Switchblade Press presents Hard Boiled for Hard Times

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Moe's Books
2476 Telegraph Ave.
Berkeley CA 94704
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Open 10 to 10 daily
Phone: (510) 849-2087
Fax: (510) 849-9938

More Moe's
Art & Antiquarian Shop
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Open noon to 6 daily
Phone: (510) 849-2133

101018 Switchblade Press presents Hard Boiled for Hard Times

Listen to the event....

Benjamin Whitmer was born in 1972 and raised on back-to-the-land communes and counterculture enclaves ranging from Southern Ohio to Upstate New York. One of his earliest and happiest memories is of standing by the side of a country road with his mother, hitchhiking to parts unknown. Since then, he has been a factory grunt, a vacuum salesman, a convalescent, a high-school dropout, a semi-truck loader, an activist, a kitchen-table gunsmith, a squatter, a college professor, a dishwasher, a technical writer, and a petty thief. He has also published fiction and non-fiction in a number of magazines, anthologies, and essay collections. Pike is his first novel.

He lives with his wife and two children in Colorado, where he spends most of his free time trolling local histories and haunting the bookshops, blues bars, and firing ranges of ungentrified Denver. Right now, he's probably sitting with a book in hand, staring out his window and dreaming of a tar paper shack somewhere in the Rockies, about fifty miles removed from his nearest neighbor.

Michael Harris grew up in a little railroad town in Northern California, in the loom of Mt. Shasta, whose mystic influence shadowed him from the University of Oregon to Harvard to the Iowa Writers' Workshop. An Army veteran of Vietnam, he has worked as a Forest Service aide, a janitor and an English conversation teacher in Tokyo. For 30 years, he was a reporter, editor and book reviewer for West Coast newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times. Like his alter ego, Harry Hudson, he stutters and is a
gloomy cuss. He lives with his wife in Long Beach; they have a grown son. The Chieu Hoi Saloon is his first novel.

San Francisco writer Jim Nisbet has published nine novels, including the acclaimed Lethal Injection. He has also published five volumes of poetry. His novel, Dark Companion, was shorted-listed for the 2006 Hammett Prize. His works have been published in French as well as English, along with a miscellany of additional translations into German, Japanese, Italian, Polish, Hungarian, Greek and, forthcoming, Russian and Romanian. 2010 could be named “The Year of Jim Nisbet” as, in addition to the publication of A Moment of Doubt, Jim has a new hardcover, Windward Passage, coming in Spring of '10, from Overlook Press, along with reprints of eight of his backlist titles, beginning with the long out of print Lethal Injection.

Michael Harris, Author of The Chieu Hoi Saloon

Summer Brenner, author of I-5: A Novel of Crime, Transport and Sex Summer, Brenner was raised in Georgia, the daughter of first-generation Ashkenazim, whose parents fled eastern Europe and wended their unlikely way to Dixie.

She was born into a South of extreme segregation (if it was better than before, she could not tell). Atlanta, Boston, Italy, and Paris where she believed she might become an authentic poet if life were sufficiently scrappy and French. Scrappy indeed, with spare centimes saved for cigarettes and Cinematheque.

After returning to the States, she drifted west, first to New Mexico and eventually to Berkeley. She currently works in Richmond, California on transportation justice and literacy projects. She is the author of nine books of poetry and fiction. Forthcoming in 2009-2010 are Richmond Tales – Lost Secrets of the Iron Triangle, Nearly Nowhere, and My Life in Clothes.Click here for an interview with Summer on KPFK or get the podcast of her interview with David Wilk on Writers Cast.

Owen Hill was born and raised in an industrial suburb of Los Angeles. He knocked around a fair bit-- baggage service at LAX, union rep, warehouse drone, janitor, “paid” political volunteer, ice cream maker—and other forms of boredom (as a poet said) advertised as poetry.

Landed in the Bay Area where he worked in several bookstores, finally settling into Moe's in Berkeley as a buyer and events coordinator. Had written poetry since puberty but had been shy about calling himself a poet. After taking a workshop with Tom Clark at UC extension he came to believe that poetry was his calling. He has since published seven slim volumes of poetry and read his poems at various venues around the country. His first novel, The Chandler Apartments, was written in Berkeley, in the building so named. At the time he was convalescing from a life-threatening
disease in the confines of The Chandler. The novel began as a satire, poking fun at the characters that inhabit the Bay Area poetry scene. It morphed into a murder mystery and became the first of the series featuring poet detective Clay Blackburn.

Currently in good health, he is working on the fourth Clay Blackburn mystery. The second, The Incredible Double, is just out from PM Press.

Coming Soon

May 17th
Nathalie Handal
Deena K. Shehabi