LITQUAKE SAN FRANCISCO, 2015

EVENT REPORT

Eileen Tabios participateD in a reading for two Bay Area journals, ELEVEN ELEVEN and Fourteen Hills during LitQuake San Francisco on Saturday, October 17, 2015.  The 6-7 p.m. reading will take place at

Flax art & design
1699 Market St.
San Francisco, CA 94103

EVENT INFORMATION LINK

Some Photos (click to enlarge):

A Welcome under the Stars!

Phillip Barron

Chris Ames

A lovely crowd!

Peter Bullen

Eileen Tabios & Avatar

Featuring: 

GABRIEL HOUCK studies in the creative writing PhD program at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln. His work has appeared in PANK, Lunch Ticket, and Fourteen Hills.

PHILLIP BARRON teaches philosophy and humanities at Woodland Community College. His first collection of poetry, What Comes from a Thing will be released by Fourteen Hills Press. 

CHRIS AMES is a writer who also draws. His work has been featured in Small Po[r]tions, Eleven Eleven, Midway Journal, Fourteen Hills, and elsewhere. You can visit him at chrisames.net

PETER BULLEN’s work explores the tender, the disappointing, and the preposterous; desire and its consequences, in other words. He was chosen as a Quiet Lightning Neighborhood Hero in 2014. His work has appeared in sPARKLE & bLINK and Blotterature. Blogs at WETRIEDOURBEST.WORDPRESS.COM.

ALLISON DELAUER’s recent texts have appeared or are forthcoming in Catamaran Literary Reader and Weatherings. Her performance collaboration, Umanità: Book I, premiered at Teatro dei Venti in Modena, Italy, in 2013. She lives in Oakland, California and works with organizations that promote social change, the arts, and, conservation.

EILEEN R. TABIOS’ most recent books include the experimental autobiography Against Misanthropy: A Life in Poetry and the poetry collections I Forgot Light Burns and Sun Stigmata (Sculpture Poems). More information is available at http://eileenrtabios.com/

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Here's some general info from last year's annual event:

The tenth annual Lit Crawl will span over three hours in the Mission District's Valencia Street corridor, featuring an astonishing 101 literary readings and events, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, comedy and more, in bookstores, bars, galleries, restaurants, stores, cafés, community spaces, a bookmobile, a vibrator store, and a police station. 

One of the most anticipated literary nights of the year, San Francisco's Lit Crawl attracts close to 10,000 people, and is the world’s largest such event. In 2008 Lit Crawl NYC launched in Manhattan, also an immediate hit. Austin was next, swarming for the first time in 2011. In 2012, we birthed two more Lit Crawls, one in Brooklyn, another in Seattle. In 2013, we expanded to Los Angeles, Iowa City, and London, and in 2014, Lit Crawls were launched in Miami and Helsinki.Get drunk on words!

You can click HERE to see what last year's Lit Crawl was like, and this coming October crawl should be just as fun!

AMERICAN CANYON CELEBRATES FILIPINO AMERICAN HISTORY MONTH!

EVENT REPORT

I was invited to celebrate October as Filipino American History Month over at the American Canyon Public Library. I decided to go as I thought I then could go to neighboring city Vallejo afterwards for dinner.  I should have known better -- this being a Filipino affair, there was plenty of food for dinner and take-home!  Then, I hadn't actually realized so many of my books were in the area's public library system and it was an unexpected treat to see them displayed.  Food and books -- what a fabulous evening!  Thanks to librarian Ricah Quinto and poet-professor Janet Stickmon for organizing the affair.  Both deserve Kudos -- I believe Ricah set up the first Fil-am History celebration for the area's public library system; Janet is not only an accomplished poet/performer but helped set up the Philippine Studies program at Napa Valley Community College. Here's a visual coverage!

Display with THE THORN ROSARY

Caramel Cake!

Display with SUN STIGMATA

Display with NOTA BENE EISWEIN, THE LIGHT SANG AS IT LEFT YOUR EYES and THE AWAKENING

Janet Stickmon and Ricah Quinto

Sheila Bare with books!

Huge Filipino flag on library fence.

The kulintang!

In anticipation of the holidays, Filipino parols or lanterns!

Dinner: pancit, ensamada stuffed with chicken adobo and fried lumpia!

Highlighted accomplished Filipinos included Cristeta Comerford

Presenter on the need for Fil-Am Studies

Student performer

Event coordinators and performers

More books!

INTERSECTION FOR THE ARTS 50/50 - KELSEY STREET PRESS READING

EVENT REPORT

SAN FRANCISCO:

Kelsey Street Press Reading for Intersection for the Arts’ 50/50 Poetry Nights Series took  place at

7-9 pm
Oct. 13, 2015
Tenderloin Museum
398 Eddy (@ Leavenworth)
San Francisco

Eileen Tabios read with Rena Rosenwasser, Nellie Wong, Valerie Witte, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Nascha Poole (click on images to enlarge):

(Curator Mg Roberts presenting Introductions)

(Eileen Tabios)

(Rena Rosenwasser)

(Trinh T. Minh-ha)

(Valerie Witte)

(Nellie Wong)

(Valerie good-naturedly took a photo of me doing something I'd never done before: photo-bombing someone, in this case Nellie Wong.  Because Nellie Wong.)

(Book Table)

(I own most of Kelsey's books, but did manage to pick up some more books!)

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From curator MG Roberts:

I've had the wonderful task of curating Intersection for the Arts' 50/50 Poetry Nights in celebration of its 50th Anniversary.  

For decades, the Tuesday Night Poetry Series by Intersection for the Arts gathered poets, “to share their newest writings in an informal, welcoming, and at times, raucous setting.” Although the Tuesday Night Poetry Series is no longer active it is my hope to channel the spirit of those readings by carrying Intersection’s literary commitment to poetry for four Tuesday nights this fall. Each event will be hosted by Small Press Traffic, Kelsey Street Press, Kearny Street Workshop, and Nomadic Press. 

The new Tenderloin Museum will host four Tuesday nights, featuring legacy poets and writers, community organizations, and emerging young artists pioneering poetry, experimentation, and praxis in dynamic new ways. 50/50 Poetry Nights seeks to celebrate Intersection’s 50 years of programming which continues to serve artists in exploring diverse art forms and experimentation.

Bios:
Rena Rosenwasser helped found Kelsey Street Press in 1974, where she continues to serve as its co-director. Rosenwasser's poetry publications include ELEVATORS (Kelsey Street Press, 2011); Dittany (Taking flight)(Mayacamas Press, 1993); Unplace.Place (Leave Books, 1992); and three collaborations with artist Kate Delos. Currently a board member of Small Press Distribution, Rosenwasser has also served on the Literary Panel for the California Arts Council. She and her partner Penny Cooper reside in Berkeley, California.

Valerie Witte is the author of a game of correspondence (Black Radish Books, 2015) and the chapbook, The history of mining (ge collective/Poetry Flash, 2013). In 2014 she began a collaboration with Chicago-based artist Jennifer Yorke, and their artist books based on her manuscript Flood Diary appeared in the exhibition, “Quotidiean/Elements of the Everyday: Water,” held jointly at the CelerySpace gallery in Berkeley, CA, and La Porte Peinte in Noyers, France. She is a member of Kelsey Street Press and the Bay Area Correspondence School (BACS). 

Nascha Poole is an extraordinary 4th grader. She loves nature and talking to wild animals. She has performed as a unicorn at SFMOMA under the wings of the poet Bhanu Kapil. She lives in a house of birds.

Originally trained as a musical composer, who received her two masters and Ph.D. from University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, Trinh T. Minh-ha is a world-renowned independent filmmaker and feminist, post-colonial theorist. She teaches courses that focus on women's work as related to cultural politics, post-coloniality, contemporary critical theory and the arts. She has also taught at Harvard, Smith, Cornell, San Francisco State University, the University of Illinois, Ochanomizu University in Japan, and the National Conservatory of Music in Senegal. Aside from the eight books she has published, her work also includes two large-scale multimedia installations and six feature-length films that have been honored in twenty seven retrospectives around the world: Reassemblage (1982), Naked Spaces (1985), Surname Viet Given Name Nam (1989), Shoot for the Contents (1991), A Tale of Love (1996), The Fourth Dimension (2001), and Night Passage (2004) .

Eileen R. Tabios is a poet, fictionist, cultural activist, critic, publisher, editor and visual artist. She loves books, and thus has released about 30 collections of poetry, essays, fiction and experimental biographies from publishers in nine countries and cyberspace. She has also edited or conceptualized ten anthologies, including VERSES TYPHOON YOLANDA, a fundraising anthology for Haiyan survivors that involved 133 poems by Filipino poets from around the world. She believes in no separation between “life” and “art.” She received her B.A. in Political Science from Barnard College and M.B.A. in economics and international business from New York University’s Graduate School of Business. More information is available at www.eileenrtabios.com.... 

Poet and activist Nellie Wong was born in Oakland, California. She is the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and in her poetry and through her community activism, she confronts social problems such as racism, sexism, and labor issues. Her collections of poetry include Dreams in Harrison Railroad Park (1977), The Death of Long Steam Lady (1986), Stolen Moments (1997), and Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner (2012). With Merle Woo and Mitsuye Yamada, Wong coauthored 3 Asian American Writers Speak Out on Feminism (2003). She is one of the founding members of the writing collective Unbound Feet, and her poems have been installed in public sites in the San Francisco area. 

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Kelsey Street Press was founded in 1974 to address the marginalization of women writers by small press and mainstream publishers. From the beginning, we linked our editorial policy to a poetics of allowance, encouraging women to write directly from their own creative imperatives, and to a poetics of inclusion that embraces racial and cultural diversity. In the eighties, we instituted a series of cross-genre collaborative works between poets and visual artists. A decade later, as our list included more established writers, we created the Frances Jaffer Book Award and, then, the FIRSTS! series to assure continued support of emerging poets. Our early books were handset and printed two pages at a time on a basement letterpress. Now we are exploring the interactive capabilities of the electronic media. At the heart of the Press remain the pleasures of the written page, books that can be held and carried, and ongoing participation in a continually changing poetry community.