madness, a book about Burning Man, and Walking with Nobby, a book of conversations with the philosopher Norman O. Brown. His most recent book, The Great Bay: Chronicles of the Collapse, traces the future history of California after a global pandemic.
He and his wife Laura and a familiar cat live in the foothills of the Sierra in California, where they grow pine and oak trees, along with some manzanita. Their performance group, Oracular Madness, most recently appeared at Burning Man.
The Great Bay tells a cautionary tale of California for the world, where nature takes a final stand against man and the heightening tensions among nations lay most to waste in a crushing break. Post-collapse technology, values, and intellect seem to move backwards in time, as memory of the world before the Collapse blends into myth over time. Combining a haunting view of the future caused by global warming with detailed maps depicting a massive transformation of California, Dale Pendell proves once again that he's a unique and provocative fiction writer and thinker. |
Thursday, July 22nd: Poetry Flash presents Marc Hofstadter & Tim Kahl
Marc Elihu Hofstadter's Rising at 5:00 A.M. is his fifth book of poems. Neal Oxenhandler says of it, "Poems that read like narrative traverse years of suffering, learning and delight. They open doors to . . . prep school, the mental ward, Russian novels. With unerring rhythm and in countless ways Marc Hofstadter sings his passion to the reader's heart." His recent books include Shark's Tooth and Luck. His essays, translations, and poems have appeared in more than sixty magazines.
Tim Kahl's first full-length book of poems is Possessing Yourself. Joshua McKinney says, "Part photo album, part diagram, part dream, Tim Kahl's Possessing Yourself hacks a life out of the harsh terrain of experience . . . In vivid narrative and acute lyric, these poems bring us close to the complexities of a whole human being. This is an exceptional book." Widely published in literary magazines, Tim Kahl is also a translator, from the German of Austrian avant-gardist Friederike Mayrocker, and from the Portuguese of several poets, including the only Portuguese-speaking Nobel Laureate, José Saramago. Tim Kahl is a board member and hosting coordinator of the Sacramento Poetry Center. Tuesday, July 27th : Bettina Rotenberg
Many children--particularly Latino--that populate the inner city schools in the Bay Area are not learning effective techniques to be able to learn to read and write, as the required literacy curriculum poorly addresses their needs. To help combat this situation, and give educators the tools they need to provide a stronger educational foundation for their students, Bettina Rotenberg has written I Dare to Stop the Wind: Challenging Children in the Public Schools Through the Arts and Poetry, a chronicle of her experience of bringing the arts and poetry into inner city schools with the VALA Project. Over the past several years, Rotenberg and her team have made clear that when English Language Learners are presented with sophisticated, contemporary examples of the arts and poetry that relate to their personal lives, students are more than capable of reading and writing passionate and engaging prose. These "underperforming" students transform into children able to discuss and analyze difficult and challenging poems and find inspiration from them to write their own extraordinary poetic responses. Thursday, July 29th: Poetry Flash presents Stefanie Marlis & Carol Moldaw
Stefanie Marlis's latest book of poems is cloudlife. C.D. Wright calls it "Aphoristic, enigmatic, and startling. Part elegy for her father and the brisance of his twentieth century, part cautionary tale for this one. Once more Marlis converts an intimate history into a distinctive, austere expression." Among her other books of poems are Slow Joy, which won the 1989 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, rife, and fine, which was a finalist for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. She has also authored the novel Love (K)not.
Carol Moldaw's new book of poems is So Late, So Soon: New and Selected Poems; "Out of acutely observed, deeply felt particulars the poems balance intimacy and objectivity in exact, lyric language." Author of four previous books of poetry, which are represented in the new book with a generous selection of new poetry, as well as a novel, Moldaw has received a Lannan Foundation Marfa Writer's Residency, an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship, and a Pushcart Prize. Thursday, August 5th: Poetry Flash presents Love Over 60: an anthology of women's poems, featuring Ellery Akers, Ellen Bass, Chana Bloch, Gail Entrekin, Kathie Isaac-Luke & Ellaraine Lickie
Edited by Robin Chapman and Jeri McCormick, this new anthology from Mayapple Press celebrates poems by women over sixty. Marilyn L. Taylor said of it, ". . . in this era of steamy effusions about romance and passion, comes this show-stopping array of love poems---insightful, sophisticated, deeply erotic at times, often undeniably brilliant." Eleanor Wilner wrote of it, "In plain language and unashamed directness, these elder women poets, in lines alive with both remembrance and presence, like Barbara Crooker's couple in their hammock, "lie . . . caught between the mesh / of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up / in love, running out of time." And, knowing what they know, they still, like Lucille Clifton welcoming a granddaughter into a violent world, can say: "and I am consumed with love / for all of it." Thursday, August 12th: Poetry Flash presents Julie Sheehan & Robert Thomas
Julie Sheehan's newest is Bar Book, Poems and Otherwise, which Molly Peacock praises as "employing the metaphor-rich names and recipes of cocktails, an exuberant third collection from a 'dancer of language.'" Her first book won the Poets Out Loud Prize from Fordham University, and her second, Orient Point, won the 2005 Barnard Women Poets Prize.
Robert Thomas's latest book of poems is Dragging the Lake, about which Brendan Galvin says, "He can be lyrically contemporary, or speak in extended narratives through the personae of Leos Janácek, Jakob Boehme, and Jaqueline du Pré. Dragging the Lake is richly textured, various, deeply satisfying, and snazzy." His first book, Door to Door, was selected by Yusef Komunyakaa as winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize, Fordham University.
Saturday, September 11Th: William Gibson
1pm Q&A; signing
Legendary Science Fiction author William Gibson will be here this Saturday afternoon to discuss and sign his new book Zero History.
Hollis Henry is an investigative journalist, on assignment from a magazine called Node. Node doesn't exist yet, which is fine; she's used to that. But it seems to be actively blocking the kind of buzz that magazines normally cultivate before they start up. Really actively blocking it. It's odd, even a little scary, if Hollis lets herself think about it much. Which she doesn't; she can't afford to. Hollis Henry, former rock singer turned journalist, has very unwillingly forced by global economic collapse to work once again for the secretive Belgian finance genius Hubertus Bigend, who hired her in SPOOK COUNTRY. She finds herself entangled in a threatening mesh of postmodern marketing, corrupt American military contractors, and belated romance. She is reunited with the Russian translator Milgrim, who spent SPOOK COUNTRY in a haze of prescription drugs, but is now fresh out of a very expensive private detox facility in Basel, and is now also working for Bigend. |
|
Thursday, September 23rd: Poetry Flash presents Bob Hicok and the Stegner Fellows: Matthew Siegel, Keetje Kuipers & Sara Michas-Martin
Bob Hicok's new book of poems, his sixth, is Words for Empty and Words for Full. Recent books include This Clumsy Living and Insomnia Diary. He is one of the nation's more celebrated poets; among his honors a Guggenheim Fellowship and two from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Felix Pollak Prize, the Jerome J. Shestack Prize, four Pushcarts, and more. He will be reading with three poets who are all past or present Wallace Stegner Fellows in poetry at Stanford University.
Keetje Kuipers' first book of poems, Beautiful in the Mouth, won the 2009 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and was published last March.
Sara Michas-Martin was a Stegner fellow and a Jones lecturer at Stanford; her work has appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere.
Matthew Siegel is a current Stegner fellow, his poetry has appeared in Poetry Daily, Diagram and elsewhere. Thursday, October 14th: Poetry Flash presents Timothy Donnelly & Barbara Claire Freeman
Timothy Donnelly's new book of poems is The Cloud Corporation. Allen Grossman says, "The poems of Timothy Donnelly astonish by their inventive intelligence . . . we learn that self-knowledge can be adequate to knowledge of the world, in all its violence and complexity." His first book of poems was Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenzeit. His work has been translated into German and Italian and anthologized in 100 Poems by Younger American Poets, Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for Boston Review.
Barbara Claire Freeman's first book of poems is Incivilities. Judith Butler calls it "an extraordinary collection of poems. They range in form and style, but they participate in an austerity, a political edge, and what one poem calls 'an abbreviated violence.' Beautifully crafted, tight, with no word to spare, these poems interrogate the region of what is left in the aftermath of devastated land and life." A literary critic and Professor of Literature, she has recently turned her full attention to writing poetry. Author of The Feminine Sublime: Gender and Excess in Women's Fiction, among other works of criticism and theory, Freeman's honors include a 2008 Discovery/ Boston Review Poetry Award and the 2007 Campbell Corner Poetry Prize from Sarah Lawrence College.
|
|
Moe's events coordinator Owen Hill is a well-known Bay Area poet. His first novel, the mystery The Chandler Apartments, was well received across the country. In 2006, Owen and Robert Eliason created the Telegraph 3pm exhibit, an ongoing image/text project, that was displayed at the Berkeley YWCA, then updated and displayed in 2007 at the Gaia Building in Downtown Berkeley. To contact Owen, please e-mail him at owen@moesbooks.com
Get emailed updates of upcoming events! |