Literary Panel on the Bay Area Literary Community

Literary Panel on the Bay Area Literary Community
Wednesday, April 26 @ 7:30pm
San Francisco State University
Poetry Center
Humanities Building, Room 512
1600 Holloway Ave.

The Bay Area Literary Community:
What small presses, literary journals, MFA programs, bloggers, and reading series are doing to foster cross genre work, support collaboration, & grow the literary community.

Featuring Panelists:

* Jack Boulware from Litquake
* Page McBee & Michael co-curators of Go. A reading series
* Brent Foster Jones & Youmna Chlala co-editors of eleven eleven {1111}
* Bucky Sinister of Last Gasp
* Stephanie Young, Blogger & Mills College Administrator


Litquake-Jack Boulware

Litquake Mission Statement: Litquake galvanizes the Bay Area’s thriving literary scene by bringing emerging, mid-career and established authors together with fans of the written word for a week of readings, performances, cross-media events, and panel discussions. We strive to foster interest in literature, to perpetuate a sense of community by making the solitary social, and to publicize San Francisco’s literary heritage, present and future. Litquake represents an ideal complement to the city’s music, film, and cultural festivals – and is unique as the only literary festival in the city. All Litquake events are open to the public and free or low-cost ($5-$10), so that all fans of the written word, from children to seniors, are able to attend.

Jack Boulware: Grew up in rural Montana. He has written two nonfiction social history books, Sex, American Style and San Francisco Bizarro, and has appeared in anthologies and won a few journalism awards. From 1989-1995 I was founding editor of the satirical investigative Nose magazine, and for several years wrote a column for SF Weekly. I currently contribute regularly to a wide variety of publications, and have traveled to many countries and throughout the U.S. in search of a cool story. Occasionally I do live readings and panel discussions, and appear on Air America Radio and in television documentaries. I’m also the co-founder and director of San Francisco’s annual Litquake literary festival.


Go. Reading Series-Page McBee & Michael Braithwaite

Go. – a monthly, curated, cross-media collaboration series. Go. focuses on bringing together a visual artist, writer, and audio artist/ musician and charges them to come up with something completely new. Go. participants only have a theme and a very short time line to guide them, and the entire exhibition is up for one night only. Go.'s primary focus is to bring together artists across lines of culture, gender, sexuality, race, and generation, to create an experience that truly blends issues of identity and medium. The first Friday of every month, three Bay Area artists will work together to transcend categorization.

Michael Braithwaite is a painter originally from Nashville, TN. She attended Massachusetts College of Art, where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2003. Her work has been shown in Nashville's Cumberland Gallery, the Nashville Public Library, Boston's Bakalar Gallery, Boston's Oni Gallery, and Somerville's The Someday Gallery. She also has worked on public art projects at the Travellers Rest Plantation and Museum in Nashville, and the Children's Floating Hospital in Boston. She is currently the co-curator and co-organizer of the monthly cross media collaborative arts event series entitled Go.


Eleven Eleven {1111}-Brent Foster Jones & Youmna Chlala

Founded in 2004 as an annual journal of literature and art, Eleven
Eleven {1111} is a test-site for writers and artists to risk and
experiment. A primary goal is to serve as a forum of exchange about the
creative process. The forthcoming 2006 issue will feature work by
artists Mark Bradford, Tim Davis, and Yoon Lee; writings by Chris
Tokar,Charles Mcleod, and Gemini Wahhaj; and interviews with artist Wangechi
Mutu and writer Daniel Alarcorn.

Youmna Chlala is a writer and visual artist. She is the founder and
co-editor of Eleven Eleven {1111}, Journal of Literature and Art, and a
faculty member at California College of the Arts. Nominated for a Ruth
Lilly Poetry Prize, she has been published in the MIT of Middle Eastern
Studies, among others. She is the recipient of a Headlands Center for
the Arts Residency, where she will be working on her novel about
architecture and fate in Beyrouth and Los Angeles.

Brent Foster Jones is a writer and teacher and is co-editor of Eleven
Eleven {1111}, Journal of Literature and Art. He lectures in the
writing programs at California College of the Arts and teaches for the San
Francisco Arts Education Project. He is at work on a collection of
stories set in Louisiana.

Last Gasp-Bucky Sinister

Last Gasp is one of the largest and oldest publishers and purveyors of underground comic books in the world, as well as being a distributor of all sorts of weird 'n' wonderful subversive literature, graphic novels, tattoo and art books.

Stephanie Young-Blogger & Mills College Administrator

Stephanie Young lives and works in Oakland, at Mills College, where she is the program coordinator for the English Graduate Program and teaches in the undergraduate program. Her first book of poetry, Telling the Future Off, appeared from Tougher Disguises Press in 2005, and she is the editor of Bay Poetics, forthcoming from Faux Press in 2006. Her blog, The Well Nourished Moon, (now at www.stephanieyoung.org/blog) has been up and running since 2003.

For more information visit www.14hills.net