Bay Area Folk — on Thursday, April 4, I’ll be participating in a community writers festival at a university about an hour and a half north of San Francisco. An event organized by the wonderful fiction writer Miah Jeffra and his students, this will be an afternoon and evening program of readings and panels on writers’ craft and the publishing industry. Take a look at the full schedule.
At 5:20 pm, I will be moderating a panel “From a Reader to a Critic” about book reviewing.
At 7 pm, I will appear with my fellow writers published by WTAW Press and will read a story (or two) from LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES.
No need to register in advance. Show up if you’re able to! There will also be a book fair: a great opportunity talk to small presses, mags, schools, and buy your next favorite book.
It’s still January, and so not too late, in my book, to wish you all a happy New Year. For those of you in San Francisco Bay Area, my first event of the year is coming up this Saturday, February 3. Come to the Main branch of the SF public library at 2 pm.
I will be reading an excerpt from my novel-in-progress set in Leningrad in the year 1990. This event called “A Sense of Place” is organized by my friend Beverly Parayno, whose collection of stories WILDFLOWERS it was my pleasure to blurb. I’ll be reading alongside Beverly herself, Toni Mirosevich, and Norman Zelaya. I’m delighted to meet these acclaimed writers in person and to hear their stories of the Bay Area and beyond.
In the past few months, I have published two stories. One, a brand new fiction “Make Peace with the Cake” — about an ex-Soviet immigrant parent coping with the post-COVID, war-time social tensions and her own anxieties — appears in the Museum of Americana, a magazine that has generously published 1, 2, 3 of my earlier stories.
Another piece, “Sweet Dreams,” is an older story that remains important to me for personal, creative, and political reasons. It was first published circa 2010 in an issue of Mad Hatters’ Review and has now been brought back online by the Bulb Culture Collective, a magazine that gives home to stories that first appeared in now defunct online magazines. What a noble quest! I certainly have more work to send their way.
Last but not least, the service that I have been using to send out my newsletter (TinyLetter) is being discontinued, so I’m attempting to use my website provider (WordPress) for these emails. Those of you who are already subscribing to my website may have already seen some of this information. Please let me know if you encounter any other technical issues.
Bay Area friends — come out to our Lit Crawl event on Saturday, October 21, 5 pm at 518 Valencia.
This event was a long time in the making. As Ukraine approaches its 600th day of defending its sovereignty against Russia’s assault, it remains paramount to continue to tell our stories and to refute the propaganda narratives that are festering in the social media spaces.
I’m really looking forward to hearing the poems, stories, personal essays and more from this group of Bay Area writers with deep personal connections to both Ukraine and Russia.
Lit Crawl is a part of San Francisco’s Litquake festival going on right now. Make sure to check out the full program and to participate in other events. It’s an amazing experience!
San Francisco Writers Workshop is proud to participate in San Francisco’s Lit Crawl 2023 festival. For more than eight decades, this free, drop-in critique group has met weekly, nurturing a wide range of local authors. Come hear from the recent participants at our home base!
Event details: October 21, 5 pm Noisebridge, 272 Capp Street
Originally from the North of England, Jo Beckett-King is a writer and translator currently based in San Francisco. Her fiction has been short- or longlisted for the UK’s Bridport Prize, the Bristol Short Story Prize, and the Bath Children’s Novel Award. She is represented by Elise Howard at DeFiore & Company.
Tahirah Nailah Dean is a lawyer by day and writer by night. She writes about the difficulties of finding love and marriage from the perspective of a Muslim woman. Her work has appeared in Al Jazeera and Insider. She is a recipient of the 2023 Hurston/Wright Fellowship and winner of the 2021 MFest Short-Story Competition. Tahirah is currently working on a novel.
Cynthia Gómez writes feminist anti-capitalist horror and speculative fiction. Her work has been published in Strange Horizons, Fantasy Magazine, and elsewhere. Her collection, “The Nightmare Box and Other Stories,” will be published by Dread Stone Press in summer 2023.
Mike Karpa’s short fiction and memoir has appeared in Tin House, Tahoma Literary Review, Oyster River Pages and Foglifter Journal. His first novel Criminals was a Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2022. His new novel, The Wealthy Whites of Williamsburg, won best gay book at the 2023 SF Book Festival.
Graham Smith built a solar-powered car in a locomotive shop and once traveled to an uninhabited island just to get some eggs. He was dredged, like an ancient bicycle, from the mud of the Upper Mississippi and continues to roll on through the hinterlands of San Francisco Bay.
Joel Streicker’s stories have been published widely. Recent winner of Cutthroat Magazine’s and Blood Orange Review’s fiction contests, he has also published poetry and nonfiction in English and Spanish. His translations of such writers as Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enríquez, and Pilar Quintana have appeared in numerous journals.
Jason Tan graduated from St. Olaf college with a degree in Latin and Asian Studies. He writes primarily fantastical novels about people who are trying to figure out the rest of their lives. He lives in San Francisco.
I’m so pleased to be returning to Palo Alto’s gorgeous Rinconada Library on August 17 to talk about my own writing. I’ll read from my book LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES and also from my current work-in-progress DON’T SHUT THE DOOR. If you’re in the Bay Area, please do come and bring friends!
My friend and fellow writer Vlada Teper has generously agreed to be in conversation with me during this event. Updated flyer will be coming soon, and for now here’s her bio: Born in Moldova, Vlada Teper is a writer and educator. Her essays have been featured in Newsweek, NPR and World Literature Today. The Community of Writers alum, she is the recipient of the 826 Valencia Teacher of the Month Award. A former Fulbright Student in Russia, Vlada Teper is the founding teacher of San Francisco International High School and the Founder of Inspiring Multicultural Understanding (I M U) Peace Club. You can learn more at vladateper.com and follow her on Twitter @VladaTeper.
Huge thanks to librarian Cynthia Karpa McCarthy for inviting me back!
How does one celebrate finishing a draft of a novel? Here’s my plan: I’m organizing an event with a few writers I deeply admire and whose books share some of the sensibilities that dictated my own. Transplants all, we write about the places that were important — perhaps, foundational — to us, churning memories into new stories. Please join me on August 6 for this ONLINE reading and conversation. Register on EVENTBRITE to receive the Zoom link.
Tamim Ansary’s SINKING THE ARK is set in Portland, Oregon in 1973, “Before it became Portlandia.” Barbara Barrow’s AN UNCLEAN PLACE is anchored to the campus of an experimental middle school in Atlanta, Georgia in 1992. In HOPE YOU’RE SATISFIED, Tania Malik captures Dubai during the weeks and months of uncertainty as Saddam Hussein’s army invades Kuwait in 1990, and the world awaits US response. Alicia Rouverol’s debut DRY RIVER is set in California’s suburban Mill Valley during the housing market bust of 2008. Moderator Olga Zilberbourg’s work-in-progress, DON’T SHUT THE DOOR is set in 1990 in Leningrad, USSR, just before it falls apart.
Please support writers and literature by buying books:
Tamim Ansary is the author of The Invention of Yesterday, Destiny Disrupted, Games without Rules, West of Kabul, East of New York, among other books. For ten years he wrote a monthly column for Encarta.com, and has published essays and commentary in the San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, Alternet, TomPaine.com, Edutopia, Parade, Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. He has appeared on the Oprah Winfrey Show, Bill Moyers, PBS The News Hour, Al Jazeera, and NPR. Born in Afghanistan in 1948, he moved to the U.S. in 1964. He lives in San Francisco.
Barbara Barrow (she/her) is the author of AN UNCLEAN PLACE (Lanternfish, 2023) and THE QUELLING (Lanternfish, 2018), which was selected as a Gold Winner for Literary Fiction in the Foreword Indies Awards. Her short stories have appeared in FAULTLINE, SOUTHERN HUMANITIES REVIEW, CIMARRON REVIEW, and elsewhere, and she also publishes literary criticism in environmental humanities, women, gender, and sexuality, and nineteenth-century literature. Originally from Atlanta, GA, she has lived in New York, Germany, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and now Lund, Sweden, where she teaches literature and writing and lives with her husband, daughter, and pets.
Tania Malik is the author of the novels HOPE YOU ARE SATISFIED (May 2023, Unnamed Press) as well as THREE BARGAINS (W.W Norton) which received a Publishers Weekly Starred review and a Booklist Starred review. Her work has appeared in Electric Literature, Off-assignment, Lit Hub, Salon.com, Calyx Journal, Baltimore Review, and other publications. She lives in San Francisco’s Bay Area. More at www.taniamalik.com.
Alicia J Rouverol (she/her) is Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Salford and is the author DRY RIVER (Bridge House Publishing, 2023) and co-author of ‘I WAS CONTENT AND NOT CONTENT’: THE STORY OF LINDA LORD AND THE CLOSING OF PENOBSCOT POULTRY (SIU Press, 2000), favourably reviewed in the New York Times and nominated for the OHA Book Award. Her stories, nonfiction and poetry have appeared in THE MANCHESTER REVIEW, THE INDEPENDENT, and STREETCAKE, among other journals. A 2008 recipient of the Elizabeth George Foundation writing grant, she received her Creative Writing MA and PhD from University of Manchester’s Centre for New Writing (2013; 2017). In 2019 she was an inaugural Artist in Residence at the John Rylands Library to develop a short story collection themed on place and migration, recently accepted by Bridge House Publishing. DRY RIVER is her first novel.
Olga Zilberbourg‘s first English-language book, a collection of short and flash fiction, LIKE WATER AND OTHER STORIES, was published by WTAW Press in 2019. It explores “bicultural identity hilariously, poignantly,” according to The Moscow Times. It also explores themes of bisexuality and parenthood. It received warm reviews from a number of publications and was named a finalist in the 2019 Foreword INDIES Book Award. Zilberbourg’s fiction and essays have appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Bare Life Review, Narrative Magazine, World Literature Today, Alaska Quarterly Review, and others. She has published four collections of stories in Russia.
Andrey Kurkov has been one of the most important Ukrainian voices who tell the story of the Russian invasion to the Western audiences. He is a powerful fiction writer who has had to put aside his creative writing for the past months to tell the story of his country. He’s also an amazing storyteller, and one of those rare people whose humor and wit color everything they do. Don’t miss this opportunity to see him in Palo Alto a week from today. He will be appearing at 6:30 pm at Palo Alto’s Rinconada library. This local appearance might be the last chance to see him in the Bay Area for a while.
June 10-11, Litquake is hosting a mini-conference on Craft & Creative life, complete with a happy hour. I will be moderating a panel on How to Find Your Writing Community at 11 am on June 10, at the American Bookbinders Museum. Please get your tickets ahead of time. For the full program, go to Litquake.org.
San Francisco Bay Area friends! Come help me celebrate the publication of my friend Richard May’s new collection of stories, BECAUSE OF ROSES. I got to talking to Rick at a Litquake event one year, when we attended an event focused on literature in translation. I’m so impressed with the geographic and cultural range of his fiction. He writes unabashedly about love that can spark between men at every stage of life, across language barriers, ideological divides, and in the face of grief and fear. It helps that love has chance, leprechauns, and roses on its side. I delight in the magic of these stories, their kindness, and the joyful appreciation of the male bodies.
APRIL 23, 2:30 PM
MANNY’s (3092 16th St, San Francisco, CA 94103)
Rick has hosted several reading series in San Francisco, and he’s a great entertainer — I expect this to be a lot of fun with some surprises!
Olga Zilberbourg 