Salons - Left Coast Writers

Literary Salon: Faith Adiele

LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Faith Adiele, PEN Beyond Margins Award winner and Author of Meeting Faith

Monday, March 7, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Faith Adiele is the author of Meeting Faith (W.W. Norton), a travel memoir about becoming Thailand’s first black Buddhist nun, which received thePEN Beyond Margins Award for Best Memoir of 2004. A Publishers Weekly starred review credited it with “a comic’s timing, a novelist’s keen observations about human idiosyncrasies and an anthropologist’s sensitivity to race and culture.”

She is also lead editor of the international collection, Coming of Age Around the World: A Multicultural Anthology (The New Press, 2008), and writer/narrator/subject of the PBS documentary My Journey Home. The film documents Adiele’s experiences—similar to President Obama’s—growing up with a Nordic-American single mother and traveling to Nigeria as an adult to find her father and siblings.

Educated at Harvard University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Adiele has taught in the Creative Nonfiction MFAProgram at the University of Pittsburgh, held the Christa Corrigan McAuliffe Chair at Framingham State College, and served as Rachel B. Noel Distinguished Visiting Professor at Metropolitan State College; she is presently the DistinguishedVisiting Writer at Mills College in Oakland, California.

Adiele has published or been featured in such periodicals as O magazine, Ploughshares, Marie Claire, Creative Nonfiction, Essence, Transition, Pink magazine, Tricycle, The Root.com, and in numerous anthologies. The recipient of a UNESCO International Artists Bursary, two Best American Essays shortlists, and the Millennium Award from Creative Nonfiction, she is currently at work on Twins: Growing UpNigerian/Nordic/American, a social/cultural memoir that will complete the story begun in the PBS documentary. Her work is newly out in two great anthologies: The Word: Black Writers Talk about the Transformative Power of Reading and Writing and The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World.

Visit her at adiele.com.

Literary Salon: Kevin Smokler

LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Kevin Smokler, Co-Founder and CEO of BookTour.com

Monday, February 7, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Wondering about internet marketing or, perhaps the future of publishing? Join us for an evening with Kevin Smokler.

Kevin Smokler is the co-founder and CEO of BookTour.com (www.booktour.com), an Amazon-funded startup that produces affordable promotional and marketing tools for authors. He lectures across North America on the future of publishing and reading and lives in San Francisco.

Kevin is an author, journalist, speaker and entrepreneur. He’s the editor of the anthology Bookmark Now: Writing in Unreaderly Times (Basic Books, June 2005), which was a San Francisco Chronicle notable book of 2005. His writing has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, The LA Times, Fast Company, and on National Public Radio.

In 2007, Kevin Smokler founded with Chris Anderson (editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine) BookTour.com, the world’s largest online directory of author and literary events. Kevin now serves as the company’s CEO, regularly speaking at publishing industry conferences and book festivals throughout North America. In April of 2008, Amazon purchased a minority stake in BookTour.com.

As a speaker, Smokler has lectured throughout North America on the arts and their role in contemporary society at The Commonwealth Club of California, The Idea Festival, Book Expo America and universities such as Stanford and Johns Hopkins. He sits on the advisory board of the South by Southwest Interactive Conference where he has been a featured speaker since 2003.

Kevin has a B.A. in Writing Seminars from Johns Hopkins University and an M.A. In American Studies from The University of Texas at Austin. A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, he lives in San Francisco.

Literary Salon: Suzanne Rodriguez and Laurie McAndish King

LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Laurie McAndish King and Suzanne Rodriquez get “App Happy” at our first salon of the year!

Monday, January 3, 2011 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Happy New Year!

We want to share the newest and best in what’s happening in the world of words and publications with you this year.

So to begin, get “App Happy” with Suzanne Rodriguez and Laurie McAndish King at our first salon of 2011.

Smartphone apps are the latest “it” format for writers—and with good reason. With 85 million iPhones/iPads/iPod Touches, 300,000 apps, and 4 billion app downloads from Apple alone, the market is already huge … and it’s growing ever-bigger at an ever-faster pace.

App developers Laurie McAndish King and Suzie Rodriguez tell us why they’re excited about the mobile app marketplace, how they collaborated to develop San Francisco Waterfront: Bridge to Ballpark (released by Sutro Media in December), and how you, too, can get in on the mobile applications phenomenon. They’ll discuss choosing a topic, assessing your market, writing for the mobile format, sourcing images to accompany the text, and the advantages of mobile apps over traditional travel guidebooks.

Suzanne Rodriguez is the author of three non-fiction books and hundreds of articles. Suzanne’s writing covers numerous topics, including high tech … but she really loves to focus on food, wine, and travel.

Laurie McAndish King is an award-winning travel writer and photographer, as well as publisher of Travel Writers News. Laurie has also written and edited erotica, as you might guess after reading the entry for Hog Island Oysters in the San Francisco Waterfront app.

Suzie and Laurie will also discuss free and inexpensive ways to market your app and the prospects for making money with it. One or more free downloads of San Francisco Waterfront: Bridge to Ballpark will be available as a prize for the audience member(s) whose head is packed with the most trivia about the San Francisco waterfront.

Here’s a headstart question: Which San Francisco beach was the 1986 birthplace of the Burning Man festival?

Do you know?

It’ll be a lively and entertaining evening. Mobile media welcome. See you there!

Literary Salon: Canyon Sam

LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Canyon Sam, Author of Sky Train: Tibetan Women On the Edge of History

Monday, December 6, 2010 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

December is a very special time for us. Every year we close a series of absolutely marvelous salons with an inspirational Presenter, one who embodies the spirit of community that means so much to our writers and to readers everywhere. This year, we’ve asked Canyon Sam to speak. We expect this to be festive, a bit of a party, a chance to celebrate together, to congratulate one another on a year of good endeavor and offer support and inspiration for the year ahead. So we hope you’ll join the festivities and enjoy a wonderful evening with Canyon Sam.

Canyon Sam is a PEN award winning author, nationally acclaimed performance artist and activist from San Francisco. A third generation Chinese American, Ms. Sam spent a year in Tibet, China and India when Tibet first opened in the mid 1980s. Upon return to the States she worked as an early Tibet activist in the U.S. — helping found the Tibetan Nuns Project, and speaking before Congress at their Tiananmen Square hearings on human rights.

Her groundbreaking book Sky Train: Tibetan Women On the Edge of History (University of Washington Press, 2009), with a foreword by the Dalai Lama, reveals for the first time the untold narrative of Tibetan women and their unsung role in the occupation of their country. Blending memoir and oral history, the author travels on China’s controversial new “Sky Train” to Lhasa in 2007 and crosses the Himalayas in search of women from her earlier oral history project. Along with the gripping stories of women’s resistance, courage and spiritual resilience, the book also offers one of the first inside accounts of the recent drastic changes in Tibet due to China’s meteoric rise to modernization.

Sky Train, over nineteen years in the making, won the 2010 PEN American Center’s Open Book Award.

“Remarkable…visceral and deeply felt.” Publishers Weekly, starred review.

“A miracle of a journey, a miracle of a book.” Maxine Hong Kingston.

Don’t miss this!

Literary Salon: Jeff Greenwald

LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Jeff Greenwald, Author of Snake Lake

Monday, November 1, 2010 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

If you have not witnessed our next salon speaker in action, you have missed out! If you have been to any presentation by Jeff Greenwald, you know what we mean. We’re delighted to be able to share a night with this amazing traveler and raconteur as he celebrates the long awaited publication of Snake Lake. In this latest work, Jeff (Shopping for Buddhas and The Size of the World) returns to Kathmandu. Snake Lake unfolds during Nepal’s bloody 1990 uprising. Encounters with a Tibetan Lama and a frisky photographer enliven a tale in which he wrestles with three wildly different paths to liberation.

Jeff Greenwald has a gift for electrifying descriptions of the profound intricacy of the world and the mind. His portrait of his erudite, inscrutable, and doomed brother and keenly illuminating memoir of place, spirit, love, and brotherhood are unforgettable.
—Booklist

Jeff Greenwald has traveled extensively through five continents, working as a writer, artist and photographer. In addition he has prepared exhibits, lectures and educational programs for the San Francisco Exploratorium, the University of California, the Body Shop International, and the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.

In the course of his travels, Mr. Greenwald has had the opportunity to participate in a number of unusual projects. In 1979, during his first trip to Asia, he designed urban playgrounds for UNICEF and the Nepal Children’s Organization. Several months later, arriving in Thailand during the Khmer civil war, he served as a volunteer water engineer at Khao-I-Dang–the largest of the Cambodian refugee camps.

In the Spring of 1983, he was awarded a Journalism Fellowship by the Rotary International Foundation, and departed for a second trip to Asia. During this 16-month residence he lived in Kathmandu, Nepal, and made excursions to the Himalaya, India, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Japan, Java and Bali. The resulting articles appeared in GEO and Islands magazines.

His first book, Mr. Raja’s Neighborhood: Letters from Nepal (John Daniel, 1986), is still in print. Shopping for Buddhas, first published by Harper & Row in 1990, was reissued in 1996 by Lonely Planet Publications; the new edition won the Lowell Thomas Gold Award for Best Travel Book of 1996. The Size of the World–a chronicle of his 29,172-mile, around-the-world overland voyage (Globe Pequot, 1995 & Ballantine, 1996)–was a national bestseller, and won the 1995 Lowell Thomas Silver Award. This was followed by Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth, released in June 1998 by Viking Penguin. Mr. Greenwald’s travel writing is widely anthologized. His new book, Snake Lake, was released by Counterpoint in October 2010.

Greenwald divides his time between California and Asia, publishing stories and essays in a variety of publications–including The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Outside, and Salon.com. Jeff is also Executive Director of Ethical Traveler, a global community dedicated to exploring the ambassadorial potential of world travel.

Note: As this salon takes place at the same time as the World Series, iphones and other devices for keeping track of the Wold Series will be permitted and there will be breaks for checking the score!

Literary Salon: Peter Goodman

LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Peter Goodman, Stone Bridge Press, President and Publisher

Monday, October 4, 2010 || 7pm

Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

What’s new and exciting in the book biz? The advent of the internet, Amazon, e-books, social networking and more has certainly thrown the book industry into a state of flux. Where is it going? What do we do? No need to stagger about aimlessly. Join Stone Bridge Press president and publisher Peter Goodman as he talks about “How Not to Be a Publishing Zombie.”

Peter Goodman is a graduate of Cornell University and lived in Tokyo for ten years, where he worked as an editor for English-language publishers Charles E. Tuttle and Kodansha International before returning to the United States in 1985. He has served (more…)

Literary Salon: Molly Dwyer

LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Molly Dwyer, Author of Requiem for the Author of Frankenstein

Tuesday, September 7, 2010 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Frankenstein was conceived during the summer of 1816 when Mary Godwin and Percy Bysshe Shelley lived on Lake Geneva in the company of the infamous Lord Byron. Frankenstein matured into a novel during the following winter, while Mary lived mostly without Shelley in Bath, keeping her pregnant stepsister Claire hidden from wagging tongues. During that winter both Mary’s half-sister, Fanny, and Shelley’s abandoned wife, Harriet, killed themselves. On January 1, 1818, one year later, Frankenstein descended upon the world. Its author, now the married Mrs. Shelley, was twenty years old. (more…)

Literary Salon: Michael Krasny

LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Michael Krasny, Author of Off Mike: A Memoir of Talk Radio and Literary Life and Spiritual Envy: An Agnostic’s Quest

Monday, August 2, 2010 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Everyone knows Michael Krasny, the award-winning host of NPR/KQED’s Forum with Michael Krasny, a news and public affairs program covering politics, culture, the arts, health, business and technology since 1993 and veteran interviewer for NPR’s nationally broadcast City Arts and Lectures series. He’s also an English professor at San Francisco State University, and a widely published scholar, critic and fiction writer. We are so pleased to have him as a Left Coast Writers Literary Salon Presenter in August. (more…)

Literary Salon: Ransom Stephens

LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Ransom Stephens, Author of The God Patent

Monday, July 5, 2010 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

Ransom Stephens, Ph.D., is a professor of particle physics turned writer and speaker. He has worked on experiments at SLAC, Fermilab, CERN, and Cornell; discovered a new type of matter and was on the team that discovered the top quark. During the tech boom that ended in 2001, he directed patent development for a wireless web startup and, a few years later, became an expert on timing noise. Now he’s turning his considerable mental powers toward the world of writing and publishing, and we’re interested in what he’s learned. He’s a much praised speaker, so it should be an informative evening as Ransom shares his current explorations and his jump into a bold new way of getting the word out.

“What distinguishes this classic battle between faith and free will is its unusually deft infusion of legitimate but accessible science.…an ambitious first novel that uses Stephens’ experience as a particle physicist, director of patents, public speaker and single father in a narrative that sings of the heart and the scientific method as two parts of the same song.”

—The San Francisco Chronicle

“Ransom Stephens skillfully weaves together multiple plot lines and characters in a fast moving story.”

—Book Case, for the Petaluma Argus-Courier

The memo said they’d get bonuses for submitting patents, so why not? Money came easily during the dot-com boom. Concealed in engineering jargon, Ryan McNear submits a patent for the soul disguised as a software algorithm and his best friend Foster Reed rewrites Genesis and calls it a “power generator.” A few years later, amid the fallout of a ruptured technology bubble, his career ruined and family shredded, a desperate Ryan discovers that a company headed by his old friend Foster is developing his patent. What he thought was a joke is generating stacks of money amid claims that it will provide a source of limitless energy and prove the existence of God.Willing to try anything to rebuild his life, Ryan stakes a legal claim to the patent but soon discovers a sinister undercurrent in the venture. Racing against time and aided by a motley group of assistants that includes an attorney/conman, a beautiful and passionate physicist and a death-obsessed adolescent math prodigy, Ryan gets caught in a battle between hard science and fundamentalist religion that threatens his sanity, his freedom and his son. Before long Ryan will test the limits of faith and free will, evaluate the nature of desire, and comprehend the human soul in a way that requires a single step, rather than a great leap, of faith.

…….

Ransom lives in Petaluma, California and makes a living by writing novels, giving speeches, producing and MCing literary events, helping engineers solve problems, and teaching writing seminars. He is the author of over 200 articles on impossible subjects like quantum physics, the future of publishing and parenting teenagers. His first novel, The God Patent, is set in the battle between science and religion over the nature of the soul and the origin of the universe.

Literary Salon: Penny Warner

LEFT COAST WRITERS LITERARY SALON: Penny Warner, Author of How to Host a Killer Party

Monday, June 7, 2010 || 7pm
Book Passage || Corte Madera
51 Tamal Vista Drive, Corte Madera || www.bookpassage.com

We have a “killer evening” in store for everyone at the next Left Coast Writers Literary Salon!

Mixing fun and fundraising for charities seemed like the perfect job for Presley Parker when she’s suddenly downsized from her position teaching abnormal psychological at the university. Pres is psyched about her first big gig—hosting a “surprise” wedding for the San Francisco Mayor at notorious Alcatraz prison.

But the party’s over when the bride bolts faster than an escaping prisoner, and is later found dead floating in the bay, a victim of poisoned chocolates. When Presley becomes prime suspect, she looks to her quirky Treasure Island co-workers for help, but it’s the attractive, mysterious crime scene cleaner Brad Matthews who helps tidy up her tarnished reputation. If she doesn’t solve this mystery, she’ll be exchanging her party dress for prison stripes.

“Penny Warner dishes up a rare treat, sparkling with wicked and witty San Francisco characters, plus some real tips on hosting a killer party.”
~ Rhys Bowen, award-winning author of the Royal Spyness mysteries.

Penny Warner has been writing since she read her first Nancy Drew in 6th grade. Since then she’s had over 50 books published, fiction and non-fiction, for adults and children. Her books have won national awards, garnered excellent reviews, and have been printed in 14 countries, including Russia, France, Spain, Germany, Holland, Australia, Canada, Indonesia, India, Israel, Poland, Japan, and China. My best-sellers include Healthy Snacks for Kids, Kids’ Party Games and Activities, Best Party Book, Games People Play, Kids’ Holiday Fun, Learn to Sign the Fun Way, Baby Play and Learn, Kids Pick-A-Party, and Kids’ Party Cookbook.

Literary Salon: Faith Adiele

Literary Salon: Kevin Smokler

Literary Salon: Suzanne Rodriguez and Laurie McAndish King

Literary Salon: Canyon Sam

Literary Salon: Jeff Greenwald

Literary Salon: Peter Goodman

Literary Salon: Molly Dwyer

Literary Salon: Michael Krasny

Literary Salon: Ransom Stephens

Literary Salon: Penny Warner

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