A full house, a wonderful night, which featured writers Nona Caspers, Gloria Frym and Arisa White. Four local authors, Emily Phillips, Rebekah Pickard, Fernando Pujals, and Juan Alvarado Valdivia also shared their work. As well, there was a musical performance by Becca Richardson. And then a last minute addition: Basque poet Kirmen Uribe read two of his poems with his translator Elizabeth Macklin.

Be sure to check out Litseen and its great rundown of the evening, complete with video. You may do so here.

And now a little bit about Kirmen, Nona, Gloria and Arisa:

Kirmen Uribe was born in Ondarroa, a fishing village in Spain’s Basque country. He received an undergraduate degree in Basque philology from the University of the Basque Country.His first collection of poetry, Bitartean heldu eskutik (2001), won Spain’s Premio de la Critica. Elizabeth Macklin’s English translation, Meanwhile Take My Hand (2007), was a finalist for the 2008 PEN Award for Poetry in Translation. Uribe’s imagery is rooted in his Basque homeland, with themes ranging from romantic love to technology, history to travel. A reviewer for the Los Angeles Times Book Review praised the translation, noting, “The poems are each a beacon of light and memory, surrounded by conflict, explosion and interruption.” In addition to his poetry, Uribe has published essays, fiction, comics, and children’s literature. He has worked as a translator, scriptwriter, instructor, and columnist for the Basque-language daily newspaper Berria. His piece for theater, Ekidazu, has been produced by the groups Kukubiltxo and Oskorri. Uribe collaborated with poet-translator Elizabeth Macklin, singer-songwriter Mikel Urdangarin, and musicians Bingen Mendizabal and Rafa Rueda on a multimedia project integrating poetry, prose, video, music, and oral history, which was documented in the CD-books Bar Puerto (2001) and Zaharregia, txikiegia agian (2003).

Nona Caspers has published four books of fiction, her most recent being Little Book of Days and Heavier Than Air which was awarded the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant and an Iowa Review Fiction Award. Stories from a new manuscript This Isn’t What I Came to Say are forthcoming or have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Glimmer Train and Black Warrior Review. She teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University.

Gloria Frym’s most recent books are Mind Over Matter (BlazeVOX, 2011) and Any Time Now (Little Red Leaves, 2010). She is also the author of two critically acclaimed collections of short stories–Distance No Object (City Lights Books), and How I Learned (Coffee House Press)–as well as many volumes of poetry. A previous collection, Homeless at Home, won an American Book Award. She teaches writing & literature at California College of the Arts.

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of the poetry chapbooks Disposition for Shininess and Post Pardon. She was selected by the San Francisco Bay Guardian for the 2010 Hot Pink List. Member of the PlayGround writers’ pool, her play Frigidare was staged for the 15th Annual Best of PlayGround Festival. Recipient of the inaugural Rose O’Neill Literary House summer residency at Washington College in Maryland, Arisa has also received residencies, fellowships, or scholarships from Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prague Summer Program, Fine Arts Work Center, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005, her poetry has been widely published and is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet. A blog editor for HER KIND, and the editorial assistant at Dance Studio Life Magazine, Arisa is a native New Yorker, living in Oakland, CA, with her partner. Her debut collection, Hurrah’s Nest, was published by virtual artists collective.

Kirmen Uribe reading one of his poems, “That Tiny, Playful God”, with his translator Elizabeth Macklin.

It’s spring already! Come celebrate with another terrific Bernal Yoga Literary Series event Saturday, April 14th featuring writers Nona Caspers, Gloria Frym and Arisa White.

Four local authors, Emily Phillips, Rebekah Pickard, Fernando Pujals, and Juan Alvarado Valdivia will also share their work.

As well, there will be a musical performance by Becca Richardson (see post below).

And just added, Basque poet Kirmen Uribe, along with poet/translator Elizabeth Macklin, will share a couple of his poems with us too.

The Bernal Yoga Studio is located on 461 Cortland Avenue (at Andover), in Bernal Heights in San Francisco (directions here). There is a $5 suggested donation to help cover expenses. Any excess is offered as a contribution to the Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center.

The event begins promptly at 8 p.m.

So then? We’ll see you there!

Nona Caspers has published four books of fiction, her most recent being Little Book of Days and Heavier Than Air which was awarded the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction and selected as a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Other honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, San Francisco Arts Commission Cultural Equity Grant and an Iowa Review Fiction Award. Stories from a new manuscript This Isn’t What I Came to Say are forthcoming or have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Glimmer Train and Black Warrior Review. She teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University.

Gloria Frym’s most recent books are Mind Over Matter (BlazeVOX, 2011) and Any Time Now (Little Red Leaves, 2010). She is also the author of two critically acclaimed collections of short stories–Distance No Object (City Lights Books), and How I Learned (Coffee House Press)–as well as many volumes of poetry. A previous collection, Homeless at Home, won an American Book Award. She teaches writing & literature at California College of the Arts.

Arisa White is a Cave Canem fellow, an MFA graduate from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and author of the poetry chapbooks Disposition for Shininess and Post Pardon. She was selected by the San Francisco Bay Guardian for the 2010 Hot Pink List. Member of the PlayGround writers’ pool, her play Frigidare was staged for the 15th Annual Best of PlayGround Festival. Recipient of the inaugural Rose O’Neill Literary House summer residency at Washington College in Maryland, Arisa has also received residencies, fellowships, or scholarships from Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Hedgebrook, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Prague Summer Program, Fine Arts Work Center, and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2005, her poetry has been widely published and is featured on the recording WORD with the Jessica Jones Quartet. A blog editor for HER KIND, and the editorial assistant at Dance Studio Life Magazine, Arisa is a native New Yorker, living in Oakland, CA, with her partner. Her debut collection, Hurrah’s Nest, was published by virtual artists collective.

See Becca Richardson perform at the next Bernal Yoga Literary Series event, Saturday, April 14th!

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.

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.