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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. Sign up for the Moe's Books events calendar alerts here.
All events, unless noted, start at 7:30pm
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Rebecca Walker, Monday, February 20th
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Rebecca Walker is the author of the memoirs Black, White and Jewish and Baby Love and the editor of the anthologies To Be Real, What Makes a Man, and One Big Happy Family. Her writing has appeared in Bookforum, The Washington Post Book World, Newsweek, TheRoot.com, Essence, Glamour, Vibe, and Interview among other publications. She has made appearances on Fresh Air, Good Morning America, Charlie Rose, Oprah, and others. |
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The legacy of Black cool is infinitely relevant. We know it when we see it, when we read it, and when we hear it, whether it's the reserved coolness in the sound of Miles Davis' horn, or what Michaela Angela Davis calls the national treasure that is Black American Style. Where does Black cool come from? Who has it and who doesn't? What makes Black cool the cool?
In Black Cool some of America's most innovative and acclaimed thinkers on the subject discuss what makes Black the new black. It is a literary cookbook of coolness, wherein each writer names and defines an ingredient of their choice. Staceyann Chin tells of “Authenticity,” while author dream hampton explores “Audacity”. In “Forever,” bell hooks writes about a timeless kind of cool, while Veronica Chambers confronts the double-edged sword of appetite in “Hunger.” With a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and an introduction by Rebecca Walker, Black Cool is at once a celebration of a cultural legacy and a guided tour of the elements that have emerged to shape how the world defines the word cool.
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Adam Levin, Monday, February 27th
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Adam Levin's debut novel The Instructions was one of the most buzzed about books of 2010, a sprawling universe of "death-defying sentences, manic wit, exciting provocations and simple human warmth" (Rolling Stone).
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Now, in the stories of Hot Pink, Levin delivers nine smaller worlds, snow-globes of overweight romantics, legless prodigies, quixotic dollmakers, textbook lovers, dirty old men, insecticidal fathers, nervous comedians, angry mimes, and a dumptruck covered with balloons—all shaken together, colliding and embracing. Told with Levin's unique blend of love and violence, slapstick humor and tender courtship, abstract semiotics and karate chops, Hot Pink is the work of a major talent in his sharpest form. |
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Aaron Shurin, Monday, March 5th
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Widely acclaimed for his lyrical language and innovative verse, Aaron Shurin brings the prose poem into new richness and complexity in Citizen. Through shape-shifting sentences and sensuous imagery he explores the nuances of civic and domestic life, the twists and turns of desire, and the mysterious shimmer of objects. Traveling across the borders of cities and the boundaries of form, he crafts a dazzling vision of daily life as a citizen of the imagination. |
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Terry Bisson, Wednesday, March 7th
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Terry Bisson is an award-winning writer. He is the author of seven novels, and his short fiction has appeared in Playboy and Harper's, among other magazines. He previously worked as an auto mechanic and as a magazine and book editor.
Publishers Weekly has called Bisson's prose "a wonder of seemingly effortless control and precision," and John Crowley hails Bisson as a "national treasure!" Any Day Now is truly a literary tour de force. It is a poignant excursion into the last days of the Beats and the emerging radicalized culture of the sixties from Kentucky to New York City and daringly unique. This road movie of a novel, which begins as a fifties coming-of-age story and ends in an isolated hippy commune under threat of revolution, provides a transcendent commentary on America then and now.
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Torn between the hippie counterculture and the anti-war movement, a young Clay Bauer shuffles between Kentucky, New York City, and a commune in the Southwest, creating an exciting road movie of a novel filled with heartbreak, hope, and hauntingly original prose.
"In this version of the Sixties we don't know what's going to happen next. Little changes quickly add up to big surprises, which is exactly how it felt at the time, and so by paradox Bisson makes that most dramatic era pop to life in a most startling way. This is the great novel of the Sixties." --Kim Stanley Robinson, author of Red Mars
"He writes like a man who invented language…Treat yourself to this book."
--Peter Coyote, author of Sleeping Where I Fall
"Bisson can charm your toes off!" --The Washington Post
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Poetry Flash presents Lorna Dee Cervantes and Barbara Jane Reyes, Thursday, March 15th
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Lorna Dee Cervantes's new book of poems is Ciento: 100 100-Word Love Poems. Luis Alberto Urrea says, "In this delightful book, Lorna Dee Cervantes has undertaken a mad discipline: the 100 word format unleashes paradoxically vast effects. Full of playfulness, rage and her traditional fire, Ciento is a masterful performance." Through her writing, she played an important part in the Chicano literary movement, and through Mango, the literary journal she founded, as well as through her small press of the same name. Author of three previous books of poems, she has received numerous honors and awards, including an American Book Prize for her first collection, Emplumada, two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and a Lila Wallace Readers Digest Fellowship. |
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Barbara Jane Reyes's latest book of poems is Diwata--which means, roughly, 'spirit' in Tagalog--a book which begins in a fusion of Genesis with a Philippine creation myth. Juan Felipe Herrera says of it, "[S]he instructs us, lures us, takes us deep into her sacred, jeweled river, then breathes into us our Creation Story--the one we thought we could no longer remember or write or speak or call our own." Born in Manila and then raised in the San Francisco Bay Area, Reyes is the author of two previous books, the second of which, Poeta en San Francisco, won the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets. |
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Poetry Flash presents Chad Sweeney and MFA Poets from CSU-San Bernardino, Thursday, March 22nd
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Chad Sweeney's two new books are The Art of Stepping Through Time, Selected Poems, his co-translation of the poetry of H.E. Sayeh, one of Iran's most celebrated poets, and his own Wolf Milk: Lost Poems of Juan Sweeney. He is the author of three previous books of poems, most recently Parables of Hide and Seek, about which Bob Hicok says, "Chad Sweeney's poems are matryoshka dolls of imagination: strangeness inside longing inside charm. Relentlessly figurative, they read as dreamscapes and translations: if the human soul has peripheral vision, these poems are what it sees." His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry and Verse Daily. With David Holler, he is the co-editor of the literary journal Parthenon West Review. Chad Sweeney teaches poetry in the MFA program at California State University, San Bernardino. On this road trip from southern California, he will be sharing the reading with MFA graduate student-poets from the CSU-San Bernardino program. |
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Poetry Flash presents Susan Cohen and Rebecca Foust, Thursday, March 29th
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Susan Cohen's first full-length book of poems is Throat Singing. Jeanne Wagner says, "Throat Singing is a collection intent on uncovering, with superb metaphor and acuity, the subtle everyday menaces and consolations of the world we live in. . . . Unstintingly, this book satisfies our quest for the poem that 'surfaces, re-surfaces, and keeps glistening.' " Winner of the Rita Dove Poetry Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize, she's been widely published in literary journals and has had a decades-long career as a journalist, including reporting, magazine writing, and science writing; she is co-author of Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry's Quest to Manipulate Height. |
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Rebecca Foust's All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song won the 2008 Many Mountains Moving Press Poetry Book Competition. Susan Griffin says, "I find All That Gorgeous Pitiless Song astonishingly beautiful. Yet at the same time it is powerfully moving, aimed at the heart of the culture we share." Her other books include God, Seed, a collection of her environmental poetry with art by Lorna Stevens and two chapbooks, Mom's Canoe and Dark Card , Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prizes for 2007 and 2008. |
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David Vann, Tuesday, May 1st
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David Vann’s widely celebrated Caribou Island solidified this internationally bestselling writer’s reputation as one of the rising stars of the literary world. Routinely compared with writers such as Cormac McCarthy and William Faulkner, Vann is being published in eighteen languages and has won fourteen prizes for his work, including France’s Prix Médicis Étranger and Spain’s Premi Llibreter. His much-anticipated new novel, Dirt, is a savagely funny tragedy that once again displays “the beautiful exactness of language, the unerring eye for detail” (New York Times Book Review) that are hallmarks of Vann’s work.
David Vann’s books—Legend of a Suicide, Caribou Island, A Mile Down, and Last Day on Earth—have appeared on sixty-five best books of the year lists in a dozen countries, and he’s been shortlisted for the Flaherty-Dunnan First Novel Prize and the Sunday Times Short Story Award, and longlisted for the Story Prize. A current Guggenheim fellow and former Stegner fellow and NEA fellow, he is a professor at the University of San Francisco, and has written for The Atlantic, Esquire, Outside, Men’s Journal, the Sunday Times, the Observer, and many others, and appeared in documentaries with the BBC, Nova, National Geographic, and CNN.
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