Moe's events coordinator Owen Hill is a well-known Bay Area poet. His two mystery novels, The Chandler Apartments, and The Incredible Double , were 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. Owen also reviews
crime novels for The Los Angeles Times. Most recently he was invited to
read at the Frank O'Connor Short Fiction Festival in Cork, Ireland. To contact Owen, please e-mail him at owen@moesbooks.com
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:
Friday, August 20th: Neal Pollack
Neal Pollack' s hilarious memoir Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude about his transformation from overweight, balding, failed rock star yoga skeptic to reborn, healthy, blissful yoga fiend.
Neal Pollack was overweight, the hair on his head was thinning, and the hair on his face was pretentious-all of which a New York Times critic helpfully pointed out while panning his second book. The nasty review, combined with the complete failure of his attempt to become the front-man for a rock band, left Pollack lying facedown in a puddle of his own tears, pounding the mattress and sobbing into his pillow.
Pollack was desperate enough to try anything to get his life back on track--even yoga. And to his surprise, as he struggled to master the "alligator pose" and keep from kicking other yogis in the face, Pollack began to feel better. So he immersed himself in the "weird and circuslike" culture of yoga, taking part in a 24-Hour Yogathon, volunteering at his neighborhood yoga studio, attending a "yoga Olympics" in an airport hotel ballroom, going to yoga conferences and yoga rock shows, becoming a reporter for Yoga Journal magazine, going on a two-week yoga retreat to Thailand, and, finally, teaching yoga himself.
In Stretch, Pollack tells the story of his profound personal transformation--all the while mercilessly lampooning the bizarre and omnipresent yoga culture of which he is now an enthusiastic proponent.
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.
Tuesday, October 5th: Four Irish Poets: Patrick Cotter, Gerry Murphy, Leanne O'Sullivan and Billy Ramsell
Writer, and publisher Patrick Cotter's poems can be found in such journals as Poetry Durham, Oxford Poetry, The Salmon, The Shop, Poetry Ireland Review and many other places. He has published several chapbooks of his poems including The Misogynist's Blue Nightmare (Raven Arts Press), A Socialist's Dozen (Three Spires Press), and The True Story of Aoife and Lir's Children & other poems (Three Spires Press). His work has appeared in the anthologies Separate Islands: Contemporary British and Irish poetry (Quarry, Ontario), Irish Poetry Now (Wolfhound), Jumping off Shadows - Some Contemporary Irish Poets (Cork University Press) , The Irish Eros (Gill & Macmillan), The Backyards of Heaven (Newfoundland), Something Beginning with P (O'Brien Press), and in The Great Book of Ireland . He has published short fiction in Cyphers, New Irish Writing and elsewhere.
Gerry Murphy was born in Cork in 1952. After dropping out of university in the early 1970s he spent some years working in London and living in an Israeli Kibbutz before returning to Cork where he has remained ever since. A champion swimmer he has made his living primarily as a lifeguard and swimming pool manager. He began publishing his books in the mid-80s containing poems so far removed from the Irish tradition that many doubted they were poems at all. Undaunted and with his usual irreverence, Murphy once insisted on using a singularly detracting review alongside the more praising ones as a blurb for one of his books. Amusingly this had the effect of silencing and defusing many of his critics.
Leanne O'Sullivan was born in Cork and is currently completing her Bachelor's degree in English at University College Cork. Her first collection Waiting for My Clothes was published by the British house Bloodaxe when she was just 21 years of age. By that time she had already won many of Ireland's prestigious poetry prizes including first prize in the Seacat poetry competition, the RTE Rattlebag Poetry Slam and the Davoren Hanna Award for Young Emerging Irish Poet. Waiting for My Clothes provoked American poet Billy Collins into saying:
"What is remarkable about Leanne O'Sullivan is not that she is so young but that she dares to write about exactly what it is to be young. A teenaged Virgil, she guides us down some of the more hellish corridors of adolescence with a voice that is strong and true. For that alone, she deserves our full attention."
Billy Ramsell was born in 1977 in Cork, where he was educated in the North Monastery and at University College, Cork. His debut collection Complicated Pleasures was nominated for an Eithne Strong Award in 2008 and he has also been shortlisted for the Hennessy Award. Ramsell has declared, "[In my work] I try to avoid the following: my family, my childhood, a certain type of rural idyll, a certain way of writing about history, poems that explicitly concern themselves with Ireland and Irishness, local characters."
Monday, October 11th: Karen Joy Fowler
Karen Joy Fowler is the author of five novels, including Wit's End and The Jane Austen Book Club, which spent thirteen weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was adapted as a major motion picture from Sony Pictures. Her novel Sister Noon was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and her short story collection Black Glass won the World Fantasy Award. She has co-edited three volumes of The James Tiptree Award Anthology. Fowler and her husband, who have two grown children, live in Santa Cruz, California.
photo by Beth Gwinn
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 Lebenszeit. 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.
Tuesday, October 19th: Omnidawn Night
Craig Santos Perez , a native Chamorro originally from the Pacific Island of Guċhan (Guam), has lived in California since 1995. He is the co-founder of Achiote Press and author of several chapbooks, including constellations gathered along the ecliptic (Shadowbox Press, 2007), all with ocean views (Overhere Press, 2007), and preterrain (Corollary Press, 2008). His first book, from unincorporated territory [hacha] (Tinfish Press in 2008) has been taught in universities across the United States and the Pacific. His poetry, essays, fiction, reviews, and translations have appeared in New American Writing, Pleiades, The Denver Quarterly, The Colorado Review, Sentence, and Rain Taxi, among others.
Anna Rabinowitz has published three books of poetry, The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders, Tupelo, 2006, Darkling, Tupelo, 2001 (which will be translated into German and published by Luxbooks, Wesibaden, Germany, forthcoming 2010), and At the Site of Inside Out, University of Mass. Press 1997. Darkling was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Best Poetry Book of 2001 Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2002, and At the Site of Inside Out was a winner of the Juniper Prize. American Opera Projects transformed Darkling into an experimental opera-theatre work that blurs distinctions between poetry, theater, and music. This production had its world premiere to great critical acclaim on February 26, 2006 at the 13th St. Theatre, NYC. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for 2001, Anna Rabinowitz has published widely in such journals as Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Denver Quarterly, Sulfur, LIT, VOLT, Verse, and Doubletake. Her work has also been reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1989, edited by Donald Hall, Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing, The KGB Bar Reader, The Poets' Grimm, Poetry Daily, and Poetry After 9/11.
Norma Cole is a poet, painter and translator. Her recent poetry publications include The Vulgar Tongue, Desire & Its Double and Spinoza in Her Youth, Scout , a text/image work in CD-ROM format. Current translation work includes Danielle Collobert's Journals, Anne Portugal's Nude and Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France. She created 2004-6 "Collective Memory," an installation, performance, and publication for "Poetry and its Arts: Bay Area Interactions 1954-2004," California Historical Society in San Francisco. Cole has received a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award, Gertrude Stein Awards, the Robert D. Richardson Non-Fiction Award, as well as awards from the Fund for Poetry. A Canadian by birth, Cole migrated via France to San Francisco where she has lived for over twenty years.
Paul Legault was born in Ontario and raised in Tennessee. He holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of Virginia and a B.F.A. in Screenwriting from the University of Southern California. His poems have been published in Denver Quarterly, FIELD, Pleiades, and other journals. Currently, he is working on an English-to-English translation of the complete works of Emily Dickinson, part of which has been published as a chapbook, The Emily Dickinson Reader, vol. 1 (Try and Make, 2009). Paul lives with his husband, Orion Jenkins, in Brooklyn, NY where he works at the Academy of American Poets.
Drawn from forty years of reporting in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle and elsewhere. Smart Ass from Parthenon Books will for the first time collect the work of the award-winning music journalist and best-selling author of Summer of Love and other books, Joel Selvin.
From the Redding ranch of country maverick Merle Haggard to the humble Hawthorne beginnings of the Beach Boys in South Central Los Angeles, Selvin tracked rock and roll lore throughout the state for the Chronicle since 1970. Smart Ass brings together his finest reporting on California rock and roll - a collection of feature articles ranging in subjects from Phil Spector to Tom Waits, Glen Campbell to CSN&Y, the Grateful Dead to the Beach Boys - all peppered with his trademark insights and acerbic asides. Highlights include Selvin's historic interview with Augustus Owsley Stanley; the award-winning series on the Bill Graham probate case; the controversial account of the life and death of Sheryl Crow boyfriend and mentor Kevin Gilbert; his frightening chronicle of the making of "There's a Riot Goin' On" by Sly and the Family Stone that first appeared on the cover of England's Mojo magazine.
Selvin specialized in coverage of the Grateful Dead and Smart Ass features a full selection of his greatest hits - from behind-the-scenes at studio sessions for "Terrapin Station" with producer Keith Olsen to his chilling tale of despair and anguish that led to the suicide of Dead keyboardist Vince Welnick. He also covered, almost as extensively, the Beach Boys and his classic interview with Dennis Wilson about Charles Manson is included. His interviews with John Fogerty earned Selvin a subpoena in the lawsuit by Fantasy Records founder Saul Zaentz and his liner notes to Creedence Clearwater reissues won the ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award.
Ironically, in March 2009, shortly after laying the initial groundwork for Smart Ass, Selvin left his staff position with The Chronicle, part of drastic staff reductions by the failing newspaper. With arts coverage in newspapers slashed and rock music producing fewer and fewer giants, columnist Selvin clearly operated during a golden era of music journalism. His epic biography of the little known rhythm and blues songwriter Bert Berns will be published next year and he is currently co-writing the Sammy Hagar autobiography for Harper Collins.
For much of the last 4 decades Joel Selvin has been one of the most revered (and feared) music journalists and critics in North America. His insights and purity of artistic standards put him in a class by himself. But Joel was unique in a way that set him aside from all other journalists. He had an innate ability to actually insert himself into the lives of many of his subjects -- counseling, advising and actually playing a pivotal role in the success of many legends. Incredibly, he played this role while maintaining his objectivity in evaluating the work of the people he befriended, and he had no hesitation in lambasting these artists when he didn't like what he saw and heard. The articles in "Smartass" are an invaluable collection that is a rare chronicle of modern pop culture. -- Joan Jett
Stephen Elliott is the author of seven books, including The Adderall Diaries, which was named a best book of the year by Kirkus Reviews, Time Out New York, the Kansas City Star, and the Nervous Breakdown; and Happy Baby, a finalist for the New York Public Library's Young Lion Award as well as a best book of the year in Salon.com, Newsday, Chicago New City, the Journal News, and the Village Voice. Elliott's writing has been featured in Esquire, the New York Times, GQ, Best American Non-Required Reading 2005 and 2007, Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006. He is a member of the San Francisco Writer's Grotto and is editor of The Rumpus.
Katherine Emery
Wednesday, October 27th: Julie Lindlow, author of Left in the Dark: Portrait of San Francisco Movie Theatres
Julie Lindlow is a writer and editor. She earned an MA in English Literature with an emphasis in cultural theory from San Francisco State University, and worked for ten years in environmental and cultural preservation at the Foundation for Deep Ecology, International Forum on Globalization, and Headlands Center for the Arts. Most importantly, she spent her youth slinging popcorn and candy at the Castro Theatre, where her relationship with San Francisco's vibrant film exhibition community began.
About the book...
Left in the Dark: Portraits of San Francisco Movie Theatres celebrates twentieth century movie theatres and moviegoing through lush full-color fine art photographs, and personal essays that offer both scholarly and literary appeal. R.A. McBride's vivid portraits of San Francisco movie theatres, including the Castro, New Mission, and Balboa to name a few, illuminate the role of the movie house as a great social nexus. McBride has gained rare access to the interiors of closed theatres, picturing them empty and allowing the grandeur of the architecture to take center stage. Casting the theatres as characters within the city's cultural landscape, scholars and film exhibitors such as Rebecca Solnit, Eddie Muller, Chi-hui Yang, and Gary Meyer, among others, uncover a spectacular variety of forgotten or never-before revealed histories. As society retreats from public life into the anonymity of multiplexes and personal entertainment technologies our moviegoing heritage becomes an ever more significant and inspiring source of ideas for new communal cinematic experiences. San Francisco is particularly fortunate to be one of the world's most vital moviegoing cities and to still have so many of its historic movie theatres. By drawing a continuum from past to present, Left in the Dark offers hope that even as these gorgeous historic theatres crumble, the spirit of Cinema thrives.
Tuesday, November 9th: Peter Conners, author of White Hand Society: The Psychedelic Partnership of Timothy Leary & Allen Ginsberg
White Hand Society weaves a fascinating tale of the life, times and friendship of these two larger-than-life figures and the incredible impact their relationship had on America. Peter Conners has gathered hundreds of pages of letters, documents, studies, FBI files, and other primary resources that shed new light on their relationship, and a veritable who's who of artists and cultural figures appear along the way, including Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Thelonious Monk, Willem de Kooning, and Barney Rosset. The story of the "psychedelic partnership" of two of the most famous, charismatic and controversial members of America's counterculture brings together a multitude of major figures from politics, the arts, and the intersection of intellectual life and outlaw culture in a way that sheds new light on the dawn of the 1960s.
"Peter Conners has given us a wondrous tale of picaresque adventure and authentic friendship - between Leary the trickster-explorer-scientist and Ginsberg the activist-bard-philosopher, two seminal figures who pioneered new pathways through the cultural maelstrom of the sixties."
-- Ralph Metzner , co-author, with Ram Dass & Gary Bravo, of Birth of a Psychedelic Culture
Tuesday, November 16th: Sandra Park and Shawna Yang Ryan
Sandra Park (MA, MFA, San Francisco State University) teaches English at Ohlone College in Fremont, California. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in the Iowa Review, New American Writing, St. Petersburg Review, Five Fingers Review, and two anthologies. Her new novella, If You Live in a Small House, will be published in the fall.
Born in Sacramento, California, the child of parents who met during the Vietnam War when her father was stationed in Taiwan, Shawna Yang Ryan graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, and received an M.A. from the University of California, Davis. In 2002, she was a Fulbright scholar in Taiwan. Water Ghosts (originally published in 2007 as Locke 1928) was a finalist for the 2008 Northern California Book Award. She currently lives in Berkeley, California.
