The New Year
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It was the first Bernal Yoga reading of the New Year, it was fun, where were you? We were here, with writers Jeff Hoffman, Li Miao Lovett and Peter Orner. As well, Tom Comitta and Marisela Treviño Orta, and music by Billy & Dolly.
Now a little something about Jeff Hofmman, Li Miao Lovett and Peter Orner:
Jeff Hoffman’s first book of poems, Journal of American Foreign Policy, won the New Issues Poetry Prize and was recently featured in Poets & Writers as one of the notable debuts of 2011. His poems have appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He was a Stegner Fellow from 2004 to 2006 and currently works as a creative executive and story editor for Phoenix Pictures, a film production company in Los Angeles.
Li Miao Lovett began her writing career after a 600-mile backpacking trip on the Appalachian Trail where she encountered a stalker, a compulsive poet, and ten thousand mosquitoes. Her debut novel, In the Lap of the Gods, is a tale of love and loss set in China amidst the rising waters of the Three Gorges dam. She has been a frequent contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle, New America Media, and KQED public radio, focusing on environmental issues before it was hip to be green. In both fiction and nonfiction, Li’s work has won awards or finalist standing from Glimmer Train, Writer’s Digest, National League of American Pen Women, A Room of Her Own Foundation, and the James Jones First Novel Fellowship. More about Li’s work can be found here.
Peter Orner lives in Bernal Heights and is the author of three books of fiction, Esther Stories, The Second Coming of Mavala Shikongo, and the recently published novel, Love and Shame and Love. Orner is also the editor of two books of non-fiction, Underground America and Hope Deferred: Narratives of Zimbabwean Lives. His work has appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, and Best American Stories. A Guggenheim Fellowship recipient, Orner teaches on the MFA faculty at San Francisco State.
Billy & Dolly
Saturday, February 4th!
To Be Read in the Dark
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Another excellent coming together of words and music that featured Maxine Chernoff, Joseph Lease and Kirsten Valdez Quade, along with Elizabeth Costello, Stephanie Dodaro, Andrew Kenower and Nana Twumasi. And Julian Hoover played guitar and sang. Poems and stories, from Mystery Train to missed trains, it really was a special evening.
Something now about Maxine, Joseph and Kirstin:
Maxine Chernoff is the author of 6 books of fiction and 13 collections of poetry, most recently The Turning (Apogee Press), A House in Summer (Argotiste Press), To Be Read in the Dark (Omnidawn Press), and forthcoming from Shearsman in spring 2012 Without. With Paul Hoover she translated The Selected Works of Friedrich Hoelderlin, which won the 2009 PEN Translation Award. Her book of stories, Signs of Devotion, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. She edits New American Writing and chairs the Creative Writing Department at San Francisco State University. Of her poems, Donald Revell said, “…there is a rectitude so pure that it not only rights but literally delights the heart. Here, most tender is most true, and tenderness shines in the cadences, each of which is new, all of which attain to love.”
Joseph Lease’s critically acclaimed books of poetry include Testify (Coffee House Press), Broken World (Coffee House Press), and Human Rights (Talisman House, second edition forthcoming). Lease’s poems “’Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” and “Send My Roots Rain” have been selected for Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology (Second Edition). “‘Broken World’ (For James Assatly)” was also selected for The Best American Poetry 2002. His poems have also been featured on NPR and published in The AGNI 30th Anniversary Poetry Anthology, Bay Poetics, No Gender, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, New American Writing, and elsewhere. Marjorie Perloff wrote: “The poems in Joseph Lease’s Broken World are as cool as they are passionate, as soft-spoken as they are indignant, and as fiercely Romantic as they are formally contained. Whether writing an elegy for a friend who died of AIDS or playing complex variations on Rilke’s Duino Elegies (“If I cried out, / Who among the angelic orders would / Slap my face, who would steal my / Lunch money”), Lease has complete command of his poetic materials. His poems are spellbinding in their terse and ironic authority: Yes, the reader feels when s/he has finished, this is how it was—and how it is. An exquisite collection!” And Michael Bérubé called Broken World “remarkably inventive and evocative work from Joseph Lease, one of the finest poets writing today.”
Kirstin Valdez Quade is a Jones Lecturer in Fiction at Stanford University and a former Wallace Stegner and Truman Capote Fellow. She received her B.A. from Stanford and her M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere.
Julian Hoover
Saturday, November 12th!
What a Night, What a Night
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Another fun evening, with such terrific music and stories and poems. If you were there you know. If you weren’t, well come next time, as one of the audience members said at the reception: What a remarkable coming together of talent, what a night, what a night.
We heard from Helen Benedict, Chella Courington, and Melissa Stein. As well, Matthew Clark Davison, José Luis Gutiérrez, and Teresa Walsh, who shared their work.
Samantha Boudrot played her guitar and sang and sang. New songs, old songs, please see the accompanying video (below) for some of what we heard.
And here’s something about Helen, Chella, and Melissa.
Helen Benedict is the author of five novels and five books of nonfiction. Her sixth novel, SAND QUEEN, set in the Iraq War, has just been published by Soho Press. Her articles and essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Women’s Review of Books, and in many other newspapers and magazines. She is a professor of journalism at Columbia University. Articles featuring Benedict and her work have appeared on BBC, NPR, Al-Jazeera and many other U.S. and international radio and television stations, and in Reuters, The New York Times, Huffington Post, In These Times, Ms. Magazine, the Italian Vanity Fair, UK Marie Claire, and numerous other print publications in the U.S. and abroad. More information about Helen Benedict can be found at her website, www.helenbenedict.com/.
Nominated for the 2009 Best of the Net Anthology and the 2009 Best New Poets (University of Virginia), Chella Courington teaches literature and writing at Santa Barbara City College. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming in The Los Angeles Review, lo-ball, Gargoyle Magazine, Opium Magazine, Everyday Genius, and SmokeLong Quarterly. “Diana loved anything orange” was runner-up in The Collagist 2009 Flash Fiction contest. Her first chapbook was SOUTHERN GIRL GONE WRONG; her second chapbook, GIRLS & WOMEN, was released by Burning River in March; and her third chapbook, PAPER COVERS ROCK, will be released by Indigo Ink in September.
Melissa Stein’s poetry collection ROUGH HONEY won the 2010 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, selected by Mark Doty, and was published by American Poetry Review in association with Copper Canyon Press. Her poems have appeared in The Southern Review, New England Review, Best New Poets 2009, Harvard Review, North American Review, and many other journals and anthologies. She has received residency fellowships from Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Djerassi Foundation, and her work has won awards from Spoon River Poetry Review, Literal Latte, and the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Foundation, among others. She holds an MA in creative writing from the University of California at Davis, and is a freelance editor and writer in San Francisco.
Samantha Boudrot
Here Comes the Sun
The Takeaway
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It was another terrific night of words and music featuring writers Joshua Foster, Toni Mirosevich and Derek Mong.
Three local authors, Dustin Acton, Darren de Leon, and Kerry Dolan, also shared their work.
As well, Pocket Full of Rye played their “acoustic, gypsy-folk, 50′s love song-influenced melodies about happy people in sad situations.”
A little something about Joshua, Toni, and Derek:
Joshua Foster was born and raised in Rigby, Idaho. He attended the University of Arizona’s Master of Fine Arts program, studied fiction and nonfiction writing, and graduated in 2008. He returned to Idaho to work on his father’s grain and potato farm before coming to Stanford University as a Stegner Fellow in 2010. Josh’s short stories and essays have won awards and been featured in various publications including Fugue, Hawk & Handsaw, Dialogue, and South Loop Review, among others. His work has recently been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Web prize. He is also the nonfiction editor for the online magazine Terrain.org: A Journal for the Built and Natural Environments. He is currently working on a novel.
Toni Mirosevich is the author of four collections of poetry including The Takeaway Bin, Queer Street, The Rooms We Make Our Own, My Oblique Strategies (Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award, 2005) a book of nonfiction stories, Pink Harvest (First Series in Creative Nonfiction Award, Lambda Literary Award Finalist, 2007), and co-author of Trio: Toni Mirosevich, Charlotte Muse, Edward Smallfield. Her multi-genre work has been anthologized in Best of the Bellevue Literary Review, Best American Travel Writing, The Gastronomica Reader, The Impossible Will Take a Little While, The Discovery of Poetry, AutoBioDiversity among others and has appeared in Kenyon Review, Zyzzyva, Five Fingers Review, Puerto del Sol and elsewhere. She has been awarded fellowships with the MacDowell Colony, Blue Mountain Center, Djerassi Resident Artists Program and her poems have received multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University, and former Associate Director of the Poetry Center and American Poetry Archives. She lives in Pacifica, California, and you may visit her website here.
Derek Mong is the author of the poetry collection Other Romes (Saturnalia Books, 2011). From 2008 – 2010 he held the Axton Fellowship in Poetry at the University of Louisville, and has previously been the Halls Poetry Fellow at the University of Wisconsin. His poetry, translations, and prose have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Cream City Review, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. He currently lives with his wife in Bernal Heights where they are co-translating the Russian poet Maxim Amelin. Last September he began a PhD in English Literature at Stanford. More of his work is available on his website, www.derekmong.com.
