Why There Are Words presents an evening of readings on the theme “Begin Again.” Join us May 12, 2016 at Studio 333 on 333 Caledonia Street in Sausalito to hear the following acclaimed authors. Doors open at 7pm; readings begin at 7:15. $10.
Paul Corman-Roberts’ most recent collection of poems We Shoot Typewriters (Nomadic Press, September 2015) was nominated for a Northern California Book Reviewers award. A Pushcart and Best of Web nominee, Corman-Roberts’ work has appeared in The Rumpus, subTerrain, Full of Crow, Connotation Press, The Cape Fear Review, Red Fez, and Corium among others. In addition to producing spoken word performance spectacles across the Bay Area, he is a core-founder of Oakland’s largest and oldest regular literary festival, the Beast Crawl.
Sherrie Flick is the author of the flash fiction chapbook I Call This Flirting, the novel Reconsidering Happiness, and the short story collection Whiskey, Etc. (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2016). Her work has appeared in many anthologies and journals, including Flash Fiction Forward, New Sudden Fiction, Ploughshares, and SmokeLong Quarterly. She teaches in the MFA and Food Studies programs at Chatham University.
A Canadian by birth, a high school dropout, and a mother at 17, in her early years, Lily Iona MacKenzie supported herself as a stock girl in the Hudson’s Bay Company, as a long distance operator for the former Alberta Government Telephones, and as a secretary (Bechtel Corp sponsored her into the States). She also was a cocktail waitress at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, briefly broke into the male-dominated world of the docks as a longshoreman (and almost got her legs broken), founded and managed a homeless shelter in Marin County, and eventually earned two Master’s degrees (one in Creative Writing and one in the Humanities). She has published reviews, interviews, short fiction, poetry, travel pieces, essays, and memoir in over 150 American and Canadian venues. Fling was published in July 2015 by Pen-L Publishing. Bone Songs, another novel, will be published in November 2016. Her poetry collection All This was published in 2011. She also taught writing at the University of San Francisco and was vice-president of USF’s part-time faculty union. When she isn’t writing, she paints and travels widely with her husband. She also maintains a blog.
Marian Palaia is, among other things, an author. Born in Riverside, California, she currently resides in San Francisco. Other places she has called (or does call) home: Montana, Hong Kong, Olympia, WA, Nepal, Saigon, Boulder, CO, and Kensington, MD. To support her writing habit, she has been a teacher, a bartender, a truck driver, “chip girl” in a poker room, and the littlest logger in Lincoln, Montana, where she and Ted Kazynski were neighbors, sort of. Her first novel, The Given World (Simon & Schuster, 2015), was a Kirkus Best Novel of 2015 (also Best Debut and Historical) and was a finalist for the PEN/Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction.
Sarah Van Arsdale’s fourth book of fiction, In Case of Emergency, Break Glass, will be published by Queen’s Ferry Press in April, 2016. She is on the fiction faculty of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts MFA in Creative Writing Program. She serves on the board of the Ferro-Grumley Award in LGBT fiction, and she lives in New York.
Zarina Zabrisky is the author of three short story collections, including Explosion (Epic Rites Press, 2015) and a novel We, Monsters (Numina Press). She moved to San Francisco from Russia in 1998 and started to publish in English in 2011. Since then her work has appeared in six countries and has been featured and reviewed in over thirty magazines, including The Nervous Breakdown, The Rumpus, Guernica, PANK Magazine, Anthropology Now, and more. She has received literary awards and nominations, including Acker Award for Achievement in The Avant Garde. She is involved in protest art as a co-founder of The Arts Resistance, a collective resisting the war and injustice through the means of the arts.
Why There Are Words takes place every second Thursday of the month, when word lovers from the Bay Area and beyond crowd the house. The brainchild of Peg Alford Pursell, this literary goodness has been going strong for six years.
