Monday, April 5, 2010 || 7pm ||
Neeli Cherkovski, Author of From the Canyon Outward
Book Passage – Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Dr., Corte Madera
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Neeli Cherkovski
Inaugurated by the Academy of American Poets in 1996, National Poetry Month is now held every April, when publishers, booksellers, literary organizations, libraries, schools and poets around the country band together to celebrate poetry and its vital place in American culture.
In honor of National Poetry Month, our April Left Coast Literary Salon Presenter is poet Neeli Chekovski.
Neeli Cherkovski (Santa Monica, CA, 1945) is an applauded poet, critic, memoirist and literary biographer. He has written twelve books of poetry, including: From the Canyon Outward, the award winning Leaning Against Time, Elegy for Bob Kaufman and Animal; two acclaimed biographies, Bukowski: A Life and Ferlinghetti: A Biography. His book, Whitman’s Wild Children (a collection of critical memoirs), has become an underground classic. In the late 1960s Cherkovski co-edited the poetry anthology, Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns with Charles Bukowski. Since 1975, Neeli has lived and worked in San Francisco . For five years he was Writer-in-Residence at New College of California, where he taught literature and philosophy. In 2005 Cherkovski won the Pen Oakland-Josephine Miles Literary Award. He is also a Friends of the SF Public Library Literary Laureate. Currently Neeli is completing an as yet untitled memoir of his life in poetry, a collection of poems on his travels in the Philippines, and a selected poems. He teaches in The Floating University, offering courses in poetics, along with David Meltzer and Michael Rothenberg.
Blogs are everywhere. They have exposed truths and spread rumors. Made and lost fortunes. Brought couples together and torn them apart. Toppled cabinet members and sparked grassroots movements. Immediate, intimate, and influential, they have put the power of personal publishing into everyone’s hands. Regularly dismissed as trivial and ephemeral, they have proved that they are here to stay.
Monday, May 5, 2008
Firoozeh Dumas moved with her family from Abadan, Iran, to Whittier, California, at the age of seven. With great humor and a sense of adventure, Dumas chronicles the American journey of her wonderfully engaging family in Funny In Farsi: A Memoir Of Growing Up Iranian In America, which was selected as a finalist for the PEN award in the Creative Nonfiction category. In a series of deftly Drawn scenes, we watch the family grapple with American culture in a story of Identity, discovery and family love. You may have heard Firoozeh’s commentaries on NPR. Dumas graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. She lives with her husband and children in Northern California.
Georgia I. Hesse was founding travel editor of the San Francisco Examiner and held that position on the S.F. Examiner-Chronicle for 20 years. She has contributed to several anthologies, is a co-author of travel guides to France and California published by Fisher and by Berlitz, and teaches travel writing and related courses at Book Passage in Corte Madera. Georgia holds the Chevalier/Ordre de la République from Tunisia and the Ordre du Mérite from France. She is a graduate of Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota, and attended the University of Strasbourg, France, on a Fulbright scholarship. She claims to have been born on Crazy Woman Creek near Buffalo, Wyoming.
Sheldon Siegel graduated from the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. He has been in private practice in San Francisco for over twenty years and specializes in corporate and securities law with the firm of Sheppard, Mullin, Richter & Hampton LLP. His four novels, Special Circumstances, Incriminating Evidence, Criminal Intent and Final Verdict, have all been national best sellers. His fifth novel, The Confession, will be released August 2004. His books have sold millions of copies worldwide and have been translated into seven languages.
Larry Habegger, executive editor of Travelers’ Tales, has been writing about travel since 1980. He has visited almost fifty countries and six of the seven continents, traveling from the frozen Arctic to equatorial rain forest, from the high Himalayas to the Dead Sea. In the early 1980s he co-authored mystery serials for the San Francisco Examiner with James O’Reilly, and since 1985 their syndicated column, “World Travel Watch,” has appeared in newspapers in five countries and on WorldTravelWatch.com. As series editors of Travelers’ Tales, they have worked on some seventy titles, winning many awards for excellence. Larry regularly teaches the craft of travel writing at workshops and writers conferences, and he lives with his family on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill.
Journalist Constance Hale grew up in Hawaii but left the islands to get a bachelors degree from Princeton and a masters from the Graduate School of Journalism at UC-Berkeley. Hale worked as a reporter and editor at the Oakland Tribune, the San Francisco Examiner, Wired, and Health and her freelance journalism has appeared in those publications, as well as in Honolulu, HotWired, and the Atlantic Monthly. Her travel essays have been published in several anthologies, Via, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. Hale is the author of two popular books on language, Sin and Syntax and Wired Style. Once dubbed, “Marion the Librarian on a Harley,” Hale speaks extensively about the craft of writing, sin and syntax, and the intersections of language and technology. She is on the faculty of UC-Berkeley Extension, Book Passage, and the Writing Salon.
Fran Gage owned Fran Gage Pâtisserie Française in San Francisco for ten years. The bakery consistently won critical acclaim locally and nationally for its pastry, bread, and chocolates. She closed the bakery following a fire in 1995 and now writes about food. Her first book, Bread and Chocolate, My Food Life In & Around San Francisco , (Sasquatch Books, 1999) is a collection of stories about food with recipes to match. A Sweet Quartet, Sugar, Almonds, Eggs, and Butter , (North Point Press, 2002) is a book celebrating the building blocks of pastry making, including recipes. Excerpts from both books were chosen for Best Food Writing . Her most recent book is Williams-Sonoma Cake . Fran is a charter member of the Baker’s Dozen and a co-author of The Baker’s Dozen Cookbook . She also writes frequently for Saveur , and Fine Cooking and has contributed to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America and Gastronomica.
Mark Routhier is the Literary Manager at the Magic Theatre. Founder and Artistic Director of San Francisco’s Mettle Theatre, 1989-1999, Routhier produced, wrote, directed, designed, and/or acted in 25 productions nationwide. His plays Scrap, Jam, Drunken Grownups, They Shall Inherit (formerly A Curious Christmas), and Someguy were produced by Mettle Theatre. His Bay Area directing credits include Ionesco’s Exit The King with American Citizens’ Theatre, Someguy, Drunken Grownups, and Ellen McLaughlin’s Iphigenia and Other Daughters with Mettle Theatre, Sam Shepard’s Cowboy Mouth with Mostly Grounded Theatre Co., readings of Alice Tuan’s Last of the Suns, and Talila Baron’s Corpus Delicti for the Magic Theatre. Routhier has directed for the Young California Writers Project, and will be directing a one-man show called The Bone Man of Benares by Terry Tarnoff with Encore Theatre in September, 2004. Routhier, who holds an MFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU, is working on a new play, and currently teaching a popular course, “From Page to Stage,” at Marin-based Book Passage.
Poet, travel writer, novelist and workshop leader Linda Watanabe McFerrin is a contributor to numerous journals, newspapers, magazines, anthologies and online publications including the Washington Post, the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Modern Bride, Travelers’ Tales, and Salon.com. She is the author of two poetry collections and the editor of the 4th edition of Best Places Northern California.
Terry Ryan, the sixth of Evelyn and Kelly Ryan’s ten children, is the author of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio: How My Mother Raised 10 Kids on 25 Words on Less (Simon & Schuster). She is the writing half of the cartooning team of T.O. Sylvester, whose single-panel cartoons have appeared in the pages of The San Francisco Chronicle, Ms. Magazine, Mother Jones, Saturday Evening Post, Saturday Review, Boy’s Life, Datamation, Vegetarian Times, Bay Guardian, San Francisco Magazine, Women’s Glib Cartoon Calendars, and a number of text books and anthologies. T.O. Sylvester’s literary cartoons ran weekly in the San Francisco Chronicle for 16 years (1983-1999). With the publication of the hardback of The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio by Simon and Schuster in 2001, Terry toured the country to promote the book, appearing on The Today Show, CBS Sunday Morning, Rosie O’Donnell, and NPR’s Weekend Edition of All Things Considered. The paperback was published in April 2002, and Terry again went on a cross-country tour. The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio – which has also been published in Great Britain, Australia, Korea, and China—will soon be made into a movie produced by DreamWorks and Revolution Studios, starring Julianne Moore. For more information, visit www.theprizewinner.com.
